Ottawa issues new directive to CRTC, aiming to spur telecom competition
Guidelines signal policy shift away from 'market forces' toward greater regulation
The federal government is giving the CRTC new guidelines for regulating telecommunications companies.
It's the first time in 17 years that Ottawa has changed its directions to the arms-length body that oversees telecommunications in Canada.
The previous guidelines issued in 2006 instructed the CRTC to "rely on market forces to the maximum extent feasible," while the new ones place a greater emphasis on regulation.
"That didn't work, and that's gone now, thank goodness," said John Lawford, executive director of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre in Ottawa.
The new directive aims to make it easier for smaller telecom companies to enter the market alongside national providers. This includes cell phone companies that buy access to the national providers' networks and then sell cheaper service to customers.
There are also guidelines about ensuring reliable service in rural areas, remote areas and Indigenous communities.
However, Lawford said he thinks the directive could have gone further in expressing that all Canadians have a "right" to reliable access to telecommunications services, regardless of where they live in the country.
One of the new guidelines says the CRTC should improve consumer protections if telecommunications companies have outages.
During consultations last summer, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada heard from a lot of unhappy consumers about the massive Rogers network outage on July 8, 2022, that left millions without cell and internet service.
A few months later, post-tropical storm Fiona knocked out phone and internet service to large areas of Atlantic Canada, with some customers waiting days for service to be fully restored.
The CRTC will use the directive to determine how it should be regulating the telecom sector going forward.
That could include consumer-protection measures such as mandatory rebates, service standards or more proactive investment in networks.
Lawford said he hopes the CRTC will hold a hearing on outages in order to determine rules on "baseline" quality or resiliency for telecom networks.
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