Transcription, Audience du 13 juin 2025

Les participants et l'endroit

Tenue à :

Centre de Conférence
Portage IV
140, Promenade du Portage
Gatineau (Québec)

Participants :

• Président de l’audience : Adam Scott
• Membres : Bram Abramson, Conseiller, Ontario
  Ellen Desmond, Conseillère, Région de l’Atlantique et Nunavut
  Nirmala Naidoo, Conseillère, Alberta et Territoires du Nord-Ouest
  Stéphanie Paquette, Conseillère, Québec
• Conseiller juridique : Michael Ostroff
• Secrétaires de l’audience : Alexanne Patry, Jade Roy
• Gérant de l’audience : Albert Xie

Table des matières

Présentations

2545 Marina Pavlovic, Adam Mawji Mercedes Parsons and Benjamin Surmachynski

2717 Commission for Complaints for Telecom-Television Services

2900 SSi Canada

3056 Competition Bureau

3203 Public Interest Advocacy Centre

Transcription

Gatineau (Québec)
13 juin 2025
Ouverture de l'audience à 8 h 59

Gatineau (Québec)

‑‑‑ L’audience débute le vendredi 13 juin 2025 à 8 h 59

2544 THE SECRETARY: Good morning. Please introduce yourselves for the record, and you may begin.

Présentation

2545 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: Good morning, Vice Chair Scott, Commissioners, and Commission Staff.

2546 I would like to recognize and acknowledge that we are located on the unceded, unsurrendered ancestral home of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation. And since we are in multiple locations across Canada today, I would also like to acknowledge the many Indigenous Nations across Canada who have been the stewards of the land, water, and air of their territories that are used for our communication over the wires and airwaves.

2547 Thank you for the opportunity to appear. My name is Marina Pavlović. To my left is Mercedes Parsons, and Adam Mawji is on the screen checking in from Vancouver where it’s very early.

2548 I’m a professor at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law. My areas of expertise are consumer rights in digital society and technology policy. Mercedes and Adam are third‑year JD students at the University of Ottawa, and together with Benjamin Surmachynski, who contributed to our written submissions, are members of the 2025 Pav Consumer Rights Research Team

2549 Our intervention builds on years of research into consumer experience in the telecommunications marketplace, including the Cavanagh‑Pavlović mystery shopper study, which we presented in several past proceedings.

2550 For this proceeding, we deepened our approach by drawing on comparative consumer research, particularly in the field of nutrition labeling, upon which the broadband label is intended to be modeled.

2551 Nutrition labels have been around for decades, are familiar to most, if not all, Canadians, and have consistently helped people make clearer, faster, and more informed decisions about complex products. They distill dense scientific data, such as sodium content and serving size, into an easy‑to‑read format that supports everyday decision‑making.

2552 Our broadband label proposal follows the same pattern. It translates complex technical metrics into usable, contextualized formats that reflect how people actually choose between services. This is not a novel approach. It is a tested and proven method of empowering consumers in complex markets.

2553 We look forward to the Commission continuing its commitment to evidence‑based decision‑making by adopting a broadband labeling framework that reflects these well‑established insights.

2554 At the heart of this proceeding is a clear goal; making it easier for Canadians to shop for internet services. We believe that this goal can only be achieved if broadband labels are standardized, permanent, contextualized, universal, and protected from contractual overrides. We will use our time today to briefly expand on each of these five elements.

2555 Standardized labels enable true comparison. One of the most consistent problems in the telecom marketplace is information asymmetry, where providers control not only what is disclosed, but also how it is framed, when it is presented, and whether the consumer even sees the information in writing.

2556 This undermines meaningful choice. Consumers often make complex decisions about essential services based on promotional slogans, vague descriptions, or verbal explanations that differ from one representative to another, even within the same provider. Key metrics, such as speed, fees, and service limitations, may be framed to highlight benefits while downplaying risks or costs.

2557 A standardized broadband label, with uniform content and format, is a step in the right direction. It provides a common baseline for comparison across providers and platforms. Standardization also makes comparison easier, it also reduces consumer information and cognitive burden, levels the informational playing field between providers and the public, and strengthens and streamlines enforcement.

2558 Labels must be permanent to support accountability. We strongly support the position advanced by a number of other intervenors that broadband labels must be accessible both before and after the point of sale. They should be available online and in store, but also attached to bills, displayed in account portals, and accessible upon request. In other words, the label should act as a persistent benchmark.

2559 The label should be something the consumer can use to comparison shop and to refer back long after the initial transaction. In the Cavanagh‑Pavlović mystery shopper study we observed repeated instances of consumers being offered verbal promises without accompanying documentation.

2560 In cases where documentation was provided, it was generic, hard to interpret or incomplete. A permanent label would provide a simple, consistent and durable point of reference. It would reduce confusion, support trust and allow consumers to hold providers accountable to what was promised at the time of signing.

2561 Adam.

2562 MR. MAWJI: Labels must also contextualize complexity and not add to it. Some of the large ISPs have argued that metrics like latency or jitter are too technical and will confuse consumers. From our perspective, the issue is not that consumers can’t understand these terms, rather it is that the providers currently do not explain them in a meaningful way.

2563 We propose two tools to address this. First, a satisfactory service‑level framework which translates technical performance into real‑world use cases such as whether a plan is suitable for videocalls, gaming, or streaming.

2564 Second, a traffic light‑style visual system; green, yellow, red, to help consumers quickly grasp service quality at a distance. It is supported by decades of behavioural research demonstrating that colour‑coded risk categories enhance comprehension and accessibility across diverse populations.

2565 Additionally, it draws from international best practices in consumer labelling, including front‑of‑the‑pack nutrition labels and energy efficiency scores.

2566 The CyLab Research Group at Carnegie Mellon has demonstrated that consumers are significantly more likely to understand, recall, and act on tiered rating systems than on raw technical data or raw numbers alone. Instead of asking consumers to interpret latency in milliseconds, the label should give them an answer to a more intuitive question; will this work for what I need it to do?

2567 That kind of meaningful, contextual information empowers consumer choice.

2568 Mercedes.

2569 MS. PARSONS: Labels must be universal and accessible. Most Canadians do not just by standalone internet service. They buy bundles combining internet, mobile and TV. While bundling often offers discounted pricing, combining services that are regulated differently often comes with unclear or conflicting terms and time‑limited promotions which, in turn, result in more complexity.

2570 As a recent CBC report highlighted, even a certified professional accountant who used a spreadsheet to track their telecom charges struggled to understand their increased bill, underscoring how difficult telecom billing is to navigate even for financially‑literate consumers.

2571 Without labels across all of these services, it is very difficult for consumers to comparison show and understand the services they are really paying for.

2572 We support OpenMedia/CIPPIC and others who have called for extending broadband label requirements to mobile services and, in fact, we recommend going further. Labels should apply to all communications services, including television, home phone, and bundled plans. The idea behind a broadband label is simple; to make essential details prominent and easy to find. That should be a universal principle for all communications services.

2573 We also emphasize that these labels must be fully accessible. This includes screen‑reader compatibility, ASL/LSQ formats, large font versions, etc. The label’s visual design, like the traffic‑light system, should enhance understanding but never replace the need for full accessibility.

2574 Marina.

2575 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: Label integrity must be protected from contractual overrides. So as a contracts law professor, I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about the importance and impact of service contracts. And my concerns are along the lines of Tom Waits’ lyrics that Commissioner Abramson quoted the other day, “the large print giveth, and the small print taketh away.”

2576 This is one of the most serious and under‑discussed risks in this proceeding. Even a perfectly designed label is meaningless if the service providers can override them in fine print, and that is already happening.

2577 Our review of ISP contracts reveals three common strategies. First, service disclaimers explicitly state that speeds and quality of service are not guaranteed. Second, “best effort” clauses that absolve providers from meeting advertised performance. And, third, terms that allow unilateral changes in pricing, features, or service terms after a consumer has signed.

2578 All of these clauses directly undermine the purpose of clear, consistent, permanent, and trustworthy consumer information, including the broadband label. We urge the Commission to prohibit contractual overrides that contradict label content. The label must be a binding commitment, otherwise consumers will continue to experience the same disconnect between what they thought they were actually purchasing and what they received.

2579 Before we close, we wanted to briefly address a few enforcement questions that we believe are essential for realizing the promise of broadband label.

2580 First, regarding implementation, we view the broadband label as a natural extension of the Commission’s existing consumer protection codes. Embedding label requirements within the codes would not only create a clear enforcement pathway, but would also support post‑sale accountability and ensure consistency across providers. The Commission has noted that it may initiate a future proceeding to unify the codes, and we believe that this conversation is both timely and necessary.

2581 The codes are overdue for a comprehensive review, and the broadband label could serve as a model for clearer, more standardized communication across all services.

2582 Ideally, the codes should have been unified first, creating a coherent regulatory foundation into which the labels could have been integrated. But even in the absence of the broader reform, the label is a necessary and pragmatic step forward. It operationalizes the principles that a unified code, or unified codes, would aim to reflect; clarity, comparability, and enforceability across all communications services.

2583 Second, the label must shape not only the purchase decision, but the customer relationship that follows. This is why we have emphasized permanence and ensuring that labels are accessible after sale, whether through account portals or upon request. In this way, the label becomes more than a disclosure, but also a mechanism for accountability and a responsive dispute resolution process.

2584 If a consumer’s actual experience deviates from what the label promised, that label should serve as presumptive evidence in a complaint with the provider or, if necessary, with CCTS.

2585 Lastly, regarding compliance, we recognize the concern raised by some intervenors that standardized labeling might impose additional costs on providers. But the heaviest burden today falls on consumers, who must wade through inconsistent information, interpret technical language, and track prices that shift without clear explanation.

2586 We believe compliance can be supported through Commission‑provided templates and clear content and formatting rules. We also want to be clear that our proposal sets a floor, not a ceiling, and it doesn’t require every provider to build a custom interface.

2587 It creates a shared language for transparency that helps everyone compete on fair terms. Leveling the informational playing field strengthens both consumer trust and genuine competition.

2588 Let me close with the words of Carson Loveless, one of the individual intervenors in this proceeding, who wrote: “I support laws making stuff easy for internet shoppers.” So do we. This is the opportunity for the Commission to design a broadband labeling system that works for everyday Canadians.

2589 Thank you, Mr. Vice‑Chair and Commissioners. We welcome any questions.

2590 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much both for your written interventions and for appearing before us, and maybe most importantly for doing a callback to the Tom Waits reference.

2591 Very happy to have you here, and we’ll go first with questioning to Commissioner Paquette.

2592 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: Thank you and welcome, Professor Pavlović, to you and your team. We appreciate your participation and contribution to this hearing.

2593 I guess I would start by asking, you mentioned that your intervention is built on the result of a study you made with Dr. Cavanagh between 2016 and 2019. The finding of this study revealed a significant lack of crucial information, making it difficult for the consumers to make informed choices.

2594 As you know, the internet code was adopted in 2019. So I guess I wanted your opinion. Do you know if things have changed since the adoption of the internet code, compared to the result of your studies? So do you know if things have changed regarding the practices, and have they improved, or do you think the consumer is still facing the same barriers?

2595 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: So there are two parts to my answer. I think the barriers that existed then still exist. I can’t tell you for certain whether things have changed, because we haven’t repeated the study. Because I was on the Broadcast and Telecom Review Panel, so I couldn’t really do my research, and then COVID happened.

2596 So we’re slowing getting back into doing the research that we have done before. But I think the structures that are in the internet code are the same as they are in the wireless code, which is what we tested, and we found rampant noncompliance, if you will.

2597 So unless something radically changed in the marketplace, and I don’t have any indication that it has, I don’t think that the situation has actually improved for consumers.

2598 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: How do you react to the result of the public opinion research that was made by the Commission prior to this hearing, which shows that 72 per cent of the respondents say they feel either very or moderately knowledgeable about what to look for for purchasing their home internet services?

2599 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: So I think surveys are always a good starting point. But I think it would be useful to triangulate them with the information and data that comes from CCTS. And I think the question, do consumers feel that they have sufficient information, also depends contextually and at which point in the purchase cycle or post‑purchase cycle they’re located.

2600 I think if you compare and contrast the survey data with the most recent CCTS annual report where complaints arise, and a lot of complaints are actually about disclosure, that it tempers some of the survey results that things are not necessarily as ideal as they may look.

2601 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: So what would you respond to ‑‑ we have many intervenors who said that there is no real problem, that this study shows that the customers have enough information to make their decisions?

2602 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: But the survey also showed that people would welcome broadband labels and would welcome more information.

2603 So I think, to be blunt, and I apologize for that, you have a legislative requirement to put the labels into place. So the choice is not whether they’re going to be put in place or not, it’s how they’re going to look like.

2604 And I would use this as an opportunity to truly level the playing field between the providers and the consumers, because I don’t think it’s level by any means at this particular point.

2605 So individual people may be satisfied, again at some point in the purchase cycle, but we don’t have studies that track satisfaction across the duration of a two‑year contract or that, you know, when your bill came in and it looked different than the previous bill, that you have information why that has happened.

2606 So we might need more longitudinal research, but I also think that it’s a good opportunity to create something that can benefit everybody.

2607 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: You suggested transparent broadband labels which should include, and there’s a list like; the base monthly cost, promotional pricing details, mandatory fees such as installation, data cap penalties, contract length and renewal of terms. So this is the content that you suggest should feature as standardized information for the customers.

2608 Many ISPs argue that they already provide this information. So is it the format that would make all the difference, or is there more?

2609 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: Again, I’m going to use this as an opportunity to say that this is a very light regulatory touch. And if the providers claim that that information is already available, that that data is available, then the issue is just repackaging that data in a format that’s permanent and accessible at all times.

2610 Right now some of that data may not be available in front‑facing documentation directly to consumers, but some of it may. And they already have all of that information to track network traffic and performance and billing, so it’s really just a matter of putting it all in the same place in a consistent format that consumers can, first, comparison shop and then, after the fact, actually have a really permanent record of the services they’re purchasing.

2611 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: So it’s more an issue of comparison than access to information, do you think? Is the ultimate goal to give the ability to the customer to compare?

2612 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: Well, if the title of this hearing is Making it Easier for Canadians to Shop for Internet Services, it is very difficult to shop if you cannot comparison shop.

2613 And one of the challenges, as I said, that we found in our survey, and I don’t think that has changed, is that if you visit two different stores by the same provider, the information that you get on your plan is different in those two different stores. And it's usually on a Post‑it note and it’s like, okay, here is what it would look like. And then you perhaps return in three days, and it’s actually not available anymore.

2614 So some sort of permanency, even if it’s time‑limited, I think would be really important. And so, again, I don’t think that consumers can comparison shop if there is no uniform format, like within the same provider, let alone across the industry.

2615 It is possible that not all of the information that has been suggested is immediately available, and that it may take some time for that information to sort of trickle up to the surface and be available in a format that it can be repackaged into the label.

2616 But I believe that most of it is already available, just in different parts, and it’s just a matter of pulling it all together into a singular format.

2617 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: Are you aware of any post‑implementation studies on the FCC label? We had access to a lot before the implementation. But are you aware of any result in this regard?

2618 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: I’m not. We can double check and come back. But they’re too new and, again, I would invite you to think broader and bigger, that the FCC labels are the closest to what the Commission is trying to do.

2619 But the labelling requirements have existed for decades in a number of different industries, and there are considerable meta studies on nutrition labels, most of which we have cited in our submission, that actually show the effectiveness of uniform labelling requirements for consumer understanding.

2620 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: You suggest to include latency and jitter in the metrics, in the information provided to the customer. Is there a particular type of consumer that we should keep in mind when developing this type of regulation?

2621 As an example, should it be gamers, families, senior people...? Do we have someone in mind that we should care for, or is it more general information that we’re communicating?

2622 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: So I will start and then I will turn it to Adam, who did most of the research on this.

2623 The issue is that it has to be targeted to an average consumer, right? And we need to create the characteristics of that average consumer. So I think part of it is that the information needs to be presented in a simple language, plain English or plain French, at grade 8, which is sort of the typical plain language requirement, to ensure that everybody actually understands it.

2624 And I think it needs to be contextualized with the different types of usage. Because gamers care about gaming, families care about multiple people being connected and doing homework or streaming, et cetera.

2625 So different people have different needs, and I think it needs to be packaged in a way that everybody can find what they need. So part of what we suggested, the traffic light system, would address some of that because it would be like, okay, this is really good for these types of things.

2626 But I would, again, caution you not to set the bar too high, that the information is provided at such a high level that only experts can understand it. I would actually go rather low so that it’s actually understood by an average member of the public with a grade 8 education.

2627 I’ll turn it to Adam, if he has anything to add.

2628 MR. MAWJI: Thank you, Marina. Yes, I would love to add to that. One of the key reasons that we focused on jitter in our initial submissions is looking at the reports by Cylabs from Carnagie Mellon as well as the studies that were done around why the FCC broadband labels are brought into place.

2629 Both emphasize that jitter, especially in the digital transformation and the connectivity of the world we see today, is becoming the increasingly important metric, along with download speeds.

2630 So when we look at the kind of information in mind, to answer your question, the consumer we’re looking for is this average consumer, and aware that the average consumer’s needs are changing and evolving consistently.

2631 As the digital connectivity greatly improves, the needs of the consumer to have an understanding of the response time as they engage with digital services is becoming increasingly more important.

2632 So not just the importance of their download and upload speeds of their documents, but the actual rate that their communication and their engagement on online systems is going is becoming a more and more important factor. And having them aware of the strength of this connection at time of purchase, especially when other metrics can be reasonably thought of by the average person to be the only metric worth considering, is essential for them to make a complete and informed decision and also for Canadians to get the services that they actually need from their internet providers.

2633 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: So in your opinion, is there a point for which this average ‑‑ the quantity of information provided to this average customer is just too much, or no?

2634 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: So I would invite you to ask some of those questions to the Competition Bureau. I think they have considerable experience in determining what would be the appropriate level of information.

2635 I think ‑‑ again, different people have different needs, and striking that Goldilocks balance may look a little bit challenging. I don’t necessarily think it is. But I will also add that the information provided ‑‑ the usefulness of information provided hinges upon consumer education. And like with nutritional labels, which were accompanied by considerable consumer education by the regulators, I think it is really important to provide avenues and opportunities for consumers to actually understand.

2636 We need to ease people into the labelling, and so there may be some sort of a transitional period over a number of ‑‑ you know, couple of years, perhaps, so that people would become familiar what actually these terms mean. So there has to be a really robust educational piece that accompanies the labels whether they’re set at a high level or at a low level or that average level so that that would ‑‑ that information would be effective for consumers.

2637 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: And we had a few intervenors who mentioned that capturing, measuring the jitter, package loss, latency would be very difficult because it depends on so many factors like, first of all, where the customer is located compared to where the server is, also the home network makes a big difference.

2638 Is there a danger to require some information that will ‑‑ that because it’s so hard to measure that could be misguiding or misleading for the customer?

2639 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: I mean, that danger is always there. I think the ‑‑ it does look like a wicked problem. I don’t think it is a wicked problem.

2640 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: Don't think so.

2641 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: Because part of it is going to be in the messaging, right. And I think some of that messaging already exists that, you know, the speed is actually to your node, to the router, and not necessarily to individual device. But I would caution against too many disclaimers because then whatever information is provided, if there are too many disclaimers, it’s not necessarily going to be useful.

2642 So I would assume that it is possible with the tech savvy people talking to each other to find the language that would be inclusive enough, that provides sufficient information for consumers about what they care and gives some sort of latitude to providers that, you know, it is still dependent on ‑‑ particularly on the number of devices in a household and what those devices are doing.

2643 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: So I’m bringing you on the topic of the subjective rating systems that you propose which I find very interesting that you associate activities to the information that is communicated to the customers.

2644 I guess my first question is, how ‑‑ isn’t there a danger that this system doesn’t provide for the future uses that could be made by the customers?

2645 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: I actually think it's the opposite. I think it’s flexible enough that any new uses that come can actually be included within the traffic light system.

2646 And so we have cited to the CyLab study. I think Professor McKelvey actually provided the full study as part of his submission, so it ‑‑ the full study’s on the record. And it is really the most robust study out there both on what people are looking for and also how the traffic light system works.

2647 So I actually think it’s flexible enough that any future use can be rated through, you know, green, yellow and red rather than having something that’s not flexible enough and that sort of sets the usage at this point in time, which I don’t think is going to happen with that.

2648 Mercedes, would you like to add something?

2649 MS. PARSONS: Yes. As well just to add, and it kind of ties into your former question as well. It’s really about showing consumers the information in a way they can understand.

2650 So it doesn’t necessarily matter ‑‑ the ideal proposition for the label, it doesn’t necessarily matter if it’s a gamer looking at it, if it’s someone who works from home, if it’s someone who this is their first time on the internet because the label should convey it in a way that they can understand it, and that’s by putting it with the services associated with it. If you benchmark it with the raw data, the raw data from many years ago is different to what’s now the average, but if you associate it with the services, we have a reflection point of, okay, we understand relatively this takes more data, more power, more latency to use, whereas other things don’t. And that’s just the information you can’t get from the raw data, which is the advantage of the traffic light system.

2651 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: So the qualification of the activity’s important. The colour is also important from your point of view?

2652 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: Yes. And we’re partial the traffic light system, but we also do recognize that traffic lighting just visually doesn’t ‑‑ isn’t fully accessible, so that it would ‑‑ whether we’re talking machine ‑‑ and we, obviously endorse, like everybody else, machine readability of these labels, but that the accessibility has to be brought into play with designing.

2653 And so perhaps if there is a different mechanism that conveys the same messaging without using the colours, that we wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to that, but we think this is a really intuitive way for people to understand what that particular service does compared to the needs that they have.

2654 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: So as additional information, would it make sense, as an example, to require the ISP to disclose something like the maximum number of users per ‑‑ for their connection or associate like services they can watch depending on the bandwidth they purchase?

2655 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: So the number of users or the number of devices? I’m not necessarily ‑‑ I don't have a clear view on either/or or both because I think it’s both for users and the devices. And with so many parts of our households being connected, there are lots of devices. Not all of them draw the same amount of data, so probably both.

2656 And like I haven’t really thought about like the specifics of like how to formulate that. We can come back to you if that’s needed but, again, I think those are the questions that I would encourage you to ask the Competition Bureau because they have the expertise that we don’t necessarily have on that.

2657 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: Okay. Thank you. I have no more questions. Thank you.

2658 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thanks, Commissioner.

2659 We’ll go to Commissioner Desmond next, please.

2660 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Thank you. Good morning, and thank you for your students being here as well. Appreciate their interventions and comments.

2661 Just a couple of questions that I have. I know my colleague asked about the FCC report and compared that to the report that the Commission placed on the record. We heard from I think it was Cogeco who told us that, from their studies, I think it was only two percent of customers actually looked at a label that was provided in the States. Would you be able to comment on that?

2662 And then maybe as well, I think we’ve got the Australian experience, the UK experience where they provide guidance as opposed to making it mandatory, so why would one of those approaches not be better than the FCC approach?

2663 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: So guidance produces different results in terms of enforcement and compliance. If it’s guidance only, then it is not mandatory and doesn’t have to be met. And if the whole purpose of a label is to assist consumers to comparison shop, then guidance won’t really achieve that objective. So I would encourage you, really, to think about the objective of this hearing, which is to make it easier for Canadian consumers to shop for internet services.

2664 And we currently have the marketplace in which voluntary or suggested guidance is already in place, and that isn’t necessarily working.

2665 I would also caution ‑‑ first of all, the FCC labels are so new that any data that exist isn’t necessarily determinative of the value at this particular point in time, and that’s why I suggested that you think and look broader to labelling requirements in other industries that have been there for a while because it does take a while for people to absorb that there is something out there with the particular purpose that they need.

2666 And so whether it’s two percent, five percent, even if it were 56 percent of people who look at the label, again, I think you have a legislative requirement to do that, so I don’t necessarily think that that’s an option. And I would encourage you to take this as a really good opportunity to assist consumers who are operating in a very difficult informational ecosystem and who are making decisions with virtually no information available, and it does have an impact ‑‑ in the current climate, it does have a significant impact on their budget, and so there is a trickledown effect on not being able to make informed choices that inform household budgets, and we know that telecommunication services are one of the top three, if not like in the top five, household budget expenses.

