Paper artifacts of political pandering

I was glancing through Canada’s Broadcast Act and Telecom Act last night – clearly a sign that I lost interest in the Monday Night Football broadcast – and I came across two sections that bear witness to the failures in digital economy leadership by the last government.

Enshrined in legislation in both Acts is a section prohibiting charging a fee for paper bills. From the Broadcast Act:

34.1 No person who carries on a broadcasting undertaking shall charge a subscriber for providing the subscriber with a paper bill.

And the Telecom Act:

27.2 Any person who provides telecommunications services shall not charge a subscriber for providing the subscriber with a paper bill.

I am certain a legal scholar can weigh in on why the two sections are phrased differently. Both sections were enacted at the same time. Why does the broadcast Act say “No person… shall charge” while the Telecom Act says “Any person… shall not charge”?

This is the stuff of Talmudic debates.

A much more fundamental question is how such clauses could become part of the legislation that governs the provision of communications services in the year 2015. These are sections that were added in 2014, buried in a budget appropriations act, Bill C-39, that was slammed through Parliament, one of many omnibus bills that characterized the last Parliament.

Where was the discussion about the economic impact of such a bill? Any debate on the signals being sent by such legislation? Evidence heard about the adoption rates of electronic billing when there is a fee differential, versus no fee differential? So many more questions that weren’t considered. This legislation wasn’t required to protect disadvantaged groups; in a meeting with the CRTC, the carriers had offered exemptions from charges to every imaginable group, as I described last year.

The paper bill sections of the Telecom Act and Broadcast Act are testaments to the failures in digital economy leadership of the last government.

Tomorrow, November 4, will see the arrival of a new Cabinet, with new leadership for the development of policy to guide the information and communications sectors.

It is time for a fresh start for fact-based policy making. That would be a real change.

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