No guarantee of public investigation into Rogers outage, despite calls from experts
CTRC to investigate outage, but innovation minister won't commit to making its findings public
Industry experts say that the findings of an investigation into the Rogers outage that affected millions of Canadians last week need to be made public.
"I think there needs to be a public inquiry as to the root cause of the outage where the [telecommunication] executives are asked questions by elected politicians," said Richard LeBlanc, a professor of governance, law and ethics at Toronto's York University.
The outage left millions of Canadians without internet and cellular service, while also disrupting government services and payment systems, for the better part of Friday. Some Canadians' services remained out of commission throughout the weekend.
On Monday, Canada's Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, Minister François-Philippe Champagne met with telecommunication executives to discuss the next steps going forward.
In an interview with The Current, Champagne said the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) would investigate what happened, but he wouldn't commit to that investigation being made public.
The minister didn't rule out the possibility of a parliamentary committee meeting, where members of Parliament would get the chance to ask their own questions during public proceedings, but didn't commit to it.
Champagne says he told companies to develop a plan to improve the resiliency of Canada's cellular and internet networks. He said companies have 60 days to complete the plan, but that doesn't mean it will be fully implemented by then.
"What happened is completely unacceptable. And I took Rogers to account on that," he said.
Call for more competition
According to a statement from Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri, the outage was caused by a network system failure following a maintenance update. He didn't provide further details.
"I think the issue here for the minister is to identify the root cause," said Leblanc.
"I think maintenance updates should not result in paralysis to 12 million Canadians. So I think the minister needs to roll up his shirtsleeves and demonstrate bold leadership once and for all."
LeBlanc also added that, "without robust regulation," another outage of similar severity will likely happen in the future.
University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist says there needs to be a push for more competition in the telecommunications sector.
"I don't think we've seen it as a priority. The position that Canada has, relative to other countries, remains roughly the same as one of the most expensive markets," said Geist.
"We haven't seen the government take it as seriously as it needs to, and we certainly haven't seen the CRTC take a position where it puts consumers at the centre of the communications system."
Champagne agreed that there does need to be more competition in the telecom sector, but also didn't commit to any concrete action to make that happen.
"I'm happy to see who can come in this sector and increase competition. That's what Canadians want. And affordability is top of mind," said Champagne.
"The logical thing to do now is to do a full investigation with recommendation and make sure that we do more to have resiliency and more choice for Canadians."
Written by Philip Drost. Produced by Howard Goldenthal and Ben Jamieson.