2667 So I see a much bigger detriment in not doing anything or working with the guidance rather than actually working with a prescribed mandatory label.

2668 MR. MAWJI: Marina, might I also add to that?

2669 In our submissions, we also reference the fact that, based on some of the consumer reports that have come out since the FCC enacted their broadband study, issues that have come up in their enforcement have been burying the labels behind checkout screens as well as hiding them behind multiple clicks, generally making them harder to access, is a cited reason from consumers in America who are dealing with the FCC broadband labels right now, and so I think that that highlights portions of our submissions and portions of other intervenors that state that one of the biggest aspects in employing these labels in Canada is to make sure that they’re very visible and very clearly attached to the plans that are being sought after.

2670 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Thank you. Just one other question and then I’ll pass the mic back to my colleagues.

2671 But I was interested in your comment that there should be no sort of contractual language that provides an exit clause. And I think your opening statement was very strong about ensuring that there was absolutely no language that would give providers the opportunity to have a disclaimer, I guess. And I’m not sure I understood exactly what you were suggesting as ‑‑ in the exchange with Commissioner Paquette because I think she kind of explained or we had a conversation about, you know, there needs to be ‑‑ you know, if there’s some difficulty in the home with their service or there’s something ‑‑ equipment that may be providing a problem for their download speeds or what have you, how does the provider have the flexibility, contractually, to not ‑‑ I mean, they’re going to give a service, they’re going to make every effort to provide that service, but if there’s a storm or there’s an emergency or there’s a breakdown in their equipment, you know, where’s the contractual opportunity to provide a reasonable ‑‑ reasonable flexibility to the service provider that ‑‑ and I think you suggested there should be some language that captures that, but maybe you could just provide a bit more detail about what that would look like and how we could mandate something like that.

2672 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: I will try to be brief because I can talk about contracts for a really long time.

2673 The ‑‑ as I said in my opening remarks, the disclaimer language in contracts, not necessarily just in ISP contracts, which is the ones that we looked at, often disclaims the very service that you’re purchasing. And so most people don’t read those contracts. We know that. And most people don’t have the financial ability to challenge some of those terms in courts. And so it is possible that if those terms were challenged in courts, the courts would actually find them unenforceable.

2674 So I actually think that contracts are one of the biggest dangers for consumers at this point in time because they disclaim pretty much everything. I think if you’re concerned about leaving some flexibility to the providers that you need to prescribe the contractual arrangement. You shouldn’t leave the contractual language to providers because then it’s going to be not ‑‑ it’s not going to be uniform across the industry and each provider is going to do a different thing. And again, consumers will not have the financial ability to go to court to challenge some of these.

2675 So ‑‑ and I would encourage you to think really seriously about the contracts. I know that there are some of the jurisdictional issues between provincial and federal regulation of contracts, but I think within the jurisdiction that you have, and you have done that with the codes where you have prescribed language of the contracts, that you have enough jurisdiction to do that.

2676 So again, if there is concern that some flexibility needs to be left, and I understand that they might need some flexibility, but that flexibility needs to be very narrow, I would encourage you to actually come up with a prescribed language how that should look like.

2677 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Thank you very much.

2678 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thanks.

2679 And we’ll go to Commissioner Abramson next, please.

2680 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thanks. I’ll try and be quick. Time continues to fly like an arrow.

2681 Let me start with regulatory burden. Would every unique win‑back offer, whatever the negotiated offer, require generating a new nutritional label?

2682 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: But that information is already available, right.

2683 And so yes. I think yes because if part of the goal is for the label to be permanent ‑‑ again, it can be time limited and I think others may have talked about if they’re machine readable, it’s very easy to make them time limited.

2684 So for comparison purposes, I think it’s easy to time limit them so that if you’re comparing, you know, that that offer is valid for, you know, three days, five days, two weeks or whatever. But if you ‑‑ every time you change your service plan, I would assume and expect that a new label would be generated because it is supposed to act also as a record of the service that you have.

2685 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Let me ask about that, about how it functions as a record. You’re talking about availability pre and post‑sale as a kind of accountability mechanism, and that’s similar to what we heard from another intervenor the other day about ‑‑ and I’ve been going back to it in some of my questions about persistence.

2686 So what does that look like? Are you talking about making available in a consumer portal? How, practically, should it be continued to be made available persistently post‑sale?

2687 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: I would assume the consumer portal is the appropriate place. I would expect it to be on the first bill and portal is probably the place where it would be the easiest to operationalize it, but again, consumers need to be aware that it’s there.

2688 And again, I think that the display requirements are somewhat different from pre‑purchase to post‑purchase and the relationships between providers and consumers are different pre‑purchase because pre‑purchase there’s really no relationship. Somebody’s just comparison shopping, so there is no obligation ‑‑ there are no contracts, et cetera, right. Like the label is really just a comparison shopping tool versus post‑purchase where there’s a contractual relationship and it’s just a record or what it does.

2689 I am aware that some of the intervenors argue that most, if not all, of that information is already available in the critical information summary. From the work that we have done, we have found that that hasn’t really been helpful and most consumers don’t really ‑‑ most portals don’t have a copy of the consumer contract, so if the goal was actually to achieve the same objective with the codes, that hasn’t been achieved because those contracts are not actually permanent documents. They may be emailed to a consumer, which, you know, they may or may not necessarily keep, but you don’t have an opportunity to actually go back and review your contract.

2690 So putting it in a portal would be probably the most prominent place, but there may be other ways that it can be done.

2691 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: You led me nicely to the next question, of course, which is would ‑‑ right now there isn’t, as you say, a requirement in the Internet Code to make the contract or the consumer information summary persistently available. There is a requirement to make it available on demand, but in this world sometimes on demand can mean longer than our attention spans.

2692 Were there such a requirement to make the critical information summary, and I presume the contract to which it’s attached, persistently available such as in a consumer portal, would that lessen the needs for the kinds of labels you’re talking about?

2693 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: So I’m going to go back to my comment on the labels need to be considered within the framework of the Codes, and it would have been perhaps easier if the Codes were unified before we went to the labels. We’re doing it the other way around.

2694 But neither is good or bad; it just is.

2695 I would say that most of ‑‑ most if not all of the information in the critical information summary is going to be in the label and I actually don’t think redundancy’s bad in this instance because different people perceive information differently and some people have meticulous records of their contracts, like I do because I read all of them, but most people don’t. So ‑‑ and label is such a visually distinctive way and easy way for people to actually understand what they’re getting.

2696 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Yeah. Redundancy is potentially not bad. I think some market participants would tell us that redundancy is not free, and so the question becomes whether the juice is worth the squeeze on the redundancy and that. I don’t want an answer to that now because we’re running short of time, but it might be something to think about in your final reply should you choose to file one.

2697 Last question, and it’s really just about, you know, we’ve been talking about a potential nutritional label, we’ve been talking about not mandating a heavy touch, in other words, you know, allowing TSPs to continue much as they have. And you’re sort of introducing almost what sounds like a third option, so let me push you a little bit on that because I’m trying to make our job easier in terms of the number of things we have to think about.

2698 You know, the FCC provides a glossary to explain the terms in it, a centralized glossary which I think the study that you’ve been citing that Professor McKelvey put in, you know, says is an appropriate approach. We’ve been talking about the role of third parties in processing machinery readable data to take raw data and make it not just explainable and contextualized, but explainable and contextualized for very particular use cases, whether it’s seniors or large families or whatever, gamers, as we often say, the different use cases.

2699 We can easily imagine sort of a broadband label GPT in which you would have a chatbot to say hey, here’s the label, explain it to me.

2700 So you know, one can consider different options and we did hear from at least one TSP which said, you know, we think we’re best placed to put out the raw metrics as to what our network is doing. We think others are best placed to do the job of explaining, contextualizing and all that stuff. That’s not what we’re best at. We’re best at running networks.

2701 Is raw data or pre‑digested data better given all that?

2702 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: I would probably say both because different people look for different things. I think pre‑digested is probably easier to understand for that average consumer, but some consumers may have specific needs and they would want raw data. So ‑‑ but I would just like to go back to your comment on who’s best placed to do the explanatory piece, and I think Commission is best placed to do that because it also ensures a uniform message that the glossary of the terms is uniform across the board versus each individual provider providing their own definition, which then, again, undermines everything. So I hasten to add more to your plate, but I would think that you’re best placed to do that.

2703 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thanks.

2704 And I guess another ‑‑ well, I’ll ask it quickly if you can give me a quick answer, and then I’m done. It’s just is there a way to combine these? You know, the different approach that you’re asking for in terms of traffic lights, could it be incorporated into the nutritional label rather than constituting a third separate option we have to think about? You know, obviously, nutritional labels have percentage of daily value, Energuide labels show how the washing machine or whatever it is you’re buying compares to others in its class. Is there some way that it could be incorporated in a light touch way into nutritional labels that we’re asking about rather than constituting a third option for us here?

2705 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: I think there is, right, because it could be raw data with like just a little traffic light thing, okay, here’s what it actually does. So I don’t necessarily think it’s impossible to do that and, in my mind, that’s sort of what I envision. Perhaps I wasn’t necessarily clear about that.

2706 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thank you very much. Those are my questions.

2707 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you, again, for answering all of our questions.

2708 And if you have a final thought that you’d like to leave us with, we’re happy to give you a minute to do so.

2709 MS. PAVLOVIĆ: I do, just a quick one, actually.

2710 And I’d like to go back to, I think, the theme that sort of pervades the questions that you had, which is that I think all of this information that we’re looking for is already available and this is really just the matter of repackaging it in a format that’s going to be consistent, permanent and useful for consumers.

2711 And I think it’s also important for you to understand that the information is not currently readily available and people cannot make informed choices, and we’re at the point in time where internet service, whether it’s broadband or wireless, is absolutely essential for people to function. And so we’re not really talking about ‑‑ you know, everybody uses the example of gamers. That ‑‑ those are outliers, although perhaps everybody’s a gamer at this point in time. But I think you really need to consider the broader public and that average consumer who relies on the internet to go to school, to work, to entertain themselves and it really is important to provide that information to consumers in a consistent way so that they can make better informed decision.

2712 Thank you.

2713 THE SECRETARY: Thank you.

2714 We will now take a break and be back at 9:55. Thank you.

‑‑‑ Suspension à 9 h 50

‑‑‑ Reprise à 9 h 55

2715 THE SECRETARY: Welcome back. We will now hear the presentation from Commission of Complaints for Telecom‑Television Services, CCTS.

2716 When you are ready, please introduce yourself and your colleagues, you may begin.

Présentation

2717 MR. MAKER: Mr. Vice‑Chair, Commissioners, Staff, good morning. I am Howard Maker. I am the Commissioner and CEO of the CCTS. With me today, on my left, Josée Thibault, our Assistant Commissioner of Operations and Business Services; on my right, Janet Lo, our Assistant Commissioner of Legal, Regulatory and Stakeholder Affairs; and on my far right, Kelsey Evaniew, our Director of Legal and Regulatory.

2718 Comme vous le savez, la CPRST est un organisme d’ombuds indépendant qui offre un service de règlement des plaintes aux clients des services de télécommunications et de télévision non réglementés. Nous traitons des plaintes visant plus de 300 fournisseurs de services exploitant plus de 400 marques.

2719 Notre mandat consiste à faciliter le règlement des problèmes entre les clients et leurs fournisseurs. Il peut s’agir de problèmes concernant les contrats, la facturation, la prestation de services et la gestion du crédit. Nous gérons également les quatre codes de conduite du CRTC sur la protection des consommateurs et appliquons aussi d’autres règles de protection des consommateurs du CRTC aux plaintes que nous traitons.

2720 We appear before you today to share our data and our insights as the industry’s complaint‑handling body, to help inform your policy‑making in this important consumer area. We believe that broadband labels could help make it easier for Canadians to understand key aspects of their Internet service, including price, what is included in their plan, and expected service metrics. Ensuring that those labels form part of the customer’s contract will create a written record of what was agreed to and the ISP’s obligations, allowing us to more effectively handle complaints.

2721 In our presentation, we will focus on two areas: First, we’ll share how broadband labels may help address some of the most common issues that we see in customer Internet complaints. And second, we’ll explain how the CCTS could potentially use broadband labels in our ombuds role.

2722 Josée?

2723 MS. BIDAL THIBAULT: In our experience, there are often mismatches between what a customer thinks they are supposed to get from their provider, and what the provider actually delivered. This causes customer frustration and leads to potentially avoidable complaints. From what we’ve seen in customer complaints, “mismatches” often flow from incomplete, unclear or poorly understood information provided during pre‑sale transactions.

2724 We have found that lack of clarity or completeness of information provided to the customer can contribute to the three most common issues raised by Internet customers: incorrect charges, unclear disclosure, and quality of service.

2725 Après une augmentation du prix par le fournisseur, par exemple, les clients des services Internet se plaignent souvent d’une possible erreur de facturation parce que la capacité du fournisseur de modifier le prix n’a pas été bien expliquée ou comprise.

2726 On reçoit parfois aussi des plaintes lorsqu’ un client croit qu’il y a une erreur de facturation après l’expiration d’un rabais d’une durée limitée. Le client soutient alors ne pas avoir été informé que le rabais était d’une durée limitée.

2727 Les clients se plaignent également de la qualité du service lorsque leurs services ne fonctionnent pas comme ils s’y attendent. Une mauvaise compréhension du client concernant la vitesse maximale entraîne souvent des plaintes concernant la qualité du service. Les clients nous disent qu’ils n’obtiennent pas les vitesses indiquées sur leur contrat ou qu’ils n’avaient pas compris que les vitesses indiquées dans leur forfait étaient les vitesses maximales qui pourraient leur être offertes.

2728 La CPRST appuie la mise en place d’étiquettes uniformisées pour les services à large bande comme mesure raisonnable pour fournir aux clients des renseignements clairs sur ce qu’ils peuvent attendre du service et pour les aider à comparer les forfaits offerts et à choisir celui qui répond le mieux à leurs besoins.

2729 Service metrics in labels would provide needed clarity and transparency, and hopefully reduce the “mismatch” issue we see in Internet quality of service complaints. We continue to support standardizing the form of broadband labels and the information included to ensure all key information is presented in a way that is easy to read and compare.

2730 Kelsey?

2731 MS. EVANIEW: Three key information pieces in broadband labels could go a long way to help customers better understand what to expect from the service.

2732 First, we’ve suggested that broadband labels include clear information about the price of the service, including any time‑limited discounts applied or additional fees they should expect throughout the term of the contract. We also suggested clear information about whether or when the provider is permitted to change the price.

2733 Second, consumers often make decisions based on what services are included in the offer, such as the monthly amount of data and the cost of any overages. Broadband labels should explain what’s included in the internet plan.

2734 As some providers pointed out in their replies, the Internet Code requires some of this information to be included in the Critical Information Summary or the contract. But we see benefit to labels setting out key service features clearly in a comparable format before the customer agrees to the offer. This is about effective expectation‑setting.

2735 The third key information piece to include in broadband labels is expected service performance. This information is critical for a consumer to be able to assess if the service will meet their household needs. Consumers would benefit immensely from better information about what speed they should expect to receive, rather than a maximum speed they could theoretically achieve under optimal conditions.

2736 As requested, we have considered if oversubscription ratio would be a useful service quality metric for consumers. The CCTS does not take a position on whether the Commission should require this metric. We note that an oversubscription ratio is not a metric that would be easily understood by consumers. If the Commission adds this metric to the label, the label would need to explain how oversubscription ratios might impact speeds.

2737 Janet?

2738 MS. LO: The CCTS’s role has always been to determine if a provider has reasonably met its obligations to the customer.

2739 We are well positioned to continue to do so if the label becomes part of the contract and forms part of the ISP’s contractual commitment. For example, we could determine whether the label price was correctly charged to the customer, or whether the service metrics promised to the customer were reasonably delivered.

2740 Incorporating broadband labels into the customer’s contract would provide a clear link from pre‑sale promises to post‑sale contractual obligations, and create evidence of an ISP’s commitments for any future dispute resolution that is needed. CCTS would then be able to assist customers who bring a complaint that there was a “mismatch” between what they agreed to and the service they received.

2741 We want to be very clear. There are three key limits to the CCTS’s current mandate such that we would not be able to help with complaints unless broadband labels are incorporated into an existing contract. Our mandate precludes us from accepting: complaints from consumers that have not received or contracted to receive services from a provider; complaints about advertising claims; and CCTS does not have a role to monitor the marketplace broadly for regulatory compliance. This means we cannot initiate investigations into systemic issues or compensate consumers for any systemic issues.

2742 The CCTS resolves complaints between an individual customer and their provider. Therefore, if broadband labels are only required pre‑sale, we would not be able to administer any new rules within our current mandate. Instead, we encourage the Commission to weave the thread to ensure clarity, from any pre‑sale broadband labels to post‑sale contractual obligations.

2743 Howard?

2744 MR. MAKER: As you have heard the CCTS sees benefit to increasing clarity between internet customers and their service providers. Broadband labels may help customers better understand what service they are buying ‑‑ and if the label is baked into the contract, it will provide greater alignment about what the provider is contractually obligated to deliver.

2745 Nos commentaires portent surtout sur le rôle potentiel de la CPRST dans les limites de son mandat actuel. Nous ne sommes pas l’organisme qui surveille les problèmes systémiques ou qui détermine la véracité des allégations publicitaires. Bien que plusieurs parties aient suggéré d’élargir le mandat de la CPRST afin de lui permettre de gérer toutes les règles concernant les étiquettes pour les services à large bande, il n’est pas approprié d’en discuter aujourd’hui.

2746 Nous croyons que la CPRST a un rôle à jouer dans l’étiquetage des services à large bande dans le cadre de son mandat actuel, surtout si ces étiquettes sont intégrées aux contrats après‑vente.

2747 Nous serons heureux de répondre à vos questions. Merci.

2748 LE PRÉSIDENT : Merci à vous et à votre équipe. La Commissionnaire Desmond va commencer le questionnement.

2749 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Good morning, and thank you for being here. I am going to start by perhaps taking you to your submission, and these three key pieces that you have identified, and really the purpose of some of my questions is to be very clear in terms of what information you think you would need in a label, both for clarity and for enforcement.

2750 So, I’d like to walk through those three pieces, and just maybe add as much detail and as much information as possible so that we have complete understanding of what it is that you are suggesting?

2751 So, if we could go first to the plan pricing, I know in your submission, I think at paragraph 8, you talk about the monthly price, any time‑limited discounts, any additional fees, and if the provider is permitted to change the price. And then, I think later on in your submission, you also talk about contextualizing the information for the user.

2752 So, just to be a hundred percent clear, what would you see as the key pricing pieces that would need to be in a label if the Commission were to mandate one?

2753 MS. LO: Thank you for the question. Yes, so, on pricing, we listed a number of things that we think would be helpful to consumers on pricing. We spoke to the monthly price, the services offered, any time‑limited discounts, and any additional fees that the customer could expect during the contract. We do find that there are challenges that consumers experience ‑‑ challenges with price changes. So, we think that having some clarity up front about a provider’s ability to change the price, when they can do that, how that would happen in terms of notice to the customer ‑‑ those would all help provide some clarity around that.

2754 I think the other part of your question was with respect to context. When we thought about context in a label, that was really with respect to more technical things that might come out in terms of service obligations or service metrics, and so that really is about service performance. Those are things that might not be as easy for consumers to understand.

2755 I will look to see if any of my colleagues want to add anything?

‑‑‑ Pause

2756 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Yes, so, just to follow up on the opportunity to change the contract or the term or discounts, I’m just trying to visualize how that would be captured.

2757 Would you want to see a label with the final monthly price, and then language maybe on the website around how long the contract was, or if there were opportunities to change price? How could you capture that in a way that was very simplified and easy‑to‑follow without having to get into too much language and making it complicated?

2758 MS. LO: I will start, and if any of my colleagues want to add, please jump in.

2759 We recognize that putting all of this information into a visual format ‑‑ it is much more an artform than it is a science. I think what is important for consumers to understand is, what is the price they are going to pay? I think at the point of sale, most customers are focussing on what is going to be the bottom line dollar. That is where it is really important to understand if there are temporary credits or time‑limited discounts, and when those might expire, because that feels like a price change ‑‑ or potential price change to a customer.

2760 And then, having a bit of a sense of when a provider might change their price. We have seen some increase in complaints about customers not being for if their provider has a right to change their price, and so that is what is driving a desire for more clarity at the front end about when a price might be subject to change.

2761 Does anybody want to jump in?

2762 MR. MAKER: I would also point you to the broadband labels in use in the U.S., and we have heard this week that they are more focussed on price than other metrics, and we’ve heard why. So, I won’t repeat that, but certainly they identify whether the monthly price is some sort of discounted or promotional rate. They identify what the monthly price will be after the promotion or discount ends. These are five or six words each per line. They identify the length of the contract. They talk about the term of the contract, and any other fees that the customer will encounter, and it’s ‑‑ I don’t know ‑‑ three inches, or two inches of text. So, I think it’s doable.

2763 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Okay, thank you. And part of why I am asking some of these questions is because, if the Commission were to go forward with a label, we want to make sure it’s in a way that is going to be easy for compliance and enforcement.

2764 So, the second piece of your submission dealt with internet plan inclusions, and you did talk about data caps and cost of overages. Would there be anything other than those two items that would need to be clearly identified?

2765 MS. LO: Those are what we think most customers focus on, is what’s included in the plan, and so, overages and the cost of overages is what comes to mind right now. And perhaps some of the consumer groups will have other thoughts, but what is included in the plan is certainly a focus.

2766 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Okay. And then finally, the third piece of course is the service performance, and I would like to maybe explore this in a little bit more detail, because how would you enforce that, I guess, if there were to be language like “typical speed” or “maximum speed”? How would you envision your organization being in a position to enforce whether or not the provider actually met that contractual obligation?

2767 MS. LO: Sure. I will ask Josée to jump in on how we approach complaints about service speed in a minute, but maybe I’ll just start by saying that we are not an enforcement body. Our role is to help customers and service providers resolve their disputes, and the lens through which we do that is, look at whether the service provider has met their obligations to the customer.

2768 So, I’ll turn it over to Josée, who can tell you a little bit more about how we do that, day‑to‑day.

2769 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Yes, I am sorry. I just want to correct myself. I appreciate it’s not enforcement; I guess it’s just really more how would you measure that and bring that to the table for your processes?

2770 MS. BIDAL THIBAULT: Great, thank you. So, frankly, I don't think it would change compared to what we’re doing today. I think what we’re looking at might change. And so, right now, the approach when we get complaints about internet speed, is to go back and see, okay, well, what promises were made to the customer; right? When the customer consented to take the service, what did the provider tell them?

2771 Then we would take a look at the evidence that’s been submitted. This is evidence usually by often the provider and sometimes the customer, so that may look like field technician reports, speed tests ‑‑ all manner of things that they would submit to us. And then, we would make a determination about whether the provider has reasonably met those promises that were given to the customer.

2772 So, right now, in the context of an environment where the promises are speeds “up to” an amount, often what we do is we take a look to see, okay, well, what were the actual speeds the customer seems to be receiving? And the reasonable aspect comes down to, well, was there another plan that would more reasonably meet the customer’s needs? So, if a customer subscribed to, you know, 100‑meg service, and they were only getting a 50‑meg service, but there is this other plan that exists that provides up to 75, we would be asking why they were put on the more expensive plan. And we do have the authority to require the service provider to compensate the customer for the difference between those two things.

2773 And so, in the context of maybe a future state with labels, I frankly don’t think it would be very different. We would look to say, okay, well, what was the promise that was made to the customer? And that promise might now come through the information on the labels about typical speeds. We would be asking for the evidence about, so, what were the typical speeds that the customer received, and therefore, did the provider reasonably meet its obligations? And if not, how does this need to be corrected?

2774 MR. MAKER: Could I just add to that? I think your question, if I may, points to one of the significant challenges that we have, because when we get a complaint about service from a customer who is on an “up to” 100 megabits plan and it’s combined of course with a ‑‑ as you heard earlier, a disclaimer in the contract that says, “We don’t guarantee it,” and we understand why they don’t guarantee it.

