Should the next Canadian government have a Minister of Communications?

The Minister of Communications used to be a stand-alone Cabinet position, under both Conservative and Liberal governments. The Department of Communications oversaw radio, television, and telephone communications in Canada, and supervised the CRTC, under the authority of the Department of Communications Act.

In 1993, spectrum management and telecom policy was moved into the Department of Industry; broadcasting and oversight of the CRTC went to the Department of Canadian Heritage.

A recent OpEd in the Toronto Star argues “Canada urgently needs to re-establish a critical portfolio for the digital age and appoint a federal minister of communications.”

The authors, Peter MacLeod (principal of MASS LBP) and Taylor Owen (associate professor in the School of Public Policy at McGill) say that we need, but are lacking “a dedicated advocate to safeguard the integrity” of the communications tools, networks and services upon which Canadians rely.

From 1969 to 1996, Canada had a minister of communications who oversaw radio, television and telecommunications, ensuring our airwaves weren’t dominated by foreign interests. Under cultural champions such as Pierre Juneau, Canada boldly regulated media content, creating space for Canadian stories and voices. The famous “CanCon” rules that Juneau pioneered secured airtime for domestic artists, launching a golden era of Canadian music and television. This proactive approach wasn’t accidental — it required vision, political will and strong leadership. Juneau’s legacy demonstrates that assertive communications policy is vital to our sovereignty.

But here is the rub. Pierre Juneau’s vision, political will and strong leadership were all demonstrated during his memorable term as CRTC Chair. His term as Minister of Communications was short-lived. He did not win a seat in a by-election so he stepped down less than 2 months after his appointment as Minister in 1975. These were the early days for the CRTC. Pierre Juneau was the chair of the Bureau of Broadcast Governors when it became the Canadian Radio and Television Commission in 1968. He was the CRTC’s first Chair. He left the CRTC to join Cabinet before the CRTC transitioned to include telecommunications in 1976.

For the past five and a half years, mandate letters for relevant cabinet ministers sought legislation that expand the CRTC’s responsibilities even further to include all kinds of online activities and content. The last Parliament passed the Online News Act and Online Steaming Act, but failed in its attempts to pass controversial Online Harms legislation.

Macleod and Owen observed:

When Parliament was prorogued, two critical bills — concerning elections security and online harms — failed to pass. These overdue bills were designed to strengthen protections against foreign interference, limit harmful online content and hold digital platforms accountable. Their absence leaves Canada vulnerable at precisely the moment it needs new tools to fight back.

Earlier this year, I asked “Is it time to modernize Canada’s outdated telecommunications rules?” That piece concluded, suggesting “Maybe it’s time to modernize the Acts for a fresh, holistic look at the legislation guiding the digital sector.”

Should the CRTC be responsible for these various online acts, or does Canada’s information and communications sector need the leadership of a strong (and elected) Minister of Communications? As I suggested in January, it would be appropriate to have a fresh, holistic review of how we govern and regulate the digital sector.

Nearly 4 years ago, I wrote Taming the World Wild Web, saying “It’s no longer a question of whether the World Wild Web can be tamed. The key question is how.”

I’m not convinced we’re currently on the right path.

In in my 2021 post, I included a reference to John Perry Barlow’s 30 year old screed, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”. Barlow declared “the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.”

I disagree.

I continue to struggle with the question of how, not if. Nearly two decades ago, long time followers will recall that I participated in filing the first application to the CRTC for authority to block certain websites because of death threats. There are more than 50 posts on this blog looking at online harms and related matters.

Last summer, in Online Platform Accountability, I wrote about an ICLE paper, “Who Moderates the Moderators?: A Law & Economics Approach to Holding Online Platforms Accountable Without Destroying the Internet”.

That piece came to mind while reading a recent article by David Newhoff. In “Too Big to Care: Should Online Platforms Remain Unconditionally Immunized by Section 230?”, Newhoff argues that online platforms, or interactive computer service providers (ICSPs) owe a duty of care to those of us who use their services. He says legislation should be aimed at creating (or restoring) an incentive for ICSPs to exercise such care.

