CRTC orders creation of internet subsidy for northerners

Canada’s internet regulator is creating a monthly subsidy, payable to all northern households, to offset some of the cost of getting online in the North.

The CRTC said on Thursday that prices “are too high,” quality is “far lower and less reliable” than in the south and there is not enough choice of provider.

The regulator is also ordering Northwestel, the North’s dominant provider, to “automatically reduce customers’ bills when internet services are disrupted for 24 hours or more.”

Money you get back will be calculated based on the cost of your package and how long the outage lasted. The order is designed to give Northwestel “a financial incentive to limit the frequency and duration of outages.”

Access to parts of Northwestel’s network will also be made easier for other companies, to “help foster competition and provide more choice” by selling alternative packages using the same infrastructure.

Northwestel initially said it was reviewing the decision. On Friday morning, after this article was first published, the company said it would implement the CRTC’s requested changes and take part in the subsidy consultation.

The company said its staff “share the commission’s view that there are unique and challenging circumstances in serving remote, northern communities.”

Last year, a consortium of northern Indigenous companies said it was in talks to purchase Northwestel from Bell. The status of that purchase is not clear and the CRTC had no update on Thursday, saying it was not involved in the transaction.

How much the monthly subsidy will be worth to each customer is not clear and will be the subject of a public consultation that is now launching. The CRTC said northerners should expect something that bridges the gap between what they now pay and what southerners pay.

The CRTC said residents of the North “on average pay $72 more per month for internet” than the rest of Canada, but only one in five northern households had “internet access that meets their daily needs.” Almost all northern households had experienced at least one outage in the past year.

The subsidy will be paid for from the National Contribution Fund, into which telecoms companies across Canada pay fees.

Cash from the subsidy would be paid to the telecoms company that offers you service, for example Northwestel, and then your bill would be reduced accordingly – with a line on your bill showing how much the subsidy was worth.

Your provider doesn’t have to be Northwestel. “All households in the Far North will be eligible for the subsidy, regardless of their internet provider,” the CRTC stated. That appeared to rule in providers like Starlink, whose services do not vary significantly in cost according to the customer’s location in Canada, though this could not be immediately confirmed.

The North – or the “Far North,” as it was termed by the CRTC – is defined by the regulator as the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and the Yukon, 19 communities in northern British Columbia, and Fort Fitzgerald and High Level, Alberta.

The BC communities included are Atlin, Blueberry, Bob Quinn Lake, Dease Lake, Fort Nelson, Fort St John, Fort Ware (Kwadacha), Good Hope Lake, Iskut, Jade City, Lower Post, Mould Creek, Muncho Lake (Fireside and Liard River), Pink Mountain, Prophet River, Telegraph Creek, Toad River, Upper Halfway, and Wonowon.

A week-long public hearing was held in Whitehorse among other consultations carried out in 2022 and 2023 before the CRTC arrived at Thursday’s announcement. The regulator said it also created its first Indigenous relations team in that time. Submissions were received from more than 300 people and organizations.

The CRTC said it hoped the measures announced on Thursday would reduce inequalities between northerners, including many Indigenous peoples, and people in the south.

Meanwhile, the regulator said work across the sector to ensure northern internet access is resilient in the face of disasters like wildfires was “ongoing.”

One commissioner dissents

One of the CRTC’s commissioners, Claire Anderson, dissented from the commission’s overall decision to create a subsidy.

“I deeply disagree that the most meaningful and effective means of achieving affordable and accessible telecommunications services in the North is to provide a uniform subsidy to all telecommunications service providers,” Anderson wrote. She is the BC and Yukon commissioner and is the first Indigenous Yukon resident to be appointed to the commission.

Anderson said northerners had instead asked for more competition.

She said that while the CRTC is planning steps to further open Northwestel’s network to competitors, those steps were weaker than some of the options available to the commission, which she said should have gone further.

“Competition was viewed as the better approach to facilitating community-based and Indigenous-owned economic opportunities, which in turn would lead to greater local job creation, better service packages, improved customer service and affordability,” she wrote.

“The resounding theme expressed by both Indigenous and local intervenors was that in order for reconciliation to occur, the commission needs to seriously contemplate Indigenous people as owners of telecommunications networks, and not simply as users of those networks,” Anderson continued.

“We heard, again and again, that Indigenous people must be given a seat at the table. That if the commission wants to actually contribute to advancing reconciliation, that this was an opportunity to move beyond the performative acts of ‘hanging art on the walls’ and implement transformative regulatory changes. Unfortunately, the decision [released on Thursday] has seriously stifled that possibility.”