By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA – The House industry committee is expected to hear from the companies involved in the Rogers-Shaw megamerger when it holds a hearing on the matter next week, a parliamentary staffer confirmed.
The hearing is expected to begin January 25 with a one-hour session at 11 a.m. with Innovation Canada officials. The staffer said there is a possibility that Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne could attend, but he has yet to confirm.
At noon, the committee will host academics including Jennifer Quaid, Ben Klass, and Keldon Bester.
Then for one hour at 2 p.m., the committee will have Globalive, which is still holding out hope that it could be the investment firm that acquires Freedom Mobile in the deal. During the hour, it will also host Distributel, which is in the midst of being purchased by Bell; and TekSavvy, a critic of the deal that recently urged the Innovation Minister to block it because of a side agreement in which Videotron, the presumptive buyer of Freedom, will get long-term wholesale access to Rogers’s network at below market rates.
Finally, at 3 p.m., Rogers, Shaw, and Videotron are expected to appear. The staffer said the executives who will appear have not yet been confirmed.
The committee will reconvene to discuss new information that emerged since it concluded the first Rogers-Shaw hearings, including how Videotron came to be picked as Freedom’s suitor, according to The Globe and Mail.
The session will also come one day after the Federal Court of Appeal will hear arguments in an appeal by the Competition Bureau, which argued that the Competition Tribunal made errors in its analysis of the competition effects during the month-long hearing that led to it denying the bureau’s application to block the merger.
Rogers argued in its submission to the appeal court yesterday that the bureau does not have a case, charging that the bureau’s claim that the tribunal erred when it mixed the analyses of the Rogers-Shaw and Freedom sale is incorrect because the main deal cannot move forward without the sale.
