Industry Committee on July 25th, 2022

[Bernard Généreux, Conservative, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I thank the witnesses for being with us.

Mr. Scott, there's a saying that goes, “Things happen in threes.” I hope that for Rogers, that doesn't turn out to be the case. Obviously, this situation caused a lot of problems for many people.

As you said yourself, there were different levels of outages in different circumstances. Since we're talking about technology, they're not always predictable. I think everyone agrees on that point.

However, to minimize the number of outages, and even avoid them altogether, is the CRTC missing any tools? Are there any other tools that might help you in your work?

[Ian Scott]

Thank you for the question.

Mr. Murray, could you answer, please?

[Michel Murray]

I think those are questions we will be looking into over the coming weeks and months.

As the chair said, committees have been established to study them.

We are going to work with the Canadian Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, CSTAC, which would be looking at these questions.

We will participate in those conversations. There's also the Emergency Services Working Group, which is constantly making recommendations to the commission on all matters related to emergency services. So we will work with that committee and see what can be done.

[Bernard Généreux, Conservative, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Murray.

Mr. Scott, you said earlier that you would make sure, in this case, to improve communications with Rogers. This is relevant for the government as well, since the minister had to call the company, not the other way around, to find out what was going on.

Also, outages don't just happen with Rogers. They happen with other companies too.

What are you going to do to make communication better in the future? This is not the first time Rogers has had to deal with this kind of situation. It happened 15 months ago as well.

Were there any penalties imposed on the company at that time? If so, what were they?

[Ian Scott]

That is a very important question.

I can't speak to what the commission will do. The issue of Rogers' communications will be something that the commission will be looking at, so I can't tell you what the resolution will be. As I said earlier, it is always a question of us making a collective decision. Clearly, there was inadequate communication, and we need to establish, I would say, a protocol not just for Rogers but for all of the industry, because Rogers is not the only company that has outages. It just had the biggest one, but it is not the only company that has outages.

Communication with Canadians needs to be better, and it needs to be, I think, prescribed. That's something we will look at in the coming weeks.

[Bernard Généreux, Conservative, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Fifteen months ago, did you impose penalties on Rogers? You say your organization is an administrative tribunal. You have the ability to impose fines if I understand correctly.

Did you do so with Rogers 15 months ago and, if so, what were they?

[Michel Murray]

No, penalties were not imposed 15 months ago.

[Bernard Généreux, Conservative, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Can you tell me why?

[Ian Scott]

I will answer in English, if I may.

It's because the AMPs are not meant to be punitive.

[Bernard Généreux, Conservative, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

So?

[Ian Scott]

No, it is an important difference. It is meant to make companies, encourage companies, to comply. Rogers and others have had outages. We investigate, and then they introduce measures, if they introduce measures, to correct the problem.

[Bernard Généreux, Conservative, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Mr. Scott, if you cannot give a fine when someone had an outage and you don't give them a fine because it's more to encourage people to change their manner, the way they are doing things, how are you going to impose une amende, a fine, whatever? How are you going to do that?

[Ian Scott]

It's not that we don't do it. We do it on the CASL side. We have done it recently on the telecommunications side. We penalized a major telecommunications company for frustrating a competitor from offering service. So, we do it.

My point was simply that if Rogers does something—has a practice—and we tell them that we want them to change and correct it and they change it, then they don't require punishment. What you're saying is that they do in this case. Maybe they do; I don't know. We haven't made that determination.

[Bernard Généreux, Conservative, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Okay, that's fine.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Michael Kram]

Mr. Généreux, that is time.

[Ian Scott]

My answer was too long. I'm sorry.

[Bernard Généreux, Conservative, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Mr. Chair, I have another one. Be generous.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Michael Kram]

I'm sorry. We do have a tight schedule.

Finally, we will go to Mr. Erskine-Smith for five minutes.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

I appreciate your being here, Mr. Scott.

I have to say at the outset that I also appreciate the questions you put to Rogers because it was from their answers that I fully understood what had taken place. You and I have exchanged in the past about my frustrations that I expressed to you around price in this sector. I always took the answer to concerns that I've expressed to be, “Well, we don't have an affordable network, but we have a resilient network.”

The outage that we've seen with Rogers puts some lie to the fact that we have this resilient network. What do you say now when we don't have an affordable network? Resiliency has also been put at risk, given the concentration we've seen in the over 12 million customers Rogers has. Does it not make you reflect? I'm certainly reflecting, but does it not make you reflect on the heavily concentrated oligopoly and the need to address that core challenge?

[Ian Scott]

The short response to your question of whether we need to do more and better is yes. Network reliability generally has been good. This is an example showing not good enough, and it was a catastrophic failure. Steps have to be taken, no questions about it.

Are wireless rates too high? You and I have had this discussion, and, yes, they are. They are going down, and they need to continue to go down. We have a regulatory framework in place to assist in that, and it will continue.

I will take issue with the different—

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Could you pause there just for a second.

I was looking at the analysis of rates, and Saskatchewan kept jumping out at me. I had a question the other day on the radio: Should we nationalize networks? I have to say I balked at the question. I wasn't as familiar with SaskTel as I should have been, but Saskatchewan has much lower rates, certainly level one and level two in wireless, than other parts of the country. Is it a consequence of a Crown-controlled operation out there?

[Ian Scott]

I don't have those numbers with me.

I can tell you that Saskatchewan does not have the lowest wireless rates in Canada. Quebec, on average, had the lowest wireless rates in Canada. That can largely be attributed to the effectiveness of a regional competitor in the form of Videotron. That competition has driven down rates in Quebec more than anywhere else in the country.

The commission's framework was designed to encourage that and other forms of competition so that will be the case everywhere.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

You mentioned that it's in Rogers' interest to address this. I would say it's now in their interest to address this because it's a PR nightmare for them.

If they had had an incentive to address this, they would have, because the answers they were describing at our committee separating wire line and wireless partitioning don't seem overly complicated to a layperson like me, and it cost them $250 million—we'll say 10 CEOs' worth—to fix this problem. They make over $1.5 billion in net income every year. If it was in their interest, if there was adequate competition, if it was so easy for a customer like me to go somewhere else, then wouldn't they have put more in to a resilient network?

[Ian Scott]

I don't know the answer to that, obviously. It's kind of a hypothetical. I would say this, though. The measure, as I understand what Mr. Staffieri was referring to, is to separate the networks out at the core because, in this instance, what happened is that, when the core failed, everything failed.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Yes, they basically DoSed themselves.