Transcript, Hearing 17 April 2023

Attendees and Location

Held at:

Kwanlin Dün Cultural Centre
Whitehorse, Yukon

Attendees:

• Chairperson: Vicky Eatrides
• Members: Adam Scott, Vice-Chairperson, Telecommunications
  Claire Anderson, Commissioner, British Columbia and Yukon
  Nirmala Naidoo, Commissioner, Alberta and the Northwest Territories
  Ellen Desmond, Commissioner, Atlantic Region and Nunavut
  
• Legal Counsel: Alexander Ly
  Michel Hogan
  Stephanie Willsey
• Secretary: Jade Roy
• Hearing Managers: Celia Millay
  Nicolas Gatto

Table of Contents

Presentations

36 Council of Yukon First Nations

214 Government of the Northwest Territories

461 First Mile Connectivity Consortium

694 G & V global Developments

Undertakings

561 Undertaking

607 Undertaking

Transcript

Whitehorse, Yukon
17 April 2023
Opening of Hearing at 9:30 a.m.

Whitehorse, Yukon

--- Upon commencing on Monday, April 17^th, 2023 at 9:30 a.m.

1 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. It’s great to see you.

2 Let’s begin by acknowledging that we are gathered today on the traditional territory of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta'an Kwäch'än Council counsel. Many joining the hearing virtually today may be situated on different Indigenous lands and I would ask that we reflect on the traditional territory that we are on and pay respect to the Indigenous peoples and their elders. I would now like to call on Kwanlin Dün First Nation Elder Ann Smith, to open this hearing with a traditional prayer. Ann, over to you.

3 ELDER SMITH: Good morning. My name is Ann Smith. I’m from here, born and raised in Whitehorse area. My Indian name is Ashea, it means coming to something that is good. I’m from the Wolf Clan, and we follow my mother’s lineage. That’s how it’s been for our people for generations and we are still here today.

4 I wanted to give you this prayer because I think it’s really important that we know how to slow down a little bit. I know Ottawa is one of the busiest places. I’ve been there, and, you know, I welcome you all to our traditional territory that we share with Ta'an Kwäch'än. And I say that because they are my relatives over there and, you know, we want to make sure that we always be positive and want you to feel welcome in our home territory, and mind yourself, because it is still pretty slippery out there and there’s still ice out there. So just be careful. Enjoy yourself while you are here. Take in the beautiful light that we -- that is coming back to our people again and the birds are coming over as we meet and sit and talk with each other and Speaking in Indigenous language).

5 I pray to the Creator, I pray to our grandfather, our grandmother, I send my prayers to the four sacred directions so that it will be answered. Creator, I ask for a blessing of these meetings that’s going on, and it’s right across Canada. I thank you, Creator, for all the people that have travelled to our home. And I pray, Creator, that you will look after them in a good way. I pray that no harm will come to them and they will enjoy our land while they are here and they will be safe until they go home and I wish them the best for the future so that it will help our people in a good way.

6 I thank you, Great Spirit, for this land that we have, that we share with other people. I thank you, Creator, for the beautiful mountains, the beautiful sunsets, sunrise. I pray, Creator, for the water that we have, that this water will be here for future generations, and it will be pure and it will be a medicine to all living things. I pray, Creator, that this water will be here for the seven generations so that our children will live here in a good way.

7 I thank you, Creator, for every day that you bring to us this beautiful breath of life that we have, to cherish it and to look after it, and also for our future generations. I pray, Creator, for our children, our grandchildren and our great grandchildren, so that they will continue to live in a good way, so that they will be able to share what we have up here with other people from this land and across the globe.

8 I thank you, Great Spirit, for looking after our animals during the winter months and I pray for the survival of our animals, and our medicines, and our plants, and this beautiful water that we have. Great Spirit, I thank you for this day. I thank you for this light that you bring back to us, and I thank you for looking after our children, our elders, and our communities. I pray, Creator, that you will always help us no matter where we go or where we go on this land. I thank you, Great Spirit, for this beautiful day. I thank you, grandfather; I thank you, grandmother; I thank you from the four sacred directions. (Speaking in Indigenous language) Miigwech.

9 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much to Kwanlin Dün Elder Ann Smith, not just for opening our hearing this morning with a traditional prayer, but for your optimism for the future. So thank you.

10 Before speaking about the hearing, maybe I can just say how happy we all are to be here in beautiful Whitehorse, surrounded by beautiful, snowy mountains. So thank you very much for welcoming us. We’re very appreciative of everybody who has taken the time to participate in the proceeding, to everybody who is here today, to the many people who are joining us virtually as well. We’re really looking forward to hearing what you want to share with us over the next five days.

11 So let me quickly touch on two things before turning over to our Hearing Secretary.

12 So first let me outline our areas of focus for the hearing this week; and, second, the questions that we will be exploring to help develop solutions for these areas of focus.

