Winnipeg MP speaks out on telecom companies

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This article was published 12/07/2022 (799 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — Winnipeg MP Raquel Dancho said the Liberals should punish telecom companies that can’t guarantee 911 service, after last Friday’s Rogers outage left millions of Canadians without phone or Internet services.

“Shouldn’t there be consequences, beyond the capital impact of this,” Dancho asked.

Dancho, who represents Kildonan-St. Paul, is the Conservative critic for public safety. She co-wrote a letter calling the outage a “policy failure” that requires a full explanation to Parliament, and a government plan to avoid a repeat.

On Monday, Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne outlined an agreement in which the large telecommunications companies would share resources during a major outage. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission is investigating the cause of the incident.

Dancho said that’s not good enough when people have gone more than 15 hours without being able to call for first responders.

“There clearly is a public safety issue if you can’t call 911,” she said, noting Rogers had another country-wide outage in April 2021.

“This is unacceptable; it’s getting worse.”

Dancho said there should be some sort of punishment, such as a fine, if it happens a third time.

“Shouldn’t there be some consequence from government to companies who fail to institute proper back-ups, particularly for critical services like 911?”

The Tories said the outage is another reason to scrap the requirement for returning Canadians to fill out ArriveCan. That digital form records travellers’ vaccination information, but has had frequent glitches and prompted long lineups at border posts and airport terminals.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca