Appeared in the Toronto Star on October 22, 2012 as Consumer Wireless Protections Completes Dramatic Policy Shift Earlier this month, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission invited the public to help create a national code of conduct for wireless companies such as Bell, Rogers, and Telus. The consultation is expected […]
Archive for October, 2012
The CRTC’s Big Shift: From Tangible Benefits to the Public Interest
The result was largely regulatory theatre. The purchaser would typically unveil a benefits package featuring self-interested proposals, often amend those plans at the CRTC hearing to demonstrate it was sensitive to criticisms from various groups, and the CRTC would proceed to further tweak the package to show it was not ready to rubber stamp the transaction.
My extra Toronto Star column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes the process generally served the companies and the tangible benefits recipients well. The merging companies were reasonably assured of getting their deal approved and the tangible benefits recipients received hundreds of millions in funding with few strings attached. 

The problem was that the public was missing from this process. Tough policy issues with a direct impact on the public were put off for another day as the public interest was supposedly served by trickle down benefits generated by market efficiencies or the creation of new Canadian programming.
Make No Mistake, This is a New CRTC
Appeared in the Toronto Star on October 20, 2012 as Make No Mistake, This is a New CRTC Last week’s Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications decision to reject the proposed Bell – Astral merger surprised most observers, as few predicted with much confidence that the deal would be flatly rejected. There […]
Reactions to the CRTC’s Bell – Astral Decision
Several must-read posts and articles on the CRTC’s Bell – Astral decision from over the weekend from David Ellis, Dwayne Winseck, and Steven Chase of the Globe and Mail.
This Is Not Your Parent’s CRTC: Commission Rejects the Bell – Astral Deal
The CRTC identified multiple problems with the Bell bid (radio, tangible benefits, lack of evidence that bigger is better online), but the conclusion says it all:
The Commission finds that BCE has not discharged its burden and demonstrated that, on balance, this transaction is in the public interest. The benefits proposed would advantage BCE and its services, but the Commission is not persuaded that the transaction would provide significant and unequivocal benefits to the Canadian broadcasting system and to Canadians sufficient to outweigh the concerns described above.
While demonstrating that the transaction is in the public interest is always the language used in these proceedings, the CRTC has in the past focused on the tangible benefits package (ie. the multi-million dollar payments to creator groups) as the primary proxy for public interest. No longer. The CRTC’s focus today is unequivocally on the broader public interest with consumer impact the leading concern.