Just before the holidays, the Prime Minister set out new mandate letters for members of his Cabinet, including one for Innovation, Science and Industry Minister Champagne.

While many may focus on what is in the letter, I think it is also worth examining what is no longer part of the Minister’s mandated focus. What has changed?

In the current mandate dated December 16, 2021, the subject of telecom services is reduced to a single bullet:

• Accelerate broadband delivery by implementing a “use it or lose it” approach to require those that have purchased rights to build broadband to meet broadband access milestones or risk losing their spectrum rights.

Let’s take a look at the telecom items from the letter for Minister Bains from just two years earlier (December 13, 2019):

• Use all available instruments, including the advancement of the 2019 Telecom Policy Directive, to reduce the average cost of cellular phone bills in Canada by 25 per cent. You will work with telecom companies and expand mobile virtual network operators (MVNO) in the market. If within two years this price target is not achieved, you can expand MVNO qualifying rules and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission mandate on affordable pricing.
• Award spectrum access based on commitments towards consumer choice, affordability and broad access. You will also reserve space for new entrants.
• With the support of the Minister of Middle Class Prosperity and Associate Minister of Finance and the Minister of Seniors, create a new Canadian Consumer Advocate to ensure a single point of contact for people who need help with federally regulated banking, telecom or transportation-related complaints. Ensure that complaints are reviewed and, if founded, that appropriate remedies and penalties can be imposed.
• Work with the Minister of Infrastructure and Communities, the Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Rural Economic Development and the Minister of Canadian Heritage to deliver high-speed internet to 100 per cent of Canadian homes and businesses by 2030.
• Co-lead work with the Minister of Canadian Heritage to modernize the Broadcasting Act and the Telecommunications Act, examining how best to support Canadian content in English and French and ensure quality affordable internet, mobile and media access.
• Work with the Minister of Canadian Heritage to introduce legislation by the end of 2020 that will take appropriate measures to ensure that all content providers, including internet giants, offer meaningful levels of Canadian content in their catalogues, contribute to the creation of Canadian content in both Official Languages, promote this content and make it easily accessible on their platforms. The legislation should also consider additional cultural and linguistic communities.

The new mandate includes additional bullets for cyber security and artificial intelligence that will merit further examination, but there is clearly a changing focus of the mandate letters, at least as relates to telecommunications related issues. To be sure, there are other digital economy points in the mandate, such as:

• Establish a digital policy task force to integrate efforts across government and position Canada as a leader in the digital economy and in shaping global governance of emerging technologies.
• Introduce legislation to advance the Digital Charter, strengthen privacy protections for consumers and provide a clear set of rules that ensure fair competition in the online marketplace.

Two years ago, Minister Bains’ letter included this consumer protection section:

With the support of the Minister of Middle Class Prosperity and Associate Minister of Finance and the Minister of Seniors, create a new Canadian Consumer Advocate to ensure a single point of contact for people who need help with federally regulated banking, telecom or transportation-related complaints. Ensure that complaints are reviewed and, if founded, that appropriate remedies and penalties can be imposed.

That appears to have evolved to this:

To enhance consumer protection and ensure a level playing field for all businesses, undertake a broad review of the current legislative and structural elements that may restrict or hinder competition. This includes directly reviewing the mandate of the Commissioner of Competition, and in so doing, ensuring that Canadians are protected from anti-consumer practices in critical sectors, including in the oil and gas, telecommunications and financial services sectors.

There seems to be less micro-management in the new mandate letter, setting out the results being sought (“ensuring that Canadians are protected from anti-consumer practices in critical sectors”), but enabling greater flexibility in how to achieve the objective.

As Minister responsible for Statistics Canada, Minister Champagne is clearly aware of the agency’s tracking of cellular prices in the monthly Consumer Price Index. That data shows that mobile prices have fallen by more than 27% since Minister Bains’ mandate.

There are other important issues to be addressed to “position Canada as a leader in the digital economy and in shaping global governance of emerging technologies.”

Before the holidays, Minister Champagne told Columnist John Ivison, “When I look ahead, my major job is to prepare Canada for the 21st century.”

Given the circumstances, the government’s focus has justifiably widened to look at a bigger picture. The Minister’s mandate letter reflects that broadened perspective.

