OTTAWA – Registration is now open for the ‘Canadian Communications Policy and Legislation: Time for a Review’ presented by the Canadian Chapter of the International Institute of Communications.
Scheduled for October 31 and November 1, 2018 at the Shaw Centre in Ottawa, the event promises to bring together communications regulators, policy makers and lawyers from Canada and the U.S. to debate the key issues affecting broadcasting, telecommunications and the Internet today.
Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien will moderate the opening morning plenaries, and confirmed speakers include CRTC chair Ian Scott, CBC/Radio-Canada president and CEO Catherine Tait, and U.S. FCC Commissioner…
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LAST WEEK, CARTT.CA's Greg O’Brien published an edited version of a presentation he gave as a “provocateur” at a roundtable session about the future of Canadian television production at Ryerson University. The Writers Guild of Canada (WGC) was, in the best spirit of intellectual engagement and discussion, indeed provoked!
To begin with, the WGC wholeheartedly agrees with O’Brien’s acknowledgement that Canadian film and television production is an important driver of economic activity in Canada. We also agree that the Canadian creative industries need and deserve government support in order to survive and thrive. And we particularly…
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“A once-in-a-lifetime chance to change the buyer-beware culture”
OTTAWA – The Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC) is making it easier for both consumers as well as current and former employees of telecom companies to share their tales of telecom sales practices with the CRTC.
With less than two weeks until the Commission’s August 30 deadline for comments, the consumer organization released two 'how-to’ documents – one entitled What Consumers Need to Know and the other called What Telecommunication Company Employees Need To Know – to help ease the process.
“In our lengthy experience with Canada’s telecommunications market, we believe the CRTC…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC has extended the deadline for comments and replies on whether or not the radio market in and around Quebec City can sustain more stations.
The Commission issued a call for comments earlier this month regarding the market capacity and appropriateness of issuing a call for radio applications in Quebec City, as well as Sainte-Marie and the Regional County Municipality of Portneuf, both of which are small towns within transmitter range of Quebec City.
On Monday, it issued amendments to all three of those Broadcasting Notices of Consultation, pushing out the deadline for submitting…
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I THINK YOUR SUGGESTION that the cultural industries should be funded entirely from the treasury, like the army, and eliminate all levies or similar measures creates worrying problems.
I don’t know where tax credits fit into this model. I do not believe that Canadians would revolt over a modest ISP tax that funded Cancon, especially if “revenue neutral” as the CRTC proposes.
Would Canadians be willing to pay more to have a country, or not, whether the funding is coming from general taxes or dedicated taxes or levies?
As you point out, that general tax funding would be…
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TORONTO and VANCOUVER — Hundreds of phone calls to northern Canada are failing to get through, and Iristel and Telus have their own theories as to why, each accusing the other company of engaging in suspect telecom practices that it claims are the underlying cause.
Iristel is claiming Telus in late May intentionally reduced its network capacity on certain toll transit circuits that carry Telus traffic to Iristel numbers in the 867 numbering plan area (NPA) in northern Canada, causing congestion in the network that has in turn caused hundreds of phone calls from Telus customers to certain Iristel end…
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OTTAWA — Having received nothing but silence from Calgary-based telecom service provider VOIS Inc. with regard to its non-compliance with the mandatory requirement to participate in the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services (CCTS), the CRTC is imposing an additional $25,000 penalty on VOIS and a $5,000 fine on its company director Harpreet Randhawa.
This is on top of a $15,000 penalty the CRTC imposed on VOIS in April 2017 for violating its obligation to be a participant in CCTS. At the time, the CRTC also ordered VOIS to restore its participation in CCTS, after it was expelled…
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OTTAWA — The City of Hamilton has been denied its application requesting the CRTC review and vary a 2017 telecom decision regarding the city’s municipal access agreement (MAA) with Bell Canada, an ongoing dispute that dates back to 2014.
In its Telecom Decision 2017-388, issued in October 2017, the CRTC revised the wording set out in its original decision of February 2016, in which the Commission had established the provisions of the MAA between the City of Hamilton and Bell. An MAA generally sets out the terms and conditions of a carrier’s access to highways and other public…
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MONTREAL — Quebecor CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau's brief foray into Quebec politics might hurt his company in a way that he never predicted, and now he's trying to sort his way out of it.
On Tuesday, Péladeau announced he was going to appeal his own guilty plea, admitting to violating Quebec's campaign finance law by paying off his 2015 Parti Québécois leadership campaign's debt, because he learned that the province's anti-corruption law might cause that illegal act to make the companies he owns — Quebecor and its subsidiaries — ineligible for government contracts.
Péladeau made the guilty plea on July…
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MONTREAL — Stingray Digital Group saw a 16% increase in revenues in the first quarter of its 2019 fiscal year, primarily due to strong growth in revenues in the United States and other countries where it has expanded its business during the last 12 months.
Overall, Stingray’s revenues increased 16.1% to $34.5 million in the first quarter of 2019, compared to $29.7 million in the first quarter of last year. However, Stingray’s Canadian revenues actually decreased 6.2% to $13.7 million (representing 39.6% of its total revenues) in the first quarter of 2019, due to less equipment and installation sales related…
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