Industry Committee on March 1st, 2018

[John Poole]

If your phone was susceptible to shutting down abruptly, there wouldn't be a lot you could do. At the time, unfortunately, no one quite knew why these phones were shutting down abruptly. You might suspect it's the battery. You could go out and buy an external battery pack, a battery case for your phone, so that it would have more longevity. You could take it into an Apple store and have the battery replaced at your own personal cost. Those would be the options available to you.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Changing the battery or supplanting the battery.

[John Poole]

Exactly.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

I didn't necessarily have to have it run slow. I could have had that choice, if I knew that either you change the battery and your phone could keep running at a normal rate.... I wasn't given that choice in this case, and I wasn't told about it. Something just happened, right?

[John Poole]

Exactly. When Apple released iOS 10.2.1, their release notes mentioned—I don't remember the exact wording—a vague notion about power management and some description of that. I don't believe it tied into the sudden shutdown issue. It certainly didn't mention it.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

There was a coded thing, just looking at power management.

[John Poole]

Exactly, and once you applied that update, your phone would no longer shut down, but it might be running slower than it would were it a new phone.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

That happened. They put this out. People unwittingly updated their phones. Then suddenly, because of your expertise, it came to your attention. Is that what happened?

[John Poole]

That's correct. Both when our customers were complaining about it and once we saw the Reddit post indicating that changing the battery could improve your phone performance, that's when we switched our theory from this being a software issue to a hardware issue. That's when we did the analysis and discovered just how severe and how widespread this issue was.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Have you seen anything like this in other technologies that you monitor, that a company might change something without advising people and it seriously degrades its performance?

[John Poole]

We've seen issues in the past where perhaps a new software update will cause a performance degradation. Usually, that's treated as a bug and is fixed. It may be an oversight on the company's part, and it's immediately addressed in the subsequent update, or something—

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

But it's not done on purpose?

[John Poole]

Generally speaking, it's not on purpose. There may be slight drops—you know, 5% or 10%—due to a new technology or a new way to work around things. A perfect example of this would actually be the Spectre and Meltdown fixes that have come out recently to address security flaws, where there is the potential for having your device run slightly more slowly as a result of these fixes.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

But that's not hidden from the...?

[John Poole]

That has received a lot of publicity and people generally understand that this could be a side effect of applying—

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

But it was not hidden from the consumer?

[John Poole]

Not at all.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

For this particular one, we can say—well, you can't speak to that.

This is a question for the Competition Bureau.

You said that you've done a lot of work with the digital economy. In your notes you also mentioned, which I found interesting, that you're doing a lot of work in fintech. A lot of people use their iPhones for banking now. You said that you were very happy—“extremely pleased” was your wording—with the recent budget.

What was in the recent budget that helped the Competition Bureau? What was the recommendation that you made to the government, which was in the budget and which you were pleased about?

[Alexa Gendron-O'Donnell]

Part of what I will do is provide you with the link to our fintech report for a bit more detail. The budget spoke about looking at things like open banking and spoke to fintech more generally. That is what I was referring to.

Fintech to us is a really important topic, as it's something that's evolving. It's really nice to see people interested as well—

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

It's evolving very fast, and the Competition Bureau had given the government some suggestions to be able to keep up, to make sure that it doesn't get abused. Is that...?

[Alexa Gendron-O'Donnell]

That's right. The suggestions are broad, and really we want to make sure that there are enough regulations that people are comfortable using this kind of new technology but not so many that we're chilling potential innovation. Really, the report is about striking that balance, and the various suggestions that we make are for that purpose. Again, I'd be happy to provide that.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Do you feel that the budget struck that balance?

[Alexa Gendron-O'Donnell]

We think the budget started us down a path that is promising.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Thank you.

We're going to move to Mr. Lloyd.

You have five minutes.