Bell announced Monday it has been awarded $24,000 in compensatory and punitive damages by the Court of Quebec in a case involving theft of the telco’s copper wire in Chicoutimi in January 2024.
In a decision handed down Nov. 26, the Quebec court awarded Bell $19,000 in compensatory damages for network repairs and $5,000 in punitive damages, which a Bell press release said underscored the seriousness of the offence and its consequences.
The copper theft in Chicoutimi on Jan. 2, 2024 resulted in 94 customers losing internet service for more than 36 hours, Bell said.
“Several factors contributed to the awarding of punitive damages, including the severity of the impact and danger to public safety, the profits the defendant gained from reselling copper, the significant threat that copper theft poses to telecommunications infrastructures and customers, and the defendant’s criminal conviction,” Bell said in its press release.
Calling it “a significant milestone”, Bell said the ruling was Quebec’s first default judgment in a copper theft case.
Copper theft has been escalating across Canada, Bell said, adding that the telco has recorded 1,275 copper theft incidents in 2025 alone, representing an approximate 40-per-cent increase year-over-year.
Some of the measures Bell has taken to combat copper theft include installing aerial alarms to alert police to infrastructure tampering, deploying additional security guards and surveillance cameras, working closely with law enforcement and pursuing legal action against offenders, and completing the transition of 60 per cent of Bell’s footprint to a pure fibre network.
Bell and Canada’s other large telcos have been calling on the federal government to take more action against network infrastructure damage and theft for quite some time.
A year ago, representatives from Bell, Telus and the Canadian Telecommunications Association appeared before the Senate Transportation and Communications committee to lobby for harsher penalties for copper wire theft.
Photo via Bell
