In June, the CRTC launched a proceeding with the stated intent of making consumer protections for communications services more clear and more consistent by combining the four separate codes (home phone, wireless, internet, and TV) into a single unified Code (the Consumer Protection Code), while reducing administrative burden.

A number of the initial submissions express concerns that simply combining four Codes into a single document does not make the regulatory framework simpler or contribute to reducing administrative burden. The Commission’s Working Document – a proposed unified Code – runs 33 pages.

The Canadian Telecommunications Association (CTA) cautions that the Working Document isn’t clearer or simpler. “Those objectives require the Commission to assess whether existing requirements remain necessary, proportionate and appropriate considering current market conditions, and whether they can be simplified, modernized or eliminated.”

Among the 24 questions posed to intervenors, only one (Q.12) asks “Are any other updates to the rules for early cancellation fees for wireless services needed to account for other evolving industry trends?”

Shouldn’t that be asked of every clause in the document? Shouldn’t the CRTC be looking for ways to update all of its rules?

CTA wrote:

The Commission should use this proceeding as an opportunity to modernize and rationalize, rather than simply amalgamate, the existing consumer protection framework. Consistency should be pursued where there is a sound policy basis for treating services alike, but differences should be retained where the nature of the service, the consumer issue being addressed or the costs of compliance justify different treatment. Similarly, where market and technological developments have overtaken the circumstances that originally justified a requirement, harmonization should provide an opportunity to simplify or remove that requirement rather than extend it to additional services.

Along those lines, TELUS says that choice and competition in the TV market “have rendered prescriptive protections unnecessary and largely irrelevant to consumers.” TELUS says there is no need for the new unified Code to include TV.

Similarly, certain prescriptive elements of some of the individual codes have not kept up with changes in the marketplace.

In its Working Document, the CRTC proposed to extend a $50 cap on data overage charges (that currently applies to wireless services) to Internet services. In a world of unlimited residential high-speed internet, is that really necessary?

The lowest priced iPhone in 2025 retailed for C$999 as contrasted with the highest price for an iPhone in 2015, C$769. An iPhone 18 Pro Max with 2TB of storage is currently listed at C$3,699. Amortizing such a device over two years at 0% financing costs more than $150 per month. Can’t we treat consumers like adults and let them have the option of spreading increased device costs over a longer period of time than the maximum 24 months set out by the CRTC more than 13 years ago?

In the interest of administrative simplicity, a number of submissions called for the CRTC to clearly assert federal jurisdiction over consumer protections for communications services. Otherwise, service providers will be left having to navigate the Commission’s unified Code, as well as 13 provincial and territorial regimes setting out inconsistent regulations.

I frequently write about regulatory stability and Calvinball. Last week, I wrote that government operates under different pressures than business. I’m not sure that the regulator appreciates the impact of some of its decisions on service providers operating businesses at scales of more than 10 million consumers.

There is a cumulative impact of decisions on the stability of business operations. With hundreds of retail outlets, thousands of customer service representatives, even small changes to retail consumer regulations can lead to changes in business processes, information systems, point of sale terminals, and training for customer service representatives and third party agents.

As the Commission continues down this path, we should ask, “for whom are we reducing administrative burden?”

According to the CRTC’s “Coming Attractions” page, there is a plan to issue a Telecom Notice of Consultation this week, with a “Call for comments – Reducing red tape – Review of telecommunications reporting requirements”. [Updated October 6, 2026 1:15pm with link to Notice of Consultation] The Commission might want to consider whether this should be a continuous process, inherent in every proceeding.

What is the cost of implementing administrative simplicity? Will these changes deliver value for consumers, service providers, both, or none of the above?

I’ve often talked about the glacial pace of regulation on the Telecom side of the CRTC. It turns out the Broadcasting side is faring no better.

For more than a year, Canada’s broadcasting and telecom sectors have been told that the CRTC is “building a house.” In May, CRTC Chair Vicky Eatrides described the Commission’s agenda as a careful construction project: laying foundations, erecting framing, ensuring the structure will last. Vice chair Adam Scott had used the same metaphor in his remarks to the Scotiabank TMT Conference, emphasizing patience, sequencing, and the importance of getting the architecture right.

But metaphors only work when they illuminate reality. Increasingly, this one obscures it. While the CRTC continues to talk about building a house, the industries it oversees are watching the neighbourhood burn.

The frustration has been documented (repeatedly) by the people who appeared before the Commission, expressing both urgency and optimism.

In early January of 2025, the CRTC launched a proceeding, The Path Forward – Working towards a sustainable Canadian broadcasting system. The oral hearing took place in June 2025; the paper filings were completed a year ago.

