It is a knee-jerk reaction in this country. It is like a Canadian’s instant recognition of the old Hockey Night in Canada theme music. Canadians have a visceral reaction to certain stimuli. In Western Canada it is to the CPR. In Ontario and Quebec it is to Bell Canada. It is a vague feeling as though you were weaned on it. It is somewhere between fear, hatred and loathing. Canadians can rarely articulate the why of those feelings but they are there.
If Canadians had listened more carefully to a gentleman named Jean Monty in the 1990s, they would have better understood those feelings. Monty was the guy who set up Bell Canada to get even with Canadians. A critical first step was when as chairman of Bell Canada Enterprises, he dumped Nortel Networks on the unsuspecting public. What used to be the jewel in Bell Canada’s crown turned out to be a stick in the eye to investors.
Monty’s long-term goal was not the technology of communications but the control of what was communicated. His hero appeared to be George Orwell, author of 1984. Like Orwell’s Big Brother, Monty left Bell Canada in the ideal position to tell Canadians what to think. As the dominant supplier of radio, television, telephone and hand-held communications, Internet services and satellite deliver of television in Canada, Bell continues its climb to power.
The only problem is that as its interests have soared into these new fields of endeavour, the company has lost all sight of what gave it the muscle to achieve these objectives. Why would any high-flying Bell Canada director ever think of the millions of kilometres of copper wire that guaranteed their loans from Canada’s banks? Why would they care about the millions of land-line customers that built Bell Canada? Customers are just a marketing statistic, of little interest to these entrepreneurs.
It is no longer Ma Bell, stock of widows and orphans, but Big Brother Bell, dictator of that land north of the United States of America. Bell’s directors have little to fear from Prime Minister Harper and his minions. The current flurry of interest in Bell taking over Astral Media is but a minor step in the Monty roadmap to power. The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission is but a limp-wristed vestige of what used to be a regulator with muscle.
The only good news lately has been the millions that Bell has lost on the Olympics. The bad news is they will have to write it off and raise the rates for your telephone again!
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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry
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