Business
Bell CEO warns ‘interventionist’ regulations could lead telcos to curtail investments
Mirko Bibic, president and CEO of BCE and Bell Canada speaks during a CRTC hearing for Telecom Notice of Consultation CRTC 2019-57, Review of mobile wireless services, in Gatineau, Que., on Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang
By Sammy Hudes in Toronto
Bell Canada president and CEO Mirko Bibic warned Monday that increased regulation in Canada’s telecommunications industry could prompt companies to scale back investment and make cuts to service for underserved communities.
Speaking at a lunch hosted by Canadian Club Toronto, Bibic took aim at the federal government and Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission for a shift “towards more micromanagement of Canada’s telecom industry.”
He said some investments are “impossible to justify” when big companies are required to provide smaller competitors access to their privately built networks at heavily discounted rates.
“Our industry is quite highly regulated and we appear to be moving rapidly towards even more intervention,” said Bibic, adding that such an approach “generates market uncertainty.”
“Our regulator’s telling us that we have to give access to the new networks that our people, our partners and our capital are building and they’re telling us the rates we have to charge for that access. That’s not how a competitive market should be regulated. [It] certainly doesn’t strengthen the quality or resiliency of the networks and services you all rely on.”
Earlier this year, Canada’s telecommunications regulator announced it would lower some wholesale internet rates by 10 per cent and review whether big companies should provide smaller competitors access to their fibre-to-the-home networks.
The CRTC said the move was aimed at improving internet speeds and bolstering competition.
That came after federal Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne directed the regulator to implement new rules to enhance consumer rights, affordability, competition and universal access, which included a requirement for improved wholesale internet rates.
The CRTC also stated earlier this month that major telecoms would have 90 days to negotiate access agreements for mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs). That followed a policy set in 2021 allowing regional cellphone providers to compete as MVNOs across Canada using networks built by large companies.
But Bibic urged Ottawa and the CRTC to ensure Canada’s four major telecom companies have incentives to invest and differentiate themselves from each other, which he said would lead to more customer value. He warned of “unintended consequences” if regulation continues to ramp up.
“There comes a point where if government is too interventionist, all of us are going to have to scale back those investments, which is not good for consumers and businesses,” he said.
“If you’ve got to start cutting back on capital, what gets cut first? Does the GTA get cut first? Or does some northern community in Ontario get cut first? We know the answer to that.”
Bibic also pushed back against a “prevailing but false narrative” surrounding the state of competition in Canada’s telecom industry, as well as cellphone and internet prices.
A report released in February by Wall Communications Inc., which conducts an annual comparison of Canadian phone and internet prices to other jurisdictions, found Canada still had among the highest prices internationally for cellphone and broadband service in 2022.
But Bibic noted that despite rising inflation, wireless prices in Canada have declined eight per cent over the past two years and almost 25 per cent since January 2020.
“We’ve all been in the U.S. right? The service is terrible. So there is a quality dimension to it,” he told the crowd.
“Too often, the prevailing narrative is based on these studies that by definition create these average baskets of goods so that there’s some semblance of trying to compare prices across the world, but the baskets of goods don’t actually reflect what people are buying today.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 29, 2023.
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Business
Canadians should expect even more spending in federal fall economic statement
From the Fraser Institute
By Jake Fuss and Grady Munro
The Trudeau government will soon release its fall economic statement. Though technically intended to be an update on the fiscal plan in this year’s budget, in recent years the fall economic statement has more closely resembled a “mini-budget” that unveils new (and often significant) spending commitments and initiatives.
Let’s look at the data.
The chart below includes projections of annual federal program spending from a series of federal budgets and updates, beginning with the 2022 budget and ending with the latest 2024 budget. Program spending equals total spending minus debt interest costs, and represents discretionary spending by the federal government.
Clearly, there’s a trend that with every consecutive budget and fiscal update the Trudeau government revises spending estimates upwards. Take the last two fiscal years, 2023/24 and 2024/25, for example. Budget 2022 projected annual program spending of $436.5 billion for the 2023/24 fiscal year. Yet the fall economic statement released just months later revised that spending estimate up to $449.8 billion, and later releases showed even higher spending.
The issue is even more stark when examining spending projections for the current fiscal year. Budget 2022 projected annual spending of $441.6 billion in 2024/25. Since then, every subsequent fiscal release has revised that estimate higher and higher, to the point that Budget 2024 estimates program spending of $483.6 billion for this year—representing a $42.0 billion increase from the projections only two years ago.
Meanwhile, as spending estimates are revised upwards, plans to reduce the federal deficit are consistently pushed off into later years.
