OTTAWA – Canada should establish a universal service obligation to ensure that communication services like telephone, broadband Internet and broadcasting are affordable for all Canadians, says a new report from the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC).
No Consumer Left Behind: A Canadian Affordability Framework for Communications Services in a Digital Age surveyed existing legal and policy explorations of how much Canadians can afford to pay for their communications services, plus conducted focus groups and interviews with organizations that work with low and moderate income families to develop a framework for defining “affordability” of communications services. The report concluded that that Canada needs a comprehensive statement of affordability in order to move towards universal communications for Canadians.
“Canada has been silent on what affordable communications services means for too long,” said PIAC’s executive director, general counsel and co-author of the report , John Lawford. “We need to start the conversation – and to do that we need to know what affordability really means to low-income consumers.”
The report says that average monthly communications expenses began at over $100 and ran up to $212 per month depending on household size. For many low-income households, communications expenses used up, on average, 7.67% of their monthly income, with smaller households of between 1 to 4 persons spending the greatest proportion – up to 8.09% – of their monthly income on communications services.
At the very minimum, a service can be described to be affordable where its cost does not require a household to cut back its expenditures on other basic necessities such as food, shelter, clothing, transportation and health care, the report continues, suggesting that communications services are “affordable” where, as a guideline, they make up about 4% to 6% of a household’s income.
The report also recommended that the CRTC undertake quantitative research on affordability on a yearly basis and make the findings and data public.
