Telecom - Staff Letter addressed to Jason Ball (Rogers Communications Canada Inc. (“Rogers”))
Ottawa, 10 July 2024
Reference: 8000-C12-202203868
BY EMAIL
Jason Ball
Vice President, Legal
Rogers Communications Canada Inc. (“Rogers”)
1 Mount Pleasant, 4th Floor
Toronto ON M4Y 2Y5
Jason.Ball@rci.rogers.com
Subject: Identifying confidential information in the Xona Report
Dear Jason Ball,
This letter concerns the Xona Partners’ expert report on Rogers’ July 2022 outage.
On 4 July 2024, the Commission published the executive summary of the report. Further, because of the public interest in understanding the cause of the outage and the measures Rogers has taken to improve the reliability and resiliency of its networks, including lessons learned since the outage, the Commission has decided to publish the full report to provide Canadians with as much information as possible.
Commission staff requests that Rogers review the report and identify, by highlighting in yellow, the information in the report that it deems confidential within the scope of paragraphs 39(1)(a) to (c) of the Telecommunications Act. Rogers is to submit a highlighted version of the report together with any claims of confidence to the Commission within 7 days from issuance of this letter, along with justification as to why disclosure of the information would not be in the public interest, including how any specific direct harm that would likely result from the disclosure would outweigh the public interest.
Any claims of confidence will be assessed in light of Rogers’ submission and, in accordance with its normal practices, the Commission may disclose or require the disclosure of information designated as confidential if its disclosure is in the public interest, i.e., where the specific direct harm does not outweigh the public interest in disclosure.
Commission staff acknowledges that on 5 July 2024 and 8 July 2024, it received letters from PIAC and Vaxination Informatique, respectively, requesting disclosure of the full text of the report. Commission staff considers that it would be more efficient to conduct an initial disclosure process with Rogers. Once this has been conducted, interested personswould be in a better position to make tailored arguments addressing specific information that has been redacted. As such, any determination made as a result of the process initiated by this letter to not require disclosure of certain information is not final and can be revisited once this process has been completed.
Given the strong public interest, Commission staff expects Rogers to accede to the disclosure of information on the public record to the maximum extent possible.
Yours sincerely
Original signed by
Noah Moser
Director, Broadband and Network Engineering
Telecommunications Sector
c.c: Howard Slawner, Rogers Communications Canada Inc., Howard.Slawner@rci.rogers.com
Simon-Pierre Olivier, Rogers Communications Canada Inc., Simon-Pierre.Olivier@rci.rogers.com
John Lawford, PIAC, jlawford@piac.ca
Jean-Francois Mezei, Vaxination Informatique, jfmezei@vaxination.ca
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