Canada is suffering under the rule of a brutal telecom monarchy. Since Minister Champagne approved the Rogers-Shaw buyout, Rogers has become the biggest telecom giant in Canadian history — effectively crowning them “King of Canada”. King Rogers and their court of monopoly pals, Bell and Telus, have spent years doing everything they can to keep YOU on shoddy, expensive, and outdated Internet connections.
How do they get away with it? For one, our broken wholesale system.
In 2015, the CRTC ruled that you should have access to fibre internet on any choice of provider you want.1 But the rules they put in place at the time were so restrictive, it allowed Big Telecom to maintain a complete monopoly on the fibre Internet access to your home ever since. That’s almost a decade head start for Big Telecom, locking smaller competitive providers out of the market entirely, and leaving your fastest Internet option subject to a complete monopoly.
Right now, the CRTC’s unfair wholesale system lets telecom giants lock all their competitors out of state-of-the-art tech like fibre. The rules don’t let independent providers access fibre at any price, meaning they simply cannot compete against the faster connections of Big Telecom. That means for many, our only option for fast and reliable fibre Internet is to purchase a wildly expensive plan from greedy giants like Rogers and Bell.2-5
But YOUR voice could change everything. After years of your advocacy, the CRTC is finally looking at changing its fibre wholesale rules — and the system more broadly.6 This historic review is a massive opportunity to END Big Telecom’s monopoly on fibre Internet and dethrone our abusive telecom monarchy.
The CRTC is so close to making the right call, but they can only weigh the evidence in front of them. Unless we speak up LOUD on the public record of this consultation, the CRTC will have no choice but to side with the giants YET AGAIN. Make sure we win this historic fight: Tell the CRTC to END Big Telecom’s monopoly on high-quality Internet!