13 Alors, je voudrais aborder rapidement deux points avant de passer la parole à notre secrétaire d'audience.

14 Tout d'abord, permettez-moi de vous présenter les domaines d'intérêt de cette audience et, deuxièmement, les questions que nous allons explorer pour aider à développer des solutions pour ces domaines d'intérêt.

15 First with respect to the areas of focus. As we all know, the purpose of this proceeding is to improve telecommunication services in the far north. Many of the telecom challenges in the far north are well-established on the record. Over the next week, we look forward to hearing about what actions we can take as the telecommunications regulator to make telecommunications services more affordable, more reliable, more competitive, and to advance reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples.

16 So very quickly with respect to affordability and reliability, we know that everyone in Canada needs access to fast, affordable, and reliable telecommunication services, to participate fully in today’s economy and society. One of the objectives of this proceeding is to find solutions to make internet service in the far north more affordable and more reliable.

17 Nous savons que toutes les personnes au Canada ont besoin d'un accès rapide, abordable et fiable aux services de télécommunication afin de participer pleinement à l'économique et à la société d'aujourd'hui. Un des objectifs de notre instance est d'identifier les mesures que le CRTC devrait prendre pour rendre les services Internet dans le Grand Nord plus abordables et plus fiables.

18 With respect to competitiveness, we know competition plays an important role in improving the quality and affordability of services. We’ve heard the frustration with the lack of choice in many communities in the far north, and one of the objectives of our proceeding is to enhance competition.

19 With respect to reconciliation, we are committed to building and nurturing a relationship with Indigenous peoples built upon mutual respect and trust. One of the objectives of our proceeding is to ensure that our policy and our regulatory actions support reconciliation, including economic reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples in the far north.

20 So moving now quickly to what questions we will be exploring to help develop solutions for these areas of focus.

21 Nous invitons les parties à faire des présentations sur l'une ou l'autre des questions énumérées dans l'avis de consultation.

22 We invite everyone to make presentations on any of the issues listed in the Notice of Consultation. To help focus the discussion this week, we will be exploring seven broad themes. First, the creation of a new subsidy to make internet services more affordable throughout the far north. Second, the creation of a standard to better measure the cost and affordability of telecommunication services. Third, how service providers engage with Indigenous rightsholders. Fourth, how to ensure the outcomes of this proceeding support economic reconciliation. Fifth, how proposed changes to services offered by the dominant telecom provider may impact competition, including potential new Indigenous service providers that may wish to enter the market. Sixth, issues related to service outages, including proposals to require automatic refunds. And finally, how proposals to change retail services, like home internet, may interact with proposals to change wholesale services.

23 We look forward to discussing possible solutions to these issues. We want to identify targeted and measurable outcomes, and we want to move quickly. We hear the sense of urgency that’s being expressed.

24 Alors, en conclusion, encore une fois, nous sommes très heureux d'être ici. Merci à tous ceux qui ont pris le temps de participer.

25 So again, we are so happy to be here in the Yukon. Thank you for everyone who is taking the time to participate. I would now invite our hearing secretary, Jade Roy, to introduce our team and to explain the procedure we will be following. Madam secretary, over to you.

26 MME ROY: Merci Beaucoup. The Panel for this hearing consists of Vicky Eatrides, Chairperson; Adam Scott, Vice-Chair of telecommunications; Clair Anderson, Commissioner for British Columbia and the Yukon; Nirmala Naidoo, Commissioner for Alberta and the Northwest Territories; Ellen Desmond, Commissioner Atlantic Regions and Nunavut. The Commission Staff includes Celia Millay and Nicolas Gatto, Hearing Managers; Alexander Ly, Michel Hogan, and Stephanie Willsey, legal counsel; and myself, Jade Roy, hearing secretary.

27 Before we start, I would like to go over a few housekeeping matters to ensure the proper conduct of the hearing.

28 Une transcription des comparutions sera affichée quotidiennement dans le site Internet du Conseil le jour suivant.

29 Veuillez noter que les documents seront disponibles sur Twitter, sur le compte du Conseil@CRTCaudiences en utilisant le mot-clic #CRTC.

30 Just a reminder that pursuant to section 41 of the Rules of Practice and Procedures, you must not submit evidence at the hearing unless it supports statements already on the public record. If you wish to introduce new evidence as an exception to this rule, you must ask permission of the Panel of the hearing before you do so.

31 Please note that if parties undertake to file information with the Commission in response to questioning by the Panel, these undertakings will be confirmed on the record through the transcript of the hearing.

32 The hearing is expected to last five days. We will advise you of any schedule changes as they occur. Participants are reminded that they must be ready to present on the day they are scheduled. Also, when you are in the room, we would ask that you take the time to familiarize yourself with the emergency exits.

