By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA – Rogers Media and Corus Entertainment have renewed their lobby registrations with a topic once thought passed its best-before date: junk food advertising restrictions.
In 2016, Senate Bill S-228 was introduced as an amendment to the Food and Drugs Act with the goal of severely restricting the ability of advertisers to market unhealthy food and drinks to children in an effort to fight obesity. Rogers, Bell and Corus began lobbying on the issue, with the latter warning that severely limiting TV advertising of these types of products from between 6 and 9 a.m. and 3 and 9…
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OTTAWA — Women in Communications and Technology (WCT) announced Monday the recipients of the organization’s annual Leadership Excellence Awards, which recognize women, men and organizations committed to gender diversity in Canada’s digital industries.
“Every year, WCT recognizes the individuals who are taking action every day to close the gender gap,” said Joanne Stanley, executive director of WCT, in the news release. “With the rate of women’s participation in the tech industry unchanged for almost a decade, particularly at senior levels, recognizing these sparks of change has never been more critical.”
The 2020 Annual Leadership Awards recipients are:
Woman of the Year…
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TORONTO – Rogers Communications today announced 5G service is available to its customers on the Samsung Galaxy S20 5G series, Canada’s first 5G smartphone.
As of Friday, Rogers Infinite customers and business customers with unlimited plans can access 5G services, where available, on the new Samsung smartphone. Rogers recently announced it has begun rolling out Canada’s first 5G network in downtown Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, with 20 more markets to come this year.
“This is the beginning of 5G and as it evolves, it will deliver more capabilities including speed, latency and capacity. Rogers Infinite and unlimited business data…
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By Christopher Guly
OTTAWA – In Toronto on Thursday, Innovation, Science and Industry Navdeep Bains gave Canada’s Big Three wireless carriers an ultimatum to lower their prices within two years while increasing competition by giving smaller and regional telecom companies a chance to bid on 50MHz of a 3500 MHz spectrum auction to be held later this year.
Bains spoke to Parliament Hill correspondent Christopher Guly prior to making his major announcement.
Christopher Guly: So you’re forcing the big guys to lower their prices and giving smaller, regional guys a break to help do that.
Navdeep Bains: You’re right. The spectrum set-aside is…
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OTTAWA — On Tuesday, the same day it denied an application by the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC) and the National Pensioners Federation (NPF) to require Koodo Mobile and other wireless service providers to provide paper bills upon request, the CRTC announced a new proceeding looking into the issue of paper billing.
In its decision against PIAC and NPF, the Commission says it found “there was no existing legislature or regulatory obligation that mandated the provision of paper bills and, since the rationale and evidence on the record of this proceeding related largely to Koodo alone, it would not…
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TORONTO — As the world’s Olympic and Paralympic athletes prepare to compete this summer, Accessible Media Inc. (AMI) announced Tuesday that season three of Mind Set Go returns to AMI-tv on Wednesday, April 1 at 8 p.m. The series is co-produced by AMI and Anaïd Productions in partnership with the Canadian Paralympic Committee.
The third season (8×60) follows eight Canadians living with a disability, debilitating injury or chronic pain as they transform their physical, mental and emotional health over a 90-day journey of body, mind and soul, says the news release. Lead expert Stephanie Dixon, a 19-time Paralympic medallist,…
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CALGARY — Ahead of International Women’s Day on March 8, Global Calgary announced Tuesday Cami Kepke (pictured left) is the network’s new weekend sports anchor. Effective immediately, Kepke is joining the Global News Hour at 6 Weekend and Global News at 11 Weekend anchor teams of Jayme Doll and Jodi Hughes.
Kepke has been a journalist with Global Calgary since April 2019. She previously worked as a digital broadcast journalist/anchor with the Global Regina team. With a passion for telling unique news and sports stories, she won an RTDNA for Sports Feature Reporting in 2017.
Kepke’s career began in Northern B.C. as…
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Far north provider sees good traction
By Ahmad Hathout
GATINEAU – Executives at Canadian wired and wireless service provider SSi Micro said Friday the Yellowknife-based company has seen “high” consumption of its lower-cost wireless plans and that those packages are a necessary component of the market.
“If you look at the disposition of users amongst all of our plans, you would find that a very large number of them are on a lower-end plan but you would also find that our consumers switch plans very easily,” SSi Micro’s founder and CEO Jeff Philipp (pictured in a cpac.ca screen cap) told CRTC commissioners…
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TORONTO — Independent Internet and TV service provider VMedia Inc. has submitted an objection to cabinet (officially the Governor-in-Council) in response to Bell Canada’s and the major incumbent cablecos’ petitions in November, in which they asked cabinet to overturn the CRTC’s August decision concerning final rates for aggregated wholesale high-speed access (HSA) services.
VMedia filed its submission on February 14, the last day to do so, and has posted a copy on its website. On Thursday, the independent ISP issued a news release to publicize its submission to cabinet and to explain its arguments for why the Commission’s decision…
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TORONTO — After premiering last weekend on Netflix, the four-hour docuseries Unabomber: In His Own Words will air in its entirety on Discovery Channel tonight at 8 p.m. ET and 5 p.m. PT.
Starting March 4, the series (4×60) will then re-air one episode at a time Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET on Investigation Discovery, and will begin streaming on Crave on April 3, the 25th anniversary of the Unabomber’s capture.
Domestic terrorist Ted J. Kaczynski is a Harvard-educated math prodigy and University of California-Berkeley professor who infamously led the FBI on a $50-million, 17-year-long manhunt and inspired a new generation…
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