For example, the 2022 fall economic statement projected a deficit of $25.4 billion for the 2024/25 fiscal year, and declining deficits in the years to come, before reaching an eventual surplus of $4.5 billion in 2027/28. However, subsequent budgets and fiscal updates again revised those estimates. The latest budget projects a deficit of $39.8 billion in 2024/25 that will decline to a $26.8 billion deficit by 2027/28. In other words, though budgets and fiscal updates have consistently projected declining deficits between 2024/25 and 2027/28, each subsequent document has produced larger deficits throughout the fiscal outlook and pushed the timeline for balanced budgets further into the future.
These data illustrate the Trudeau government’s lack of accountability to its own fiscal plans. Though the unpredictable nature of forecasting means the government is unlikely to exactly meet future projections, it’s still reasonable to expect it will roughly follow its own fiscal plans. However, time and time again Canadians have been sold a certain plan, only to have it change dramatically mere months later due to the government’s unwillingness to restrain spending. We shouldn’t expect the upcoming fall economic statement to be any different.
Authors:
Business
Trudeau gov’t threatens to punish tech companies that fail to censor ‘disinformation’
From LifeSiteNews
A report from the House of Commons Heritage Committee claimed that ‘some individuals and groups create disinformation to promote political ideologies including extremist views and conspiracy theories or simply to make money.’
A report from a Canadian federal committee said MPs should enact laws to penalize social media and tech companies that don’t take action to quell so-called “undesirable or questionable” content on the internet.
MPs from the ruling Liberal, New Democratic Party (NDP), and separatists Bloc Québécois party on the House of Commons Heritage Committee summarized their opinions in a report.
“The Government of Canada notes some individuals and groups create disinformation to promote political ideologies including extremist views and conspiracy theories or simply to make money,” reads the report titled Tech Giants’ Intimidation and Subversion Tactics to Evade Regulation in Canada and Globally.
“Disinformation creates ‘doubt and confusion’ and can be particularly harmful when it involves health information,” it continues.
The report notes how such “disinformation” can cause “financial harms as well as political polarization and distrust in key institutions,” adding, “The prevalence of disinformation can be difficult to determine.”
As noted in Blacklock’s Reporter, the report claims that many of Canada’s “major societal harms” have come from “unregulated social media platforms relying on algorithms to amplify content, among them disinformation and conspiracy theories.”
Of note is the committee failed to define what “disinformation” or “conspiracy theories” meant.
Most of the MPs on the committee made the recommendation that Google, Facebook, and other social media platforms, which ironically have at one point or another clamped down on free speech themselves, “put mechanisms in place to detect undesirable or questionable content that may be the product of disinformation or foreign interference and that these platforms be required to promptly identify such content and report it to users.”
“Failure to do so should result in penalties,” the report stated.
As it stands, the federal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has plowed ahead to push laws impacting free speech online.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, Canadian legal group The Democracy Fund (TDF) warned that the Liberal government’s Bill C-63 seeks to further clamp down on online speech and will “weaponize” the nation’s courts to favor the ruling federal party and do nothing but create an atmosphere of “fear.”
Bill C-63 was introduced by Liberal Justice Minister Arif Virani in the House of Commons in February and was immediately blasted by constitutional experts as troublesome.
Jordan Peterson, one of Canada’s most prominent psychologists, recently accused the bill of attempting to create a pathway to allow for “Orwellian Thought Crime” to become the norm in the nation.
Conservative MPs fight back: ‘A government bureaucracy should not regulate content’
Conservative MPs fought back the Heritage Committee’s majority findings and in a Dissenting Report said the committee did not understand what the role of the internet is in society, which is that it should be free from regulation.
“The main report failed to adequately explore the state of censorship in Canada and the role played by tech giants and the current federal government,” the Conservatives wrote in their dissenting report, adding, “Canadians are increasingly being censored by the government and tech giants as to what they can see, hear and say online.”
The Conservative MPs noted that when it comes to the internet, it is “boundless,” and that “Anyone who wants to have a presence on the internet can have one.”
“A government bureaucracy should not regulate which content should be prioritized and which should be demoted,” it noted, adding, “There is space for all.”
LifeSiteNews reported how the Conservative Party has warned that Trudeau’s Bill C-63 is so flawed that it will never be able to be enforced or become known before the next election.
The law calls for the creation of a Digital Safety Commission, a digital safety ombudsperson, and the Digital Safety Office, all tasked with policing internet content.
The bill’s “hate speech” section is accompanied by broad definitions, severe penalties, and dubious tactics, including levying pre-emptive judgments against people if they are feared to be likely to commit an act of “hate” in the future.
Details of the new legislation also show the bill could lead to more people jailed for life for “hate crimes” or fined $50,000 and jailed for posts that the government defines as “hate speech” based on gender, race, or other categories.
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