33 Please make sure to speak clearly in your mic and, if you are not speaking, put your microphone on mute.

34 And now, Madam Chairperson, we will begin with the first presentation by the Council of Yukon First Nations.

35 Please introduce yourself, and you have 15 minutes for your presentation.

Presentation

36 MR. TURNER: Thank you. Can you hear me? Excellent.

37 Thank you very much for the opportunity to join you this morning. I want to convey for you that Grand Chief Peter Johnson was unable to attend today and sends his regrets. I’m delighted that we’re able to meet here today on the traditional lands of the Kwalin Dün First Nation and the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council, and particularly delighted that Elder Ann Smith, who was a teacher to me about 10 or 12 years ago when we did ground-breaking ceremonies in this beautiful building, was the one who counselled me, so it was delightful to meet her again here in this space.

38 My name is Peter Turner, and I’m appearing before you today in my role as the economic development analyst for the Council of Yukon First Nations. In this capacity and as a result of previous professional experience both in the IT and telecom sectors, I worked with my counterparts across the Yukon First Nations on matters related to telecommunications, internet and all communications facilities in the Yukon.

39 In my past life, I worked for nine years for a pioneering IBM joint venture ISP in the United States as a senior account executive and director of e-commerce. That was followed by seven years as a partner development person and strategic planning resource for Sprint Communications at their corporate headquarters in Kansas City, and most recently in the telecom space, I managed the dial-up and DSL consumer business for Northwestel serving 11,000 internet customers across the three territories and northern British Columbia.

40 Subsequent to these roles, I undertook economic development for Kwanlin Dün First Nation and served as president of the Yukon Chamber of Commerce for eight years, and I’ve been working in my current capacity with the council of Yukon First Nations for the last two years.

41 I’m coming before you today because Yukon First Nations Indigenous Canadian citizens across the north and, indeed, all Yukoners and northerners, are substantially challenged compared to the citizens of southern Canada in terms of both quality and cost of consumer and business internet access and, indeed, all communications services compared to the south.

42 Northern users, especially Yukon First Nations and other Indigenous people, require availability of reliable and affordable telecommunications as much, if not more, than other Canadians. To set the stage for the testimony this week that my colleagues representing various Yukon First Nations and transboundary Nations will make, it may be helpful for you to better understand the telecommunications landscape that we deal with.

43 The Yukon is in need of affordable and reliable communications solutions. Many citizens of the 14 Yukon First Nations live in small, remote locations, distant even from Whitehorse. We are currently connected to the worldwide web through a single vulnerable fibre connection running down the Alaska Highway with some small emergency redundancy provided by satellite links and, in some cases, microwave.

44 While redundant connection up to the Dempster Highway to Inuvik and back down the Mackenzie Valley through the Northwest Territories is under construction, completion of that project is likely a year away. Additionally, colleagues in the Yukon First Nations traditional territories through which the connection runs have expressed unhappiness about the lack of opportunity for economic participation in the construction of that fibre connection.

45 And as you are also likely aware, we have limited cell phone service, limited almost exclusively to within Yukon communities themselves. This limitation is often further exacerbated by the fact that Yukon First Nation citizens often live disproportionately outside the centre of towns and are thus further impacted by limited cellular service. Additionally, there’s virtually no cellular service on our highway system.

46 A primary challenge, particularly for Yukon First Nation citizens, revolves around the cost of service. Yukon consumers and businesses as a whole are offered internet service packages that can cost two to three or even four times the price of comparable performing services in southern Canada, and with the lack of any significant competition in the Yukon, there’s usually not the opportunity to choose from competing offers.

47 The COVID-19 pandemic revealed clearly that access to affordable and unlimited internet is not a nice-to-have luxury, like cable television, but rather, a basic critical utility like electricity or potable water, particularly in the north and even more particularly in the Yukon First Nations communities.

48 Yukon First Nations citizens and businesses rely on the internet as a critical platform for education, health care, social services, commerce, governance, communications, conducting business, paying bills, and all manner of transactions. Internet infrastructure is often the only alternative to a 400-kilometre drive to Whitehorse, and so affordable and reliable connectivity is even more critical for Yukon First Nation citizens living in communities outside of Whitehorse.

49 Through the week, my First Nations colleagues will be speaking in more detail on the challenges of their citizens and the remedies that the CRTC has the decision-making power to make happen. Almost 10 years ago, in a review of Northwestel’s regulatory framework, the CRTC stated:

50 “...the Commission considers that modern telecommunication services are necessary for economic development in the North, and are needed by northern Canadians to participate in the digital economy to the same level as southern Canadians. The commission is of the view that there’s the need for reliable, affordable telecommunications service of high quality in the many small and remote communities in the Northwestel’s operating territory. The ability to access services such as healthcare, education government programs, and banking is vital to consumers in these communities.”

