Claire Anderson, Commissioner for British Columbia and the Yukon
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC)
Check against delivery
Thank you once again, Bob, for that welcome and for inviting me to join all of you once again at the British Columbia Broadband Association's annual conference. My thanks, as well, to the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations for allowing us to conduct our conference on their traditional, ancestral and unceded territories.
The City of Vancouver acknowledges that the City is "located on territory that was never ceded, or given up to the Crown by the Musqueam, Squamish, or Tsleil-Waututh peoples. The term unceded acknowledges the dispossession of the land and the inherent rights of those Indigenous peoples to the territory." So again, I pay my respects.
Thank for you for inviting me to speak with you for a third year running now. This time, of course, I am meeting with you under very different circumstances, as we are currently in the midst of an election period.
As you know, the CRTC is an independent quasi-judicial tribunal that regulates the Canadian communications sector in the public interest. We hold public consultations on telecommunications and broadcasting matters and make decisions based on the public record.
And as an independent tribunal, we are mindful that during an election period the federal public service operates under the principles outlined in what is commonly referred to as the "caretaker convention." We, like the rest of the government, continue routine operations and necessary business, but we exercise restraint in what we say and do to demonstrate respect for the democratic process.
What that means for today is I will not be able to discuss, for the most part, what the future might hold for the CRTC. I certainly will not speculate on the election or what it might mean for the CRTC, your sector, or any other areas of interest being discussed at the conference today. This will be true both for my time here at the podium, as well as in any discussion we have together afterward.
With that out of the way, I would like to get to the things we can discuss, especially considering the theme of this year's conference: "The Dollars and Sense of Telecom." Because for many of the members here today, the CRTC's recent regulatory decisions create the potential to open up new market opportunities for service providers willing to seize them.
So let's get started.
HSA
I am, of course, referring to our decisions over the past couple years regarding aggregated, wholesale high-speed access services over fibre-to-the-home networks. The process by which we arrived at our decision began when we received a new policy direction from the government in February 2023. The direction asked us to renew our approach to telecommunications policy in Canada, requiring the CRTC to consider how our decisions could promote competition, affordability, reliability, and consumer interests.
Shortly after we launched a proceeding on the Internet services market, focusing on how we could increase competition and encourage more affordable choices for consumers in the market.
In November of the same year, we released an interim decision that provided competitors with a workable way to sell Internet services using the fibre-to-the-home networks of large telephone companies in Ontario and Quebec, where the CRTC had noticed that competition in the market had declined most significantly.
We continued our public process, including a comprehensive review of all submissions on the matter, as well as a week-long public hearing in February of last year. In August 2024, we released our final decision in the proceeding. That decision expands competitor access to fibre networks nationwide.
Our decisions throughout this process have aimed to promote greater competition in the Internet services marketplace while ensuring incentives for companies to continue investing in high-quality networks. For example, the access granted in our decisions only includes fibre that was already deployed on the date of the decision. Any new fibre built after that date is exempt until August 2029.
Our hope is that through this decision, British Columbians and Canadians in general will soon benefit from increased competition for high-speed Internet. Because we know increased competition leads to more affordable choices and innovative services.
For service providers like many of you here today, the new framework presents an opportunity to compete in the fibre-to-home market. The access to that market is already available - large telephone companies had to be ready to grant it to competitors by February 2025. So we hope that you consider this as an option in your business planning.
Broadband Fund
Promoting both competition and continued investment has been one key focus of CRTC decisions in the past couple years. Another area where we have focused much of our attention is on expanding networks to ensure all Canadians have access to high-quality and reliable Internet - especially in underserved rural, remote, and Indigenous communities. The open data we publish tells us that 21.8 percent of households in those areas do not have access to reliable 50/10 connectivity.
In 2016, we decided to overhaul our program for ensuring basic telephone service to all Canadians to focus on broadband. We established the criteria for the Broadband Fund in 2018, and launched three calls for applications - the first two in 2019, and then the third in 2022.
