Garvia
Don’t bring your phone into the bedroom, they say it’ll wreck your sleep, they say. This past Thursday night, I was feeling reckless and had my cell phone right by the bed. Early Friday morning, in a foggy, half sleep, half awake, mostly reptilian brain state, I reached out for my phone. It was around 5:20a.m. and did what I know I’m not supposed to do. I grabbed the device in the half dark and started looking at my messages. And there it was. I had forgotten to answer this one message. I’m sure the recipient will appreciate my 5:00 a.m. response to her day old message. So I responded. I hit send. And then I saw it: no signal. My WiFi was strong, my cell was down. Like down goes freezer down. And I was thinking, maybe it’s just my phone. Nope. This time it was a true technical knockout. A quick scroll through of Twitter confirmed it. Rogers, one of the largest communications networks in the country, and also, by the way, the owner of Frequency Podcast Network. And therefore, this very show, was down and having no luck getting back up in a timely fashion.
It was down for around 15 hours altogether, just like that. No cell service, no Internet. Which meant no banking, no shopping for many, no calls to 911 for any of their customers. It was a wake up call on many levels. This week, Ottawa called telecom CEOs to the table to talk about ways to prevent future large scale disruptions. Ottawa demanded a plan from telecom providers within 60 days. The CRTC has launched a full scale investigation, but many of us are still left wondering, how could this happen? What does this say about the telecommunications framework we live under? What’s the government’s role in all of this? What solutions should we be pushing for?
I’m Garvia Bailey. This is The Big Story. We’ve got so many questions about what went wrong, but are there also solutions within reach on the horizon? Vass Bednar thinks that there is. Vass Bednar is a senior fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation and the executive director of McMaster University’s master of public policy and digital society program. Thanks for being with us, Vass.
Vass Bednar
Thanks for having me back, and it’s so great to meet you.
Garvia
It’s great to meet you too. Let’s go back to last Friday, to that Friday,
Vass Bednar
Red Friday.
Garvia
Red Friday. Let’s call it Red Friday. What surprised you most about the Rogers shutdown on that Friday?
Vass Bednar
I wasn’t surprised that an outage occurred. Right. These are large, complex systems, and I think people generally understand that stuff happens. I was surprised by the scale of the outage, the duration, and some of the kind of spotty corporate communication that we received. To me, Friday really felt like and yes, Red Friday kind of a joke, but I kind of want to remove the Rogers from it. Because I think it was like a bigger reckoning for Canada. For me, Friday was an emergency for Canada. I think we saw emergency services provided over this private infrastructure. And also I’ve been hearing the word essential quite a bit. All of a sudden, this digital infrastructure and physical infrastructure felt so essential to our everyday lives, to the economy. It’s more than just missing a text message from your crush or missing a Zoom meeting. So I think that’s been really interesting for people to reflect on and kind of reconcile with.
Garvia
Were there clues that led up to this? Was there anything that felt like this was something that was going to happen eventually?
Vass Bednar
Not to my mind, as kind of an average person bumbling through life. I know I noticed a bunch of screenshots of kind of people noticing activity that they sort of monitor in interesting ways. But it doesn’t seem like an outage is something we can anticipate in the way we might a tectonic plate shift or something like that. And many people have brought up and I don’t want Rogers to be the punching bag here and now I’m the one that keeps bringing them up as a company, but they had an outage last year or something. But again, to my mind, this is not about one company, and it’s not just about an after action review on an engineering fail point. We’ve got to learn way more about what happens so that other companies and other jurisdictions can prevent something like this. But also, these kind of shocks are going to happen. I feel like Canada can do a lot better the next time there’s an outage.
Garvia
Yeah, for sure. In your Global and Mail op ed, you compared this to the blackout of 2003. It felt very much the same way for me personally. In what ways were the two events similar?
Vass Bednar
Okay, wait. I want to know where you were during the 2003 outage. I was living in Hamilton as a teenager. I had taken my younger cousin from Montreal to Toronto. I was walking her around, and things started to become like a weird ghost town. Like, things were just kind of closed.
Garvia
It was wild.
Vass Bednar
I remember this is how silly I was at the time. I wondered to myself, do toilets need electricity? Like, I wasn’t sure. I was like, could I flush the toilet? And I was like, wait a minute, this is important. How does it work? Can I flush it? We just got on the bus, got home, and then people explain to us, but where were you? And then I’ll tell you how I think they’re similar or different.
Garvia
Okay. I was just about to leave my job. I was at the CBC. I was in my early days as a reporter, very early. And then they sent me out to do Streeters, which is the worst thing you could possibly do.
Vass Bednar
Why?
