Does it take a court order to improve performance at the CRTC?

That is what a recent filing by Cogeco is charging following delays in getting a ruling on a complaint that says a Quebecor internet radio station (QUB) is broadcasting over the FM airways in contravention of CRTC ownership and control rules.

A summary of the case is found in a CRTC letter to the parties from this past January. Filing jointly with Bell, Cogeco sent its complaint to the CRTC in November 2024, seeking a determination to prohibit Quebecor Media and Leclerc Communication from broadcasting QUB Radio content on Leclerc’s radio station CJPX-FM Montréal.

In December 2024, the Commission published the application and sent a letter to Leclerc and Quebecor. With all of the clearing of confidentiality claims, submissions and responses, the file didn’t wrap up until March 7, 2025. In early August, Cogeco asked for the Commission to render its decision without further delay (“nous demandons au Conseil de rendre une décision, sans plus tarder”). Two weeks later, five months after the file closed, the CRTC informed Cogeco that it can expect a decision “in the coming weeks”. The space-time continuum seems to work a little differently in the public service, so here we are, two months later, and “the coming weeks” have not yet come.

You may recall that I had a post last summer entitled “Regulatory accountability” that included a link to a [pdf] 171-page report from the Forum for Research and Policy in Communications (FRPC). Included among the recommendations in “The CRTC’s performance, 1969 – 2025: Analysis and recommendations” were calls to “improve the timeliness of its decision-making by publishing decisions concerning broadcasting, telecom and online news applications within 4 months of receiving the applications.”

The CRTC’s own plans call for 75% of “decisions on telecom and broadcasting applications [to be] issued within four months of the close of record”. I found it interesting that the CRTC’s plan shows that it achieved that target 87.5% of the time in the 2023-24 budget year, but the Commission set a target for itself of only 75% in 2024-25.

Is this “sandbagging” the objective or setting their sights too low? When the CRTC achieved the 4-month objective 7 out of 8 times one year, why lower the target so significantly? Indeed, looking at what percentage of files don’t meet the standard, the Commission is saying that its target is to double the number of files that miss, rising from 12.5% to 25%.

Perhaps the Cogeco court filing reflects a reality, but shouldn’t we be able to expect a better service standard from the CRTC? It shouldn’t require a court order to improve performance at the regulator.

Is it time to disband the CRTC? Has it outlived its purpose?

Those questions were stimulated by an article I read last week about its US counterpart, the FCC. “It’s Time to Disband the Federal Communications Commission” was authored by Mark Jamison, the director and Gunter Professor of the Public Utility Research Center at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business.

Why disband the FCC? Because it has become a convenient political tool, it too often abandons its independence, and the very reasons for its creation in 1934 have disappeared. As others and I have noted, the FCC was designed to regulate the old Bell telephone monopoly and to oversee the public airwaves. Independence mattered because regulated businesses needed stability across administrations to make the massive infrastructure investments needed for expanding our networks.

As evidence of the FCC’s loss of political independence, Professor Jamison cites a 2015 net neutrality decision as driven by the White House, saying that it was “widely derided for being devoid of sound economic reasoning.” You will recall that I have been critical of the CRTC’s approach to a number of internet policy decisions.

And so, we must ask: What is the FCC for today? The answer: very little. The telecommunications monopoly it was built to police no longer exists. Many of its consumer protection and equipment authorization functions could easily be handled by other agencies. Emergency services oversight does not require an independent body. International relations, homeland security, and policy analysis already overlap with other federal departments.

Professor Jamison says there are 2 remaining functions, saying that neither requires the FCC to manage: Spectrum management; and the universal service subsidy.

Should we read his article and consider whether it is also time to disband the CRTC? We should at least be thinking about what reforms are necessary, and what efficiencies can be achieved through regulatory reform.

Two and a half years ago, the government issued a Policy Direction to the CRTC. That Policy Direction refers to earlier Directions provided in 2006 and 2019 and states, “Whereas the telecommunications market and its regulation have changed since 2019 and the Governor in Council is of the opinion that new directions should be issued to the Commission as a result of those changes”.

