Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm Howard Maker, commissioner and CEO of CCTS, the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-Television Services, and with me today is my colleague Josée Thibault, our assistant commissioner of operations and business services.
CCTS is Canada's national organization providing free service to consumers to help them resolve complaints about retail Internet, wireless TV and local phone services under a structure and mandate approved by the CRTC, thus ensuring that our governance and operations are independent of the industry.
In simpler terms, we're the industry ombudsman and we have dealt with over 150,000 complaints since inception. We deal with complaints about billing, service quality, adherence to contracts and credit management. We're here to ensure that service providers meet their contractual obligations to their consumer and small business customers. We have an enviable track record in assisting Canadian customers, facilitating the resolution of nearly 90% of all complaints, often within 30 days. Indeed, we have the authority to require our 400-plus participating service providers to fix customer problems and to compensate customers when appropriate. Our decisions are binding on those providers.
We also report on what drives consumer complaints, regularly publishing aggregated data about the issues we see to ensure that consumers, the industry and the regulator are fully informed about the issues that cause complaints and to drive positive change in the industry.
In addition, we administer the CRTC's four consumer codes of conduct, which we use as benchmarks for service provider conduct when we are investigating complaints.