Garvia
Because you’re just asking strangers to just talk to you and strangers are trying to figure out what’s going on. So they sent me out with this microphone to just talk to people. Hi, how are you? It’s a blackout. How are you feeling? It was the most surreal kind of experience. And everyone that was supposed to leave work, none of us left until like 10:00 at night because we were all trying to figure it out. But the great thing was I was at work and we had a generator, so we were able to still work. It was wild.
Vass Bednar
Yeah. So I think the generator aspect is interesting because it does remind you that there are things people can do that they can pay out of pocket for or invest in to kind of build their own independent resilience. And that’s something we heard coming out of Friday. People sort of saying, you got to de-bundle yourself, decouple, make sure you diversified everything at home. And I appreciate that feedback and I see how in the immediate sense, it can provide a sense of kind of comfort and confidence for some people. But I really don’t like it as a solution because to me it’s just downloading the burden to individual people to kind of make sure they can stay connected.
Similarities, something we all experience together, of course, uncertainty, needing to use kind of a full court press and all the possible ways we can communicate. We didn’t have consistent communication over radio with the Red Friday. We didn’t have emergency alert banners on key news kind of televisions. We didn’t use the emergency alert system that we have right now. I know if your phone was brick, you can’t get an emergency message, but the people around you can. Right? We had to sense make we didn’t know who was vulnerable.
I also wouldn’t have minded. And I know we have legislation, of course, around spamming people, but I would have accepted an email from Bell, which is my home internet provider, telling me, here’s how if you have a phone with this, here’s how you can access emergency services, or here are ways you might want to support others. Because I appreciate the differences from 2003 and I think there’s a romanticism to sort of thinking back to 2003 because it was five years before the App Store launched. Not everyone had a cell phone. If you did have a cell phone, it was like a huge deal to have a camera phone, actually to look that up. Whereas now I do think the Internet and cellular services felt more like electricity in our lives because we saw how the economy was so kind of hobbled and hamstrung. I think Red Friday was embarrassing, if not humiliating, for Canada.
And again, I’m using that strong word of emergency, but it was an emergency to have Canadians not be able to access 911. That can never happen again. We need to work very hard. And I know people are working smart people are working hard on this. But I think that’s a great goal. And I think Canada as a country needs to own this and needs to reflect back what did we learn not just about engineering, but also about communicating to the public, connecting people to emergency services, and yes, how to go into that mode and give citizens the information they deserve, not sporadic corporate communication.
Garvia
Sure, you speak to it as a national sort of reckoning, but I’m thinking about what’s happening around the world with telecommunications and the way we differ from providers abroad and what we might be able to learn from the way the systems are set up in other countries.
Vass Bednar
Yeah, there’s tons we can learn. I think what’s fascinating about our telecommunications system in Canada. One, the way it’s regulated is really complex. It’s tough to learn about. I’ve been doing some independent reading, so for anyone listening who can’t totally wrap their head around it, I sort of want to say that’s normal. And part of why that is is just because it’s a little Frankensteinian. We’ve built it over time, it’s evolved over time. The system we have now is not the system that was necessarily initially envisioned because we’ve had these new products and services, right?
So in terms of what we can learn from other jurisdictions, some jurisdictions like Australia, which is a good counterpoint to Canada, just because of the similarities in terms of geography and how the population is distributed, they actually decouple competition that’s based on facilities. So facilities refers to the physical infrastructure of the wires that go in your house or your place of work. They decouple that from the services based competition, and services are what’s layered onto that physical infrastructure. So an independent service provider you hear ISP. In Canada, you can compete on both the facilities and the services, so the large incumbent firms that have made amazing and significant capital investments to connect up the country, they own that infrastructure, they rent it out to competitors, but they also compete with their own companies for those services. So one thing we can learn is that it’s possible to have that decoupled, to have the facilities be publicly owned.
So you hear this more radical or provocative idea where people are like, nationalize the telcos. Generally, what they’re saying there is, look, the physical infrastructure has tended toward a monopoly anyway. Maybe it should be public. And we have private competition from ISPs. Now, let me pause for a second and say, does that change the resiliency of the system necessarily? Does that make it more robust? Not necessarily, but also maybe, probably. Because when something is managed as a public asset in that way, in a public good, the incentives are different. Again, private companies beholden to shareholders who need to return value to those shareholders, not value to everyday Canadians necessarily. And part of why the broader conversation gets so muddled is because you get people sort of saying, why am I paying more money year over year for this. Like, what’s the quality of this service? So one thing we can learn from other places is that you can decouple that form of competition, and it could contribute to a more robust network.