Some of the elements in the Policy Direction should have gone without saying, such as “The Commission should ensure that its proceedings and decisions are transparent, predictable and coherent.” And, “The Commission should base its decisions on sound and recent evidence and should exercise its powers to obtain necessary evidence.” What does it mean for the federal government’s confidence in the regulator for Cabinet to believe that such statements had to be explicitly set out within legislative Policy Direction?

The Direction speaks to the need for reforms.

7. The Commission should conduct proceedings and issue decisions in a timely manner, in recognition of the need for market clarity. The Commission should consider whether adopting new processes or engaging external experts would help reach this objective. [emphasis added]

There is also language like “The Commission should revise its approach…”, “periodically review”, and “make any necessary adjustments”, among other language indicating a desire for ongoing reform.

There are considerable levels of duplicated effort at the Commission, where similar functions take place in Government departments, such as those headed by Industry Minister Joly, and Culture and Identity Minister Guilbeault. At the same time, various pieces of government “online” legislation have assigned new responsibilities to the CRTC, to distribute funds to news agencies, and to determine how to regulate streaming media services.

Returning to the question I asked at the outset, should we disband the CRTC? We need to at least consider what functions should be within the CRTC and how the agency should be structured to execute those functions.

We are coming up on the twentieth anniversary of the Telecom Policy Review Panel [pdf]. That report recommended a review every 5 years. Canada’s Telecom Act was enacted in 1993 – more than 30 years ago. The Broadcasting Act is 2 years older.

It’s long past time for a holistic review at how we guide and regulate the digital sector.

How should we measure broadband affordability?

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece that looked at 4 different ways to measure affordability of telecom services: Income-based affordability; Expense-based affordability; Relative affordability; and, Subjective affordability. I wrote that affordability is a complex and multifaceted concept, that is dependent on the context and the goods or services being considered. I observed that economists may use one or a combination of these approaches to assess affordability in different situations.

In that piece, I also wrote:

In a 2015 report [pdf, 2.1MB], the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC) said “We suggest that communications services are “affordable” where, as a guideline, they make up about 4% to 6% of a household’s income.” In 2017, PIAC found that low income households considered home internet to be equally important as health care.

So I was very interested to see that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a study on Broadband Affordability last week [pdf, 634KB]. Among its key findings: “Low- and moderate-income communities pay a notably higher share of their income for broadband — 2.43% compared to 0.51% in wealthier areas — exceeding the FCC’s 2% affordability benchmark.”

I shouldn’t have to point out that for low and moderate income households, just about everything costs more as a percentage of income than it does for wealthier communities. Basic arithmetic teaches us that happens when the denominator gets bigger.

What I was interested in was how this compared to Canadian figures. As it turns out, Statistics Canada tracks a lot of this kind of information on its Telecommunications Statistics portal. The data shows that spending by all Canadians has been hovering around 1% of total expenditures, and for the lowest income quintile, broadband has remained under 2% of total expenditures.

Please note that this chart looks at broadband affordability as a percentage of total expenditures (expense-based affordability), not total income (income-based affordability). Total expenditures is almost always lower than total income, the percentage of total income would be even lower. In 2023, Statistics Canada reported the figure for total expenditures for the lowest income quintile was $42,240.

It is also interesting to look at trends in what households are spending for broadband service. We can see that monthly expenditures have increased over time, from 60 to 80%. A major part of that has been due to families choosing to subscribe to faster, most robust services. In addition, especially in lower income households, more families are now choosing to subscribe to broadband for the first time, which has the effect of increasing average expenditures.

In the CRTC’s Canadian Telecommunications Market Report 2025, the section on Prices and Affordability confirms that prices have been falling, with gigabit services down 35% and 50 Mbps services down 25% in the period from January 2020 to September 2024.

There is a lot of interesting information in the NY Fed report on broadband affordability. The first message I gleaned was that Canada is far ahead of the US for affordability and adoption of broadband, even for our most vulnerable communities.

More can always be done, but with the cost of living figuring so prominently in political debates these days, the data shows that Canada is doing much better than the US for affordability of broadband services.

Through the years, I have written a number of posts about improving network resilience. About a dozen years ago, I wrote “Cradling your eggs”, writing about me telling the Canadian president of Digital Equipment Corporation that his CIO should be fired for placing 100% of their corporate communications in the hands of the company I then worked for. “It doesn’t matter how good we are, networks can fail. When that happens, do you really want all your eggs in one basket?”