We have directed funding to Inuit communities in northern Quebec and Nunavut, to nearly 100 kilometres of major roads in Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec and Ontario, and to roads and rural communities in the Yukon, here in B.C., and in Manitoba. Over the Fund's lifetime, it has supported improved broadband infrastructure for more than 270 communities, including significant investments in the Far North.
Thirty-one of these projects are in the $1 to $10 million range. Seventeen of these projects come in at $1 million or below. Although we are encouraged to see that smaller providers have been able to successfully apply for funding, we know that we can do more to make it easier.
That's why we are conducting an ongoing review of the Fund. Late last year we announced a number of changes in three broad areas - making it faster for you to submit an application and for us to evaluate it; supporting Indigenous applicants; and making our mapping more sensible and accessible.
In terms of faster application and evaluation, we simplified some eligibility and assessment criteria, like the requirement to propose specific packages and rates. We also collapsed the separate access and transport categories to further simplify things. We have reduced the amount of information required at all stages of the funding process, and we've consolidated separate reporting requirements.
In terms of reducing barriers for Indigenous applicants, we have made a number of changes including on community engagement. We have taken steps to streamline the application process and to provide Indigenous applicants with a dedicated point of contact in our Indigenous Relations Team, instead of having to navigate our processes alone.
We are also providing funding for up to two years of technical training for Indigenous staff in communities they are proposing to serve as part of funded capital projects, and for Indigenous applicants we are not requiring a 10% holdback on projects with approved funding of $5 million or less. Furthermore, we are requiring each Broadband Fund applicant to obtain and show they have conducted meaningful consultations with Indigenous communities and earned consent for any projects that are built on their territories.
Finally, in terms of updating our mapping, we've dropped the hexagons for a call-by-call approach, expanded how we define major transportation roads, and provided a way to identify the roads that provide key linkages between communities.
We expect these changes to improve how we operate the Fund and improve outcomes for recipients. Any further changes we make will be in service of our overarching goal: to help close the remaining connectivity gaps across the country effectively and efficiently.
Recent decisions and ongoing consultations
Our Broadband Fund work and our decisions regarding network access are not our only ongoing telecommunications work at the CRTC. Far from it.
Just two months ago at the end of February we also released a decision to help strengthen network resiliency and reliability for emergency services like 9-1-1. Measures in the decision will help improve the resiliency of the wireless public alerting system, prioritize 9-1-1 traffic over Internet traffic during periods of network congestion, and provide greater information to the public on how to contact emergency services during outages.
As British Columbians know all too well, access to emergency services and public alerts are even more important in a crisis. We will continue to help support Canadians' access to 9-1-1 services and public alerts within our mandate.
Another of our ongoing work streams at the CRTC regards access to poles and support structures. As many of you know, we issued decisions in recent years streamlining the approach to accessing support structures that are owned or controlled by large incumbent local exchange carriers, and then finalizing the tariffs by which to do so.
At the same time, we have been exploring whether these tariffs ought to give competitors the right to include wireless attachments to help deploy next-generation 5G networks - in other words, whether the rules requiring telcos to let third parties attach equipment to support structures should be modified and, potentially, broadened. What types of facilities could be deployed to support wireless networks? What would that mean for spare capacity, construction standards, and interference? What can we do at the Commission to streamline processes?
These are just a few of the questions we are considering. Because this is a matter before us, I cannot even hint at any possible outcome, except that any decision we make will continue to promote both greater competition and more investment in networks.
Next, I want to take a few moments to explain some of our ongoing work on the consumer side of things. While we hope our high-speed access to fibre-to-the-home networks decision will improve choice and affordability for consumers, we also think more can be done to ensure consumers have better information in the Internet services market.
Last fall, we published our Consumer Protections Action Plan, which summarizes our measures to ensure clear contracts and promote transparency both in terms of how consumers are able to choose their provider, and in knowing what to expect from them.
We are currently engaged in a series of four consultations around making it easier to choose, change, and cancel a plan.
The first one is about clear rules for notifying customers when their plans or discounts are about to end. The second looks at fees that some service providers may charge when a subscriber cancels or changes a plan. The third consultation is around tools that providers give their subscribers to manage their plans, like online portals.
