Bell says it will withdraw court app challenging lack of action on rate-setting before new attach rules
By Ahmad Hathout
The CRTC on Tuesday made interim the current wholesale rates competitors pay to attach to the poles owned by Bell and Telus, paving the way for the setting of final rates that will apply retroactively.
The decision, effective today, locks in Bell’s current charges of $1.04 per pole per month in Ontario and Quebec and Telus’s going rate of $1.61 to do so in British Columbia and Alberta as the commission evaluates the telcos’ request to bump up those aging rates.
More importantly for Bell and Telus, the decision will allow them to recover costs if the CRTC decides at a later date that those final rates should be higher.
The decision comes after the CRTC approved in late January the terms and conditions to attach to those poles. That decision brought into force rules the commission made in February 2023 that, among other things, shifted from competitors to pole owners the cost of bringing those structures into compliance standards when there’s a new request to attach.
As a result of the February decision, and before the January determination, both telcos asked for a bump up of their rates to $2.09 for Bell and $2.49 for Telus because they claim the current costs are out of sync with the additional burden of complying with the new rules.
The CRTC said at the time that it wasn’t going to make the rates interim because it had yet to approve the terms and conditions. But then the January decision came and the commission again punted the issue down the road. That prompted Bell to file a procedural request on February 17 to make those rates interim, warning that it would otherwise be losing money on rates set 15 years ago and that were allegedly made unjust and unreasonable by the new rules.
Bell, in fact, said in a recent Federal Court of Appeal application requesting a stay of the CRTC’s January decision that it is expending approximately $2 million a month on unrecoverable costs as a result.
“The CRTC’s failure to set an interim rate creates permanently unrecoverable costs for Bell since the CRTC’s rate-setting power only permits it to set rates on a forward-looking basis, not on a retroactive basis,” Bell said in its court application. “The CRTC was not required to determine the final pole rate in the Decision. But it was required to set an interim pole rate until it determined a just and reasonable final pole rate.”
That application will now be withdrawn as a result of Tuesday’s decision, Bell told Cartt. “We are pleased with today’s decision and the quick action taken by the CRTC,” a Bell spokesperson told us.
Photo via Xplore