2775 You know, we’ve hit on the crux of a problem, because now we have to look at that and say, well, they got up to 75. Is that reasonable, for a 100 megabits plan? What about if they only got 40? Is that reasonable? And so, you’ve heard about how we try our best to deal with that, but by the creation of the label, essentially what you’re doing is creating a more clear commitment from the service provider to the customer.

2776 And then, of course, as we’ve suggested, if you require that to go into the contract as well, it just becomes another contract dispute for us to look at. We do that every day; that’s our “sweet spot”, and it doesn’t really matter for us whether they’re technical metrics about jitter and latency. It doesn’t matter. I mean, for us, a little training of our staff and it’s just another measure we look at in terms of the reasonableness of what’s been provided to the customer.

2777 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Thank you, and thank you for commenting on the latency and jitter, because I did want to ask you ‑‑ in your experience, how much familiarity do your clients have with some of this technical language? And would it be useful to include more technical terms, for the client to better understand their service?

2778 MR. MAKER: So, I think if I was in your shoes, I mean, you heard this morning a submission about trying to aim this at the average consumer, and I think that’s reasonable because people who have above‑average understanding of this will by nature dig up the information that they need to satisfy their particular needs and wants.

2779 So, we are agnostic as to what the metrics might be. I can tell you we talked about this yesterday among ourselves in preparation for this, and I commented that I’ve been with CCTS since 2008 and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a complaint about latency or jitter.

2780 MS. LO: I think most customers, to that point, come to us saying, “My experience isn’t matching my expectations, or what I thought I was going to get.” And so, the complaints come to us more as an experience complaint, and then speeds are the most obvious way that most customers describe their issues, or they will describe them as, you know, a service is dropping in and out, and it’s not working during the times that I need it to.

2781 Most customers don’t quite have ‑‑ or from what we’ve seen, are not engaging with very technical metrics. We haven’t said what specific metrics to put in the label, but certainly, if you choose to put in more technical metrics like latency and jitter, we do encourage there to be enough context for consumers to understand how that actually translates into their experience.

2782 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Okay, thank you.

2783 I think in your submission you talked about having additional measures to ensure that rural and remote consumers are better informed on the service they expect. So, I’m wondering if you could add a little clarity to your experience dealing with customers in rural or remote regions, and if there are common issues that they have been experiencing, and why? And how could we best help you in the resolution of some of those issues?

2784 MS. LO: Yes, I will take a first cut at it, and if anyone wants to jump in, please go.

2785 So, what we were explaining in our submission is that we have in the past seen complaints where there is a disproportionate number of service quality issues that are raised by rural customers compared to all customers.

2786 So, we don’t have specific views on what additional metrics might be useful for rural and remote, but we are flagging that there might be something for the Commission to consider there, and from an objectives and a goals perspective, it is important that all consumers are getting service metrics in a label, if that’s where you choose to go, that help them understand what their experience will be.

2787 So, for rural and remote users, they are going to need to be able to rely on the labels and the information in the labels to understand what their experience is going to be. What that looks like is really up to you.

2788 MS. BIDAL THIBAULT: Maybe I can just add for context in terms of what we’re seeing in internet complaints right now from rural customers, and Janet, I think, has alluded to this. You know, about 9 percent of all issues across all types of service that CCTS gets come from rural customers, but when you look at internet quality of service, that jumps to 15 percent. So, I think the point here is more it’s important to keep in mind the specific experience of rural Canadians, and it’s not really about maybe different metrics, but just the impact that service delivery complaints tend to have on rural Canadians.

2789 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Okay, thank you.

2790 We are talking about labels. I’m wondering if you have any insight into the effectiveness of the labels that have been initiated by the FCC?

2791 MS. LO: We don't have any specific insights from colleagues in other jurisdictions. I think what you heard from the researchers earlier today ‑‑ they are a little bit closer to the experience than we are. We did look at the labels ourselves, as Howard alluded to, to just imagine what that might look like in a Canadian market, and so, that’s really what we are bringing to you today.

2792 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Okay. Thank you.

2793 And again, in your submission you talk about both the EU experience and the Australian experience, where they describe the speeds differently. So, I can take you there if you want, but I guess I’m wondering if you could maybe just confirm as an organization, and you’re providing the Ombudsman services ‑‑ do you have a preference between those two approaches ‑‑ between the Australian or the EU experience?

2794 MS. LO: Yes, I think you are looking at paragraphs 52 and 53 of our intervention. So, our intent in providing this was really more to make the point that there is guidance in other jurisdictions that are moving away from the “up to maximum speeds” and seeking to give consumers more precise metrics around what their typical or average experience would be.

2795 We were not speaking in terms of which of these standards is preferable. It was really to show that, you know, there is other guidance in other jurisdictions that are moving away from “up to” speeds, and we think there is value in that, in helping set that consumer expectation more appropriately at the front end.

2796 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Thank you.

2797 Now just, if we could have a very brief conversation about having a label and whether it’s at the pre‑sale, or included in the contract ‑‑ if we were to ensure that the information is to be included in a contract, would the service provider then ‑‑ would their obligations change? Would they have to retain that information? How would that look from an ISP perspective? Would that have to go into the Critical Information Summaries? How long would they have to keep that kind of information, if it was posted for a short time, as a promotion?

2798 MS. LO: Yes, it’s a good question. I will start, and as always, if anyone wants to jump in.

2799 So, what’s important for CCTS in baking it into a post‑sale obligation, is that that information is available to us as evidence. We also think ‑‑ and you have heard from intervenors ‑‑ that it’s important for that to be available for the consumer as well. Availability of that information to the customer after they have signed the contract might also help reduce complaints and help solve problems before they come to us, which I think is a benefit for everyone.

2800 Where that information is baked in ‑‑ you know, you have opportunities to put it into the Critical Information Summary or into the contract. Ultimately, it needs to be in the contract and preserved in a permanent way in order for it to be reflected as a contractual obligation.

2801 Does anybody want to jump in?

2802 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Okay. And I appreciate in your opening comments this morning that we are not here to talk about expanding the mandate of your organization, but I would really appreciate hearing from you in terms of, what is the path forward in terms of bringing this into fruition, if there were to be a label? Like, what changes would need to take place? What would be the best path forward? Amending the Code, a regulatory policy? What would ‑‑ in your view, what would be the best approach?

2803 MS. LO: Yes, we provided, hopefully, a helpful analysis in our reply, specifically on where the rules might apply. If they are in the Internet Code, and they flow through into a post‑sale requirement in the sense that they are a contractual obligation, that very much squarely fits into our current mandate. I don’t know that there would need to be a lot of shifts to what we do. We would have to adopt them and train our staff on the Codes, but we could certainly continue to use those rules in dispute resolution, and we would track and publicly report on any Code breaches that we see in the course of our dispute resolution. So, you know, that I think is something we can continue to do.

2804 If the obligations that come out of this proceeding are purely presale and don’t exist in the code, and we were trying to be very clear, that is where it is not currently in our mandate, because those are advertising claims and because those are potentially the types of complaints where a customer is complaining about something they saw on a label, but haven’t gone to the point of signing a contract with a service provider.

2805 So those are complaints that are not currently in our mandate.

2806 I don’t know if, Howard, you want to jump in on that as well?

2807 MR. MAKER: I might add that we did a little arithmetic before we came, and we determined ‑‑ so if you put it in the code, obviously you are ‑‑ it’s going to apply to those service providers who are subject to the code. Out of all the participants in CCTS, we figure that’s about 60 internet service providers.

2808 So as we looked at the whole range of providers, there would be about 270, I think was the number, approximately, of participants in CCTS that would not be subject to the code, or to the labelling requirements.

2809 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Okay, thank you. I just have actually one smaller question before I pass the mic back to our Chair.

2810 But we did hear earlier this week from Canada Deaf Grassroots Movement and other intervenors who talked about the LSQ/ASL videos, and that you were actually an excellent resource for that, but they felt maybe more could be done to kind of improve their ability to communicate with your organization and with service providers.

2811 So I’d just invite you to comment on that.

2812 MS. LO: Thank you very much. We listened, with interest, to the comments on Tuesday. And we do have regular consultations with not just the deaf community, but all of those in the accessibility community. So we really do welcome that feedback on our services.

2813 I do want to be clear that our services are available through VRS and TTY, so consumers who need help can reach us through those ways. We also do offer a chat and other ways.

2814 But I recognize there are opportunities to continue to reduce barriers on how consumers can use our services, and we do take that feedback under advisement and we’ll consider how to continue to improve.

2815 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Thank you very much.

2816 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you. We'll go to Commissioner Naidoo next.

2817 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Hi there. Thank you so much for being here today.

2818 You’ve probably seen many ISPs in this hearing are saying that creating labels, in their view, would just simply be too costly. But OpenMedia on Day 1 or 2, I can’t remember which day it was, actually came before us and said they look at things differently. For them, it’s not a matter of cost, it’s a matter of investment, in their view.

2819 I’m wondering what your thoughts are on this. And then I’m also wondering if you’ve been given or gleaned any insight at all as to how costly these labels would be?

2820 MS. LO: I think that's a good way to frame the question, is is this a cost or an investment. And it might have to be both.

2821 Often when we think about complaints, because we are really at the latter end of the consumer lifecycle, we deal with problems when they have happened, we look at all of the data, and Josée can speak to it in more detail, if you like, through the lens of what is a friction point, what is the pain point that are driving these things?

2822 You’ve heard from us, I think in our interventions and this morning, that often it’s that mismatch at the front end from the presale transactions that are driving the customer frustration, and then are borne into the complaint process. And that is really the opportunity, is if we can provide more or better formatted or more easy‑to‑understand and clear information at the front end, if that will align expectations.

2823 The goal would be to reduce friction points later through the customer lifecycle, whether that’s later in the customer transaction or complaints that have to come to CCTS, and first go to the provider as well. So that, to me, would be the investment that’s being made in the broadband labels.

2824 I don’t think we have any specific insights in terms of service provider costs, so service providers are the right place to ask that.

2825 Did anyone want to add anything?

2826 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Thank you very much. So some ISPs have said they already offer the information consumers need, you’ve heard that several times, and they say that it’s sufficient, in their view.

2827 You mentioned in your presentation though that you’re seeing a lack of clarity, a lack of completeness of information provided to the consumer, and that’s basically the core reason for the complaints that you’re seeing, right?

2828 So what do you think or why do you think that there’s a disconnect between what you’re seeing and the point of view of some of the ISPs; that they’re providing sufficient information, and yet you’re hearing these complaints?

2829 MS. LO: I’ll pass that one to Josée to answer, because I think maybe a little bit of colour of the kinds of issues that we see in the complaints and what drives them might help provide some of that.

2830 MS. BIDAL THIBAULT: Great. Thanks, Janet. You know, I think it’s important to acknowledge that there’s a difference between providing information and providing clear information that is readily accessible and easily understood in terms of what it means, you know, to me as a consumer.

2831 We’ve talked in our submissions and a bit today about, you know, the example of time‑limited discounts. I think this is a good example, right? Where we regularly see that customers are surprised when suddenly their monthly bill service increases. And that’s because they didn’t appreciate that the $100 they were quoted was just for the first three months, and that after three months it would increase to $120.

2832 So I think there’s a difference between providing information and providing clear, easily accessible, contextualized information. And I think that there is an opportunity in the broadband labels to potentially do that in order to increase consumer understanding, and then hopefully decrease frustration and complaints as a result.

2833 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: So would you say it’s kind of like packaging, that the information’s there, it’s being bottled, but can consumers actually open the bottle and access the information?

2834 MS. BIDAL THIBAULT: Yes, I think that’s maybe a good analogy, maybe with the caveat that the way it’s currently packaged isn’t necessarily contextualized to what it means for the particular subscriber or subscribers.

2835 MS. LO: I would just also jump in to say, you know, I think when providers ‑‑ I’ve also heard them say all of this information is already in the code. And we want to be clear, pricing and service plan inclusions are key contract terms in the internet code. But service speeds or quality of service that’s to be expected, that is not a key contract term that is currently required in the internet code and, therefore, it is also not required to be clear in the offer.

2836 I think there is really an opportunity to provide customers with more and clearer information about service, what to expect in terms of the reliability or the performance of the service, in order to make that more clear.

2837 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Thank you. Those are all my questions.

2838 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much. We'll go to Commissioner Abramson next.

2839 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thanks, and thanks for being with us.

2840 I’m going to pick up where my colleague left off perhaps and start there. And, you know, it is a significant difference that most TSPs have pointed out, the fact that in the US the FCC spends quite a lot of time on price nutritional labels, whereas here in Canada we’ve already had a requirement related to price and surely that ought to make some difference.

2841 So let me ask you about that and let me start with the question I’ve been asking I guess many folks. Were the critical information summary persistently available to end users on demand, such as in the customer portal, would that assist with the kinds of transparency and avoiding confusion that you’re talking about?

2842 MS. LO: Yes, we’ve heard you ask that question to many other intervenors. So, yes, I think having the critical information summary in a manner that is persistently available to a customer, such as a portal, would help customers.

2843 And I spoke earlier about reducing friction points, so it’s not always when it’s just at the complaint level. You know, I think there are lots of opportunities.

2844 But what I would note is that currently we understand the critical information summary as a post‑sale requirement. So they’d only be required to be given to customers after they have entered into the contract. It is not currently a presale requirement.

2845 And so I think there still potentially is a gap, particularly with the objectives we understand in the notice of consultation of providing information in a way that’s clear to consumers earlier, when they’re shopping, to also assist with comparability.

2846 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: What is your experience with customers who have disputes about price, you know, not getting the price they were charged or, you know, time‑limited deals and so on from customers who actually have, are able to locate, have consulted their critical information summary?

2847 And I realize that may not be the totality of complainants, but perhaps there are some who have. Do they tend to be well‑informed? I guess I’m asking really, at bottom, does the critical information summary, assuming one can find it, do a good job at capturing what it’s intended to capture?

2848 MS. LO: I’ll pass it over to Josée in a minute who would give you more colour about how we handle those complaints.

2849 But, you know, I think the CIS, the critical information summary, and the internet code does require a view of the monthly price as well as time‑limited discounts, and so that information is there. Often there can be a bit of a difference between what’s written in the post‑sale contracts and what the customer remembers from their presale transaction.

2850 And Josée can give you a little bit more colour of how that plays out in some of our complaints.

2851 MS. BIDAL THIBAULT: Sure. Thanks, Janet. I think the important thing here ‑‑ you know, and just going back to something Janet said I think with regard to a question a few minutes ago, is that that critical information summary was being provided after the fact.

2852 And so if it’s accessible to consumers, they might go back and they might say, oh, okay, it actually does say that after three months my price would increase from $100 to $120. But that wasn’t necessarily their understanding when they agreed to take the service. We know that customers are not reading all of those materials before they sign on that, you know, dotted line so to speak. So I think that that is the issue.

2853 So in spite of the fact that there is time‑limited nature of the discounts required in the CIS, we do still see customers that are surprised to learn about the time‑limited nature of their discounts.

2854 I think another area where we see this has to do with service providers’ rights to change the monthly price plan for services that are not bound to a fixed‑term agreement, like the month‑to‑month services, right? That’s another area where we see surprise from customers.

2855 And so they may be able to go back into terms of service after the fact and read that that is in fact a right of a provider. But it doesn’t change their understanding when they agreed to the service, when they agreed to that price.

2856 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: I’ve been trying to puzzle that through in terms of what you would see on a potential nutrition label for which you’re advocating.

2857 Would it be sort of like the average monthly cost and the term for which that’s locked in, and a separate number for the average monthly cost of the at‑risk pricing that is not locked in?

2858 MS. BIDAL THIBAULT: I think, and Howard had I think mentioned a little bit about his views in terms of the FCC label, I think at the end of the day what is most efficient is something that is going to be succinct and clear for customers, and that might look like your price is $100 for three months, and then $120 for the remaining whatever number of months there are, or $100 for three months, after which it increases by $20, like whatever makes it clear and quick to the point.

2859 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: I guess, technically, nothing’s locked in for three months if there are certain charges that can fluctuate month‑to‑month, so there’s the challenge. It’s quite a game to figure out how to design such labels, I can only imagine.

2860 Let me turn to and pick‑up the thread that we heard earlier about those who come forward with complaints about the speeds they’re getting. Because it does strike me that, you know, we’re holding a hearing about creating commitments to speeds and realistic speeds and so on, and you at the CCTS have been hearing complaints about the speeds folks have been getting or not getting for years. So you have quite a bit of experience with it.

2861 First, let me say, you know, I suppose broadly there’s always two types of ‑‑ at least anyway, two types of call it enforcement, call it recourse, whatever, one is top‑down and one is bottom‑up.

2862 You know, top‑down is the way that we, at the Commission, used to approach consumer quality of service. For instance, for the PSTN that I believe is no longer in place very much, if at all, where there would be quarterly or, you know, periodic targets to be hit, and telcos that didn’t hit those targets, that were below the target percentage of performance would have some sort of penalty. So that’s top‑down.

2863 Bottom‑up is where individual consumers have recourse somehow, and CCTS provides that recourse by putting them in a virtual room, in a way, with their telco.

2864 Is that an effective way for us, that bottom‑up approach, to hold telcos to account for speeds? Now, they’ve told us that, by and large, most people already get the speeds that they’re promised, and that’s very good, it means that there shouldn’t be very much by way of bottom‑up complaints. But there will always be exceptions and shoulder cases.

2865 Is that bottom‑up approach effective in holding them to that?

2866 And then I’ll ask you separately about operational questions, but let me start there first.

2867 MR. MAKER: To address your question directly, I don’t think it is a sufficient replacement for compliance work as well. The numbers aren’t big enough, the data’s not clear enough. We take great pride in the data that we do provide, but you’re not going to get a big picture about multiple operators in any real depth from that data, in my view.

2868 MS. LO: I think one of the challenges that might also exist in the bottom‑up approach is you’re putting a lot of expectation on a customer to bring forward their complaint, to think that there might be some merit to their complaint, and then to be willing to see it all the way through the end.

2869 And so you’re not really getting a good picture of what’s happening across the system. And, you know, we did note in the policy direction there is a call on the Commission to strengthen the position of the customer with respect to service providers, and part of that is also having a view of what measures are out there on the network. And so that is a broader look that is not within CCTS’s domain to do.

2870 MS. BIDAL THIBAULT: If I could just add, I think that, you know, the bottom‑up approach is really good in situations where a customer has contracted for the service and there are clear commitments that we can measure against, right?

2871 And if those commitments have not reasonably been met, we can provide redress for the customer. And this is what we do and we’re good at it and we’re successful at it.

2872 I think where there is potential, maybe room for improvement overall, or areas where we can’t help, has to do with the systemic issues, right, and we spoke about that a little bit earlier. So our services can’t help with regard to identifying systemic issues. And I think that that’s a little bit more what you’re aiming at when you talk about this top‑down approach where that might be better suited to dealing with systemic issues.

2873 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thanks. This will be my last question, as time flies. Let me ask about the operational side to that.

2874 I have the impression that, you know, a complaint about I’m not getting the speeds that I expected can be hard to adjudicate because it’s murky, because, you know, over what period of time, and generally that there aren’t a lot of: a) tools; and, b) standards, to apply to whatever data the tools could create.

2875 Is that an area where some guidance from the Commission might help the CCTS deal with those kinds of complaints more efficiently?

2876 MS. BIDAL THIBAULT: I think any clear requirements that is backed by a clear definition of what that means is always a helpful tool in taking a look at these complaints and determining whether the provider’s met their obligations or not.

2877 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Am I right to have that impression, that these are challenging ones to deal with? For instance, were one to look at the average time for resolving them, would that tend to be a little bit higher than the average time for resolving complaints overall or of other types?

2878 MS. BIDAL THIBAULT: Yes, I would say you are correct in saying that they are more challenging, because the area is a little bit greater, especially currently, right? Again, right now, what we’re looking at is promises of “up to” speeds, right?

2879 So I mean, again, a promise of 100 Mb, if a customer is getting 1 Mb they’re technically within that. And so it becomes our job to say, yes, but is that reasonable, right? If there’s a 50 Mb plan that exists, that’s not reasonable.

2880 So, yes, they’re complex. They may become easier to deal with with clearer, more specific guidance requirements, what have you.

2881 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Those are my questions. Thank you.

2882 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thanks, Commissioner. We will go to Commissioner Paquette next.

2883 CONSEILLÈRE PAQUETTE : Bonjour. Je comprends de votre intervention que la clarté de l'information est importante parce que, dans beaucoup d'exemples que vous donnez, ce sont des situations qui sont déjà couvertes par le code Internet. Mais, dans le fond, ce que je comprends, c'est que, si c'était plus clair en amont, probablement que ça faciliterait la suite du processus.

2884 Est‑ce que, dans tout ça, la question… l'étiquette est fondamentale à la compréhension, vous pensez? Ou… Parce qu’il y a différents niveaux à ce qui peut être exigé en termes de clarté d'information. Est‑ce que, d'après vous, une étiquette est fondamentale ou d'avoir certains requis, certains standards par rapport à la formulation ou par rapport à l'endroit où l'information devrait être affichée serait suffisant?

2885 M^me BIDAL THIBAULT : Merci pour la question. Je pense que c'est les deux, honnêtement. Les étiquettes comme telles sont une mesure pour assurer que les renseignements qui sont fournis sont clairs, sont exacts, sont précis. Donc, je pense, dans ce sens‑là, que c'est une mesure importante afin d'accroître la compréhension du consommateur et, d'abord, en effet de peut‑être réduire la frustration et les plaintes.

2886 Et nous avons entendu, t’sais, d'autres intervenants que… où que les étiquettes… comme où dans la procédure que les étiquettes sont fournies, c'est aussi important. Donc, c'est important de fournir les renseignements avant que le consommateur décide d'accepter le service. C'est important de les avoir dans une place où le consommateur peut le consulter par la suite. Et c'est important de les retenir pour que la CPRST puisse faire sa job et de déterminer s'il y a de quoi qui s'est passé.

2887 CONSEILLÈRE PAQUETTE : Parce qu'on entend des fournisseurs que la production de l'étiquette comme telle est quand même un fardeau. Ce qu'on sent, c'est que de fournir l'information n'est pas un problème, de la fournir dans un… selon un certain libellé non plus, mais que la production de l'étiquette comme telle est un problème. Et, en fait, je prenais l'exemple du contrat. Et puis, là, je parle vraiment de la forme parce que, dans le contrat, l'information qui est déjà prévue par le code Internet figure et puis il pourrait y avoir plus d'informations qui apparaissent au contrat, mais, encore une fois, est‑ce que ça doit avoir la forme d'une étiquette? Je comprends que vous pensez que oui, c'est ça?

2888 M^me BIDAL THIBAULT : Je pense que les étiquettes, la forme des étiquettes, c'est une façon de faire sûr que l'information est fournie d'une manière qui va être peut‑être plus compréhensible pour le consommateur. Et je pense que, présentement, fournir des renseignements en vertu des contrats ou des modalités de service, ça ouvre la porte pour des malentendus ou de même pas vraiment être au courant des informations nécessaires.

2889 CONSEILLÈRE PAQUETTE : Puis une dernière question pour vous. Vous suggérez que l'étiquette devrait également inclure une référence à la CPRST directement sur l'étiquette afin d'aider les clients à comprendre qu'ils peuvent s'adresser à vous en cas de problème. Est‑ce qu'il n’y a pas un danger en référant directement à vous d'éviter l'étape où est‑ce qu'ils doivent d'abord et avant tout essayer de régler leurs problèmes avec leurs fournisseurs?

2890 M^me LO : Merci pour la question. Je vais répondre en anglais.

2891 We have made a suggestion that the Commission could consider whether it would be useful for consumers to have information about the availability of CCTS. We absolutely agree that part of providing that information would need to be very clear that the first step is to work with the provider to resolve the problem. And that is required in our process. And so it is going there, but then understanding that there is the availability of independent recourse in the event that that does not satisfy the customer.

2892 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: No more questions.

2893 THE CHAIRPERSON: Great. And that means no more questions from any of us. So thank you very much for appearing and providing your written submissions as well. As always, we'd like to give you the opportunity to leave us with a closing thought.

2894 MS. LO: Thanks very much. We will keep it short. We want to thank the Commission for giving us the opportunity to appear today on this important topic.

