OTTAWA – A senior government official acknowledged during a Parliamentary committee appearance Thursday morning that the federal government’s $500 million Connect to Innovate (CTI) program won’t do enough to bring broadband to all underserved communities in Canada.
Speaking to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology, Susan Hart, director general for the Connecting Canadians Branch at Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED) noted the number of communities which will get new backbone infrastructure under CTI is “a drop in the bucket” compared to what’s needed.
When setting out to determine the scope of the CTI program, the…
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EDMONTON – CCAA-protected pay TV provider Super Channel last month had its protection order extended until February 28th, 2018. The court also recently dismissed claims from unsecured creditors HSBC and Shaftsbury Films against secured creditors Rosedale Meadows Development Inc. and Peter Allard.
The Allard-family owned company (its legal entities are called Allarco Entertainment 2008 Inc. and Allarco Entertainment Limited Partnership) entered bankruptcy protection in May 2016, then owing $115.7 million to a number of creditors. It has been granted several extensions on its protection from creditors under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) since.
According to numerous…
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SUCCESSIVE FEDERAL GOVERNMENTS have for years thrown money at the northern broadband problem with varying degrees of success.
Programs such as BRAND (Broadband, Rural and Northern Development), Connecting Canadians and now Connect to Innovate are the three most recent ones, backed by hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. For the most part though, these national initiatives have been more broadly-based, focusing on both the transport and local access problems and many have argued this approach has missed addressing the most pressing problem.
That problem is a lack of transport and backbone network redundancy, a critical infrastructure need which the federal government’s…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC is stepping up its fight against unwanted telemarketing calls by proposing universal call blocking for “blatantly illegitimate” phone numbers.
The Commission defined blatantly illegitimate numbers as those where the calling number is the same as the called telephone number; numbers spoofed to be local calls when they’re actually long-distance numbers; and numbers that do not conform to the to the North American Numbering Plan (NANP), i.e., are non-dialable telephone numbers like 000-000-0000.
The regulator issued a call for comments Thursday on a proposal that would require all Canadian telecommunications service providers to implement the technology within nine months…
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Bell says it’s also hiring 40 digital media specialists
TORONTO – Bell Media this week let go a number of people at several local radio and TV stations this week.
While the company declined to confirm the numbers, Bell Media union Unifor says at least 50 positions have been terminated spread across 17 stations. The cuts include on-air positions as well as technicians and other operations employees.
According to the Unifor press release, this last round of cuts eliminates what people have historically defined as local anchors and journalists dedicated solely to sports. Bell began this process earlier this year. Popular…
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OTTAWA—Public policy should not dictate matters of jurisdiction, lawyers for Bell Canada argued on Tuesday before the Federal Court of Appeal in the company’s nearly two-year-long quest to have the court overturn the CRTC’s mandatory Wholesale Code.
Bell Canada argues that nothing in the Copyright Act or Broadcasting Act gives the Commission the right to impose certain prices and other commercial terms for TV programmers to license their programming to BDUs, which is Bell’s main beef with the Wholesale Code.
“There is no doubt that the CRTC has wide discretion” to regulate programming negotiations, “but its power to do so is…
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OTTAWA – Canadians are so reliant upon their internet service that some 46% said that they’d give up fast food for a year rather than disconnect, says a report this week by the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA).
CIRA Internet Factbook 2017, an annual report that covers the state of Canada’s internet, e-commerce, cybersecurity and the online habits of Canadians, also said that 34% of respondents would give up alcohol, 31% would pass on chocolate, and 26% would ditch their coffee rather than lose the internet.
Of the 87% of Canadians who have a broadband internet connection, 81% say that…
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OTTAWA – Piracy continues to be a major problem for the international content industry. Whether it’s the Premier League football in the UK or HBO’s Game of Thrones, rights holders are under pressure to find ways to stem the piracy tide. As a potential remedy, site blocking was one option raised at the International Institute of Communications’ Canadian event in Ottawa this week.
A paper by Richard Lizius, an associate with McCarthy Tétrault argued that site blocking is a legitimate approach and the Canadian courts have the authority to issue such orders (Lizius wasn’t in attendance; he was at the…
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OTTAWA – This new guy is definitely different from the last one.
Exactly five years ago, then-new chair Jean-Pierre Blais used Ottawa’s IIC Canada conference to set out his plan for the Commission under his leadership. None could understand at the time how his “consumers, creators and citizens” vision would break apart industry assumptions, challenge business as usual, increase consumer involvement with the Regulator – and foster unprecedented levels of acrimony between the chair and industry – and between the chair and some of the CRTC staff and commissioners. A lot of that pain was fueled…
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OTTAWA – Canada’s anti-spam legislation may be burdensome for businesses, but it is beginning to pay off, says Steven Harroun, the CRTC’s chief compliance and enforcement officer.
In a recent address to the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology as part of CASL’s planned three year review, Harroun described the legislation as “largely effective” and stressed that it would be counterproductive to tweak it at this point.
He quoted a third-party study that determined there was 29% less spam email in Canadians' inboxes and 37% less spam originating from Canada just one year after CASL's implementation. Internationally, he continued, Canada is…
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