He argues that Section 230 of the US Communications Act was intended to encourage ICSPs to act to mitigate harms arising from their platforms. Instead, courts have interpreted the immunity provided by Section 230 as applying whether or not the platform is applying good-faith efforts to block or screen online harms. Quoting George Washington University law professor Mary Anne Franks:

Put simply, a law cannot incentivize the rendering of aid if that law is interpreted to confer the same benefit upon those who render aid and those who do not. Interpreting Section 230 to shield online intermediaries from liability even when they are indifferent to or benefit from harm actively undermines Good Samaritan behavior and flouts the policy decision made by Congress.

When Parliament was prorogued in early January, some heavy handed Online Harms legislation died on the Order Paper, and now we are into a federal election. As I wrote in January, perhaps a new approach should be on the legislative agenda with new leadership coming into power.

It isn’t a question of whether the World Wild Web can be tamed. The key questions are how, and when.

What is the right number of mobile operators for a country? Is there a correct number? An optimal number?

For years, Canada’s policy has been that the right number is at least four. In 2013, then Industry Minister Christian Paradis issued a statement saying “To be clear, our government wants to see at least four players in each market.”

For a dozen years, through multiple Ministers, and changes of ruling parties, the four carrier objective has been the guiding rule in Canada.

That was why I thought it was interesting to hear so many service providers in Europe calling for changes to regulations constraining consolidation. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, CNBC wrote “Tech ‘Please unleash us,’ Europe’s telcos urge regulators as industry bangs drum for more mega-deals”. The article quotes Marc Murtra, CEO of Spain’s Telefonica:

If we’re going to invest in technology, in deep know-how, and bring drastic change, positive drastic change in Europe — like other large technological companies have done in the US or we’re seeing today in China — we need scale. To be able to get scale, we need to consolidate a fragmented market like the telecoms market in Europe. And for that, we need a regulation that allows us to consolidate. So what we do ask is: please unleash us. Let us gain scale. Let us invest in technology and bring upon productive change.

CNBC said a number of CEOs of European operators said they would be able to compete more effectively with only three main players per market. The article said three is the model that has “become the standard in places like the US, China and India.”

In a keynote address to MWC, Tim Höttges, CEO of German telco Deutsche Telekom said, “if we cannot increase our consumer prices, if we cannot charge the over-the-top players, we have to get efficiencies out of the scale which we created.”

If jumbo sized markets like the US, China and India have consolidated to 3 major players per market, and European operators are claiming they need to consolidate to build scale for investment, one has to ask whether Canadian policy makers can continue to hold onto a magic number of 4 players in each market.

What should be the role for telecommunications policy? What should top Canada’s telecommunications policy agenda?

Those topics are being explored in a workshop hosted by the Ivey Business School in Toronto. “Innovation and Telecommunications Policy: Shaping Tech, Markets & Networks”, Ivey’s fourth workshop on telecommunications policy, will take place in the afternoon of Wednesday, May 21, at Ivey’s Donald K. Johnson Centre in downtown Toronto.

As noted on the workshop’s website, telecommunications policy traditionally focuses on competition, affordability, digital divide and access. Far less attention has been spent on how telecom policy can be used to develop innovation and new technologies for economic growth.

It is crucial for Canada to be developing policies and strategies that support investment in digital infrastructure. Innovation and economic progress is crucial for Canada (and other countries) in the wake of global trade disruption and geopolitical challenges.

Frequent readers know that I have been calling for a refresh of Canada’s digital agenda for a long time. Late last year, when I was checking my scorecard against my 2024 policy agenda, I noticed that there was some overlap with what is planned for the workshop. I continue to have concerns about driving increased adoption. Not enough work is being done to identify (and solve) those factors that inhibit a subset of Canadians from getting online.

The half-day workshop will be held in downtown Toronto, starting with lunch at noon and running until approximately 6:00pm. Lunch will be provided and there will be a networking reception at the end of the day. In between there will be multiple keynote speakers and panel sessions looking at such questions as:

• Will 6G be another “G” or just fizzle out?
• How are AI and quantum communications shaping infrastructure needs?
• How are big tech, application providers and telecom operators driving innovation?
• Innovation, affordability and digital divide: are there trade-offs?
• And more!

While we are one the topic of technology policy, there was a recent session hosted by AEI on the subject, “Dignity and Dynamism: The Future of Conservative Technology Policy”. You can find the replay here.