2895 As you've heard, we take great pride in our role in helping customers and service providers resolve issues. We've aimed to provide our input through the lens of the industry ombuds. We want to help improve the information that customers receive from their service providers to close that mismatch gap, particularly because we see that as driving many customers' frustrations and eventually sometimes complaints to CCTS.

2896 We view that it's in our role to continue helping customers with contract disputes. And if broadband labels are incorporated into the contracts and there's a dispute about whether a provider has met its obligations, we can continue to assist with those types of complaints.

2897 We do urge the Commission in whatever information or requirements come out of this proceeding to ensure that there are clear standards for all. We want to make sure that the information is clear and understandable for consumers, also for service providers, and also for CCTS. That will help us more efficiently and effectively resolve disputes in the event that they come to us. And so we're very happy to help with any new rules that come out of this proceeding that remain within our mandate. And thank you again for the opportunity.

2898 THE SECRETARY: Thank you.

2899 I will now ask SSi Canada to come to the presentation table. When you are ready, please introduce yourselves, and you may begin.

Présentation

2900 M. PROCTOR : Bonjour. Moi, je suis Dean Proctor. Je suis chef expansion de l'entreprise pour SSi Canada. À mon côté, c'est le docteur Mairi MacDonald, qui est notre conseiller externe sur les questions de réglementation.

2901 It is truly a pleasure to be with you to present our views on how to make it easier for consumers to shop for Internet services. You as a Commission face some challenges, the first of which is to decide if there is a problem to be fixed. If there is, you must determine what that problem is, and then design a remedy that does not in any way restrict or negate the innovation, consumer choice, and affordability of a competitive marketplace.

2902 Our time is short, so forgive me for being blunt. We are concerned with proposals to require all Internet service providers to present information about the plans and services they offer in a standard format, such as the grocery store “nutrition label” model. We fear that this will harm innovation, diminish true customer choice, and hamper competition between ISPs, not enhance it.

2903 In the 20 years since we first introduced broadband service in Nunavut, we have learned that consumer interests fundamentally align with those of their service providers. Consumers want services tailored to their changing needs that permit them to take advantage of the very best technology has to offer, and their service providers want to keep their customers by offering those services.

2904 We're doing exactly that, but our approach to the consumer marketplace cannot be reduced to a standardized and prescriptive label. Again, to be blunt, one size cannot fit all.

2905 Last year, SSi introduced a true broadband revolution with our QINIQ in Nunavut. Our new Kamotik service is a fully customizable, pay‑as‑you‑go model that offers all Nunavummiut access to the most affordable, highest‑quality, fastest, and lowest latency local Internet now available in Nunavut.

2906 Our Kamotik service delivers the greatest possible range of choice to QINIQ customers. We begin with a Kamotik base that includes 25 gigabytes per month of data for $20, with no contracts and no credit checks. The consumer takes the base as a building block, and then chooses how to build their service plan to meet their needs. You can add users such as family members or friends; you can add more data, add speed, add voice service, add data roaming outside Nunavut. Kamotik truly puts the customer in control, not only of what services they choose, but of when they need service and for how long.

2907 Kamotik's unique and innovative approach to the retail Internet market empowers consumers, giving them the nutrition (sic) they need to make good choices. It does not readily fit into a “nutrition list.”

2908 Just before I hand over to Mairi, I would like to refer to the Commission's Exhibit A, proposing the use of oversubscription ratios as indicators for consumers. We don't think it's the right approach simply to isolate this metric, thinking it can provide meaningful or complete information to consumers on network performance. Rather than this being a consumer benefit, it can be at best incomplete information, and at worst, outright misleading.

2909 Our QINIQ network has been referred to by users in the territory as “the one that works.” That is in part because of SSi's efforts to maintain oversubscription ratios that we believe allow for good network performance, but that is only part of the story in delivering service quality. Also fundamental to QINIQ being the one that works are other inputs we balance: significant investments in and upgrades to capital infrastructure; the technologies we choose; last mile equipment; electronics, servers, and caching; backup power; satellite ground infrastructure; redundancy and diversity of backbone transport; and very, very importantly, our local community service providers. How do you simply and coherently label all that?

2910 DR. MacDONALD: The “nutrition label” approach might support consumer choice if that choice is nothing but the option to switch between service providers whose offerings are basically the same. But in our view, that is neither the market as it is in Canada, nor is it the market the Commission should want it to be.

2911 It is, however, the model that the Competition Bureau seems to endorse. And we're concerned about that. The Bureau approached this proceeding apparently having already decided that the Commission's objective should be to facilitate consumer switching by “minimizing the effort and cognitive burden required to switch telecommunications plans or providers.”

2912 If you do find that there's a problem with consumer information ‑‑ and, frankly, we haven't seen evidence that there is ‑‑ then the Commission needs to address the market in this real world, not some mythical market where all Internet service is exactly the same and switching services is as easy and cost‑free as picking a different menu item.

2913 And if you do find there is a problem, you have already implemented a wide range of tools to address it. You have created retail service codes to tell ISPs the minimum information that they need to give Canadians. You have developed a Broadband Fund to help upgrade service where that is the need. And you have CISC, the CRTC's Internet ‑‑ not Internet ‑‑ Interconnection ‑‑ sorry, it's been so long since I actually spelled out CISC, I've forgotten what it stands for. But you have a working committee between the providers that works very well, and has for a number of years, to develop common standards in a competitive industry that is diverse in size, in means, and in technology.

2914 Dean?

2915 MR. PROCTOR: In this real world of Canadian telecommunications, we actually use a mix of wireless, wireline, and satellite‑based technologies to compete by offering choice and flexibility, quality and accessibility of customer service, and reliability based on business choices that also give back to the communities we serve.

2916 None of these aspects of how we do business can be captured by the standardized “nutrition label” the Commission is considering. Indeed, a label like that is the antithesis of innovation, choice, and service. It brings to mind Henry Ford's famous call for choice in vehicles to be “any colour the customer wants, as long as it's black.” And so we are concerned that a consequence of standardized labelling will be to eliminate competition, eliminate innovation and competitors, not to deliver their benefits to consumers and Canadians.

2917 Alors, Monsieur le Président, les conseillers, on serait très contents de répondre à vos questions. Et merci pour le temps.

2918 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much. We will start our questioning with Commissioner Naidoo.

2919 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Hi there. Thank you so much for being here today. We appreciate it.

2920 You noted that your Kamotik service's customizability does not readily fit into a “nutrition list.” You had mentioned that in your opening statement. Can you just expand on why you think that is, and how many different variations of options are there?

2921 MR. PROCTOR: Thank you very much for that open question. I am going to hearken back to yesterday's evidence from Rogers, where in fact they did not want to ‑‑ they were very polite. I'm not trying to impute any ulterior motives of in particular Telus and Bell trying to use a regulatory proceeding to create a competitive advantage.

2922 But in the market in which we operate, capacity, speeds ‑‑ because of the limit of capacity, that means backbone capacity, satellite capacity ‑‑ has forever been an issue. We spend a fortune continuing to upgrade the equipment that we have to bring in new innovative approaches, new technologies. But that is still with extremely, on a Toronto‑wide basis, limited options in terms of speed.

2923 So what we allow the user to do with the new Kamotik, and I'll go back to Kamotik, we have put in place now the technology ‑‑ and with the decision last week from the Commission approving our statement of work, we'll continue to improve the offerings that are available under Kamotik ‑‑ but we have already put in place, absent that, speeds that have never been seen before, a backbone technology that provides latency through LEO ‑‑ low Earth orbit ‑‑ satellites that has never been seen before, the state‑of‑the‑art technology that we've been investing in over the last several years, in fact, since the beginning, but continue to upgrade.

2924 But we take a building block of that so there's no ‑‑ and again, this is the market in which we operate ‑‑ but there is no stigma attached to buying the lowest price service offering. In fact, that is what everybody has to buy. And you build from that and you choose, to get back to your initial question, do you want voice, do you want more capacity, do you want more speed, do you want to be able to roam outside the territory ‑‑ it is truly customizable.

2925 At the same time ‑‑ and again, this is a prop, but it's a prop I think was necessary because of the discussions this week ‑‑ we launched with this back in, well, it's 20 years ago this month in 2005. We were the first company in Canada to introduce broadband wireless access. This whole discussion of fixed and mobile or fixed and nomadic is frustrating for us, because when we launched this 20 years ago, we had to work with Industry Canada at the time to define what this was. There was fixed wireless, and there was mobile. Mobile meant voice; fixed wireless meant microwave or Internet. And we're still stuck in that jargon. Watching the legislative proceeding last year where this is coming about, this fixed wireless, was concerning for us.

2926 So why doesn't it fit into a standardized label? Because our attributes are not what you guys have been discussing all week. It's not what the legislation says. Our attributes are flexibility, portability, no contracts, local customer service. I haven't heard any of that show up as what should be on the nutrition label, and those are our attributes. So if in fact we're supposed to compare ourselves to downtown Toronto standards that Telus and Bell think are appropriate, the consumer is just going to be confused.

2927 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Yeah, because we are talking about trying to standardize the information; right? And so intervening parties have mentioned on the record that they felt pricing clarity should be improved or could be improved. Are there ways that you think clarity of pricing can actually be tweaked in a way that's advantageous to consumers?

2928 MR. PROCTOR: Thank you. I don't know how, given ‑‑ again, I could show you some of the pamphlets. Our pricing is just glaring at you. Every single penny you spend is made very clear before you spend it. That is in the online, that is in the pamphlets we have, that is through every one of our community service providers.

2929 And it shows up after the fact. Once you've signed up, you immediately receive an email as to what you signed up to. You have a customer portal that you can customize it yourself. If, for some reason, you felt, Oh, cripes, I don't need this extra speed, you can cancel it immediately. We offer complete flexibility both in the pre‑purchasing and in the post‑purchasing, where you can actually control through your own customer portal what it is you're buying.

2930 DR. MacDONALD: May I add to that, Dean? One of the things that I have learned working with SSi is that it was really important from the beginning of offering QINIQ service to recognize that there are going to be customers who will want Internet some months of the year and have no interest or use for it in other months of the year. And I think, Dean, that that's still the case throughout Nunavut.

2931 An example, you've got children at home who need to do online learning. You need good, strong Internet during the months that they're in school. You go out to the land in the summer or you take your children out to the land. Suddenly, your Internet needs drop.

2932 And this is one the things that QINIQ has always accommodated, but that Kamotik in particular recognizes. And given that kind of flexibility, again, we just don't see how the kind of fixed and standardized labelling that people have been advocating to you fits.

2933 If we have a customer who decides that, right, the weather is good, we're going out to the land and therefore we need nothing, we'll put them on hiatus immediately. But there is still, in principle, if there's a label, there is still a label suggesting that they're on the hook for services that they have decided to drop. And they can drop for a week; they can drop for a month; they can ‑‑ you know.

2934 So that sort of flexibility was developed by SSi in specific response to the nature of the customers that they serve in Nunavut, and we think it's really important. And we are concerned that that would be constrained.

2935 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: All right. Thank you for that. I want to move onto congestion. You have probably seen a part of the hearing that the Commission has identified congestion as a notable cause of subscriber complaints, with the oversubscription ratio explained in the exhibit that was provided being one of the ways to describe congestion. So I'm wondering if you have any insight into how you measure and manage congestion felt by consumers. I'm looking for how do you measure it, how often do you measure it, is it a broader measure that you're using or at the household or node level. So if you can cover whatever you can in your answer, that would be great.

2936 MR. PROCTOR: Sure. I will try to. And, unfortunately, I have to divide my answer, too, between Nunavut and the rest of the North, where we purchase backbone from Northwestel. So please let me answer the first one with Nunavut.

2937 And in both cases, actually, we have a network operation centre out in Kanata. We have 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year people monitoring, as one of the techs who developed all the software told me, probably 3,000 different metrics to determine the health of the network.

2938 You know, a simple example is if we're seeing a significant amount of packet loss coming out of a certain community or certain sector within a community, that's an indicator potentially of a problem. So that's where we start having flags. We start doing diagnoses, et cetera.

2939 In terms of capacity itself, we obviously have projections of how much is needed based on our expected customer base and the expected usage of those customers. Investment is constant. So if we're seeing an uptake, for example, in an unexpected community, it might be Gjoa Haven. For some reason or other, QINIC is more popular than expected in Gjoa Haven. We're seeing an increase in customer count. That would indicate probably a need to invest more into the last mile infrastructure and perhaps to add additional satellite infrastructure into that community. And we do that on a constant basis.

2940 So it's a combination of is there an immediate problem that needs to get fixed, is there an ongoing ‑‑ and again, it's a positive problem, where we've got a growth in customer base, a growth in usage, so we need to increase that.

2941 To turn over just quickly ‑‑ and I can come back if you've got additional questions on that, but I hope that answers Nunavut.

2942 In the case of our service areas ‑‑ Yellowknife, Whitehorse, elsewhere ‑‑ where it's served by Northwestel's fibre, the nutrition labels raise a particularly egregious concern by us. Our downstream competitor is Northwestel in that market. And for 14 years, we've been in front of this Commission, laying complaints that the backbone service we receive from the monopoly backbone service provider, Northwestel, isn't adequate.

2943 Now, to give a simple example of that, if we're supposed to label oversubscription, jitter, latency, packet loss, we aren't even given that information by our upstream service provider, Northwest Tel, who is also our principal competitor in the downstream market. I can only imagine the mischief, the problems, the confusion that would harm the competitive industry if, in fact, we had to compare our services to our largest competitor who's providing us inferior service to deliver better downstream service. I hope that's clear.

2944 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Yeah, I appreciate you answering that. This hearing is about transparency, so and you have painted a picture about congestion. And I'm wondering, if you think that it's even possible, in your view, to explain the metric and how you measure congestion in an understandable way to consumers, in a way that they would understand.

2945 MR. PROCTOR: This was also partly explained by Rogers yesterday in their evidence. But as a nomadic wireless service provider that, as per the Earnscliffe study ‑‑ which did not cover the North, I might add ‑‑ we would fall within the definition of fixed wireless as a home Internet service.

2946 There's different devices here. Again, I apologize for the props, but they're important. This is old WiMAX technology. We retired that seven years ago. It had a limit on the amount of capacity that could be delivered, the amount of speed, so it was time to retire it. It's old WiMAX technology it's known as.

2947 This is our principal home Internet device. It's got large antennas I didn't bring that can deliver pretty good service, no matter where you are within our network coverage area.

2948 And then we have additional devices. And we indicate to people the functionality and the limitations of these. These are smaller devices that are basically Wi‑Fi hotspots. So and you can imagine the size of this one. It's not as powerful as a larger device. We explain all of that to customers in terms of functionality.

2949 If we were to go into metrics on, for example, oversubscription, the oversubscription in one sector might be X. But as soon as two or three users happen to wander over into that same sector, the oversubscription changes. The nature of a wireless network is dynamic.

2950 What we have make certain is that we don't get customer complaints, that in fact we can monitor ‑‑ again, as we tell you we're doing in a real‑time basis, where is our packet loss, where is our congestion, is it temporary or is it in fact something we need to address on a more permanent basis with additional investment.

2951 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: So there are a lot of factors that ‑‑

2952 MR. PROCTOR: Tons. Tons.

2953 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Okay, thank you for that.

2954 I want to talk about what other service quality metrics ‑‑ you touched a little bit on latency. You touched a little bit on jitter. What other kinds of service metrics, in your view, would be helpful for consumers who are out there searching for plans? And are any of those metrics affected by peak periods or congestion?

2955 MR. PROCTOR: A metric such as do you have a local customer or community service provider? Is your service portable? Is it able to be carried across Canada? Those kinds of metrics have not been talked about. We think they’d be very useful because that’s our competitive advantage. I don’t know how else to answer that one.

2956 We see such fundamental limitations on lists being discussed on the nutrition label making everything as if you might as well be regulated monopoly, to be quite frank. Everything’s looking like that. If we’re over here, how can we compete with that? We don’t want to. We want to offer these attributes, and none of those are being discussed.

2957 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: And what are those that aren’t being discussed that you’d like to put on the record?

2958 MR. PROCTOR: As I’ve just mentioned, the mere fact that we are offering a non‑fibre technology is one that is providing great attributes in terms of flexibility, in terms of the ability to add additional units into a house. Earlier this morning, there was a discussion about how, if too many users are using even a fibre network, that can cause constraints. In our case, you can add additional devices which actually add flexibility and additional capacity, flexibility in the sense of being able to move around the community, around the territory or down south, but also additional capacity within the household. So that’s one benefit.

2959 Portability, the ability to move around.

2960 Local community service providers, as I say ‑‑ I mean, Mr. Mazier when he was presenting and ‑‑ it almost seems as if we’re seeing nutrition labels as a solution for what looks to be a customer service problem. People want to talk to a real person. We offer that. So I mean, is that on the nutrition label?

2961 So there’s a number of attributes we have that we don’t believe can properly be addressed in what we’re discussing in this hearing and that, really ‑‑ I mean, they could be addressed, I suppose, in terms of the Internet Code, the Wireless Code and the critical information summaries, but is that really what we want? I mean, is it going to be 3,000 different items on a consumer label? That just becomes a tower of Babel. It’s incomprehensible for consumers.

2962 They kind of know what they want. We want to focus on what we think they want, and that’s really up to the competitive market to be innovative in terms of how to address that, not ‑‑

2963 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Thank you. I wanted to make sure you had a ‑‑ because you had said that you felt that there was a gap. I wanted to give you a chance to address the gap specifically and then tell us what information you wanted to put on the record, so I really appreciate that.

2964 I want to move on to typical speeds. What’s a workable definition, in your view, of typical speeds during peak periods that’s feasible for ISPs to report on in a way that is understandable by consumers?

2965 So for example, should all ISPs report on the same peak period, say, 7:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. being that peak period, or should they report specifically on their own peak traffic periods, whatever their busiest four hours are? What’s your opinion on that?

2966 MR. PROCTOR: That’s a hard one, too.

2967 I suppose the benefit of having something uniform would provide uniformity of what the issues are at that time period, but every community can be different, every customer base can be different, so that would probably harken more to a service provider specific busy hour.

2968 DR. MacDONALD: If I can add to that, several of the ‑‑ obviously, we’re not on the ‑‑ we disagree with a lot of ‑‑ particularly the largest ‑‑ the larger service providers that have appeared before you this week and we can talk about that if you’re interested. But one of the things that they have said that I think that they’ve said very consistently and that ‑‑ with which we can agree is that there really does need to be a degree of flexibility involved in this.

2969 So in the example that I was talking about earlier, one of ‑‑ among the other things that I learned about SSi in the time that I’ve been working with them is that there was a real surge in learning from home during the pandemic and in the wake of the pandemic, so SSi’s peak period during that time in a community where students were sent home and did ‑‑ and had the opportunity to continue their learning online would be quite different from 7:00 to 11:00 p.m. or could be quite different from 7:00 to 11:00 p.m. I think flexibility is really important around that.

2970 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Thank you for that. I’m getting down to the last couple of questions. I know my colleagues have questions for you, too.

2971 You’ve seen that, throughout the hearing, many ISPs have said that they just simply think that if we were to go the route of labels, that labels are just too costly. And I’m wondering, Open Media, you probably saw ‑‑ I think it was day 1 or day 2 when Open Media was here. They said in their view, it’s not about cost. They felt it was about how you’re looking at things, is it costly or is it basically that it’s an investment?

2972 And so I’m wondering what your take is on it and how costly do you think it would be? Can you paint a picture of just what the costs would entail and how costly you think it would be?

2973 MR. PROCTOR: To start with the latter question, we can’t tell what the costs would be without knowing what you’re asking us to do, so I can’t even fathom a guess on that one.

2974 In terms of this being an investment, in other words, something that would actually be a benefit for consumers, we’re trying to get across as clearly as we can we think this would be outright misleading for consumers in most cases. That’s not a benefit. That’s not an investment that’s worth making. That’s actually an investment that could cause problems in the competitive market and ultimately would lead to us receiving a bunch of complaints that, really, aren’t warranted.

2975 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: So you’re saying that you aren't sure that you could assess the costs because you’re not sure ‑‑ so how do you respond to other ISPs who, at this point, have already said that they think it’s going to be too costly?

2976 MR. PROCTOR: We can't because, in fact, all you’re doing is ‑‑ we can’t respond to that suggestion. If all you’re suggesting is one or two additional very simple metrics such as price, which everybody would have available to them, to be more clearly included in the critical information summary, that wouldn’t be very costly. If it’s other metrics that, for example, we don’t even control, Northwestel’s latency or Northwestel’s jitter loss or jitter, rather, and packet loss, we don’t even have access to that, so what would the cost be? Would Northwestel charge us even more than they’re charging for us to gain access to that information? I don’t know.

2977 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Okay. And my final question before I hand it over to my colleagues is, how easy do you think it would be ‑‑ I already know what your response is to labels, but I just want to just get on the record response to how easy you think it would be to add a few additional data points such as typical speeds at peak, jitter, latency to new offers on a go‑forward basis and what challenges or constraints would you expect to run into?

2978 MR. PROCTOR: I think the record’s pretty clear on which ones might be useful. The jitter, for example, I don’t think anybody’s really been coming across ‑‑ again, I will stand back on that one a bit ‑‑ for certain the deaf community understand the need for high‑quality video service. I don’t want to negate that in any way. But it’s a question of whether or not it’s a measurable metric that can be consistently applied given the types of technology, the type of backbone service, et cetera. That’s a bit of a problem.

2979 I do believe that if they are simple metrics, adding additional items ‑‑ simple metrics, adding additional items to the critical information summary is the way to go. I don’t ‑‑ Mary and I have been talking about this. I’m having a lot of trouble trying to distinguish what is a nutrition label versus what is a properly constructed critical information summary.

2980 We’re not subject to the Internet Code, nor the Wireless Code given that we’re a pay‑as‑you‑go service. We endeavour to comply with it, but we don’t include, obviously, critical information that is irrelevant to our service. That would only cause confusion.

2981 So I hope that helps.

2982 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: All your answers have been helpful. Thank you so much. Those are all my questions.

2983 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thanks.

2984 I just wanted to ask about looking at the Kamotik services because you really do market those differently than many other ISPs market their products. You don’t have speed. That’s kind of the top line distinguishing feature, but you do have an add‑on where folks can pay $10 or $20 for 2X speed or 5X speed.

2985 MR. PROCTOR: That's right.

2986 THE CHAIRPERSON: How would a customer know whether they’re getting 2X or 5X if they don’t know what their starting point is?

2987 MR. PROCTOR: Thank you for that.

2988 5‑1 is the basic, so you may be right. I was looking at the same thing going, well, might have to add 5‑1 as the basic. It is if you go down below to our home. That’s very clear. And that’s what we’re building from, is that, but yes, it’s a very fair question and Kamotik, the website, is under constant review, so I do appreciate that comment, Vice‑Chair Scott. And I’m just going to say, it’s funny you would actually mention that one, but if you go on ‑‑ again, in all of our marketing documents and, most importantly, on the customer portal and on the ‑‑ we’ll call it the critical information summary, but the summary of contract that you receive by email immediately after signing up, your speed is there.

2989 I, for example ‑‑ I was just playing with it this week. I upgraded my Kamotik service to include a higher speed. On my customer portal, it is very, very clear what my speed is and I have the ability to control that speed from my portal so I can adjust it.

2990 So understood on the website, but people ask what does that mean and what does it mean to be two times faster, what does it mean to be five times faster, but on the customer portal it’s very clear and you can adjust it at will.

2991 THE CHAIRPERSON: I didn't mean it as a proofreading gotcha.

2992 And hearing your broader point on your customers in particular not viewing quality of service strictly as a function of speed, I think that’s a fair characterization of some of what you said today.

2993 MR. PROCTOR: That is. The biggest issue has been does it work, not the speed at which it works because, again, I’ll move away from our network, I’ll take my mother in Saskatoon. She’s 89 years old. If SaskTel was ever to try to sell her a gigabit service suggesting that it’s better than what she has right now, that would be outland, but does a nutrition label, when we look at it red, orange, green, would gigabit service actually be green? Would that mean that my mother should be tempted to buy gigabit service? That’s a real concern.

2994 DR. MacDONALD: And if I can add to that, there is a theme developing in some of the presentations that have been made to you this week and in some of the submissions that there are some ISPs who would really quite like to enlist the CRTC to help them do their marketing for them. And we would really strongly urge you to resist those temptations.

