It reminds us of the yahoos who visited the Nation’s Capital last February looking for freedom. The people in this case found freedom but this Freedom is only allowed if the federal government and its agencies agree. We are talking about the Freedom Mobile sale to Videotron.
You have to admire the nerve of the Rogers’ and Shaw beneficiaries that assumes that the government is going to allow them to merge their fiefdoms. As you can imagine, they are not selling Freedom Mobile to that Péquiste, Pierre Karl Péladeau of Quebecor, unless the feds allow Rogers and Shaw to merge into Canada’s largest and money-grubbing telecom.
And why would any government allow the country’s largest telecom to be run as a one-man company. It was okay when Ted Rogers was alive. He took the risks that built an empire. His son is just enjoying spending his daddy’s money.
And with the recent outage of Rogers’ services, we learned how serious that foolishness could be. Who knew that the crashing of systems at Rogers would knock out cell phones and credit/payment systems across the country?
And you can lay the blame for that catastrophic black-out squarely on the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). The CRTC has become a lap-dog for the telecoms. It has neither the will nor the expertise to do its job. It should have made sure long ago that the Internet and wireless services remain separated from each other. For them to be inter-connected makes for a slip-shod and cheap network that was bound to fail.
I can remember many years ago when a shielded cable fell across a connecting board for the microwave network at Bell’s Elgin office in Toronto and knocked out the CBC’s national programming. It should have been a lesson for all. It certainly firmed up my decision, at the time, that I was not cut out to be a communications technician.
But I was trained for it and I was less than pleased many years later when my late friend Herb Gray (who was president of the privy council at the time) suggested to fellow cabinet minister John Manley that I should be appointed a CRTC commissioner. I got a stupid letter from Manley saying he did not think I was qualified. He should have asked.
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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry
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