I’ll provide more details about the Ivey session as the agenda [download pdf] firms up. The last Ivey workshop was sold out, so be sure to make your plans to attend. I hope to see you May 21.

The CRTC recently released its “Canadian Telecommunications Market Report 2025”, available online or as a 73-page 1.0 MB downloadable pdf.

You may recall that last year, the CRTC released its Market report, labelled as “Annual highlights of the telecommunications sector 2022”, and as you will see, it can be found among the 2023 files on the CRTC website. This year’s edition is found among the 2025 files, but contains market data from 2023. Confused?

In the Executive Summary of the report, the CRTC recognized the importance of encouraging investment, but in some ways, it failed to draw a line between investment and the need for high EBITDA margins. The Commission wrote “A central challenge for the CRTC is to incentivize providers to invest, while allowing new competitors access to their networks to provide more affordable choices to Canadians.” The report observes that among comparator countries (Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States), “Canada’s telecommunications service sector shows among the highest levels of capital expenditures.”

The CRTC’s Market Report could be more precise in its use of language to be more objective in its presentation of the data. For example, the Competition section of the Executive Summary leads with “Canada’s telecommunications industry has expanded to several Internet and cellphone service providers. However, a small group of large service providers maintain commanding market shares and continue to report high profit margins.”

What does this mean? How are we supposed to interpret this? Why start that sentence with “However”?

In Section 4.2 of the report, the CRTC states “Canadians benefit from competition when there is a range of service options and providers of various sizes competing in the market.” Can someone point me to an economics text that says an indicator of a markets level of competitiveness is the variety of size of service providers? Ted Woodhead suggests “It would appear that CRTC believes the ideal state would be to have a large group of small service providers with low market shares reporting low profit margins.”

Let’s look a little more closely at “a small group of large service providers maintain commanding market shares and continue to report high profit margins”. Later in the report, we see that “profit margins” are defined as EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization). The report leaves the reader with the impression that these EBITDA profit margins are too high, which ignores the actual financial challenges being faced by Canada’s facilities-based carriers. That is misleading. EBITDA, by definition, is a measure before taking into account interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. For capital-intensive businesses, EBITDA simply doesn’t reflect business profitability, especially in times of rising interest rates and high levels of investment.

The Executive Summary goes on to say “In the last two years, Internet and cellphone prices have declined nearly 10%, and roughly 25% respectively. However, Canadians have noted the opposite, with many seeing higher bills. This may be explained by some Canadians paying for more data and faster speeds.”

“May be explained”? Come on now. The phenomenon of higher bills is fully explained by customers choosing to buy higher value plans.

Let’s take a look at the data. In Figure 15, the CRTC shows some pretty significant changes in internet services prices between 2020 and 2024. In the case of 50 Mbps service, the monthly price dropped 27.4%; Gigabit per second services fell 35.6% during the same period. In Figure 16, the drop for the Internet Price Index over that same period is less dramatic, at 10.6%.

Prices for specific plans dropped more significantly than the Statistics Canada Internet Price Index. How do we account for the discrepancy?

Clearly, as the prices for various speeds fall, households are migrating to faster services, changing the norm. Figure 27 provides evidence of that migration. In 2020, only 1 in 12 households (8.3%) subscribed to gigabit internet service; just 3 years later, by 2023, more than a quarter of Canadian households (25.7%) subscribed to gig services.

On the wireless side, the same effect can be observed in Figure 43. The price for a 10 GB plan dropped nearly 60%, from $69.42 to $28.03. The 50 GB plan fell by more than two thirds, from $124.28 to $39.94. During the same period, Figure 55 shows a migration to higher capacity mobile plans.

Why would the CRTC cast shade over the fact that prices have gone down? Its phrase “Canadians have noted the opposite” should have been written as “Canadians have incorrectly noted the opposite”. Why would the CRTC be peddling public opinion – urban legends – along side of hard data? The facts show prices have gone down significantly. Why isn’t the CRTC clearly dispelling misperceptions about prices instead of contributing to the confusion? 

If you can read past the biased commentary, the Canadian Telecommunications Market Report 2025 is a valuable collection of authoritative data. Just be prepared to read a report that was written with a not-so-hidden agenda.