2995 THE CHAIRPERSON: We’ll go to Commissioner Paquette next.

2996 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: Hi. So my colleague, Commissioner Naidoo, asked you about the cost and the burden if we were to require a label and you gave the exact same response ‑‑ answer as the other ISPs that appeared this week, which is we cannot assess as long as we don’t know what will be the requirement, which, in a way, doesn’t help us much because we’re asked to balance, you know, the advantage versus the inconvenience, the costs versus benefit. We have many, many intervenors to this proceeding who said that the benefits are important, that the costs shouldn’t be that low because you already have all the information in hand. So I guess my question would be, is there a place where you could draw a line? At what point do you think the burden becomes too heavy on the ISP?

2997 Without knowing the exact requirement, is there a place where we could draw a line and what would you need to be able to answer the question?

2998 MR. PROCTOR: From what we’ve been reading and hearing from the legislative proceeding that led to this proceeding, from the written interventions and from all of the public interventions this week is that there’s probably no amount of information that’s going to satisfy everybody, which makes it very hard. And that, to me, rings back to our base point.

2999 This is a competitive marketplace. This is not a regulated monopoly. A competitive marketplace should be able to determine what information best serves the consumers. To the extent there’s problems, we can solve those fairly readily because we don’t have term contracts.

3000 What I’ve been hearing more and more this week is that the big evil is actually term contracts people can’t get out of when they find that there’s something they don’t like. That’s not part of your proceeding this week, but that would seem to be a big issue to get resolved.

3001 So again, I’m not trying to avoid the question, Commissioner Paquette. It’s just we don’t think that that question is necessarily where we want to go.

3002 As I say, we could certainly add some additional items to the critical information summary, but to create some kind of standardized permanent, as we heard earlier this morning, consumer label doesn’t work in a dynamic market. It kills innovation.

3003 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: And I understand that you testified to this effect, but I’m not asking you if you think it’s a good idea. I’m not ‑‑ I’m more asking you, can you give us more details about the burden that it represents for your company to answer the requirements if we come to the conclusion that there should be a requirement.

3004 MR. PROCTOR: I’ll have to harken back to ‑‑ I’ll let Mary follow up, but I’ll have to harken back to the complicated market in which we operate. We don’t control our backbone, so a lot of these issues that are being raised that this should be simple to include works fine if you’re an end‑to‑end provider. There aren’t many of those left. In fact, there probably aren’t any of those left despite how Telus and Bell might present themselves. Everybody uses a piece of other people’s technology, and you heard a lot of that this week, that, in fact, if you go down to the neighbourhood level, here’s what over‑subscription is at the neighbourhood level.

3005 That doesn’t mean that’s what you’re getting. There could be a problem somewhere over in Tokyo when you're trying to go onto a certain website there. There could be a problem, as we face all the time, in not having disclosed to us what are those very same attributes that you might like to have public not being disclosed to us by our upstream provider, particularly Northwestel, so it’s hard.

3006 DR. MacDONALD: What I was going to add, if I might, is that Dean said earlier that although SSi is subject to the Wireless Code, because our services are offered on a pay‑as‑you‑go basis, we aren’t actually required to provide a critical information summary.

3007 In thinking through how to apply the Wireless Code, we thought yeah, there’s some benefit in doing this. There is some benefit in trying to present the information in a fixed way.

3008 There’s a benefit for the customers, obviously. There’s a benefit for our customer service providers. If we can provide a forum with tick boxes about what options the customer has selected at the beginning, then that lands up, I think, being worthwhile for the company as well as worthwhile for the ‑‑ obviously worthwhile for the customers.

3009 So that, I think, was the reason that they chose to introduce something that looks like a critical information summary.

3010 So that might be one way to try to figure out where that line ought to be. It’s ‑‑ if you have found that there is an information ‑‑ if you find as the result of this proceeding that there is an information problem, that maybe the next line is, okay, so who benefits from disclosing that, but also, how can we require ‑‑ how can you as a Commission require ISPs to make this disclosure in a way that doesn’t bind them so that if, for example, a Kamotik customer comes along and says, yeah, you know, I don’t need to have a family and friends package added onto this. I really just ‑‑ all my family has moved away. I’m just ‑‑ I just need this, that we’re not required to produce a whole lot more paper and virtual paper to disclose information that no longer applies.

3011 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: Okay. One more question.

3012 MR. PROCTOR: Sorry. If I could just add one more thing to that because I think it's important for the record.

3013 We operate in the north. As I’ve mentioned earlier, the study from Earnscliffe did not survey anybody in the north, so it’s actually an incomplete survey in terms of us. We like to think that, in fact, as good a consumer satisfaction was demonstrated in the survey might even be higher in the north. To bring on what the CCTS had mentioned earlier, they indicated that the majority of their complaints come from rural service providers.

3014 We have never had one complaint in all the years that we’ve been a member of the CCTS in front of the CCTS. There was one filed last fall where, in fact, the customer filed at the same time with the CCTS as with us. We kept trying to reach the customer. It was a very small issue that, in fact, was resolved. Tried to explain that to the customer, the customer never withdrew the complaint. The CCTS picked it up and actually dropped it, so I will hold to the fact that we’ve never had a complaint in front of the CCTS.

3015 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: Okay. One last question.

3016 If, in fact, we come to the conclusion that there should be standardized information requirements, what do you think of the proposition that the technology used by the provider should be a requirement?

3017 MR. PROCTOR: That, again, falls into that nasty trap of is somebody trying regulatory gaming for a competitive advantage. Is fibre better than wireless? Not if you need portability. Is fibre better than wireless? Not if you need to add voice or additional users in the house.

3018 I mean, this is where it turns into this, as I say, red, green, black. Do you really need gigabit service? We can’t offer it. There’s not enough capacity in the sky to offer you gigabit service.

3019 So we want everything to be technology neutral. We really do. And we’ve been advocating for that, well, since we were together in the local competition hearing in 1992 where wireless should be equal to wireline. But you can’t start saying ‑‑ because this is meant to be attributes. You can’t start saying this one’s wireline and this one’s wireless and that means that this one is inferior to that one. It’s not. It’s different attributes.

3020 And that’s where it becomes very dangerous.

3021 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: Thank you. No more questions.

3022 THE CHAIRPERSON: Commissioner Desmond, please.

3023 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Just two brief questions, hopefully.

3024 You talked about your new service. Could you just let me know like how long that’s been in place and do you still offer other plans in addition to that? And have you had complaints ‑‑ I know you’ve said you’ve only had one before the CCTS, but are you dealing with customer complaints at this point with respect to disclosure under your new approach?

3025 MR. PROCTOR: On the last question, no. In fact, people seem to be quite happy with this. It is simple to understand. We tried to make it very simple to understand on the website.

3026 In terms of where we’re at, we launched it last ‑‑ I can’t remember the exact day, but yeah, last year, so it’s been in play for about a year. Because of the waiting for approval, the statement of work under the Broadband Fund because Kamotik, in fact, was a creation under the Broadband Fund, the QINIQ Broadband Revolution. We’ve launched the service, but there are, in fact, additional attributes to come, so we couldn’t whole hog in terms of launching all those attributes without, in fact, the funding from the Broadband Fund being completed.

3027 I think that’s it.

3028 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Are there other service plans or ‑‑

3029 MR. PROCTOR: Yeah, pardon me.

3030 On the website, you’ll see that ‑‑ this is the cover page of the website when you go onto service plans. Thank you.

3031 We’re migrating off of those. That was actually to do with the we’re not yet complete. So we don’t want to shock customers by one day to the next saying the old plans are over, you have to take the new plan. The new plans have all kinds of great attributes. We have seen extremely high migration from the old plans over to the new plans. But we want to give people enough time to actually be aware of what the new plans are, all the attributes, put in place the final ‑‑ I shouldn’t say final because it will constantly be evolving, but the next level of improvements and, with that, continue to push people onto the migration.

3032 But it’s been very highly taken up.

3033 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Thank you.

3034 And then just ‑‑ I just want to clarify something because you’ve talked about how you are innovative and you’ve got a unique way of offering your service. And you know, we have to be careful that we’re not impacting market positions.

3035 If the labelling approach were to apply just, let’s say, to large providers and not small providers, does that change your submissions in any way in terms of market position innovation?

3036 MR. PROCTOR: You’re really getting into what was, I hope, Vice‑Chair Scott's final question to ask us do we have anything extra to add.

3037 What we have seen, again, through the legislative proceeding, through the written proceedings of this one and the oral hearings, the issue appears to be one not of consumer information. It seems to be one of under‑investment in customer service.

3038 Even Mr. Maizer when he was discussing what he’d like to see done, I mean, he talked glowingly about how if he has a problem with his internet, he likes the fact that he can phone his service provider and they can help him, tell him that, in fact, the problem isn’t their network, it’s his network at home.

3039 Those aren’t consumer labelling issues. Those are I’ll call it cri de coeur, a desperate need for more investment in outlying areas, in rural areas, and an ability to ensure that those investments also allow for better customer service.

3040 So to get back to the question of, well, should there be more labelling for large service providers, that goes back to our initial point, too, is there a problem. I don’t know if there’s a problem in downtown Toronto with gigabit speeds. Probably not. I think people are probably very well served in Canada’s large markets by the large internet service providers.

3041 Where Bell I found interesting was skirting around, they are one of the largest fixed wireless providers in the country, they’re also in satellite served areas. They seem to only want to talk about their fibre services, not their services in outlying areas. That’s where things could get interesting is, okay, Bell is obliged to do certain things, Northwestel is obliged to do certain things, but they’d like to get out of those things, and they put that on the record.

3042 The issue is under‑investment. It’s not labelling.

3043 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Thank you.

3044 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thanks very much. Those are our questions.

3045 And while it’s not mandatory, we will give you the option of leaving us with a final thought.

3046 MR. PROCTOR: Thank you.

3047 I think I just gave it, but as we have been going through this proceeding and as we’ve been listening particularly this week, there seems to be a real identification of the problem as being in the rural and outlying areas. That’s what’s known as the digital divide. And I don’t think any consumer labelling trying to compare somebody who’s on the wrong end of the digital divide with what they’re not getting compared to if you’re in the right side of the digital divide is going to help anything in terms of customer satisfaction. It’s just going to lead to customer frustration.

3048 What we really need to do is pick up the speed of investments from funding agencies such as the Broadband Fund, such as Universal Broadband Fund, such as Infrastructure Canada. There’s no shortage of carriers such as us who are willing to not only match but over‑invest with that. We have every desire to close that digital divide, and that really is our cri de coeur.

3049 We can do it quickly, but we need help along the way and we think that’s probably the best way, in fact the only way, to truly solve customer frustration with respect to broadband speeds that they don’t think are adequate or service that they don’t think is adequate.

3050 It’s not due to labelling; it is due to under‑investment.

3051 And that’s our final words for you on that one. Thank you.

3052 THE SECRETARY: Thank you.

3053 We will now take a break for lunch and be back at 12:30.

‑‑‑ Suspension à 11 h 38

‑‑‑ Reprise à 12 h 30

3054 THE SECRETARY: Welcome back. We will now hear the presentation from the Competition Bureau.

3055 When you are ready, please introduce yourself, and you may begin.

Présentation

3056 MR. CALLAGHAN: Thank you. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, Commissioners, and Commission staff. Thank you for the opportunity to appear here today on unceded Algonquin Anishinabeg land just north of the Kichi Zibi.

3057 My name is Brad Callaghan and I’m the Associate Deputy Commissioner of the Policy, Planning, and Advocacy Directorate at the Competition Bureau of Canada.

3058 Let me begin by introducing the members of our panel Today. So, to my immediate right is Ben Klass, Competition Law Officer in the Policy, Planning, and Advocacy Directorate; and Derek Leschinsky, Senior Counsel, Competition Bureau Legal Services. To my left is Dr. Jonathan Fonberg, Senior Behavioural Scientist; and Dr. Émilie‑Ève Gravel, head of the Bureau’s Behavioural Insights Unit.

3059 Le Bureau de la concurrence est un organisme indépendant d’application de la loi, qui protège la concurrence et en fait la promotion au bénéfice des consommateurs et des entreprises canadiennes du Canada. Nous sommes une organisation axée sur les données probantes. Nous sommes guidées par l’intérêt public et non par des intérêts commerciaux, tout comme le CRTC.

3060 Nous espérons que notre participation à la présente consultation contribuera à l’adoption des mesures servant l’intérêt public en favorisant la concurrence.

3061 Les services de télécommunications tels que l’accès à Internet résidentiel et la connectivité mobile sont devenus essentiels à la vie contemporaine. Depuis la pandémie, les Canadiens d’un océan à l’autre dépendent plus que jamais de ces services, que ce soit pour rester en contact avec leur famille et leur communauté, pour apprendre, travailler, se divertir ou faire des affaires.

3062 Des politiques favorisant une concurrence dynamique sur le marché permettent à la majorité de la population d’accéder à une gamme de services novateurs adaptés à leurs besoins et offerts à des prix concurrentiels. De plus, vos codes concernant la téléphonie sans fil, l’accès à Internet et les services de télévision ont contribué à renforcer la transparence et à outiller les consommateurs afin qu’ils puissent faire des choix éclairés entre les services et les fournisseurs selon leurs propres critères.

3063 Malgré ces progrès positifs, certains signaux indiquent que des efforts restent à faire. Et la concurrence demeure un levier essentiel pour atteindre vos objectifs de politique publique. À l’heure où la technologie, les marchés et les modes de communication évoluent rapidement, nous considérons cette consultation comme une occasion de consolider les acquis et de maintenir cet élan.

3064 In our written material we’ve shared several recommendations that we hope will help improve competitive dynamics and consumer choice in Canada’s telecom markets. Our recommendations are grounded in the general principle that good information and freedom from barriers to switching are key ingredients in the recipe for competition. When either or both of these components are lacking, it makes room for the exercise of market power, which can be harmful for consumers and for the economy more broadly.

3065 To develop our input, we conducted desk research, consulted with stakeholders ‑‑ including other regulators ‑‑ and engaged our behavioural insights experts, who are here with us today, to sharpen the focus on providing evidence‑based best practices for empowering consumers. So, with that in mind, I’ll now briefly outline our recommendations and some of the key ideas why we think adopting them will help.

3066 First, we support the adoption of a “nutrition label” format for providing customers with information. Four out of five participants in the CRTC’s public opinion research felt that standardized information in a recognizable format, like the nutrition label but for home Internet services, would be beneficial. We agree. The label is a good idea and Canadians are already familiar with it. Their experience in the food products sector shows that labels are an effective, adaptable tool for conveying complex yet crucial information about goods and services.

3067 From a competition perspective, enabling people to more easily compare services and providers gives them the power to make choices based on their own specific needs and circumstances. When consumers have good information that they can act on to switch, providers will work harder to make sure people’s needs are being met.

3068 The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has already put in the legwork to adapt the nutrition label for the fixed and mobile broadband services. We believe that the record of their extensive rulemaking process represents a helpful resource to consult as the CRTC develops its own “made for Canada” version of the label.

3069 So what does a “made for Canada” label look like? For the most part, we think it should look a lot like the FCC’s label ‑‑ information about price, performance, and other important service characteristics is presented in a format that’s already familiar for Canadian consumers from their experience in the grocery aisle, with just a few key differences.

3070 In our view, the monthly price on a “made for Canada” label should show an “all‑in” price. That should include all fixed and obligatory charges or fees as opposed to the approach favoured by the FCC, where a baseline monthly price is followed by additional monthly fees. The reason for is that Canada’s Competition Act prohibits “drip pricing”. Keeping the label consistent with the drip pricing provisions means making sure that the carriers cannot be permitted to display a price that is unattainable because of additional fixed and obligatory charges or fees that drive up the price that consumers ultimately pay for their services.

3071 Adopting an “all‑in” approach to pricing would help the label to work in harmony with the Competition Act’s provisions on drip pricing. Similarly, all relevant ads and information contained in policies and disclaimers must be consistent with information in the label. To the extent that the label refers or links to disclaimers, they cannot be used or relied upon to restrict, contradict, or negate any marketing messages, or otherwise cure misleading or deceptive marketing practices. Overall, this approach would help keep information simple, relevant, and it would facilitate apples‑to‑apples comparisons.

3072 Second, we think the label would benefit wireless phone customers and competition in that market, too. Like home internet services, wireless phones are essential for nearly all Canadians. CCTS and CRTC data show that Canadians have similar issues with both services, too. Every Canadian wireless network operator also offers home internet ‑‑ meaning that they will already be developing labels as a result of this proceeding.

3073 From our perspective, extending the labels’ application to wireless phone services could deliver significant benefits for minimal additional cost. Doing so would help to simplify and harmonize the consumer information environment in general, while avoiding the need to duplicate efforts down the road.

3074 And third, we think the labels would be especially beneficial for customers who are actively shopping, and for subscribers whose contracts are about to expire. Dr. Fonberg will explain how we can think about making sure the labels are as useful for consumers as possible.

3075 DR. FONBERG: Thank you, Brad.

3076 Consumers are less likely to engage with information if the effort required to identify and understand that information is high. Therefore, difficulties in accessing critical information about broadband plans and alternatives can create barriers to switching.

3077 Our recommendations draw on key principles and best practices from behavioural science. They aim to empower consumers by reducing the effort required to identify and understand critical information, thereby reducing barriers to switching. To that end, these recommendations address both the format and availability of the label.

3078 First, the label design should allow consumers to quickly grasp key information; it should be easily accessible and comprehensible. This is intended to reduce the effort required by customers to understand complex plan information.

3079 But beyond what’s in the label, when and where it’s found is also important. We recommend that it be widely available anywhere specific plan information is displayed. We are also asking that the label be included in notices sent to customers whose contracts are set to expire. This will reduce the need for customers to search for key details buried in the fine print, making the process more convenient and increasing their chances of engaging with it.

3080 These recommendations are intended to ensure that customers will have easy access to the label when they need it most, maximizing its benefit.

3081 MR. CALLAGHAN: Thanks, Jon.

3082 So, to wrap up, the CRTC has taken important steps in recent years to empower consumers in their relationships with their service providers. Ensuring that phone numbers are portable, placing limits on contract length, and unlocking devices are just some of the actions the CRTC has taken to foster competition in the marketplace for the benefit of consumers and the economy.

3083 The Bureau is pleased that the CRTC continues to build on these achievements. A broadband nutrition label can put consumers in the driver’s seat of the switching process and improve competition in telecommunication markets. With clear, standardized information to compare their options, consumers can take advantage of competition more easily, and companies will compete harder to keep them.

3084 We’d like to thank the Commission for the opportunity to participate in these proceedings, and look forward to your questions.

3085 THE CHAIRPERSON: Great. Thank you very much for your submissions to date and for your appearance before us today. The Bureau has been a great partner agency for the CRTC and I am happy to see that continue.

3086 And we will start our questioning with Commissioner Abramson.

3087 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thank you. And thanks ‑‑ my thanks to you for being here and for bringing a good group of people to discuss with.

3088 A previous intervenor gave me a good lead‑in, so I am going to cheat a little bit and use it. You know, they characterized your submissions ‑‑ not unfairly, I think ‑‑ as being directed at minimizing the effort and cognitive burden required to switch telecommunications plans and providers, as you said during your presentation. And this other intervenor said, “Look, if you do find there’s a problem with consumer information ‑‑ and we haven’t seen evidence there is ‑‑ then the Commission need to address the market in this real world, not some mythical market where all internet service is exactly the same, and switching services is as easy and cost‑free as picking a different menu item.”

3089 Some economists would say that telcos compete pretty aggressively, head‑to‑head, in an oligopolized market through retention offers and targeted bundling, as well as straight‑up price competition, as well as quality competition. You have argued that switching costs should be lowered. You are really arguing for increased churn, I suppose, in a way.

3090 Isn't there an argument that increasing short‑term churn erodes margins and kind of disconnects price structures from the cost of investing in facilities? In other words, isn't this a recipe for commodifying telecommunications and creating a bruising race to the bottom that doesn’t allow for room for investment or innovation?

3091 MR. CALLAGHAN: Thank you for the question. Maybe I can start, and as we go along I will welcome my colleagues to add on.

3092 The starting place for us obviously is not one that is going to dampen any incentives for innovation. We recognize that that’s an important outcome of competition. It’s one that we have highlighted to the CRTC in the past ‑‑ a careful balance that needs to be struck. But certainly it is true that the focus of our submission was on whether consumers are well placed to allow competition to work for them. That’s kind of the basis of our focus.

3093 But they are not the only beneficiary. Obviously, companies who are looking to compete on the merits ‑‑ small and big ‑‑ have an interest in competition working properly here. But yes, the focus generally for us is about the clarity and usefulness of the information for consumers.

3094 Do you want to add on?

3095 MR. LESCHINSKY: Maybe I will take an initial point of illustration. So, a company that makes representation to promote its product through your label that you might select ‑‑ that’s one piece of information that the firm would have available to consumers. But the fact that that label exists and is made to promote that product would not exclude it, for example, from making other statements, from highlighting other ways in which its product may be distinguished from those in the market. So, we see this as providing additional information rather than closing the door to innovation.

3096 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: What is the problem we are trying to solve?

3097 MR. KLASS: So, we have heard previous intervenors using a variety of statistics to suggest that the numbers of people who would be served by this are small ‑‑ 70 percent of people indicate that they are relatively satisfied. You know, I think the numbers range, depending on the metric, but I think when you flip that equation, we’re talking about 30 percent of ‑‑ what, 15‑plus million people who are less happy or perhaps unsatisfied with their service, various sort of aspects of the information available. And so, 30 percent, 15 million ‑‑ that’s quite a lot of people.

3098 The public opinion research that’s been released since this hearing on the awareness of the consumer Codes ‑‑

3099 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Sorry to interrupt. I am being told that many are not quite hearing you. If you could move the mic a little bit closer?

3100 MR. KLASS: There has been quite a focus on the public opinion research that was entered as part of this hearing, but there is quite a lot of research that the CRTC has conducted since then. The POR on the awareness of the Codes had indicated that in wireless markets about 15 percent of people had filed a complaint in the past year about their service; 19 percent of home internet subscribers had done the same. So, these are, I think, not insignificant. You know, we want everyone to be able to benefit from competition in these markets for essential services, not just 80 percent. We’re not happy with that.

3101 And looking back, I will also point out that this has been a longstanding problem. Specifically, what comes to mind is the CRTC’s hearing on false and misleading advertising ‑‑ false ‑‑ what is it ‑‑ aggressive advertising practices, back in 2019. And the mystery shopper research that has been conducted since that time ‑‑ you know, the CRTC specifically indicated in those reports that consumer information measures could be improved, and that the carriers, despite representing that they took this very seriously and were implementing measures to address it, weren’t always living up to those promises.

3102 So, to sort of put a cap on it, yes, the market does work quite well for a lot of people; things have improved in many ways, but I don’t think we’re across the finish line just yet.

3103 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: So, ‑‑

3104 MR. LESCHINSKY: If I might supplement that answer ‑‑

3105 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Absolutely.

3106 MR. LESCHINSKY:  ‑‑ somewhat, as well? When prices are complex, the points of comparison may be obfuscated for a consumer, and so, I think when you look at this issue, it’s important to distinguish competition in relation to the services being offered, what’s available, how good is it, from how it’s marketed? And so, what we’re trying to do is to include a greater connection between the information that’s presented to consumers and those service offerings, so that competition on the merits is heightened.

3107 There might be some consideration given to the advertising as well, and as I’ve said, that’s not necessarily excluded, but to focus consumers on information that will help them in a comparative exercise when the pricing formats are challenging is something that can promote greater consumer utility or surplus, and particularly in a market where some aspects of it may be affected by market power.

3108 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: We have talked a lot these last few days about the pre‑sale and post‑sale contexts. Is the problem greater in one of those?

3109 MR. CALLAGHAN: So, I may not be a ‑‑ hopefully this is directly answering the question. I mean, the focus that we have tried to emphasize is really kind of the point of sale, and making sure that consumers have the relevant information to understand what’s being offered to them, and how they can compare it to other offers. What we see is kind of the critical moment, which is when they’re considering renewing their plan or making a purchase of a plan for the first time.

