Archive for May, 2026

Rogers_Place_Arena by Alexscuccato, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 267: Peter Nowak on Rogers, the Shaw Merger Aftermath, and the Limits of Canadian Telecom Policy

The recent announcement that Rogers is offering buyouts to half of its workforce is just the tip of the iceberg in a series of developments involving one of Canada’s dominant communications companies. It has seen rising consumer complaints, is cutting capital expenditures, increasingly pivoting towards sports and media, and is now looking to cut its workforce dramatically. Three years after the Rogers-Shaw merger, is this simply the predicted outcome of allowing that merger to go through?

To help assess what is happening, Peter Nowak, a veteran telecom journalist, joins the Law Bytes podcast. Peter has covered the industry, worked in the industry and now publishes “Do Not Pass Go”, a regular newsletter and a podcast focused on competition, monopoly, and corporate concentration in Canada.

Closer Look: Why banning kids from social media is a terrible idea

I appeared on the Closer Look podcast on May 3, 2026. In the episode, we discussed proposals to ban children from social media, whether age restrictions are likely to work, and the privacy and enforcement problems they may create. The link to the episode is here.

Going Through the Motions: How Parliament Is Shutting Down Study and Debate on Political Party Privacy

Since the Carney government took power, it has shown an odd pre-occupation with preserving the power of federal political parties to use the personal information of millions of Canadians under fewer restrictions than those faced by practically any other organization in the country. It started with the quick introduction of Bill C-4, an “affordability measures” bill that buried provisions exempting parties from provincial privacy laws and substituted a weak system that applied retroactively to the year 2000. The Senate found the approach so deficient that it sent the bill back with a sunset clause requiring something better within three years, only for the government to reject the amendment and rush the bill to royal assent within hours. Now political party privacy is back in another bill, and the government is back to trying to shut down study and debate. The apparent hope is to pass rules that do not meet modern privacy standards and hope no one notices.