In a widely shared LinkedIn post, Steve Jones of Stingray Radio recounts appearing at the hearing “to plead for the modernization of content regulations at Canadian radio.” His summary is blunt: “One year later. Absolutely nothing has happened.” No modernization of CanCon definitions. No movement on ownership caps. No recalibration of exposure requirements. Not even minor progress. Eight more stations have gone dark in the meantime.

Rod Schween of Pattison Media echoes the same experience in a separate LinkedIn post. He says he arrived at the hearing with “cautious optimism,” believing the Commission understood the severity of the pressures facing broadcasters. Six months later, he heard the Chair’s house‑building metaphor. He says he is still standing outside the construction site asking the same question: “How long does it take to build a house?”

These are voices representing hundreds of stations, thousands of employees, and communities across the country relying on local media for emergency information, civic coverage, and cultural expression.

The CRTC’s glacial pace is actively harmful.

Steve Jones illustrated the contrast between technological change and regulatory inertia. He observed that in the year since the proceeding closed:

• Smartphones learned to communicate directly with satellites.
• AI learned to create and buy advertising campaigns.
• Car dashboards became global multimedia platforms.

Meanwhile, “Canada’s radio content and ownership rules didn’t move a millimetre.” Stations are still regulated by the number of AM and FM transmitters they own, as though those transmitters compete only with each other and not with a global ecosystem of unregulated digital platforms.

Technology is advancing in months, while the pace of CRTC regulation is measured in years. This mismatch is a structural failure, no different from the failed regulatory hypothesis I described in May, highlighting the investment consequences of regulatory uncertainty. Capital does not wait for proceedings. It does not pause for consultations, reconsiderations, or multi‑year sequencing exercises. It flows to jurisdictions where the rules are clear, predictable, and aligned with market realities.

Canada’s broadcasting and telecom sectors need a regulator that understands that the cost of delay is not theoretical. Regulatory uncertainty and delay can be measured in shuttered stations, reduced newsrooms, deferred and reduced investment, and diminished Canadian ownership.

A commenter on the Jones post said the CRTC “eliminated license renewals to free up staff to focus on more impactful policy changes. So annnnnny year now.” The joke lands because the underlying truth is clear: the Commission’s internal processes are not producing timely outcomes.

The CRTC speeches describe a careful, methodical construction project. But a house that takes too long to build is of no use if the intended occupants don’t survive long enough to move in.

Steve Jones says, “It is as if the house is on fire, and we’ve called 9‑1‑1… and been put on hold. For a year.”

Rod Schween is equally pointed: broadcasters are standing outside in the cold, waiting for the keys to a house that should have been finished long ago.

While the CRTC talks about framing and foundations, the broadcasting industry is talking about survival. These two conversations simply aren’t aligned.

Unfortunately, government operates under different pressures than business. Government studies, consults, reports, and eventually acts. But, eventually just isn’t good enough in today’s business environment. The business world can’t wait for Canada’s regulator to finish getting its house in order.

The fires are spreading while the Commission is still fiddling with blueprints.

I sonetimes think the CRTC’s regulatory twilight zone is situated in a place beyond that which is known to mere mortals. If you want to cross over into that disconnected world, join me as we examine the CRTC’s latest consumer broadband directive, Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2026-238, issued just under 2 weeks ago (September 10). “You are about to enter another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination.”

As my friend and colleague Ted Woodhead pointed out in his recent blog post, this policy decision raises several confusing issues for consumers and ISPs alike. Ted took aim at the Commission’s redefinition of “typical” internet speeds. While the CRTC originally flirted with defining “typical” as a speed delivered 95% of the time, they ultimately threw logic out the window and decided “typical” means a speed ISPs must deliver at all times.

As Ted noted, transforming a “typical” expectation into an absolute, 100% guarantee defies basic network physics.

But, as baffling as the “typical speed” semantic gymnastics are, that might not be the strangest part of the decision. For that, we’ll take a journey into that “wondrous land of imagination.” I refer to the new mandate requiring ISPs to publish all retail plan data on their websites in highly structured, machine-readable CSV spreadsheets. You’ve just crossed over into the Twilight Zone.

The Commission decided that a more “dynamic marketplace” would emerge, if only ISPs were to publish all their Internet plan data in a machine-readable format. That way third-party developers could build automated comparison-shopping engines using the ISP provided data. While the CRTC did not explain why ISPs should help third parties make money off ISP labour, it did determine that the data must be provided in a standardized database format. And in doing so, the CRTC looked south for inspiration, explicitly pointing to the FCC’s technical guidelines for broadband machine-readable files as its blueprint.

There is just one glaring problem: The FCC already killed those exact rules.