3110 And maybe just to add on something else that we emphasized, another recommendation was that we felt it important at the time plans were expiring to present that information to the customer as well. Obviously, it’s going to be a moment when they will be looking at what their options are for either renewing that plan or considering a switch. And so, we thought that was essential as well.

3111 You wanted to add?

3112 MR. LESCHINSKY: Sure, maybe I will add to this as well, which is to say it matters when consumers receive information. We have a drip pricing provision in the Competition Act, and that is actually informed by a recognition of behavioural economics, behavioural insights. When information is presented first, it can have a compelling effect on consumers and, for example, when additional information is presented later in the process, consumers may not fully account for this.

3113 For example, in the case of drip pricing, there is one well‑known study by academics known as Steve Tadelis and colleagues, who did a field study in relation to drip pricing, using StubHub data, an actual natural experiment, and they looked at what the effect of it disclosing upfront price at the beginning, and a drip price scenario. And in that comparison, they found rather dramatic results. For example, a 21 percent increase in revenue in the dripped price condition and a 14 percent greater likelihood of making a purchase, as compared to the all‑in condition.

3114 So, it matters when consumers see information ‑‑ if it’s after the fact, when that decision is effectively made or has been anchored, or when it’s in the shopping process. So, as we’ve said, upfront disclosure is helpful to consumers.

3115 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: I have been asking intervenors about the role of the Critical Information Summary, one of whose purposes is exactly to provide accurate and clear pricing information, including as to term, and so on, to consumers. An intervenor today noted that this was more in the post‑sale context. You’re talking about drip pricing, I take it in the pre‑sale context, or at least partly, which relates to that.

3116 At the end of the day, you regulate advertising, including drip pricing, as do we, to a certain extent ‑‑ or at least we have that jurisdiction. We’ve already purported to regulate in the post‑sale context. Do we need new rules? Do we need new labels? Or is this a question of both of us doing our jobs better?

3117 MR. LESCHINSKY: So, I think we need to maybe situate ourselves within the regulatory context. The Competition Act provides a floor, not a ceiling, when it comes to the marketing of telecommunication services. Yes, the Competition Act applies, and yes, it applies to telecommunication companies. For example, as I’ve said, a company may engage in deceptive marketing, contrary to the Competition Act, when the services it provides to consumers differ materially from what they promote. And a company may not escape enforcement action when they bury important information, for example that contradicts the primary representations and linked policies, or footnotes.

3118 But what’s important to realize in this consultation is that a nutrition label would serve a distinct and complementary function from what the Competition Act serves. And so, especially in regulated industries, as I’ve said, that may be affected by market power, it can foster greater competition and provide consumer benefits.

3119 Yes, it’s relevant for you, as the CRTC, to consider whether there are costs, and that is something that you will be considering, but these producer costs need to be weighed in terms of the consumer benefits. And, as we’ve seen, these sort of plans exist for food; they exist in respect of services in the United States, as regulated by the FTC. So, my point here is that there are two distinct zones.

3120 And so, for example, when it comes to making a decision on these matters, if there were to be choice about a label, it would be helpful, for example, for the CRTC to clarify ‑‑ as I think it already has in this consultation ‑‑ that it’s not seeking to regulate deceptive advertising; you’ve carved it out of this consultation, presumably because there is some recognition of the Competition Act.

3121 And so, when it comes time to think about a decision, it may be helpful to clarify, for example, that the Competition Act is a floor, not a ceiling, and that these are supplementary requirements that you may determine to be in the benefit of consumers, having weighed those potential producer costs.

3122 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: So, you are talking about weighing the costs against the benefits, which is easy to say and, I suspect, hard to do. Let me apply that equation to a particular context. Should we require ‑‑ and you are advocating that we require nutritional labels ‑‑ should we do so of all TSPs? Of only certain service providers?

3123 MR. CALLAGHAN: Maybe I can just begin. The idea, from our perspective, in terms of a potential for competition here, is being able to compare. And so, to exclude certain service providers ‑‑ to us, it just doesn’t jibe with the kind of policy rationale in terms of comparability.

3124 Certainly, we’re mindful of the costs, as you’ve mentioned, and there are sectors obviously where the compliance costs to adhere to new regulations is not an even hit across the board. They can pose more of a cost to small‑ and medium‑size enterprises. We are not best placed to kind of make an assessment about what those costs are for this particular proceeding, but from the perspective of the goal ‑‑ of being able to kind of compare these services ‑‑ we would think that it makes sense for the nutritional label to apply to all providers.

3125 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: But if ‑‑ and I just want to push you on it a little bit because you have said you recognize that we’re weighing costs against benefits.

3126 MR. CALLAGHAN: Yes.

3127 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: You have also said that it would make sense to apply this to all providers, no matter how small.

3128 MR. CALLAGHAN: Yes. I think what I am trying to say is, for us, the benefits for competition are important ones, and the consumer is only going to benefit from competition. Indeed, the small‑ and medium‑size business that is trying to maybe enter in the market, or expand in the market, wants to put itself in a place to be able to compete. So, for the label to be able to kind of serve its purpose of being the thing that a consumer can look at and compare apples to apples ‑‑ we would think there would even be some incentive there, in order to be kind of in the market, competing for those customers.

3129 Ben, did you want to add to that?

3130 MR. KLASS: Yes, sure. You know, I think that, in looking at the history of the nutrition label in the food market, we understand that there was quite a bit of concern about the uncertainty of the burden of compliance with these types of rules in the lead‑up to the design, and in the subsequent revisions that have taken place from time to time in that space.

3131 But once the rule is in place, it becomes a part of the furniture. And our understanding is that it even becomes sort of a point of pride for companies who may have opposed it initially. You know, consumers, instead of perceiving claims about products as being in the provider’s interest, being marketing ‑‑ they perceive them as being in a common interest, and having trustworthy, reliable information about products they consider essential. And I think there’s a general understanding that’s developed that it is worthwhile for all parties involved.

3132 Now, you know, extrapolating from that sort of comparison can take us so far. So, I won’t go down too far, down that road, but what I will say is that I think there is quite a lot of room for flexibility, both in terms of how you apply this rule, as well as how you design it in terms of the cost burden. So, people who are producing food and selling it in‑house, for instance, there are certain escape hatches where circumstances permit companies not to have to meet such an onerous burden.

3133 And I think there are also ways that you can design the requirements with respect, for instance, to performance. It seems to be one of the subjects of greatest concern here ‑‑ the cost associated with passive management of the network and the capabilities that gives for performance reporting versus significant costs associated with active management.

3134 And I saw the spread in the submissions of one party, and I heard this mentioned during the hearing the other day of 100 million at the top end of the scale. It sounded to me a lot like a sort of causal cost exercise in which customer equipment would have to be replaced with customized modems at each individual household at the top end. And, you know, you could say that, right, that would be a very, very costly and burdensome type of approach.

3135 But on the other end of that scale, I think I saw existing testing measures and compliance with the advertising requirements being less than a million. So, somewhere in there I think you can probably design a method that gets people the information they need without imposing such a heavy burden as to be unrealistic.

3136 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: I think you are right that cost of compliance will depend substantially on what it is that folks are complying with, and certainly the cost of continuous measurement ‑‑ or of ongoing measurement as opposed to simply knowing what one has put into ones plan in terms of pricing, and perhaps the platform over which it's delivered, physical medium over which it's delivered is where we get into a wider spread of costs. Have you developed a view at the Bureau on what we should be including in that area of service quality metrics?

3137 MR. KLASS: Yes. The answer to that question is yes. We have turned our minds to this, and, you know, aware of the fact that the more detailed you get, the more costly compliance is going to be.

3138 I think you need to ‑‑ I think identifying the things that are most important to customers is the core mission here. In terms of where exactly you land on those numbers, I think it's important to keep in mind ‑‑ and this is a conversation that's been going back, you know, I've heard talk about the criteria for universal broadband. I remember in 2015 being in this room talking about what do people need with respect to their Internet. It posed as a sort of Goldilocks problem.

3139 I don't think you can really put your finger on a perfect number that's going to serve everybody. It's sort of like the paradox of the heap. You start with a pile of sand and you remove one grain of sand until eventually you have not a pile of sand, but you can never identify that point in the middle. I think that's essentially what you're focused on here.

3140 And so picking those measures that will suit most of the people most of the time is the focus while keeping in mind at the same time that the label format itself puts the power for people to make those determinations in their own hands. So not every piece of information is going to be instructive to each person. Thinking of food, someone might be more concerned about trans fat if they have high cholesterol, but not at all concerned about salt. Someone who is diabetic would be concerned about sugar, but not those other things.

3141 And so I know I'm not giving you a precise answer to your question. Perhaps my colleague can add. But I'll just say, you know, I think thinking about how to empower consumers with the information that's useful to them is the key here.

3142 MR. LESCHINSKY: The CRTC is a sector‑specific regulator. It may have expertise, but maybe we can share some general principles which include that simple metrics that indicate the aspects of the products that the consumers value will be helpful information if standardized in allowing for comparisons as between service providers. Complicated product offerings could be distilled so that consumers can maximize their utility to a greater extent.

3143 But as my colleague has said, we're not being prescriptive. We're recognizing that you will be familiar with the aspects of telecommunication services offerings, so your great expertise may, for example, have some views. For example, there may be some precedents, such as an FCC label that might highlight certain aspects of consumer decision‑making that are particularly relevant. Price is obviously a key factor.

3144 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thank you for the principles‑based approach.

3145 So let me push you a little bit, then, if that's the case, and turn to your comments on machine readability. You know, doing any nutrition label ultimately requires creating structured data. And once one had created structured data, publishing it in that format is low‑hanging fruit. It doesn't require design. It doesn't require re‑engineering one's business processes in the same way. Would it suffice to put out machine‑readable data that would, as you've argued, help develop a third‑party ecosystem of comparison sites and specialized consumer help? In other words, would that better optimize the cost and reward?

3146 MR. KLASS: I certainly think that there is a reason to believe that it could be helpful, particularly on the cost of compliance piece. I've noticed, for instance, a sort of cottage industry, it seems, of these types of third‑party services catering specifically to smaller ISPs in the US, recognizing that there may not always be capacity, technical capacity to comply.

3147 You know, we've heard this week already about I'm taking weeks out of my time to fill in reports. You know, they're going to have to divert scarce resources from one part of the business to another that they might not necessarily feel is a priority as a result of this.

3148 It seems that that avenue is already starting to arise in the context of the United States' label. And so certainly, here, I think that that is something you should consider.

3149 MR. LESCHINSKY: Although, if you are thinking of that as a substitute to a CRTC policy requiring that information to be displayed by the carrier, it's really a question of who bears the cost of that. And I think the question you would consider was whether you predict a market response that would create a business, for example, around the creation of that data. If it's costly to generate, it may not arise as a result of market forces, for example. So the question you might want to consider is, you know, whether this alternate could be generated by a market response or whether the costs being imposed on a carrier to bear those costs is a better policy decision.

3150 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Yeah. And I mean, obviously, the goal or the effect, you've argued, of making the data available in a machine‑readable format is to lower the cost and to further enable the kinds of businesses like WhistleOut and others that already do this without that advantage present. So one would think it would grow as opposed to shrink the market, but it's a good general principle. I agree.

3151 You've talked about applying this to wireless as well. Is that something that you're asking us to consider doing immediately at the same time as we seek to apply it, should we seek to apply it, to broadband?

3152 MR. KLASS: I think that, like the CCTS earlier today, I believe, we are seeing other measures related to the space coming down the pipe. The policy direction has sort of indicated that a harmonization of the codes is coming, a bit more general provisions about consumer empowerment, noting that the FCC has also opted to apply this measure to mobile broadband. All those factors, I think, point towards the synergies that could potentially be realized by doing these things at the same time.

3153 That being said, I think you would probably need a substantially better evidentiary base to move forward on that determination in this proceeding, so we would anticipate that that would be something that would come with additional process.

3154 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: I am going to throw it back to you, Vice‑Chair, for others to ask questions, given the time.

3155 THE CHAIRPERSON: Great. Thank you, Commissioner. That means I get time to ask my favourite question, which is we'll call it the Get Out of Jail Free question. But it has to do with the language “up to.” And we've had discussion with a number of intervenors about it. I think one ISP said specifically that it, you know, “up to” doesn't act as a Get Out of Jail Free card.

3156 So under the Competition Act, to what extent does “up to” absolve an ISP from meeting that advertised top‑line speed? And there's also a behavioural aspect that I'm interested in if a consumer was under the impression that “up to” absolved the ISP from something, might that have kind of a chilling effect on a consumer seeking remediation?

3157 MR. LESCHINSKY: I will address the Competition Act aspect. Cases under the Competition Act occur in a factual context. And so I think it's important to think about that as we address an abstract question like this. So whether a statement is ‑‑ so the Competition Act ‑‑ and if you're talking about deceptive market analysis under the general provision ‑‑ requires to determine the general impression and literal meaning of an advertisement. And then you compare that to what the actual service offering of the company is. And you ask, Is there a discontinuity between those things? And then, is that false or misleading in a material respect?

3158 With respect to the question of what's the general impression created by the advertising, it may, for example, be relevant to call on specific empirical research into these things. For example, you might be able to set up a randomized control trial where you present to a person the two types of advertising, and you ask, What do you think, for example, the impression created by this advertising is? It may be done in a more rigorous way, for example.

3159 And so it's very difficult for us to answer definitively whether these things on their words are true or not true, false or misleading or not misleading, because it will depend on that factual assessment of what does the advertising convey, what evidence is relevant to the impression created by that advertising, and finally comparing it against the activities of the actual business.

3160 So it's a difficult question to answer in the abstract. And so for that reason, this may be an opportunity to bring greater clarity whether or not this is reviewable under the Competition Act. So I think that's a helpful way to look at it.

3161 The Competition Act is doing a very specific thing. It's acting under particular provisions of the legislation. And frankly, there's an enforcement cost to the Commission of bringing such litigation. And then the questions you're asking are the trade‑offs to consider a distinct and complementary regulation to it, not in relation to the regulation of deceptive advertising, but to achieve a distinct and complementary policy goal with your framework, not having anything to do with misleading advertising.

3162 And so there's an ability to achieve these complementary goals through the distinct exercise of jurisdiction.

3163 DR. FONBERG: Speaking a bit more on the purely behavioural aspect of that, it's obviously hard to make a more general statement, but I would say it really depends on a couple of factors. The first would be how “up to” has been presented to the individual and their understanding of it, because of course by itself there's not a lot of information. So without a specific example, it's hard to draw a very specific conclusion.

3164 But if it's close enough, like if what you get in reality is close enough to that up‑to speed, maybe somebody might not be too upset about that. But as you get farther and farther away from that or there's a bigger gap between what has been advertised and what the consumer is experiencing, that is perhaps when you might start to see that action towards, you know, contacting your ISP.

3165 Now, of course, where that goes is going to depend on a lot of factors as well. How much time and effort does it take the consumer to talk to their ISP? Do they have options to switch somewhere else could impact them as well. And I know, like it's not a very specific answer, but it is ‑‑ there's a lot of complex human factors that go into that. And it will depend on each individual circumstance.

3166 THE CHAIRPERSON: Okay, yeah. Thank you both for your thoughts. I am going to stick with this just for a little bit, because you spoke about some of the challenges you have in enforcing these types of things.

3167 One of the challenges we have is finding that reasonableness without being detrimental to the benefit of consumers. I think really that's our challenge. So I mean, any general thoughts you have on where we might set kind of a reasonable amount of flexibility? And specifically, we had another intervenor reference ‑‑ I think she said something similar to, well, if the speed I'm getting is actually below the next lower speed that my service provider sells, then clearly that would be kind of a bright line. Like clearly, that's not reasonable, right, if I could have paid less for something faster, it's not reasonable for me to be paying more for something slower.

3168 Do you have any further thoughts on where ‑‑ like how do we accommodate reasonableness without overly restricting somebody? I've asked it poorly, but I'm hoping you can answer it well.

3169 MR. LESCHINSKY: You can think about what other people have done, for example. You can think, for example, has it worked for food? Has it been used in the United States? Those may provide some parameters.

3170 Just because there may be some fuzzy lines, I don't think that means that the general principle is necessarily unclear. And the CRTC, as an experienced Commission, will be able to turn its consideration of what the relevant aspects are for consumer preference.

3171 Price is relevant. All the services is relevant. And think about aspects which it wishes to highlight not as the only information available to consumers, but as a part of that information.

3172 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thanks. Commissioner Naidoo, let's go to you.

3173 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Hi there. Thank you so much for being here today.

3174 I think, as you probably heard this morning, SSi was here. They argued that their new Kamotik service plans do not readily fit into the nutritional label idea because of how many variations are possible. They were talking about that. I'm wondering if you have any ideas or any thoughts on the statement that they thought that that would be an issue for them?

3175 MR. KLASS: So, I am not familiar with Kamotik or SSi's specific service offering, so I won't offer comment on their offering.

3176 But in terms of the idea about service plans being customizable, I think that these providers are already required to offer the critical information summary once the plan has been developed to customers. And so like I think what we're asking is for that type of information to be packaged in a standardized format and made available pre‑sale.

3177 So I assume that a company that allows customizable services for its customers is able to produce a critical information summary after the fact. I think in this scenario, we would simply be asking them to produce it alongside that. And I'm not a technical expert, but I imagine it must be possible to design a website in a dynamic way to display those existing representations to customers, so there must be a way for an innovative company to create a dynamic representation in the form of a label.

3178 MR. LESCHINSKY: I might add a couple of points. The first is that the CRTC can apply its judgment to where and when to apply its policies. For example, it may consider relevant geographic markets. When thinking about geographic markets in telecommunications and a wireline context, it's fairly easy, for example, perhaps, to think about what those markets might be.

3179 A market is probably actually someone's home. If you look at whether or not a person is going to switch to a competing service provider, they're going to choose between the wires in their home. They're not going to move to avoid the price change. And so that's not the end of the story. There's an opportunity, for example, to aggregate markets within those common serving areas so that you're clustering competitors within those service areas. So there may be an opportunity to apply that cost benefit analysis on a geographic market basis.

3180 The other thing to think about when doing this analysis is that companies can understand their business revenue, for example, by averaging over the term of a contract, for example. So a complex service offering might be simplified into a revenue per user or a revenue per plan. And by taking information over the term of a plan, some of this complexity maybe subsumed.

3181 For example, you take the total cost of a plan so that a consumer might look at the total cost for server A over server B over a two‑year contract, for example, and be able to do that comparison more easily.

3182 That's one way that this complexity could be surmounted. But there are perhaps other ways for you to consider as well.

3183 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Thank you very much. That is my only question. Thank you.

3184 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.

3185 Commissioner Paquette will be next.

3186 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: I would like to continue on this topic, which I find particularly interesting. With the nutritional label, the information that's inside the label seems easy to measure. You know, it's a percentage of sugar, of fat in a product. When it comes to the quality of a connection, and I'm not talking about like data plans, price switching, but the quality of a connection, we hear that it can be difficult because of the set‑up of the consumer or because of the distance from their server. There can be many, many factors that influence.

3187 And the question I'm asking myself is: is it useful to display some information that is that difficult to measure? And isn't there a danger that, since it's difficult to measure, it's difficult to enforce? And if it's the case, is there a danger to regulate?

3188 MR. CALLAGHAN: I think maybe I can start and welcome ‑‑ Ben may want to supplement, here.

3189 Certainly, I think that's an important consideration for the Commission. I think for us, the important thing is what is most important to the consumer to inform their decision at the process. I don't know that we are best‑placed to inform in terms of how difficult those technical aspects may be for the companies. The CRTC may be sort of better‑placed than the Bureau to kind of understand that and gather the record to inform its decision.

3190 Is there anything you wanted to add on this, maybe, Derek?

3191 MR. LESCHINSKY: In keeping with our submission, the CRTC is the sectoral regulator. And it should consider what metrics best proxy the qualities of service that consumers value. And then you'll have a choice as to, you know, what's best in your judgment. Is the answer that the current condition is better, or is it better to think about some of the practices that have been taken elsewhere, either in food or in respective FCC policy.

3192 And so there may be difficulties of measurement, and you may craft a standard that's reflective of those differences, and you will have a decision about how narrow and prescriptive those standards might be or how general those standards may be. And your judgment on those issues, you know, is something that your experience will inform.

3193 And so there may be complementary action under the enforcement of the Competition Act potentially, I suppose, if someone makes a misleading claim notwithstanding what you said. But I really do see those as distinct areas. We don't understand the CRTC to be prescribing regulation in respect of deceptive marketing. It's rather a proactive disclosure requirement addressing this perhaps consumer confusion and the difficulty of doing those price comparisons.

3194 THE CHAIRPERSON: Great. I think that's it for questions. I would like to thank you again for your written submissions and for answering our questions today. And we'll turn it over to you if you have a final thought you'd like to leave us with.

3195 MR. CALLAGHAN: Thank you. Sure, just briefly, we do think this proceeding is important. It goes to, as we've been trying to iterate, what we think is the heart of the competitive process, which is the customer's ability to switch or at least be in a position to make that decision about whether to switch. Of course, not all customers will switch. But it's being well placed to be in that position and make an informed decision that will allow them to, for example, renegotiate with their current provider.

3196 Barriers to switching are barriers to competition, and we think that's why there's a lot of important potential here for the broadband nutrition label. The more customers can rely on clear, understandable information about the services that are offered to them, the more that they can make competition work for them. They do that by choosing the services or the provider that works for them the best in their circumstances. So we think this is an idea that works for entrants as well, not just for customers.

3197 Certainly, it's important to consider the costs of implementing an idea like this. We would want it to lower the barriers to competition and not be raising new problems, especially for smaller players that are looking to enter or expand in these markets. But we just want to re‑emphasize the benefits that ‑‑ and we think they will be meaningful ‑‑ from clearer information to customers at times that we think will mean the most, and that's these decision points to switch, to purchase, or to renegotiate.

3198 So it's important that the CRTC gets it right. We think, as we said, there's a lot of learn from experiences in other sectors in terms of how it has come along in food and how it has been applied to this sector in the United States.

3199 So we want to thank you again for the opportunity, and we'll be following closely.

3200 THE SECRETARY: Thank you.

3201 I will now ask Public Interest Advocacy Centre to come to the presentation table.

3202 Once you are ready, please introduce yourselves and you may begin.

Présentation

3203 MR. WHITE: Good afternoon to Commission staff, translator, court reporter, security guard and, of course, esteemed Commission. Congratulations. You’re almost there after a very long week. Thank you for your continued patience and engagement with witnesses.

3204 I’ll first begin by adopting by reference Professor Pavlovich’s Indigenous land acknowledgement. We are also here in the spirit of truth and reconciliation.

3205 We are here today on behalf of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, a not‑for‑profit advocacy group that, for decades, has fought for better outcomes for all Canadians and, in particular, vulnerable Canadians in sectors like communications, privacy, energy, transportation and financial services. The public interest, we fight for that.

3206 I am Geoffrey White, Executive Director and General Counsel. To my right is Tahira Dawood, PIAC staff lawyer, and to my left is Joshua Goldberg, who joined PIAC two weeks ago as our 2025‑26 public interest articling Fellow.

3207 Many of you Commissioners come from various employment backgrounds, some in the telecom sector, and so do I. I’ve worked at the CCTS and also served on its Board of Directors.

3208 I was Executive Director of an industry association of a smaller telecom service providers, and I worked as regulatory counsel to what was once MTS Allstream. But just as you, Commissioners, are not here to serve your prior employers, nor am I.

3209 The title of this proceeding is “Making It Easier for Consumers to Shop for Internet Services”, a title that I suggest is incomplete. I invite you and staff to think of this proceeding as being about making it easier for consumers to compare internet service plans and to hold their service provider to account because this proceeding is not just about the pre‑sale setting, nor the sales transaction. It’s also about how, post‑sale, consumers can have recourse when they do not get what they’re paying for.

3210 PIAC has fought long and hard for more transparency on how broadband services are sold to users. In 2013, PIAC published a report titled “Transparency in Broadband Advertising to Canadian Consumers”. Then in 2022, we published a report titled, “Selling Speed: Reforming Broadband Advertising Regulation in Canada”, which the Commission cited at paragraph 21 of the Notice of Consultation.

