Industry Committee on March 20th, 2023

[Josée Thibault]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you very much, Mr. Lemire.

Mr. Masse, you have the floor.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Merci.

Monsieur Lemire has brought up an interesting point that hasn't been raised before, actually, in all of our telecom studies. I want to follow up on that with Ms. Thibault. It's on the equipment issue.

I've been through it myself, when it's not working right and your telco provider doesn't tell you that you need a new modem. I found out that my modem was about five years old and hadn't had software updates or whatever and hadn't done the right download it was supposed to and so forth. There was no notification. I just kept on paying and assuming it was okay.

Is there a lot of this happening? Obviously it became a problem, which is why we started raising the issue. However, it would almost seem that it would be to the advantage of the provider at that point to have me suffering and not getting the best service I could. In the meantime, they don't have to replace my equipment and they also could actually expand other speeds elsewhere.

I'm just wondering whether there's something on the consumer advocacy front that we have to do so they will have to notify people about equipment updates as well.

[Josée Thibault]

Again, I don't have statistics I can share with you about that. What I can say is that it is very common for service providers to take a look at the customer's equipment when they are troubleshooting issues. That's been our experience. When we're working with complaints, that is our expectation, and we follow up on that and get reports on what was found.

That's what I can tell you. That's what I can speak to. As for the rest of it, it's a little bit more about informing consumers of their rights. Again, we're always big proponents of making sure that consumers are as educated as possible and that they understand how to navigate the system.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Thank you.

Quickly to Ms. Knight, do you think that's maybe something we should be looking at, in terms of at least being responsible for notifying customers about when they should actually upgrade equipment and whether they're eligible for that? I only found out by accident.

[Erin Knight]

I can say that I wish my ISP would tell me that information, personally. Yes, that falls under a lot of what we talked about today. A lot of great ideas are coming out as to how we can help empower consumers to actually get what they pay for and have good-quality service in ways that are currently not protected. Absolutely, we can explore all these ideas. I don't think this bill is the place for that, but yes, I would never shut that down. I think that's a great idea.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Thank you. Thank you to the witnesses.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you very much, Mr. Masse.

That concludes our official rounds of questions, but given that we have more time, I will open the floor to anyone who wants to ask questions.

Go ahead, Mr. Perkins.

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I have a couple more questions. I won't prolong the meeting too much.

In his opening, the sponsor of the bill, Mr. Mazier, who is here today, talked about how complaints to the regulatory bodies have actually gone down where this has been implemented, I think primarily in Europe. I wonder, Mr. Maker, if you have or have seen any data on that.

[Howard Maker]

I have not seen any data on what's going on in other countries that have done this. It seems that the complaint environment is different in different countries, so I would hesitate to draw any direct comparisons.

However, that's the objective here. The objective is to try to reduce the number of complaints as a result of customers being informed about what they're getting and having nothing to complain about.

Now, we don't live in nirvana. We know that there are always going to be problems, and sometimes there's the opposite effect when providing disclosure makes customers actually understand what they're not getting. It's really very difficult to predict what will happen in terms of complaint numbers, but we're hopeful that something like this would cause them to go down.

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Ms. Knight, I have the same question for you. I don't know if you have access to any data or are aware of that at all.

[Erin Knight]

I don't think I'm the best to speak on that. If you want me to speak on how our community responds to this type of thing, I would say that, yes, we've had a wider conversation with our community for more than a decade about this type of issue, through several iterations of Parliament, about the unfair power that big telecom has over people in Canada. When we hear the service quality sentiment from our community, it's often embedded within a wider conversation about things like the Rogers-Shaw merger. People dislike that, and some of the reasons they give are that these big companies already abuse us. These big companies already hurt us, so why would we want them to get even bigger?

That's the kind of thing we hear from our community, and I don't have stats to share with you. I'm always happy to report more on what our community thinks about this type of thing.

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

I appreciate that.

I have one more question, Dr. Rajabiun.

There has been expressed a concern that if you say that it's possible to have a regulated minimum speed within these packages, the companies—unless you're very specific—will just use zero as the minimum speed, as they do now. What would be your suggestion about how we, either through this bill or any other mechanism, make sure that doesn't happen?

[Dr. Reza Rajabiun]

The CRTC has already established a 50-millisecond minimum service quality standard. It's not implemented, but they have established it.

That minimum needs to be low. It cannot be too high, because speeds are going to vary. You could set a minimum. Let's say it's 5 megabits per second. You could have a baseline for what you want that minimum to be. For example, the 50/10 basic service standard that is part of the universal access process says that this is supposed to be a speed, a capacity, that's enough for a household with multiple people to be running multiple applications at the same time. That's why the CRTC adopted it, but people are adopting higher-speed packages because they really cannot use the services they need with 50/10.

A much lower minimum that enables people to use very basic service—say at 5 megabits per second, up and down—can be a standard that can be used. It could be something like that.

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Sorry. I am going to back up and say that I have one more question, even though the last one was the last question.

Ms. Knight, on that minimum speed issue, I think in your submission you actually had 3, 5 and 10 megabits per second. Is it meaningful to have a minimum standard that low, especially when some of the packages are saying that they're going to offer as high as 8 gigabytes per second? Is it meaningful to say that 10 is an adequate minimum?

[Erin Knight]

I don't think I can tell you what the adequate minimum should be.

When I think about service quality standards in Canada, I'm always looking to the future. The speed standard we're shooting for in Canada is 50/10. At OpenMedia, we always talk about future-proofing, so we're looking into, say, 50 years from now. When does 50/10 become obsolete? If our communities are getting insufficient service today, how are we looking forward to make sure that in the future, we're not getting them bits and pieces, and later on they have the same problem and we're just kicking the can down the road?

I don't think I can tell you what a particular minimum should be. Shoot for the stars, I guess. We can look to the gold standard of connectivity in a lot of communities, which is fibre Internet. We can look at types of technologies being required in public funding for Internet infrastructure and making sure those are available to communities, regardless of where they are. I'm a believer that we shouldn't be funding too many satellite services when things like fibre are available.

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Just to summarize, the idea is that as technology changes, somehow there should be a mechanism that should be part of this process, annually or maybe even faster, that says the CRTC, the government, ISED or whoever it is has to do an annual review to say that technology has moved ahead and therefore we should move to a higher minimum standard at some point. Just letting it sit there for five years is probably silly. It will all be obsolete, as you say.

Is that essentially what you're saying?

[Erin Knight]

I'm saying that future-proofing should always be a part of figuring out any sort of minimum service standard for any reason. I don't know if that's a legislative application or a regulatory thing. Absolutely, it can't just be one and done forever.

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Great.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you very much, Mr. Perkins.

Thank you to all of our witnesses today for sharing your time and your insights with us.

Thank you also to MP Mazier for bringing this important bill forward.

I thank the interpreters, the analysts, the clerk, the support staff and the political staff.

I wish everyone a good evening.

The meeting is adjourned.