A month earlier (August 13), the FCC took a hard look at its own broadband label experiment and realized that backend spreadsheet files were a costly compliance headache that nobody was using:

We also conclude that the substantial compliance burdens imposed by this requirement are not justified by the minimal, if any, likely benefits for consumers. The current record offers a fuller description of the relevant compliance burdens than was available to the Commission in 2022. We also find insufficient evidence that the requirement is needed to facilitate transparency and consumer decision-making, as some commenters argue. …And there is no record evidence that any third parties have used machine-readable label content to develop pro-consumer tools.

Real-world consumers don’t shop via raw CSV data, and the expected wave of tech developers building comparison apps never materialized. So, the FCC sensibly chopped the requirement to reduce regulatory burden and costs.

Yet, the CRTC eagerly copy and pasted the homework of a neighbor who had already thrown it in the trash.

Adding another layer of unnecessary administrative nonsense, the CRTC acknowledged that US and Canadian plan metrics don’t align, so while the format for the data requirement that the FCC just eliminated will serve as a starting point, the Commission punted the final file layout to the CRTC Interconnection Steering Committee (CISC), giving them until September 2027 to “Canadianize” the already dead American technical specification. That’s right – a year from now.

By the time Canadian carriers spend millions configuring their databases to output these complex backend files, the rules will be built on the skeleton of an obsolete framework that the US abandoned for being useless. You have entered another dimension.

It is a classic case of regulatory FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) — except Canada is missing out on the actual lessons learned, preferring instead to import the administrative burdens our neighbors were smart enough to get rid of.

Investors from around the world recently met in Canada and implored Canadian governments and regulators to make Canada an easier place to invest. I have written before about those calling for “Ottawa to remove the obstacles that currently deter companies from investing in this country.”

The CRTC continues to do the opposite, adding regulations that do little to help consumers and only increase the cost of doing business.

Is there a role for the CRTC in regulating AI wholesale?

Every few years, Canadian telecom finds a new frontier onto which old regulatory debates are projected. A recent Cartt.ca op‑ed arguing that carriers must “answer the AI wholesale question” is the latest example. It’s thoughtful on commercial dynamics, but it misfires on the role of the CRTC. AI infrastructure is not telecom infrastructure, and trying to drag it into the regulatory orbit of wholesale fibre or aggregated access misunderstands both the law and the economics.

The op‑ed’s premise is that Bell and Telus are building large AI compute clusters—true—and that smaller firms may want resale access—also true. But the leap comes when it implies that the CRTC should eventually adjudicate questions about GPU allocation, bundling, or resale eligibility. That is where the argument breaks down.

AI compute is not a telecommunications service under the Telecommunications Act. It is not carriage, transmission, or routing of information. It is a cloud‑adjacent, data‑centre‑based computing service. The fact that Bell and TELUS happen to own networks does not magically convert their AI businesses into regulated telecom offerings. If Rogers builds a movie studio, the CRTC does not regulate wholesale access to the cameras. If TELUS builds a health‑tech platform, the CRTC does not regulate wholesale access to the diagnostic algorithms. Vertical adjacency is not jurisdiction.

The op‑ed also treats AI compute as if it were analogous to wholesale broadband. It isn’t. Wholesale telecom regulation exists because networks exhibited certain characteristics associated with duplicating last‑mile access. GPU clusters do not. AI data centres are capital‑intensive, but they are not monopoly bottlenecks. CoreWeave, Hut 8, AWS, Google, and a dozen Canadian data‑centre operators are all building capacity. The market is competitive, global, and expanding. The CRTC intervenes when competition cannot emerge; AI compute is the opposite case.

Even the bundling concern is misplaced. The op‑ed warns that carriers might combine network services with compute in ways that raise competitive questions. But bundling only becomes a regulatory issue when the underlying telecom component is itself subject to tariff or mandated wholesale access. If Bell sells fibre plus GPUs, the fibre portion remains regulated exactly as it is today; the compute portion remains a commercial cloud service. The CRTC does not — and should not — set rules for how private companies package unregulated products.

The op‑ed’s commercial questions are legitimate: Will there be resale? What are the minimum commitments? How will allocation work during peak demand? But these are questions for the marketplace to answer, not the regulator. The CRTC’s involvement would not create clarity; it would create uncertainty, slow investment, and entangle an emerging sector in legacy frameworks.

Canada needs more investment in AI infrastructure, more competition, and more innovation. The fastest way to get there is to let the market work — not to conscript the CRTC into regulating something that is not, by any stretch, a telecom service.

שנה טובה | Shana tova.

This year, Rosh Hashana, the two-day holiday marking the Jewish New Year 5787, begins Friday evening, September 11 – unfortunately coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the world’s most deadly terrorist attacks.

Over the past few years, I have talked about how Rosh Hashana (literally “head of the year”) is very different from celebrations marking the arrival of January 1 each year. Rosh Hashana is a time of reflection and introspection. We review the previous year, and look ahead to the next.

