BELLEVILLE, Ont. — During a virtual meeting yesterday, 59 heads of council from municipalities across eastern Ontario voiced their support for the Eastern Ontario Regional Network (EORN) “Gig Project” and are calling on the federal and provincial governments to help fund the proposed $1.6-billion public-private partnership to bring gigabit fibre Internet service to homes and businesses in the region.
EORN has been seeking federal and provincial support for its Gig Project, and says today in a press release it is requesting $200 million each from the two levels of government.
“This is about six per cent of the total…
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TORONTO — The Canada Media Fund (CMF) today provided an update on the progress of its Equity and Inclusion Strategy and presented the results to-date of the initiative.
“Over the past year, we heard from the industry, we learned, evolved and adapted. Today, we’re happy to have partnered with and supported hundreds of extraordinary projects and creators from racialized communities,” said Valerie Creighton, president and CEO of the CMF, in a press release. “I believe we have taken several steps in the right direction, but we’re only getting started. We will continue to listen, adapt and support Canada’s…
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VANCOUVER and OTTAWA — In response to Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry François-Philippe Champagne’s announcement last week the 3500 MHz spectrum auction scheduled for June 15 will not be delayed, independent telecom services provider Novus Entertainment has instead asked for the application process to be reopened.
“Novus would like to propose that the Department of Industry, Science and Economic Development (ISED) simply extend the time allowed for providing an application,” writes Donna Robertson, co-president and chief legal officer of Novus, in a letter sent to Minister Champagne on April 30.
“We would not expect a delay to the auction,”…
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OTTAWA — The department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) released today its latest quarterly report on wireless plans, which shows prices for the majority of mid-range data plans across Canada have decreased since tracking began a year ago.
As Cartt.ca readers know, the federal government wants service providers to reduce the cost of wireless plans by 25% over two years (from the beginning of 2020 to early 2022), and has been tracking prices since January 2020.
For plans with 2 GB to 6 GB of data, the latest tracking data shows most of these plans have seen price…
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TORONTO – Wireless upstart Data On Tap (dotmobile), filed a petition to federal cabinet Tuesday asking the federal government to overturn the portion of the CRTC’s recent wireless policy decision which excluded a mandate for full mobile virtual network operators to participate in the wireless market in Canada.
Dotmobile is Canada’s first full MVNO but has yet been unable to come to a wholesale agreement with any Canadian wireless network operator (company owners say none of the carriers even return their calls seeking a meeting). The CRTC’s much-ballyhooed wireless decision, however, didn’t mandate access for full MVNOs like…
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“The anger and hostility towards journalists has gotten worse, and the nature of that anger is far more personal than it ever was.”
By Christopher Guly
OTTAWA – In the past, CBC’s foreign correspondents covering wars first underwent “hostile environment” safety training before being deployed into a danger zone. The syllabus includes such topics as risk evaluation, stress management and resilience, and civil disorder.
However, over the past two years, as accusations of “fake news,” first fueled with a fury by the truly awful former U.S. president Donald Trump during his regular rallies and tweets, gained momentum during the Covid-19 pandemic by…
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TORONTO – It was announced today Maxine Bailey has been appointed executive director of the Canadian Film Centre (CFC).
Bailey joins the CFC after 18 years at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), most recently as vice-president, advancement. Bailey will take the job on May 3, 2021, succeeding Slawko Klymkiw, who retired at the end of March 2021.
“We at the CFC could not be in better hands,” said Christina Jennings, chair and CEO, Shaftesbury and chair, CFC Board of Directors. “She knows our industry well – not only from her many years at TIFF, but also as an active member…
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OTTAWA – Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, François-Philippe Champagne, said today in a letter the 3500 MHz spectrum auction scheduled for June 15th will not be delayed.
Several companies and organizations had asked for a delay in the auction so that they could reconsider applying, since the CRTC changed its wireless policies just days after the auction application deadline and if they knew then what they know now, they might have applied.
The mid-band spectrum is considered crucial to the roll out of next generation 5G networks.
The minister’s short letter addressed to Distributel CEO Matt Stein, reads as follows:
“Thank…
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By Len St-Aubin
THINK ABOUT HOW MANY millions of audio and video clips get posted to social media every day. Now contemplate, for a moment, the human and other resources that would be needed to supervise, regulate and control it all.
That is what the Liberal government has just proposed to do with an amendment to Bill C-10 that it pushed through Parliament’s Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage meeting Friday. That will be your tax dollars at work: wasteful, ineffective jobs for regulators, and freedom of expression be damned.
With the deletion of one clause (4.1) in Bill C-10, the bill to…
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TORONTO — Bell Media today announced a partnership with ad tech company Xandr, a business unit within AT&T, to create a proprietary omnichannel demand-side platform (DSP) for advertisers.
The new Bell Media product is being branded as SAM DSP and is an enhancement to the company’s strategic audience management (SAM) suite of data-enabled tools for marketers, says Bell Media’s press release.
Powered by Xandr’s buying platform, Xandr Invest, SAM DSP “will enable Canadian advertisers to easily plan, run and measure scaled, targeted campaigns using premium inventory over multiple platforms and channels,” reads the press release.
“We are building a best-in-class self-serve platform…
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