Post Tagged with: "crtc"

Government Directs CRTC To Consider Fee-For-Carriage

Following on yesterday's post on how Conservative MPs submitted comments to the CRTC in support of fee-for-carriage, this morning Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore announced an Order-in-Council directing the CRTC to hold hearings and report back on a fee-for-carriage system in Canada.  The challenge, as noted yesterday, is the possibility […]

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September 17, 2009 10 comments News

Conservative MPs Voice Support For Fee-For-Carriage

As the CRTC gears up for yet another round of hearings later this fall that will address the fee-for-carriage issue, the most recent batch of submitted comments contains what may constitute an interesting shift in policy by the Conservatives.  Earlier this year, the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage conducted extensive hearings on the future of local broadcasting.  Fee-for-carriage (ie. a requirement for broadcast distributors such as cable and satellite to pay for retransmission of over-the-air signals) figured prominently in the discussion.  The Conservative members of the committee issued a dissenting opinion in the final report and offered up the following:

this dissenting report must now indicate our most fervent and rigorous opposition to any potential fee for carriage system, either negotiated or imposed, that would have a detrimental effect on the consumer.  We believe it is fundamentally unfair to expect Canadian consumers to pay new and substantial charges each month to their cable or satellite distributor to reflect such a system. 

Fast forward several months later and Conservative MPs Ed Holder (London West), Laurie Hawn (Edmonton Centre), Bruce Stanton (Simcoe North), Patrick Brown (Barrie), Gord Brown (Leeds-Grenville), and Lois Brown (Newmarket-Aurora) have each submitted comments to the CRTC public hearing process on the issue.  Each MP sent roughly the same letter, suggesting that they all come from the same playbook.  The new message:

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September 16, 2009 21 comments News

Rogers Raises Questions About CRTC “Procedural Fairness”

Rogers has issued a press release raising questions about whether certain CRTC commissioners, including Chair Konrad von Finckenstein, have pre-judged the fee-for-carriage issue and should drop out of the hearing on the issue later this year.

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September 15, 2009 Comments are Disabled News

MTS, Acanac Take Net Fight With Bell To Federal Court

The CBC reports that MTS Allstream and Acanac have filed a motion with the Federal Court of Appeal seeking reversal of the CRTC's usage based billing decision.

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September 15, 2009 1 comment News

MTS, CAIP, CFIB Launch Campaign for Competitive Broadband

MTS Allstream, CAIP, and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business are among the companies and groups that have launched the Campaign for Competitive Broadband, an effort to overturn a recent CRTC decision on competitor access to broadband networks.

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September 10, 2009 Comments are Disabled News