Another thing we can learn is just from the innovation and iterations we’re seeing in Canada. So there are a bunch of municipalities that are starting to link up their fiber optic cables. I didn’t know this, but I didn’t know enough about it, is what I mean. But cities lay down fiber optic cable often when they’re doing new transit products projects. We have it at Smart, traffic lights, sewer and water treatment plants, but they’re disconnected. It’s not quite a network. So the city of Toronto, I’m speaking to you now from Toronto, is considering, okay, is it worth it for us to make the capital investment to link up this existing fiber network, so that it’s municipally owned, so that it’s ours? Almost like a marketplace or an app store, right? Where we’re starting to think about, from a competition perspective, what it means to own and operate that platform.
Last thing I’ll say to you, and I hope it doesn’t sound too silly, but if you want to zoom out with me all the way to outer space, we have a constellation of low orbit satellites now, and this is a space in outer space where we are pretty comfortable with a foreign owned competitor competing in the space. So the most infamous one is Elon Musk-owned Starlink. We got a Canadian company tell us that with a lot of investments from government, that could be a novel Canadian competitor. And that’s one of the ways, again, that our system exists. I don’t mean to convey that it’s a patchwork by any means, but I do want to convey that there’s a mix of private investments, public investments. And I think what other people learned from Canada is there’s often a lot of admiration for the Crown Corporation SaskTel in Saskatchewan that is a model and not a total hypothetical, because it exists there, and there’s things we can learn. So I will stop rambling and just say, what can we learn? It’s confusing, it’s muddled, it’s messy, but we built it, and we can continue to sculpt and shape it and make it an even better system where there’s more choice for people and maybe even better prices as a result.
Garvia
Okay, so let’s move from blame and move into solutions. The telecommunications giants were brought to the table by our Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, Francois-Philippe Champagne. What was the thrust of that meeting?
Vass Bednar
So, I know the external optics kind of made this meeting seem like the CEOs were being called to the principal’s office, but I think the minister did something really important, which is, again, not just singled out one company. Speaking to all the companies together and starting to focus on what are the areas that we can collaborate on. So, number one, that comes up to my mind and what I was anticipating. So the minister said, the minister tweeted, just to get that out of the way, that he directed the companies to reach agreements on three things. The first was emergency roaming. Two was mutual assistance during outages, and three, a communication protocol to better inform the public and authorities during telecommunications emergencies. And the outage will be investigated by the CRTC as well. I think that’s a great plan.
And on the emergency services, what that would mean if we’re able to implement it, which I think is something, again, worth celebrating as Canadians. If Rogers is down in the future, your phone would automatically connect to Bell in a way that when and if you travel, your phone kind of automatically connects when you’re roaming to A & T or Verizon in the U.S. Right? So emergency roaming basically means established conditions for when you would allow that to happen domestically. Because right now, my understanding is that it’s blocked by the towers. Those towers read that you’re on or, like, interpret magically or something, that you’re here on a competing SIM card and reject you. So what basically happened on Red Friday is that Rogers was out, but people were then rejected back to, I don’t know, I’m being, like, basic rejected, but were rejected by other towers that actually could have connected them up to a network, or at least for emergency services purposes.
Garvia
Okay, Shaw and Rogers are discussing a merger with the competition bureau, which would be more consolidation of power in the telecom sector. Does this Rogers outage sway those talks in any way? And if they do, how?
Vass Bednar
So the proposed Rogers Shaw merger is just so fascinating because when it was initially proposed, two things happened. One, I think a lot of Canadians sort of jolted up, and were wondering, is this actually a good idea? Like, is this a joke? Is this from the kind of the Beaverton here or CBC Pitch Bot? Because people had this natural reaction that, okay, there’s already a kind of oligopolistic situation in the telecom, so what’s the benefit to me?
The second thing that happened is people started learning a little more about the weirdness of Canadian competition law. I sort of joke that it’s this one simple trick in our current law that is actually set to be reviewed, comprehensively reviewed, by this government. So that’s why it’s an extra interesting time, because we’re getting to a point where Canada might actually totally rethink how we approach mergers like this, and yet we have this really historic proposed merger kind of sneaking in ahead of that happening.
Third thing that I want to emphasize about the weirdness is Canadian competition law places this emphasis on efficiency. So as long as a merger it’s kind of a get out of jail free card, I’m certainly oversimplifying it. But as long as these two parties can demonstrate that there will be efficiencies found to the economy. As a result, it actually doesn’t matter if people are laid off, if prices go up later on, if they have a huge proportion of the market. So it’s counterintuitive, right. It feels out of step with what people expect competition law to do.
But it is one thing to make that efficiency argument to something like a competition tribunal or the competition commissioner. It is another thing to try to make that efficiency argument back to everyday Canadians. And I don’t think Roger Shaw has been doing an effective job of that. People, I think, are appropriately skeptical and uncertain about it. So will this will Red Friday affect the proposed merger? I’ve seen different speculation about it. There’s nothing in competition law directly that should shift the terms of the merger. But I think changes to their share prices, potential bad press associated with Rogers may be concerns about the potential fragility of these systems. Again, I want to divorce it a little bit from Rogers just because I think whatever it was that happened probably could have happened to any one of the three large companies.