The mandate letter implicitly allows for a less interventionist approach in the marketplace, but it remains to be seen if the Minister’s office can resist the temptation. As William Watson wrote in response to the Ivison column:

“Visit me when you’re in Ottawa,” a true-blue industry minister would tell all those CEOs who keep calling, “But don’t feel obliged to come. There’s nothing for you here except skating on the canal. In Canada, we let markets decide which businesses succeed and which don’t.”

Which of my blog posts attracted the most attention in 2021?

Looking at the analytics, these 5 articles had the most individual page views:

1. “Mythbusting Canadian Telecom” [April 7, 2021]
2. “Hijacking affordable broadband” [February 1, 2021]
3. “Canada’s future depends on connectivity” [August 15, 2020]
4. “The truth about structural separation” [May 19, 2021]
5. “Toronto is no broadband backwater” [January 21, 2021]

Honourable mentions go to:

• “Wholesale telecom services aren’t the solution” [March 15, 2021]
• “Which CRTC decision is the outlier?” [June 22, 2021]
• “Where is the scholarship?” [August 20, 2021]
• “Regulating competitive markets” [February 22, 2021]
• “Clear, mutually exclusive, and exhaustive” [May 17, 2021]

Thank you for following me here on this blog (and on Twitter), and thank you for engaging online and by phone over the past year.

I hope the coming weeks give you an opportunity to connect with your family and friends, safely in person, and otherwise connecting telephonically.

Let me extend to you the very best wishes for health, happiness and peace over the holidays and in the year ahead.

Last year, I commented “Never before have I wanted to wrap up a year like this one.” I am much more optimistic this year. I have just returned from my first overseas trip in nearly two years, having had an extended visit with family. Spending time with grandkids has given me a renewed optimism for a return to semblance of normality.

There is something especially refreshing about the optimism and simple naïveté of children.

This marks the 10th year that I have entitled my year-end wrap-up with lyrics from Joni Mitchell’s “Circle Game”.

Then the child moved ten times round the seasons
Skated over ten clear frozen streams
Words like, ‘When you’re older’ must appease him
And promises of someday make his dreams

Many of you know that I was in Israel for the past month. There is a story about an old man who had been praying at the Western Wall twice a day, every day, for a very long time. A journalist heard about this guy and went to interview him. She learned he had been coming to the Western Wall and praying for more than 50 years. “I pray for peace between the Christians, Jews, and the Muslims. I pray for all the wars and all the hatred to stop. I pray for all our children to grow up safely as responsible adults and to love their fellow man. I pray that politicians tell us the truth and put the interests of the people ahead of their own interests. And finally, I pray that everyone will be happy.” And the journalist followed up asking “How do you feel after doing this for 60 years?” He responded, “Like I’m talking to a wall!”

In some of my posts, you may detect a certain level of frustration and impatience. That may be due to my age. Forgive me as I find myself sometimes turning into my grumpy old man persona, while still trying to be optimistic that someone out there is reading my rants, and maybe, just maybe, taking some action with an improved understanding of the issues.

So as a result, I know that I have been critical of the often glacial rate of progress on expanding broadband to underserved communities and increasing adoption among those who are not yet online. But I continue to be optimistic about the overall direction in which we are heading.

Still, there is so much more we need to learn about the factors impacting the decision to go online. It isn’t a simple matter of price, as I discussed in a post last April (The broadband divide’s little secret). The subject is ripe for serious academic study, trying to understand (and overcome) the barriers to adoption among certain communities.

Looking back at the past year, I see that there have been 113 blog posts, slightly above the 2020 level and continuing to run significantly higher than the pre-pandemic pace. I reached a few milestones in 2021: celebrating 41 years of work in the telecommunications sector; launching a new design for this blog (and my website); writing my 3000th blog post (there are now roughly 3040 searchable posts available in the archives); and, in a dozen days, celebrating a milestone wedding anniversary, with kids and grandchildren who are an immense source of pride and inspiration.

As I noted last year, despite difficult pandemic-induced operational and financial hurdles, Canada’s communications industry delivered world leading services that enable most Canadians to manage their lives and livelihoods. Many of those challenges continue.

A year ago, in his closing remarks at The 2020 Canadian Telecom Summit, Industry Minister Navdeep Bains said “I want to close by saying that these have not been easy times, but they have shown just what Canadians and our industries are made of. At no time have I been more proud of being the Minister of Industry.” Last month, at the 2021 edition of the Summit, Bell Mobility president Claire Gillies echoed those sentiments and added, “we kept the country running. We seamlessly kept people connected to the things that mattered to them most through the last couple of years.”