3211 Big ISPs are trying to convince you, it’s subtle, but the implication is there, that customers are stupid and that they don’t even know what they want in terms of information and that they are very easily overwhelmed. As we wrote at paragraph 15 of our March 26 reply comments:

“Consumers are not stupid – they clearly want more information and can handle more information and demand that it be provided accessibly. Industry opposition [such as we’ve heard this week] to standardized disclosure and presentation is both patriarchal (we know best) patronizing (you don’t know what you need).”

3212 Today, we seek to assist you with three matters. First, why you should mandate standardized, persistent broadband information disclosure that includes price, download and upload speed, the over‑subscription ratio and additional technical metrics, no asterisk, footnotes or tricks, and a reference to CCTS basically saying, “Not getting what you signed up for. Talk to your provider. If you cannot resolve it with them, talk to the CCTS.”

3213 Second point we want to assist you with today, why you must mandate standardized, persistent broadband information disclosure and third, how you can go about doing it.

3214 Spoiler alert: The Commission has everything it needs today to do this without further process and not doing anything will be a breach of duty.

3215 MS. DAWOOD: On our first point, we will leave aside for a moment the fact that the Telecommunications Act specifically directs you on this point. In 2013, we wrote:

“Better disclosure is needed to inform consumers about claims about internet speed and performance. More standard disclosure by ISPs would greatly enhance consumers’ abilities to evaluate broadband package offerings in the market to find the best match for their needs and to compare offers of the various ISPs.”

3216 While there are a number of technical factors that can affect a consumer’s home internet performance, very little information is provided to consumers by Canadian ISPs about this factor. It’s about these factors and their effect on the achievability of the advertised “up to” speed claim.

3217 Any information that is provided is often located in fine print in footnotes and not prominently displayed and described generally. Furthermore, this information is not accompanied by explanations of how consumers can check the actual speed they are receiving.

3218 Fast forward to 12 years to today, and this remains the case.

3219 Contrary to what many ISPs are arguing, consumers want standardized broadband labels. The Commission’s public opinion research related to this proceeding found that 84 percent of respondents said that it would be at least helpful, if not very helpful, when asked about if being provided with standardized information about home internet services would be beneficial.

3220 The fact that 63 percent of Canadians who participated in the Commission’s POR study are at least somewhat satisfied with the pre‑sale information available to them when shopping for home internet services shows considerable room for improvement.

3221 Only roughly half of survey participants are at least somewhat satisfied with their ability to compare information provided by ISPs when purchasing services, with 22 percent being outright dissatisfied.

3222 In the post‑sale context, just over half feel the information they received after purchasing a plan is easy to understand.

3223 These figures do not demonstrate overwhelming consumer satisfaction that some ISPs in these proceedings have sought to portray.

3224 PIAC’s own research shows a need amongst vulnerable consumers for proactive regulation to increase transparency and accountability. In our 2022 report on reforming broadband advertising regulations in Canada, we reached out to consumer groups such as ACORN and the National Pensioners Federation to understand knowledge gaps among vulnerable Canadians. Our research showed that vulnerable groups such as seniors, new immigrants and low‑income Canadians and other consumers who are less technically savvy struggle to effectively shop for internet services that meet their needs.

3225 MR. WHITE: With apologies, we’re just going to move along here. I think we’re going to run out of time because we’ve been monitoring every minute of this proceeding and, of course, when last we wanted to make sure we were up to speed of what was happening, so we’re going to move on to our second point.

3226 Of course, in Q&A we’ve got a lot more dialogue and response to the question of, well, where’s the evidence, where’s the need, what’s the problem we’re trying to solve.

3227 Our second point, point number 2, why the Commission must mandate broadband information disclosure.

3228 The Commission must mandate broadband information disclosure because Parliament lawfully directed it to do so. There has been a tendency by some service providers to refer to this requirement as still being a Bill. It's not. It’s a duly enacted, plainly worded unequivocal section of the Telecommunications Act, specifically subsection 24(2), at point 2(2) that requires that a Canadian carrier, et cetera, et cetera, as read into the record and forming the public record here as part of the Act.

3229 As your first witness, Member of Parliament Dan Maizer, noted, this proceeding is not about whether ISPs should provide broadband labels and information but, rather, how they should provide them. As to what the legislative intent of Parliament was for section 24.2, we’re happy to discuss that in Q&A. We even have a memo from our new articling student on this point, privileged, of course.

3230 But it’s clear that beyond ‑‑ that the broadband mandate is to be broad and to empower customers, and legislative intent is actually beyond what MP Maizer said to you on Tuesday. It is the will of Parliament, not just the sponsoring Member of Parliament.

3231 I’ll also say that the Commission did not need a legislative amendment to impose mandated broadband information disclosure. Your pre‑existing jurisdiction under section 24, Conditions of Licence for Carriers, section 24.1, Conditions of Licence for Non‑Carriers, was and is sufficient and mandating disclosure would also be consistent with several sections of the 2023 Policy Direction.

3232 It is disappointing that I have to sit here citing provisions of the Act to you, but several service providers are trying to goad you, goad the Commission, into making a legal mistake, that you have more discretion here than the Act allows. You do not.

3233 Let a quote, a 1905 decision of the Railway Board of Governors, Duffy v. Grand Trunk Railway Co.:

“To assume jurisdiction which we do not possess and to shirk the exercise that given us would equally be breaches of duty.”

3234 If the Commission cannot mandate implemented broadband ‑‑ implement mandated broadband information disclosure, I fear the Commission’s ability to regulate on bigger issues and its overall legitimacy will be comprised.

3235 The other element of the should you question is the issue of what might this mandate cost the industry. The industry generally says it will cost huge amounts, that it will take away from network deployment and increase costs for users.

3236 I’ve watched every minute of this proceeding except for the several times where my home internet went down, and I did not see any evidence put before you of how much it would cost. All I heard was a standard threat that any regulation, no matter how small, will somehow impair deployment and raise prices.

3237 There’s no evidence of this. Rather, there’s a track record in numerous proceedings of this threat being made. I urge the Commission to reject the threat.

3238 MR. GOLDBERG: Point number 3, our last point, is about how the Commission should go about mandating broadband information disclosure. Here, we will briefly address information that should be disclosed and how that information could be used to provide recourse.

3239 So the Commission should mandate standardized persistent broadband information disclosure that includes price, download and upload speed, the over‑subscription ratio and additional technical metrics with no asterisk, footnotes or tricks and, to reiterate, we would like to include ‑‑ we would like you to include reference to the CCTS essentially saying, “You’re not getting the speed you signed up for, talk to your provide. If you cannot resolve it with them, talk to CCTS”.

3240 We can speak more to the prescribed information in more detail during the Q&A.

3241 The broadband information disclosure mandate should apply to all service providers providing home internet service and we certainly encourage you to do the same for mobile wireless. Standardized labelling and consumer empowerment efforts are only effective if they are available to all consumers.

3242 In the context of broadband labels, unstandardized formatting defeats the entire purpose of having a useful tool for comparing plans and services across providers.

3243 MR. WHITE: In terms of design and how do you pull this off, how do you execute on it, we don’t recommend, we recommend strongly against, putting this into a CISC working group. CISC is a lengthy, slow, opaque, divisive process that consumers and their representatives, such as PIAC, don’t have the capacity to participate in. It's exclusionary, it’s contentious, it’s time consuming and it’s unnecessary for your purposes.

3244 And so what’s the point of all this information that we are seeking and other intervenors are seeking? It’s to put it into a consistent format that allows a comparison and a persistent format that enables customers to hold their service provider to account when service falls below what was provided.

3245 That’s our presentation. We explained why you should mandate standardized broadband information disclosure, why you must mandate standardized, persistent broadband information disclosure, and how you can go about doing that.

3246 Parliamentarians want broadband disclosure and policies that empower consumers and Canadians want it, too.

3247 THE CHAIRPERSON: Excellent. Thank you very much for both your participation in the process up to the point and for being here with us at the very end of the oral hearing. We appreciate it greatly.

3248 I’m going to kick off the questioning, and I can assure you that I’ve had the legislation open in front of me throughout, so why don’t we start there because the language that the legislation uses is “typical download and upload speeds”. Eventually we’ll need to get to a specific methodology, but I don’t think, during the course of the hearing, we’ve even reached kind of a ‑‑ we haven’t yet established it as a defined term.

3249 Do you have a definition of typical download and upload speeds or do you have thoughts to leave us with as we look to define “typical”?

3250 MR. WHITE: We have a lot of thoughts on pretty much everything that is in issue today, including subscription ratios and so on, and perhaps Tahira can jump in as well.

3251 The problem seems to be ‑‑ well, the problem is Canadians aren’t getting the speeds that they’re signing up for and the “get out of jail” card seems to be speeds of “up to”, and then there’s this trend or tendency of under‑performance. And that is mostly because of over‑subscription, too many users on a fixed scarce resource.

3252 And so we think an elegant solution to this ‑‑ because we are talking about consumer protection; you want to get what you pay for ‑‑ is you put an obligation, a condition of service on the service provider, that says you must provide minimum guaranteed speeds in the parameters of upload, download, jitter, packet loss, latency, whatever. And we’ll talk about ‑‑ and price has to be part of this, by the way, but we’re talking about service attributes right now.

3253 We believe minimum allows this ‑‑ sets the floor, it sets the minimum expectation for what you’re signing up for and paying for. It allows for the network to upgrade over time and speeds to increase, et cetera, but it’s that floor, and it’s that floor that sets the recourse when you think about monitoring, enforcement and bilateral disputes that would go to CCTS.

3254 THE CHAIRPERSON: So the construction would be then kind of 100 percent of the time you’re able to deliver at least this speed?

3255 MR. WHITE: Correct.

3256 THE CHAIRPERSON: Okay. And then kind of the other half of the equation in the legislation because it does speak to peak periods, we’ve got views on a fixed peak period versus kind of a floating peak period or whatever any given provider’s actual peak period is. Do you have a view on which would be more supportive for consumers?

3257 MR. WHITE: We do have a view on how the Commission ‑‑ how we recommend the Commission go about defining that.

3258 I want to take the opportunity, though, before Ms. Dawood helps you with that one just to say, generally, you hear a lot of requests for flexibility and we say not all of that. Flexibility totally undermines the purpose of a standardized information program and could easily lead to confusion and trickery that results in nothing getting accomplished.

3259 So Tahira, what have you got to say on peak period?

3260 MS. DAWOOD: Yes, thank you for the question, Vice‑Commissioner Adam Scott. I got the designation right this time.

3261 Yes. So for peak periods, in our submission in response to question 3 at para 19, we recommended that the Commission must require ISPs to provide typical speeds, which are basically an average speed, but also we recommended that ISPs must be required to provide speeds on an hourly basis, that each hour what the speed looks like.

3262 This is not something completely new or unique that’s going to be required of ISPs over here. The Australian Commission ‑‑ the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has been providing charts which are similar to that that break down speed on an hourly basis and we have included a prototype, a graph in our submission to show how that would work.

3263 Why we recommend that is important to include speed on an hourly basis is because times have changed, especially since the pandemic. A lot of people have been working from home, studying from home. It may not be such a trend at this point of time as it was before, but still, trends have changed. The peak periods for consumers vary now.

3264 It’s not like all consumers are going to work and then at home, coming in the evening, and that’s where the congestion might be the highest. So the Commission has to take into account the changing times, the changing consumer preferences when thinking about peak periods, and that’s why we think it is useful to have a chart where, you know, the speeds are demonstrated on an hourly basis.

3265 Another thing is that also, you know, my colleague was pointing out that for rural and remote regions, the usage is different than it might be for an urban setup, and that’s also the reason why peak periods might have a more variable definition.

3266 And the last thing I would say on this point is that when it comes to like peak periods and providing an hourly basis diagram or a chart for that, the consumers can see, okay, what does ‑‑ you know, how is my internet speed going to be from 2 o’clock to 4 o’clock. That’s the time I really need my internet because my child comes home and I need to do homework with my child.

3267 So having a breakdown of an hourly basis is what’s going to actually help consumers make well‑informed decisions as to what would work for them or what would not work for them.

3268 Thank you.

3269 MR. WHITE: This important idea of peak period and network congestion, it evokes a narrative from the industry that is ‑‑ contradicts ‑‑ a contradictory narrative from the industry, which is, well, we’re doing this anyway and we have all this data. And they do.

3270 They tell us about the 24/7 network operating centres. They talk about thousands of streams of 24/7 telemetric ‑‑ telemetry and then they say and we do ‑‑ we provide this information already, but when the question was asked, “Why don’t you do this?”, “Oh, well, we can’t. It’s too complicated and it’s going to add a lot of cost”.

3271 They have this information. They are ‑‑ their number one job is to be network operators. It is the lifeblood of their business, and so that goes to both it’s here, it’s available, it can be done, they say it’s been done, and that goes to the issue of costs, how much of a burden this is going to be. They say, “We can’t answer this question. It’s on spec. We don’t know. You didn’t tell us what this is about”.

3272 We know what this is about because most parties have developed a consensus around it’s download speed, it’s upload speed, it’s latency, jitter, packet loss. We’ve added in ‑‑ we’ve talked about price. PIAC here, we’re adding in a reference to CCTS.

3273 You can kill many birds with one stone here and it’s not like the nutrition labels on the four bottles of salad here, and I hope we get a chance to talk about these salad dressing. It’s not like the nutrition labels here that are fixed. These are digital. There are ways to make them permanent, obviously, through QR codes, accessible QR codes, and indeed, we want to make this permanent, we want to make sure it’s available. And so that’s our main submission in addition to this fine technical point is the information is there. It’s a question of getting it out to customers.

3274 MS. DAWOOD: Sorry. I just wanted to add to Geoff's point just one more thing on peak periods is that we would strongly recommend against leaving the definition of peak periods to like the ISPs to determine or, you know, to have a flexible criteria for, you know, peak periods because there is a risk that that could significantly vary and then consumers might be left with a confusing set of, you know, metrics to look at. So we want something which is clear for consumers and consistent and uniform, and so we would strongly recommend against leaving it on the ISPs to define peak period. It should come, if at all, from the Commission.

3275 Thank you.

3276 MR. WHITE: And I’m sorry to interject one more time, Vice‑Chair Scott, but this is very important to us. We’ve been fighting for this for years and we feel like we’re cautiously optimistic that the Commission’s going to do a right thing.

3277 But you want practical guidance in terms of how this is going to look and you want an elegant solution in terms of peak periods. For the broadband information label I would include daytime and nighttime as the expectation. Those are two relatable periods of the day that can account for those who telework during the day, those who may have a more busy telecommunication need at night because of kids and school and streaming and all that.

3278 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.

3279 So yeah, you kind of opened the door to a line of questioning about how to operationalize these types of things or how to package this information that you’re saying exists. We won’t debate it, but how to package it is at least as interesting.

3280 So if we were to do something like hour by hour reporting on actual speeds, at what geographic granularity would that be sampled? Is that the speed in my neighbourhood, and how frequently are we sampling?

3281 Like at what geographic granularity and at what sampling frequency should that be made available to consumers?

3282 MR. WHITE: Absolutely. And I really appreciate the questions about how we’re going to operationalize this because we also have thoughts on how do you actually, as an institution, as a quasi‑judicial body, how you go about this. Is it a regulatory policy, is it an amendment to the Codes, whatever?

3283 So we’ve recommended today as our elegant solution number 1 is that you put a minimum guaranteed speed on as the level download ‑‑ as the minimum rather than an “up to” to get rid of the “get out jail free” card, which is causing consumer grief, causing CCTS complaints, and, need I remind you, that CCTS complaints as Commissioner Maker has said, it’s only the tip of the iceberg, partly because most Canadians don’t know CCTS exists, many Canadians can’t be bothered to go to CCTS.

3284 But where there’s smoke there’s fire on this issue of quality of service, and so when you set a minimum guaranteed download/upload, that sets the base expectation.

3285 In terms of the level of geographic granularity, I believe it was my friends at Cogeco saying it’s province‑wide. I believe other service providers saying it’s more geographic. Ideally, because the nodes are more geographically dispersed, you would want the label to reflect that ‑‑ the geographic difference. And that also honours the often different experience of rural or remote users who do tend to experience more of these quality of service, service reliability issues.

3286 So we would recommend that ‑‑ we would suggest to you, and the record bears this out, that the detailed granular network telemetry is there and the record bears out that, well, we always provide these speeds. It’s the way we do it.

3287 We think that warrants the most granular level for it to be the most useful.

3288 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.

3289 I do want to move next to additional technical metrics and, really, in the context of at what point does additional information become too much information.

3290 Totally agree with you, could not agree more strongly that customers aren’t stupid. I’m a customer. I’m not stupid, either. But even I can be overwhelmed sometimes.

3291 Is there a point at which adding more and more line items of technical information does detract from those that are most of interest to consumers?

3292 And like I’m not asking from the perspective of the burden or the challenge it imposes on the carrier. Strictly from the customer’s point of view, does too much become too much?

3293 MR. WHITE: Yeah, yeah. Thanks for the question.

3294 I am not accusing you nor suggesting that you’re playing into any trap. I think what I’ve heard is an acknowledgement or we assert that, as advocates for the public interest, there is very much the narrative that consumers are stupid, okay.

3295 The reality is, I suggest, sir, you don’t know the answer to that question about how much is too much, and I am going to bring up my salad bottles, okay ‑‑ my salad dressing bottles. And I’m going to refer my friends in the ‑‑ with visibility issues on the cover of our oral remarks there’s a picture from my local grocery store in Chelsea, Quebec of the salad dressing with dozens and dozens of choices.

3296 And there’s described ‑‑ text to describe what that is, about how there’s prices are clearly ‑‑ and I brought four bottles of salad dressing here to illustrate some points.

3297 You can see the nutritional labels on all four of them, and I’ll show you number 1 here. This is President’s Choice. This is the Bell and the Telus, okay. They’ve got nutritional label.

3298 This is the Quebecor or the Cogeco. This is headquartered in Trois Rivières, Quebec, and more of a local ‑‑ available more in local shops.

3299 This is the big bad American owned company Kraft that says it’s produced in Canada, but you know, the shareholder dividends go back to the U.S. It has nutritional labels on it.

3300 And this is Les Fougeres, a beautiful restaurant just down the road from me in Chelsea, Quebec. They produce salad dressing, the only one type, and they sell it in store but because it’s a retail product they put nutritional information on it.

3301 It’s standardized information across the board. You know what the ingredients are, you know what the price is, and you know what the quality of certain nutrients are prescribed by the regulator.

3302 Now, does every Canadian understand the role of trans fat versus saturated fat? I doubt that. What the average allotment of carbohydrates should be in one’s diet? No. But this over decades, since the nineties ‑‑ well, seventies, has set the baseline for people to be able to compare. And there is a lot of comparison if you look in the grocery store. A lot of people are looking not at price. They’re also looking for nutrition.

3303 Someone in my immediate family needs a kidney transplant within the next two years and I’m the chief shopper and chief cook, so I ‑‑ sodium and protein are our enemy, so I look for those two things. That’s not to say other shoppers aren’t looking for everything else, but a lot of people are more health conscious.

3304 And to think ‑‑ do you think 60 years ago everybody understood the role of sodium in their life or in their diet, carbohydrates, vitamin A, vitamin C?

3305 And I hate to take this analogy. Ben Class was wary of taking the analogy too far and so am I, but I think it’s important to show, well, there’s a lot more choice in salad dressings. It’s far less of a commodity than, I would argue, telecom bits over transmission wires are. Small producers are bound by the regulation and nobody in Canada seems to be complaining about nutrition labels and consumers seem to be using them.

3306 So I’m going to go back to my earlier submission, which I don’t think you know the answer to the question about what’s too much. What you do have from the record of those wanting to see you fulfil Parliament’s will is consensus around speeds and the three technical characteristics of latency, jitter, packet loss and, of course, and we argue for it, over‑subscription ratio.

3307 And on that last point, there’s a number of service providers trying to tell you, consumers, oh my god, they’re going to be overloaded with over‑subscription ratios. I mean, that’s nonsense.

3308 Over‑subscription ratio is when you’re standing in line for 10 toilets at Ottawa Bluesfest and there’s 50 people. The fist 10 people are going to have a good experience. If you’re customer number 11, your experience is going to be worse.

3309 It’s a shared resource. The more draws you put on the shared resource, the lower it gets, so I think consumers ought to know that just ‑‑ that something they’re paying for has a guaranteed speed, the minimum guaranteed speed, and that it is being over‑subscribed at X ratio.

3310 Again, that can be provided and that allows room for growth to the extent that the network becomes more efficient over time or to the extent that the population changes, et cetera.

3311 MS. DAWOOD: I just want to quickly add to it. Thank you. That, you know, it’s all about organization. You know, it’s not about the amount of information that you’re going to be putting into the label. It is also how that information is presented and organized. That’s the key.

3312 And it’s not about overwhelming the consumer. Every consumer is different and it is possible the average consumer may not need that much detail, but some consumers might. And so the choice should be on the consumers as to what information they want to refer to, but it should be presented in a way that is clear so that it is not overwhelming for anyone to look at.

3313 Thank you.

3314 MR. WHITE: May I just zoom out for a minute on this issue of technical specifications, why are we talking about technical specifications?

3315 We’re ‑‑ that discussion still seems very much anchored in the making it easier for consumers to shop for internet service, which is an aspect of this hearing. But I suggest to you that this is also about making it easier for consumers to hold their service provider to account.

3316 And there’s a value in having this information out there. There’s a value in being able to have a remedy by going to the CCTS if your service that you’re paying for is below standard. There’s a value in having that information. And there’s an overall meta benefit to having this information out there in terms of raising digital literacy, but also putting pressure on service providers to actually back up their guarantees of minimum service by actually providing. And we think that’s inherently consistent with what you need to do as a regulator in pursuit of the 2023 Policy Direction.

3317 More information, more attention to service quality. That’s totally responsive to consumer interests, affordability and information because this gives customers the ability to go to CCTS and say, “I’ve got a problem here”.

3318 And the companies don’t like when a CCTS. It’s costly, it’s time consuming. The statistics are embarrassing to them.

3319 So if you can have more recourse, it’s going to put pressure on the companies to do better by consumers.

3320 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.

3321 Telus is one of the companies that proposed including disclosure of the technology type as part of the labelling. Are there inherent characteristics of technology type such that disclosing technology type might do part of the lift in terms of setting expectations of other technical measures? So in other words, if I know I’m getting a fibre ‑‑ if I know I’ve got a fibre to the home communication, does that inform me or establish for me certain expectations with regards to latency, jitter, speed, or do we need ‑‑ does it not serve that function?

3322 MR. WHITE: I heard various industry colleagues talk about pros and cons to that and one argument being we need to be sort of technology neutral and forcing the disclosure of this might prejudice one technology over another.

3323 I don’t think that’s the case, and I suggest to you it’s not the case on the basis that what we’re asking for is neutral information. It may be ‑‑ it may be a stereotype that fixed wireless access ‑‑ and I know SSi has a problem with that term.

3324 It may be a stereotype that fixed wireless is not as reliable as fibre.

3325 I think what the goal ‑‑ one of the goals here is really to get that information. It’s product information. It’s an ingredient to the end product, and so I see no harm in including that.

3326 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thanks.

3327 So the FCC nutritional label style ‑‑ or nutritional style label has obviously been mentioned many times. Some people like it, some people don’t. We’re not stuck in a binary world where we take it or leave it. We could take inspiration from it and improve upon it.

3328 If we were to take that as kind of a starting point beyond just the line items that ought to be included, do you have any other suggestions on how we could build upon what they’ve established and make it more relevant to Canada or even just a straight‑up improvement across the board?

3329 MR. WHITE: At the highest level, I really think it's time to stop comparing what the Canadian regulator does to what the U.S. does. I am looking at Chairman Kerr of the FCC’s remarks, his press release in re “Delete Delete Delete” docket talking about under President Trump’s leadership the administration is unleashing a new wave of economic opportunity by ending the regulatory onslaught from Washington, he says.

3330 He goes on and on and on about how they are going to deregulate to focus on alleviating the burden on innovators, entrepreneurs, and small businesses. That’s not a consumer focus.

3331 I think what’s going to happen in the U.S. ‑‑ first of all, the rule of law is on its deathbed in the United States. Secondly, if I read “In re: Delete, Delete, Delete” docket properly, broadband labels are going to go away. It was a good starting point but there’s a question of, how well has it worked? The answer is, nobody seems to have a great, comprehensive answer about how it worked. But one of our ending messages, and one of my messages in the CanCon proceeding is, you really need to dare to be different here.