So we all have to be learning from it. But what the efficiency stuff reinforces for us, and some of my research colleagues have been chatting a bit about this. Is that what about the sources of regional resilience? How do we think about resilience in a system that is sculpted by efficiency, right. So that we can also return value back to shareholders and not back to everyday Canadians? So good things happening from both these events with the proposed Roger Shaw merger, people wanting to learn more about how competition law works or doesn’t work, how does a merger get reviewed? I think that’s important to learn. And with Red Friday starting to think and understand more about, okay, how does the system work and how did we get here and where are we going, I see both those aspects as being very productive, even if there’s certainly kind of unintended consequences, for sure.
Garvia
I think the other thing that this has brought up is a kind of urgency around change. People have seen how their lives just in an instant, our lives were shifted completely. We had to think about everything differently. We had to talk to our neighbours. Do you have WiFi? Can I get on here? There were so many things that shifted, and personally, what I’m looking for is not a lot of talking. I’m looking for urgent change. And I’m wondering if what you were talking about in the private and public sector working together to ensure some kind of stability. Can this be done urgently? Is this just going to be a lot of talk for many months and many years and this is just going to happen again and again?
Vass Bednar
I get it. I think the telecom site is really having a surge. I sort of likened the telecom broader conversation in Canada to a volcano. It’s not my best analogy, but it’s hot, it’s fiery, it’s largely dormant, but like it looms, right? It’s there. We all kind of see it. On Friday, the volcano erupted. And I think what happened with that eruption is it sort of burst open this policy window of opportunity for us to have that reckoning and sort of say, well, this hurt our economy, hurt people, was embarrassing on an international stage, is this the best possible system we can have? Because if it is, then let’s talk about why, right? I think people need a refresh on that.
Second, I think people are impatient, frazzled, impatient with policy change. We’re in this really stressful inflationary period where we’re more price sensitive than ever before. And I think people are just calling BS on the telecom. Why are our prices amongst the highest in the world? Why are they going up when it’s the same service? Is this a function of the market power that these companies hold? And again, is that exertion what appears to be an exertion of that significant market power? Is it just incongruent with the public good? I know you mentioned going to a coffee shop or talking to your neighbour on Red Friday. I frankly appreciated and was super curious about what it would feel like for white collar workers to have the same experience that Canadians that always lack to be at home either because their apartment building does not have a network attached to it or it’s simply not affordable for them.
The people that are sometimes too often actually made to feel shame for setting up in a McDonald’s to do their school homework or lingering too long in a Starbucks or competing for computer space at a library. And we need to pay attention to that. I think we need to also, in terms of the change we can expect, let’s go for a full court press. Municipalities, public library systems, provinces, the Feds. Again, complex system role for everyone. And incremental policy change can be policy innovation too. I know that we touched on nationalizing the telcos and how maybe this should be a public asset, maybe this should be regulated more like a utility. Maybe we need to totally revamp this. That seems scary and that makes it seem impossible, but I think there’s lots of low-hanging fruit for Canada to kind of put in our focus.
The last thing I’ll say there is, I think it’s a unique area of cross partisan alignment. I noticed the leader of the federal NDP tweeting about competition in telecom. I noticed contenders for the CPC leadership tweeting about it. So maybe this is going to be something where we get all parties are really motivated to focus on this, which aligns, I think, with a lot of Canadians that are ready for change. And the real question is the how and the when. And that’s where there’s tons of experts, people smarter than me and also everyday Canadians that just have cool ideas that we should be thinking more about.
Garvia
I don’t think there’s people smarter than you and I really appreciate you and your smartness taking the time to give us the sort of from space view of what’s happened and what’s happening and how we as Canadians can kind of push the needle. It’s in our hands to, as you say, pick some of that low hanging fruit. Thank you so much, VAS, for being here today.
Vass Bednar
Thank you. I’m looking forward to staying in your orbit.
Garvia
Vass Bednar is the executive director of McMaster University’s master of public policy and digital society program. She currently writes a newsletter about Canadian startups and public policy called Rags to Riches, and you can check out her byline in The National Post, The Hub, the Financial Post, and The Globe and Mail. That’s where you can find Vass’s latest opinion piece: “The Rogers Outage is an opportunity to change how we think about our digital infrastructure.”
That was The Big Story. For more, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. Find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPNtalk to us anytime via email [click here!]. And of course, you can call us at 416-935-5935. If you’re able to review this podcast, please do so. It’ll be really nice. I’m Garvia Bailey. We’ll talk tomorrow.
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