The power, the capabilities and the reach of our telecommunications networks are often taken for granted; we simply expect them to work through inclement weather, power blackouts, localized emergencies. Over the past 20 or so months, we have stress tested the utility of those networks as the world transitions in and out of a hybrid of physical and virtual presence. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the power of those virtual connections.

History will look favourably on how Canada’s telecom sector rose to meet and overcome the challenges of delivering service excellence throughout the past two years. It is why I continue to take pride in being a part of the telecommunications industry, a sector that is helping drive Canada’s economy toward better times and a more normal, prosperous future.

I wish you and your families a happy, healthy, safe and peaceful holiday season.

I look forward to engaging with you in the New Year.

Earlier this week, I wrote “Setting Expectations And Finding Joy”, in which I said “If you choose not to find joy in the snow, you will have less joy in your life, but still the same amount of snow.”

In many ways, that expression talks about how you approach a situation. It’s about the perspective you take when things appear to be suboptimal. My mother would quote Erma Bombeck and say “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.”

For the past month, I have been visiting family in the Middle East. Over here, it rarely rains from April through September; the region depends on rain in the winter to fill the lakes and reservoirs.

The weather has been beautiful, by Canadian standards, for most of our trip, with sunny skies and temperatures in the low 20s (Celsius).

Today, it has been windy and rainy, but we feel good about it. The desert flowers instantly bloom, the dust on trees gets washed away and green mixes with the grey skies.

As we head toward a new year, it just seemed to me to be a reminder to keep everything in perspective. And maybe, if you are feeling negative, try a new angle to take a fresh look at your current situation.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife forwarded one of those cutesy motivational sayings that she saw on social media: “If you choose not to find joy in the snow, you will have less joy in your life, but still the same amount of snow.”

It is an appropriate expression for Canadians facing the arrival of December.

And since I am writing it on this blog, you can expect that I am going to find yet another of those metaphorical allusions to the telecom sector.

As I wrote last month, there are some advocates who naively seek to spend other people’s money “to give virtually every person access to essentially the same quality of internet connectivity, whether they reside in a major city or a remote Indigenous community.”

It just isn’t going to happen. I am sorry to be the bearer of such bad news. Australia has spent tens of billions of dollars building its NBN, National Broadband Network, and it isn’t providing the same quality of internet connectivity to urban and rural communities.

Unpopular as it may be to say so, in my view, there are some basic realities that need to be faced: there are disadvantages to living outside major urban centres that accompany the wonderful benefits associated with a more rural geography. You simply don’t have access to all the same government services or private sector services once you leave the cities.

“If you choose not to find joy in the snow, you will have less joy in your life, but still the same amount of snow.”

You can complain about it, but you are likely to find that many Canadians in rural markets still won’t be able to go to the same concerts, theatre, variety of restaurants, many will lack ready access to world class hospitals, and relevant to today’s post, many will have to rely on broadband solutions that are not the same as the technology choices available to their compatriots in urban settings. Through the summer, I wrote, “Fibre optic connections aren’t always the best solution for broadband.”

When fibre optic connections are set as a mandatory requirement for broadband, rather than simply being identified as one of the possible solutions, it restricts the degrees of freedom for solutions that could be innovative, more cost effective, and delivered sooner. In today’s environment, an adequate solution delivered sooner is more likely to be viewed more positively by consumers than a perfect solution delivered years later as I wrote in “Isn’t some broadband better than nothing?”

Just three weeks ago, I wrote “We can’t wait for a perfect, “future-proof” solution for universal broadband for all Canadians. But surely we can strive to do a lot more, a lot better, and a lot sooner.”

We can moan about rural communities lacking equal access to the identical range of service options as those enjoyed by urban dwellers, or it seems to me that we can (and should) celebrate the availability of access to more than adequate broadband services that meet the CRTC’s target objective of 50 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up with an unlimited option, regardless of the delivery technology.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t always aim higher. However, an adequate solution delivered sooner is indeed better than a perfect solution delivered years later.

“If you choose not to find joy in the snow, you will have less joy in your life, but still the same amount of snow.”