Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
My name is John Lawford. I'm the executive director and general counsel at the Public Interest Advocacy Centre.
PIAC is a national non-profit organization and registered charity that provides legal and research services on behalf of consumers, and in particular, vulnerable consumers. PIAC has been active in the field of communications law and policy for over 40 years.
Unlike previous quality-of-service regimes for wireline telephone, now all but abandoned by the CRTC, there have never been quality-of-service requirements imposed on companies for wireless or Internet retail service. This is why the commission, from whom you have just heard, has a hard time describing just what it is doing to both inquire into Rogers' outage and ensure that it will not happen again, not only to Rogers but to any other telecommunications service provider.
I could bore you with details about regulation by competition under changes from the 1993 Telecommunications Act and talk of forbearance from regulation, but the result is the same: Canadians are at risk of going digitally dark at any time. Frankly, there are no rules for how the telco involved must communicate the outage and to whom, not what services are impacted, when service will be restored, whether customers will get a rebate, nor whether emergency connectivity can or will be restored. In short, there is nothing.
Rogers says, “Trust us,” “Sorry,” and “We will fix it,” after it has happened at least twice. We say, “We don't trust you.” The regulator should say, “Trust but verify, inform, compensate and become resilient,” but we have no faith the CRTC has said that or will ensure that.
PIAC filed a letter on the day of the Rogers outage requesting that the CRTC first, conduct a CRTC-led inquiry under section 48 of the Telecommunications Act to inquire into the Rogers outage and, second, initiate a notice of consultation involving all Internet and wireless providers to set a baseline of service resumption, notification, compensation, interconnection and emergency response.
These two formal processes would ensure that the CRTC could ensure that Rogers made necessary corrections and, more importantly, that all consumers taking service from all telecommunications service providers would be protected going forward in a similar manner.
The CRTC then announced it would ask Rogers questions and by implication, I believe, not undertake the two more thorough public and open complete investigations. This means we think the CRTC will do nothing more. It is sweeping this under the rug and yet it has a lot of power and tons of jurisdiction to do it.
We have reviewed Rogers' responses filed Friday. They are predictably redacted and effectively useless and opaque. The minister's request for a mutual assistance agreement between major telcos for emergency coverage and limited roaming is only a tiny portion of the answer.
Parliament can act when the CRTC refuses to do so. It can make changes to the Telecommunications Act. In 2014, Parliament, tired of waiting for the CRTC to issue a wireless roaming tariff to make roaming more affordable and available, amended the Telecommunications Act to add section 27.1, temporarily setting a rate until the CRTC moved itself to replace the legislated rate with a regulated one. It did so relatively quickly.
Similarly, here Parliament can legislate. It can legislate the baseline protections that PIAC and retail customers are demanding and dare the CRTC to actually replace those requirements with a holistic, regulatory regime for outages. We ask you to do it.
Those are our comments, and we welcome your questions.
Thank you.