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.
The podcast can be downloaded here, accessed on YouTube, and is embedded below. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcast, Spotify or the RSS feed. Updates on the podcast on X/Twitter at @Lawbytespod.
Show Notes:
Credits:
CTV News, Rogers Offering Buyouts to Half of Its Work Force, April 27, 2026
Really interesting discussion on the long-term impact of the Rogers-Shaw merger. I like how this episode breaks down complex telecom policy issues in a way that’s still easy to follow, especially for people who don’t normally track Canadian tech policy closely.
The workforce cuts at Rogers are a telling signal of what happens to IT infrastructure investment post-merger. In large telecom consolidations, the first casualties are usually the internal engineering and product teams – the people responsible for maintaining and evolving the tech stack. What often follows is a freeze on custom development, a pivot to off-the-shelf vendor solutions, and a gradual accumulation of technical debt that takes years to unwind.
The Shaw merger added significant infrastructure complexity. Rationalizing two separate network stacks, billing systems, and customer platforms is not a quick integration job – and cutting capex while doing it is a risky combination. The rising consumer complaints may be a direct symptom of that.