3332 So, that’s a starting point, but we and other public interest intervenors and academics have given you the ingredients for our broadband label that will work. And that does include price, which was the FCC’s focus.

3333 MS. DAWOOD: I just want to quickly add to that, thank you, that the Commission should be looking at what the consumers have said with respect to having a nutrition‑type label in Canada, and the POR report indicates that a lot of consumers are supportive of having a nutrition‑type label for broadband services. So, it’s not really about what FCC is doing, or what has worked in the U.S.; it’s about Canadians and what Canadian consumers want, and if the POR report is also indicating that consumers are supportive of having a nutrition‑type label and would find it helpful, that should be good reason ‑‑ or actually a very strong reason ‑‑ for the Commission to consider having something similar here in Canada. Thank you.

3334 MR. GOLDBERG: Might I just add something? So, looking into it and ‑‑ you know, there has been talk by other intervenors about perhaps there is a low click rate on these FCC labels, and so in response to that, some of our ‑‑ just looking around, there is very little ‑‑ there seems to be no quantitative data on the reception of the FCC’s labels right now, but what seems to be a recurring problem amongst consumers is that there is an awareness and visibility problem.

3335 So, one way in which these labels could and should be different from the FCC’s labels is that they there should be better visibility and mandated forms of visibility so that consumers can easily access these labels. So, that’s just one element that perhaps could be different.

3336 MS. DAWOOD: And just to add to what Josh said, that the Commission, when considering the standardizing of labels and how it’s going to work, should also very, very strongly consider as to how to standardize or include standards on how these labels are displayed, as well. Thank you.

3337 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thanks. Last question from me is on the topic of pricing, and in particular consumers being surprised by changes in their bill. Is there anything we could do within the context of this proceeding and the decision that will result that would reduce instances of consumers being surprised or shocked by a change in the bill that they didn’t see coming? How could we better require pricing to be reported, so consumers don’t get those types of nasty surprises?

3338 MR. WHITE: I recognize that perhaps ‑‑ well, we’re here today and we didn’t look at the Codes or CCTS’s mandate; we’re sort of looking at this in a different sequencing manner, in terms of where could you put this obligation? I understand there’s been a lot of discussion about the Critical Information Summary, but clearly there is an ongoing problem there, which Commissioner Maker talks about the mismatch between the customer thought they were getting and then what happens, and then the breakdown in the customer relationship.

3339 We do think price is a topline item, if you are going to visualize a nutrition label. It is a topline item. It’s the guaranteed price, much like there is a minimum on guaranteed speed; it’s the all‑in price, post promotion. The all‑in price, post promotion ‑‑ because it’s often promotions and the falling away of promotions ‑‑ time‑limited incentives to get someone in ‑‑ that tends to generate a lot of traffic over to CCTS.

3340 MS. DAWOOD: And just because I’ve heard from some of the IPS suggesting that, “We already provide all this information based on the Internet Code and the requirements laid out in that Code,” but that’s not a good enough reason for them to not include this information in the labels as well. If it’s the same information that has to go through these two different mediums, then they should be provided to the consumers.

3341 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you. I am going to stop there and turn to Commissioner Paquette for the next questions.

3342 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: Thank you. Just one question, and it’s the same question that I asked the Competition Bureau just before you. So, you recommend that some additional technical metrics appear on the label, and that there should constitute a minimum guaranteed. Would the nutritional label of, as an example, salad dressing ‑‑ there is no need for minimum guaranteed because the information is easy to measure and verify. It’s a question of percentage of sugar, percentage of cholesterol, and it’s data that can be very easily measured ‑‑ well, “very” I don’t know, but that can be measured.

3343 When it comes to the quality of an internet connection, we hear that it can be difficult to measure and inconsistent ‑‑ like, inside a network, there are many factors that can influence, and it depends on who controls the network, it depends on the setup inside the home. And you mentioned that this is about the consumer making their service provider be held to account. But isn't there a danger in requiring information that we cannot easily measure and verify, and therefore that is not easily enforceable? Is there a danger in regulating in this context?

3344 MR. WHITE: I appreciate your question, Commissioner Paquette, and I noticed that you have asked this question and used the word “danger” a lot, and I am going to suggest to you that the danger to this Commission vis‑à‑vis it following Parliament’s will and also it wanting to maintain its legitimacy as a regulator ‑‑ the danger is in actually giving in to untested industry claims about this not being possible. I’ve talked to you about the doublespeak about how “we provide these levels already, we are already doing it, yet we can’t do this and we don’t want to do it.”

3345 As to the specific question, this is measurable. The telemetry exists 24/7 in the network operation centres. It has to exist. It has to exist for them to be able to say, “Well, we know what’s going on with our networks and we know exactly what we’re providing.” The speed is into the home through a ‑‑ generally it’s a router or it’s a portable device that we saw from SSi Micro. That’s where the speed gets measured. Certainly there could be factors impacting the device end‑user, but the test goes on the router, the provisioning into the home. That is objectively measurable. It is objectively known to the service providers.

3346 And when is this really going to matter? It’s going to matter in raising the game of Canadians’ digital literacy over time, just like nutrition labels; at first, nobody really thought about trans fat and sodium and all that stuff. There’s a lot more nutritional literacy in Canada. This is going to raise the game of Canadians in terms of being able to hold their service provider to account, and where is this really going to matter? And why ‑‑ why might the industry be really afraid of this mandate?

3347 This is speculation on my part, for the record, but outages seem to be a big problem in the industry. Massive outages, affecting hundreds of thousands of customers, if not more. And if there has to be compensation for outages as a result, or CCTS gets hundreds of thousands of complaints, there has to be recourse. There is going to be a penalty for these service providers to pay ‑‑ and that’s ultimately about raising the game of the Canadian telecommunications industry to respond, as the Act requires, to the social and economic needs of the users.

3348 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you, Commissioner. We will go to Commissioner Abramson next.

3349 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thank you, and thanks for being here and bringing salad dressing.

3350 Let me push you a little bit on where you were just now, and make sure we have your full views on the record.

3351 Are some ISPs too small to be saddled with continuous measurement of some things?

3352 MR. WHITE: No, and we caution against the Commission doing any carve‑outs. As you heard from our peers at the Bureau, this is a consumer empowerment tool. It’s more useful, the more widespread it is. This is a salad produced by one restaurant, and they do the labels. And this is not information, by the way ‑‑ it’s nutritional facts; that’s what it says. And I suggest to you that the information about network quality and speed ‑‑ those are facts, too. There are standards. There are service standards, deep service standards here. So, carving anyone out of this would be a huge mistake.

3353 I do not overestimate the burden of this. In order to operate a network, you need to have control over those quality of service metrics in the first place. I don’t know how you can provide any form of connectivity without knowing how fast packets are moving or what equipment is on the other end. And it runs the risk, and it’s the error with the Internet Code ‑‑ you’ve carved out ‑‑ what did Mr. Maker say? There’s 270 companies in CCTS ‑‑ 270 member companies, but only 60 are bound by the Internet Code.

3354 Like, what does that say to those users of the smaller service providers ‑‑ that they don’t benefit of the protection. It’s wrong, really, and we’re here to speak up, not just for the average Canadian; we are here on behalf of vulnerable Canadians too, and that sometimes can include Canadians in rural, remote areas. They need the benefit of this protection.

3355 The small service providers ‑‑ they have to know these things to begin with. It’s a standardized format. They don’t need to develop it themselves. We are putting on the table what it should look like. The Commission has technical resources to design the formatting of it and all that, but absolutely ‑‑ absolutely not should there be any exclusions. Or let me put it more positively: No exclusions. No flexibility. It’s exclusions and flexibility in CRTC rules that cause problems for consumers.

3356 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: I guess you are saying, look, cost is actually low, and also benefit is high. Does the benefit vary with the number of subscribers? Is the benefit less in ordering an ISP with 100 customers than it is in ordering one of the ISPs that has shown up at this hearing to do this?

3357 MR. WHITE: There is a bilateral or an individualized benefit that comes from having the same level of consumer protection no matter who you are or where you are, or who you subscribe to in Canada. And there is a social benefit to us as a nation, the same way the price of a stamp is the same no matter where you are. You know, we have some baselines in Canada. We do have some social supports.

3358 I really do suggest to you not to buy into the notion that this is too expensive, when numerous service providers told you they already have this data. We are just trying to convince you that it can be packaged, made permanent, and can be used not just to shop, but to go to CCTS and get compensation when you don’t get a service that you signed up for.

3359 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: And by extension, in considering which if any service quality metrics to mandate, should be thinking about the cost of layering on more and more? Or by the same logic, are you saying they’re all low‑cost and we shouldn’t need to consider that?

3360 MR. WHITE: Well, we are not talking about an extensive amount of information here. Should I count them out? One, all‑in prices, before or after promotional discounts. Minimum guaranteed download speed ‑‑ that’s number two. Minimum guaranteed upload speed, three. Peak period during the day, peak period during the evening, that’s five. And then, three quality of service metrics. That’s eight lines on a nutrition label, with a QR code ‑‑ or a couple words around “Got a problem? Talk to your service provider. Can’t resolve it? Go to CCTS.” This is not complicated. The data exists. The service providers said it exists. It’s about packaging that up.

3361 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thank you. You highlighted the importance, in your view, of making these labels persistently available ‑‑ a word which we’ve heard and which I’ve returned to with a number of intervenors. Concretely, what does that look like? Is that making it available in a customer portal, for companies that have customer portals? What would you like to see us do in terms of building requirements that would result in persistence?

3362 MR. WHITE: Yes, that is right. I actually thought “persistent” was your word, Commissioner Abramson. “Persistent” means it could be a part of the Critical Information Summary that’s provided, and of course made available online in the portal, and you can use distributed ledger or sort of a bitcoin style way of tracking this to make sure it’s unique. The technology is there to individualize these pieces of information to store them so that they can be referred to as part of a CCTS investigation.

3363 We haven’t gone too far into that, but I did get the impression that CCTS was saying, “Yeah, we can do this. We sort of do it already, but we can really do this when we look into what was promised and then what was actually happening.” And that’s it’s for. That’s why this needs to be persistent ‑‑ so that it’s there, it’s unalterable, and consumers ‑‑ you’ve heard this in other proceedings where CCTS comes before you; they say that it’s often the company says versus customer says, and customers don’t often have the best records. But to the extent that this information is digitized permanently, that gives customers a let up in having bilateral disputes with their service provider before CCTS.

3364 MS. DAWOOD: I just want to quickly add to that, that digital formats in portals ‑‑ it’s very important, and we totally agree on that, but also it’s important that they are different formats. The information is available in different formats at any point in time if the consumers are, for instance, facing any disabilities where they don’t have access to internet at all times, it is important that that persistent information is available even in different formats, so that different consumers’ needs are met. Thank you.

3365 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Okay. Those are my questions. Thank you.

3366 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you, and we will go to Commissioner Naidoo next.

3367 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Thank you. I saw you sitting in the room, so I know that you heard me ask this question of some of the other intervenors, and I know you were here for some of the hearing. So, many ISP in the hearing, as you know, have talked about how providing standardized labels, in their view, would just simply be too costly. OpenMedia, you probably heard, responded to that and basically said that they didn’t view it as a cost issue rather than a consumer investment issue.

3368 So, I’m wondering. I want to put that question to you. Have you been given any insight at all as to how costly it would be ‑‑ not just that it’s costly, but some sort of idea as to what the costs would involve? And should the cost of labels to help with consumer understanding and transparency, in your view, be considered the price of doing business for ISPs?

3369 MR. WHITE: Yes. In fact, we have monitored every single minute of this proceeding with the exception of when my home internet went down, or in perhaps the odd biological break. I have tried to answer this question in some of my responses to other related points.

3370 So, the industry has a habit of threatening network investment and consumer price raises as a result of anything the Commission asks it to do, and the industry also has a habit of talking about the incredible regulatory burden that is imposed upon telecom service providers. And I would like to push back on that. As you know, telecom is largely deregulated. We don’t regulate the price. You have to participate in CCTS. You have to follow the ITMP framework. There are four Codes of Conduct; hopefully one someday. And there is outage reporting. There are some other things there, and BITS registration, but the burden is so minimal compared to the way it was years ago. And the oversight really is quite limited. So, let me push back on that.

3371 As to the financial costs ‑‑ so, I did not see a single piece of evidence put forward to quantify it. I heard excuses for why it couldn’t be quantified ‑‑ that this was on spec ‑‑ “Well, you haven’t told us what the requirement is.” I think that should not have the effect ‑‑ it could have the effect though, of delaying this Commission from actually doing the right thing for Canadians and coming out with broadband labels, because it’s very clear, the record  ‑‑ there is a consensus, I suggest to you, about what the non‑industry intervenors, including Mr. Hudson ‑‑ what we want to see. And I enumerated them on my hand to Commissioner Abramson ‑‑ these eight factors. I think there is a consensus about that. So, that’s what it looks like.

3372 The industry has that cost. The industry has also told you that they have all this information already. How costly would it be to package information that exists, that is at‑hand? That’s a question for them. But I don’t want their non‑answer, which I believe could be designed to have the effect of delaying you from actually doing anything and then kicking this into CISC for three years to rot, or doing something else, or more RFIs, because if you ask them how much it’s going to cost in RFIs, they are going to overengineer everything and make it seem costly, to try to push you off doing this.

3373 So, if this does cost a lot ‑‑ and I don’t know what would that, in terms of a metric ‑‑ there is a cost to participate in CCTS, there is a cost to be involved in this business, and at the end of the day, I conclude this is a cost of doing business, just like the little restaurant down the road; they had to produce a nutrition label. That is a cost. It’s an expectation in our society. People want to know what they’re buying and putting into their bodies. The same thing needs to apply, because Parliament said, and because we’ve been arguing for it for years ‑‑ you want to be an advanced digital society in Canada? We want to stand out from our peer nations in terms of a digital society and a digital economy? Let’s be bold. Let’s put that information on, regardless of any costs scare tactics.

3374 MS. DAWOOD: Just to ‑‑ sorry, just to quickly add to that, just to end on that, consumers are not asking for something which is too onerous, and even the Commission is not asking for that of ISPs. We are just asking for clear, transparent information and realistic estimates. That’s a legitimate demand from consumers and from the Commission to ISPs, and so ISPs should be able to respond to that in a positive manner. But because they are in this business ‑‑ I was going to say exactly the same thing, it’s just the same ‑‑ this is the cost of doing business.

3375 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: All right. Thank you both so much for that. That is all my questions.

3376 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thanks. We will go to Commissioner Desmond, please.

3377 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Thank you. Just a couple of small questions.

3378 Earlier today, we heard from SSi, that has developed this sort of self‑serve menu which  ‑‑ I’m not sure if you heard the conversation related to that, but to me, that’s a little bit of innovation, and it’s not something we want to stand in the way of. We asked the same question of the Competition Bureau, and I think their response was they probably have the technology to design pre‑sale information for each option. But to me, that sounded a little bit complicated. I mean, I’d like to hear your view on how a provider that has been innovative and has come up with a self‑serve menu option, so you can choose what you want ‑‑ how would that fit within a broadband label?

3379 MR. WHITE: It can fit because we are dealing with statistics. Fundamentally, we are dealing with information that exists. And we are dealing with contracts between customers that set out expectations, service in exchange for money. The information exists, and I did not see any technical obstacles to that being possible. I didn’t see any policy options. I do not see any policy options for why their customers deserve to be exempt from what should be a nationwide base standard of consumer protection and recourse.

3380 I heard concerns about the mobile nature of their service offerings, and I understand that they may be a little bit different, because the Codes don’t necessarily apply to them because they are more of a pay‑per‑use provider. There is no problem with that service provider, first of all; that’s a problem with our consumer Codes. But there is nothing  ‑‑ just like contracts are between a customer and the service provider, there is no technical impediment to crystallizing that in a permanent digital form that provides a baseline guarantee of what your minimum speeds will be, even if that device is mobile. It could be disclosed.

3381 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Okay, thank you. Oh, I'm sorry.

3382 MS. DAWOOD: I just wanted to add that, you know, when it comes to, like, you know, the far North and the different regions in the far North, PIAC has participated in numerous proceedings regarding far North. And I think what is important to consider when looking at different ISPs across different regions is the consumers. Northern consumers, like what is important for them? Not just what can be done by the different ISPs, and just like Geoff has already pointed out with respect to what ISPs should be required to do. But I think it's important that Northern consumers are not left out of the protections that are available to the rest of Canadians. Thank you.

3383 MR. WHITE: It was a bit strange, though. I had to look back, because I heard some submissions that it's sort of like, Let us compete; it's competitive in the North. But that very same party, as part of the 2023‑147 proceeding, was making arguments about how it's not competitive. So I'm not sure which one is true.

3384 I know what PIAC's position is, that it's not competitive, and that all consumers deserve the same set of rules across Canada regardless of the technology they use, the service provider they use. That's what's fair.

3385 And what's the problem we're trying to solve here, Commissioner Abramson? The problem we're trying to solve here, there's an institutional one, which is how does the Commission honour Parliament's intent and preserve its institutional legitimacy. But the problem is how does the Commission make sure that Canadian Internet subscribers are treated fairly, and when something goes wrong, they have a way to get recourse? That's the problem we're trying to solve.

3386 We've offered our ‑‑ we've been advocating for this solution for years. Parliament is more specifically directing you to do it. You already had the power to do it. And I think I'd like to recommend that this result in a telecom regulatory policy and not a CISC endeavour. This can be implemented, and I recommend that you do that in a timely manner.

3387 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Thank you.

3388 THE CHAIRPERSON: We are going to circle back to Commissioner Abramson for one more question.

3389 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Yeah, I had another one on my dance card that I didn't dance with.

3390 You mentioned ‑‑ actually, it's going to be a couple. There will be a follow‑up. But you mentioned all ISPs ought to do this. And are there any special considerations as to how we go about doing it? And I'm thinking of wholesale‑based, HSA‑based service providers here. I know that in the past they've argued ‑‑ and we unfortunately don't have HSA‑based providers here at this hearing or at least at the appearing portion of this hearing to speak to it. But is there anything in particular as to how we design the nutritional labels that you're asking us to, in the event we do, that we should think about in order to take into account the circumstances and service delivery model of wholesale highspeed access?

3391 MR. WHITE: Yes. I think it is unfortunate TekSavvy wasn't here.

3392 But the solution, I think, looks somewhat like the competitor quality of service regime. And the primary, like the regulatory obligation ‑‑ not being divided, but you know, it applies to the primary ISP to provide that information to make it available. There needs to be an interface, obviously, between the secondary ISP and, like a TekSavvy, and the primary. But I think technically speaking, yes, you may need to account for it.

3393 But what I want you to get from us is that it is possible. It's a technical ‑‑ it is a variation on service delivery. We've said to you we want customers of all ISPs in Canada, regardless of size ‑‑ and I want to be clear, all ISPs in Canada, regardless of size ‑‑ to provide the same information on a persistent basis. There needs to be a technical interface there between the two service providers, but it should be done.

3394 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thanks. And then the follow‑up that I promised is simply one that will bring us full circle, because I think it's a question I asked very early on. But as you know, and you've referred back to the language of the legislation, in 24.2(2), the specific obligation, you've argued that we can and ought to go beyond specifically what we're obligated to do. But the language that Parliament inserted talked about a Canadian carrier, and they chose to use that language rather than telecommunication service provider. Should anything turn on that, that linguistic choice, in your view?

3395 MR. WHITE: No, absolutely not, sir, because you have 24.1, which ‑‑ let me pull it out ‑‑ 24.1 is your jurisdiction over non‑carriers.

3396 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: And I want to be clear. We have the ability to go beyond it, and I recognize that.

3397 MR. WHITE: Okay.

3398 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: I'm just asking whether anything ought to turn to the fact that they chose to structure that obligation in this way.

3399 MR. WHITE: I don't think Josh, our new articling student, has the answer. He did a lot of research on legislative intent.

3400 But if I'm going to construe the words of Parliament in real time about this issue, and I remember you asking it as well, I think ‑‑ I assert if you read that provision in conjunction with the 2023 policy direction, which, among other things, including the health of the industry and efficiency and regulatory burden, also talks about the very things at issue here, which is, you know, enhancing consumer rights and recourse and making it better for customers. So I think those two plus 24.1, you have everything you need. And like I said, you didn't need 24 ‑‑ is it 24.2 or sub (2)? ‑‑ anyway, the provision, you didn't need it. You had it already under section 24, conditions of licence, which is the one provision ‑‑ one of the rare provisions the Commission has not forborne from.

3401 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thank you for including PIAC's views on that on the record.

3402 THE CHAIRPERSON: And with that, we will turn it back to you for any final thoughts you'd like to leave us with.

3403 MR. WHITE: I don't have a Tom Waits lyric. That seemed to be a trend. I'm going to quote Loverboy: “Everybody's working for the weekend.” All right? This has been a great ‑‑ a very good proceeding. I thank you for your attention, your engagement.

3404 I did want to say something for the record. He's my former boss, and I worked with him when I was on the board of CCTS, Howard Maker. He was hired as CCTS's founding commissioner in August of 2008. This is his last year. He's stepping aside from that role. I hope I don't get in trouble with my industry colleagues, especially from big telcos, because we all give ‑‑ we've all given Howard a tough time over the years in our various partisan capacities.

3405 But I'd like to say and I'd like the record to reflect that I think he should be incredibly proud of his legacy at CCTS. He took it from like a two‑people organization to a stable, mature, successful organization. And it weathered numerous storms. And CCTS performs a valuable service, so I would like the record to reflect what I suggest is widespread appreciation for his service.

3406 And with that, I've said enough about the subject matter at hand, and I will wish everyone a good weekend.

3407 THE SECRETARY: Thank you.

3408 Before closing the hearing, we would like to announce key dates for the next steps. Requests for information will be sent to specific intervenors on July 3rd, with a response date of July 30th. Parties will then be able to file final written submissions by August 20th. Attached to Notice of Consultation CRTC 2024‑318 setting out those dates will be published shortly. Thank you.

3409 LE PRÉSIDENT : Tout d'abord, merci d'avoir assisté à cette audience publique.  Les quatre derniers jours ont été très productifs.  Avant de conclure officiellement cette audience, j'aimerais remercier tous les participants de nous avoir fait part de leur point de vue et de leurs expériences.  Vous avez exprimé vos points de vue sur divers sujets allant du type d'information nécessaire pour choisir un forfait Internet jusqu'à la manière la plus claire et efficace de présenter cette information.

3410 Having heard from 19 individuals and groups, including consumer groups or associations, and Internet service providers, I'll try to summarize three key points that were discussed.

3411 First, encouragingly and unsurprisingly, all presenters agreed that it's vitally important that all Canadians, including and especially those who have visual or hearing disabilities, have information on Internet services that is clear, accessible, and easy to understand.

3412 Secondly, this information should include comparable data. We've heard recommendations from both service providers and consumers about what should or shouldn't be made available, such as how we should require that speeds be measured and whether or not other data like latency should be included.

3413 Finally, I think it's safe to say that there are different views over whether the CRTC should prescribe a standardized format to present this information. We've heard well‑reasoned arguments as to the best ways to deliver this information to Canadians.

3414 The discussions that took place over the last four days will significantly inform our work. I think I can speak for the rest of the Panel when I say that you've given us a lot to think about.

3415 Allow me to outline the next steps as we move forward. We will be sending requests for further information to certain parties.

3416 Le CRTC prendra le temps d'analyser l'ensemble du dossier public afin de formuler une décision. Notre objectif est d'aider des consommateurs à pouvoir comparer facilement des forfaits de services Internet afin de faire des choix éclairés

3417 Permettez‑moi de terminer en remerciant encore une fois tous les participants. Merci à tous d'avoir été présents, d'avoir été présents, d'avoir pris le temps de soumettre une intervention et d'avoir participé au processus.

3418 Je vais maintenant clore cette audience publique sur les moyens de rendre le magasinage de services Internet plus simples pour les consommateurs.

3419 Bonne fin de journée à vous tous.

‑‑‑ L'audience se termine à 14 h 35

Sténographes
Deana Johansson
Monique Mahoney
Lynda Johansson
Tania Mahoney
Brian Denton