Much of what I have to say this year is unchanged from last year and I say that with regret – the situation has gotten worse, not better.

The past three years have been unlike any other in my lifetime. For Jews around the world, these are extremely troubling times. Jews in Europe and North America are actively questioning whether it is safe to wear signs that visibly identify ourselves. Canadian Jews have experienced higher levels of antisemitism than just about everywhere on the planet, and it just doesn’t seem to be getting better.

As I noted a few years ago, the first month in the Jewish calendar (Tishrei) is filled with holidays – indeed, they are religious Holy Days. Combined with Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, there are 7 holy days this month: 2 days for Rosh Hashana, 1 days for Yom Kippur and the first 2 and last 2 days of Sukkot. This year, all of those days other than Yom Kippur fall on weekends, meaning that observant Jews will not need to take a lot of time away from the office, other than possibly leaving early on the Friday afternoons. Yom Kippur begins on Sunday evening, September 20 and continues through Monday September 21. Please try to help your employees, your colleagues, your students, by making reasonable accommodations for observance of the holidays. My office will be closed for those holidays.

In 2023, the last day of Sukkot fell on October 7, a day that forever changed the world for Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora. A few weeks in advance of that day, in my 2023 post, I asked if the world was more tolerant than I experienced in my early working years. That was before we witnessed the waves of antisemitism that have continued to rise over the past three years.

Two and a half years ago, I wrote “Defending my identity”, trying to capture some of my feelings on what was then the 5 month anniversary of the horrific attacks by Hamas. October 7, 2023 marked the start of a global campaign attacking Jewish indigeneity in Israel, a global campaign that began even before Israel’s military entered Gaza to respond to the attacks. I encourage you to re-read that piece to get an appreciation of what Jews like me are feeling as we approach the third anniversary of October 7. Warren Kinsella’s book, The Hidden Hand, is “An explosive inside look into the highly-planned and well-funded global propaganda campaign to delegitimize Israel and sow the seeds of antisemitism in the aftermath of October 7th.”

Unchanged from that time is my disappointment in the failures of those in positions of authority to take meaningful steps to address issues within their purview. As I have written before:

I am tired of politicians thinking that the way to respond to antisemitic acts is to write on Twitter that “This is not who we are” or claim that “Hatred and violence against Jewish communities have no place in Canada.”. Condemnations on social media are no match for intimidation by throngs calling “Death to the Jews”. Tweets are ineffective against fire bombings and shots fired at synagogues and Jewish community centres.

Three months ago, Prime Minister Mark Carney addressed a Toronto synagogue saying, “A country in which Jewish day schools require guards, in which synagogues require barriers, in which Jewish children attend school behind perimeters of protection – is a country that is protecting its citizens but is failing its civic compact.”

The Prime Minister said,”The crisis of antisemitism in Canada today is specific, severe, and demands a targeted response.” And what was that response? He struck a committee, a new Ministerial Advisory Council on Rights, Equality, and Inclusion to be chaired by Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, Marc Miller. Although Minister Miller’s department, also know as Canadian Heritage, is certainly the right home for such a committee, Heritage has the distinction of having the highest percentage of Jewish employees experiencing discrimination (34%). Three months later, the Ministerial Advisory Council has not indicated that any actions have been taken to date.

Schools are opening with no actions taken. Canadian Jews attending services for the Holy Days will pass through security check points, under police guard with synagogues absorbing much of the cost of protecting their members. What was accomplished over the summer?

Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) has provided a shameful case study in how leaders have failed to lead. A report on two campus antisemitic events was commissioned by TMU. The report was released a few weeks ago detailing 8 actionable items recommended by the author, retired Justice Mary Lou Benotto. Rather than acting on the report and implementing any of the actions in time for the start of school, TMU followed the Prime Minister’s approach and appointed a committee to develop “an implementation blueprint”, kicking the can down the road for 7 months. As the Globe and Mail wrote in a banner editorial entitled “The betrayal of Jewish students needs to end”, “No blueprint is needed, just a spine.”

Which brings me to how you fit in to help in defending my identity.

In resigning from British Columbia’s provincial NDP caucus, Selina Robinson wrote, “I don’t need your hugs and your emojis. What my community needs however, is for you to stand up to antisemitism.”

Call out hate when you see it online. Tell your elected officials that antisemitism isn’t just a problem for Canada’s Jews. Demand action. Grow a spine.

And as I have indicated, every once in a while, I’d be OK with a hug.

I’ve observed that the journey we travel over the course of a year often takes some detours, presenting challenges along the way. “It is rarely a smooth, incident-free trip. Sometimes, it feels more like we are riding a roller coaster. Still, we press ahead, continuing to approach each day with a positive outlook, moving forward one step at a time.”

May the year ahead be marked by good health, by personal and professional growth, and may it be a year of peace for all. Shana tova.