That story came to mind when I was reading a news story about the US Secret Service dismantling a hidden telecom network that had the potential to jam cellular networks, 911 emergency response centres and overwhelm networks with 100,000 simultaneous calls. The system consisted of more than 300 servers loaded with over 100,000 SIM cards, located in New York, with many of the world’s leaders participating in this week’s United Nations General Assembly.

What would have happened if emergency communications were disrupted coincident to a threat or actual disaster condition?

It got me thinking about what options would exist had the rogue network become operational. My daughter reminded me that “All good dystopian novels involve using dead technology to save the day.” Improving network resilience through old-school CB radio? Would the fax machine prove to be the real hero?

I have been an advocate of embedding the public safety broadband network within the public network, leveraging the scale and scope made possible by billions of dollars in annual investments by the private networks.

Still, in the face of all potential threats, resilience needs to be a factor when examining the architecture of networks, including planning for complete system outages.

A dozen years ago, I wrote “reliability and overall capacity can be enhanced through interoperability with commercial networks.” It is also important to recognize that all networks will fail. So, as I wrote before, “carrier diversity provides improved reliability.” Colloquially, don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

I have written about regulatory overreach in the past, but I never imagined that I would witness such egregious examples as those emerging south of the border.

If you somehow missed it, ABC/Disney suspended the Jimmy Kimmel show following some “ill-advised” comments by Kimmel about the assassin of Charlie Kirk. Let’s face it, trying to find humour from a political assassination demonstrated questionable judgment.

Too soon? The funeral hasn’t taken place yet. In today’s polarized environment, the subject should have been treated like kryptonite by any national programming host.

So, from a purely commercial perspective, it would have been understandable and fair game for ABC/Disney to intervene.

But, the timeline of events show that the decision was catalyzed by a comment from Brendan Carr, the chair of the FCC:

There’s actions we can take on licensed broadcasters. Frankly, I think it’s really sort of past time that these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say “Listen, we’re going to preempt. We’re not gonna run Kimmel anymore, until you straighten this out, because we the licensed broadcaster are running the possibly of fines or licensed revocation from the FCC, if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion.”

So, I think again Disney needs to see some change here. But, the individual licensed stations that are taking their content, it’s time for them to step up and say this garbage, to the extent that it’s what comes down the pipe in the future, isn’t something that we think serves the needs of our local communities. But, this sort of status quo is not acceptable where we are.

Some additional context is warranted.

The FCC’s own website notes that the regulator cannot interfere with what is said on the air, with a extremely narrow exceptions, including news distortion. So it is interesting that FCC Chair Carr used that term in reference to Jimmy Kimmel.

I would not have considered late night talk shows to be news programming. And if news distortion is prohibited for comedians and talk show hosts, I think that would mean the end of the opening monologues for most of those shows.

Still, the thinly veiled threat toward licensed local stations stung Nexstar, America’s largest broadcasting group, with 200 stations in 116 markets, serving 220M people. A month ago, Nexstar entered into a $6.2B agreement to acquire TEGNA, a deal requiring FCC approval. Not surprisingly, Nexstar announced that it would preempt the Jimmy Kimmel show, and not carry it on its stations – precisely the remedy suggested by the FCC Chair.

With a giant hole in its coverage area, Disney/ABC pulled the plug.

Would commercial considerations have led to a similar outcome anyway? After all, the comedic lines were in poor taste and were certain to offend a large swath of Americans. We’ll never know. But the FCC Chair had no business making those threatening comments.

In Canada, we have experience with regulatory chairs making comments that resembled summary judgments. In my view, it was inappropriate regulatory overreach.

When I ran The Canadian Telecom Summit, for many years, the CRTC Chair would speak, often in an interview format. Open files were clearly off-limits.

We should not expect regulators to be cloistered for their terms, unable to speak to the media or the industry. However, perhaps we should be talking about what are the appropriate boundaries? I am also conscious of this week’s on-air antisemitic rant by Radio-Canada’s Washington correspondent. How should a regulator respond to such an incident?

As Canada moves to introduce legislation on hate and the promotion of terror, limits on speech freedoms are being more clearly defined. How should regulators ensure timely reactions to violations?