By Ahmad Hathout
The CRTC has on Monday finally decided to ease Corus’s financial obligations and delay the payback period to certain Canadian content funds, more than six months after it requested said relief.
That means Corus will see its obligations to programs of national interest (PNI) reduced from 8.5 per cent of previous year’s revenues to 5 per cent and extend beyond the current licence term the repayment period of certain amounts owed to its Canadian programming expenditure (CPE) that were deferred from the pandemic.
“The evidence on the record of this proceeding demonstrates that Corus is under considerable financial strain,”…
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Canadian Heritage announced via X on Thursday that Claire Anderson has been reappointed as CRTC commissioner for British Columbia and Yukon for a second five-year term.
The official order in council dated May 3 says her reappointment is effective Aug. 26, 2024.
A citizen of the Taku River Tlingit First Nation and based in Whitehorse, Anderson is the first Indigenous woman and first Yukon resident to be appointed as a CRTC commissioner. Her original appointment started in August 2019.
Called to the Yukon bar in 2014, Anderson started…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Telus said the CRTC must pony up if it requires the telco to build a new network to keep landline customers in certain remote communities of British Columbia connected – even though there are alternative service providers in those areas.
Earlier this year, the Vancouver-based company was forced by the CRTC to explain what was going on with home telephone services in those BC communities after it proposed to disconnect the services. Telus explained that those services are based on decades-old wireless technology known as the SR500 system that uses the 3.5 GHz spectrum, which…
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Regulator says it is aiming for wholesale internet decision by end of summer
By Ahmad Hathout
The CRTC said Friday it will not immediately decide whether the three largest telecommunications companies should be banned from accessing the large telcos’ bundled middle- and last-mile fibre facilities, effectively greenlighting Bell, Rogers, and Telus to ride on those networks in the interim.
A consortium made up of Bell, Cogeco, Eastlink, TekSavvy, and the indie rep the Competitive Network Operators of Canada filed a late March request for the CRTC to rule that the Big 3 are banned from accessing Bell’s and Telus’s fibre facilities…
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By Doug Barrett, adjunct professor in the Arts, Media & Entertainment MBA program at the Schulich School of Business
This is the third piece examining the current debate on the definition of Canadian content.
In the first I examined the different legal foundations of the Canadian Audio-Visual Certification Office (CAVCO) system and the CRTC system
In the second I argued that the CRTC should require CAVCO certification for all programs benefiting from “public purpose” money available because of CRTC regulation or other subsidies.
In this piece I look at the appropriate role of the CRTC content certification…
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The Municipalité régionale de comté (MRC) de D’Autray, located in the Lanaudière region northeast of Montreal, has submitted a Part 1 application asking the CRTC to clarify the rules regarding costs related to preparatory work on Bell poles to which the regional county municipality wants to attach.
In an application dated April 18 and posted to the CRTC’s website Tuesday, the MRC’s director of information systems and telecom services asks the commission to facilitate and to encourage Bell’s application of the provisions of the CRTC’s February 2023 telecom regulatory policy regarding costs associated with make-ready work…
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By Ahmad Hathout
An independent telecommunications association is asking that the CRTC to raise the revenue threshold for companies required to contribute annual fees to the commission, after the regulator ruled similarly for broadcasters last month.
The Independent Telecommunications Providers Association filed a Part 1 application made public this week imploring the regulator to this year increase the revenue threshold from $10 million to $25 million of previous year’s financial results – money that goes toward CRTC operations and a regime that funds telecommunications services.
“Today, the application of the $10 million mandates contribution payments by…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Google is asking the Federal Court of Appeal to allow it to argue that the CRTC should have included in its new broadcasting fee regulations an explicit exemption for advertisements that are placed on user-generated content.
The CRTC ordered in March a new way it was going to calculate revenues and collect fees for its operations, lowering traditional broadcasting obligations with the transfer of some of that collection to online platforms in line with the new Online Streaming Act that will bring the latter services under its ambit.
During the intervention phase of that 2023 proceeding,…
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Quebecor said it will rethink pricing strategy as a result
By Ahmad Hathout
Quebecor will need to accept Telus’s rate to connect to its wireless network, the CRTC ruled Monday, eliciting a scathing response from the Montreal company that included a promise to reconsider its low-cost pricing and suspend the launch of certain plans in Manitoba.
Telus and Quebecor could not come to an agreement on the price-per-gigabyte component of that access, so they each presented their respective prices and asked the CRTC to make that determination via final offer arbitration.
While it said both offers would allow Quebecor’s mobile virtual network…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Bell will argue before the Federal Court of Appeal that the CRTC was not right to rely on the government’s policy direction to order telcos to provide interim access to their bundled transport and last mile fibre facilities because it is inherently contradicted by the Telecommunications Act.
Section 10 of the 2023 policy direction to the CRTC requires the commission to mandate the provision of an aggregated wholesale high-speed access service. At the same time, section 8 of the Telecommunications Act provides the government with the ability to order the regulator to make decisions of “general application on…
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