51 These words ring even truer today than when they were articulated a decade ago.

52 Proceedings to date have already indicated overwhelming support for competitive service choices and significant concerns about affordability and the lack of service and quality and reliability in the north. Effectively northern Canadians, including Yukon First Nation citizens, often pay twice as more or more than their southern counterparts for the services that are neither as fast nor as reliable as those found in -- or available to First Nations citizens and other Canadians in the 10 provinces to our south.

53 CFYN, in recognition of the lack of a competitive telecommunications landscape in the north, believe that it’s time for the CRTC to apply national policies and standards in the north so that northern users have access to telecommunications service comparable in price, performance and reliability to services available elsewhere in Canada.

54 Additionally, the principle of reconciliation requires recognition of Yukon First Nation citizens and, indeed, all Indigenous people as rightsholders entitled to participate in cooperative decision-making and actions related to the affordable provisioning of telecommunications services in the north and the CRTC has the responsibility to address reconciliation on behalf of the Crown. In the areas of telecommunications responsibility this has yet to be fully met.

55 Accordingly, the Council of Yukon First Nations recommends that the CRTC establish a function dedicated to addressing and acting on the needs and interests of Indigenous people. These actions should include both the implementation of a wholesale access regulatory regime in the three territories in a careful and intentional way, to facilitate economic development opportunities for Yukon First Nations and other Indigenous northerners, and to further economic reconciliation.

56 As well, the CRTC, in the absence of competitive choices, should undertake whatever steps are required to ensure that northerners have access to high-speed internet and telecommunications services that are comparable in price, performance and reliability to those offered in the south. This may take the form of consumer or wholesale pricing subsidies, mandated wholesale service availability and/or performance and reliability minimums or other approaches.

57 These proceedings, first initiated in 2020, are now into their fourth calendar year. This week we’re discussing issues that were first raised almost a decade ago. The CRTC must act on these issues, and act promptly. The current state of telecommunications in northern communities where services are substantially less affordable, less reliable and offer lower value and quality of service is unacceptable and inconsistent with the Telecommunications Act policy, equitable regulatory treatment, and declared federal intentions and legislation.

58 The CRTC must demonstrate through these proceedings its commitment to act in accordance with the obligations of the Crown in treaty agreements and legislation as well as the United Nations declared rights of Indigenous people by consulting and cooperating in good faith with the Indigenous people concerned with their own representative institutions in order to obtain their free, prior, and informed consent before adopting and implementing legislation or administration measures that may affect them.

59 Thank you very much.

60 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much, Mr. Turner, to you and to the Council of Yukon First Nations as well for your submissions and also for being here today to speak with us about some of the significant or, as you would say, substantial challenges and some of the actions that the CRTC could take to deal with some of these challenges.

61 So maybe I could just start before diving into -- there’s been some key themes, I think, throughout your submissions and what you’ve shared with us this morning as well.

62 We’ve heard that Yukon First Nations need equitable, affordable and sustainable access to telecommunications services. We’ve heard about the need to focus on bringing prices, performance, and reliability more in line with southern Canada. We’ve heard about the need to implement wholesale access and we’ve heard about the need to move quickly and, you know, I’ve taken your point about the statements made 10 years ago and that we are now into the fourth calendar year.

63 So before getting into specific areas around affordability and competition and reconciliation and in light of the fact that you’ve shared with us the concerns around timeliness, is there an area that you believe the CRTC should be prioritizing?

64 MR. TURNER: I would have to say finding a way to make pricing more equitable with the south. And to give you a particular First Nations’ perspective on this, just if you look at a dollars-to-dollars comparison for comparable levels of service, you know, the CRTC has already sort of identified that, you know, upload speeds -- or sorry, download speeds of 50 megabits per second and upload speeds of 10 megabits per second is a desirable minimum threshold across the country and I fully support the CRTC’s initiatives to pursue that. We’re a long way from being able to receive that here in the Yukon and even where it is available, generally speaking, around those performance thresholds, the prices are half again to two times as much as they would be if I were getting that same level of performance in Calgary or Vancouver or Toronto or Ottawa.

65 On top of that, we also have bit cap overage charges, which I know in some cases are part of packages down south, but they’re kind of usurious when you start to look at what the rate per megabit is charged once you exceed your allocated threshold on a monthly basis.

66 The other point I want to make is that I’ve been undertaking work to look at the progress that Yukon First Nations have made in terms of having equitable levels of economic participation compared to the rest of the Yukon. And just so you’re aware of it, the average household of a First Nation in the Yukon makes only about 80 percent of the territorial average and so, effectively, the cost for a First Nations household for internet service is effectively 25 percent more of their total household income than it is for the average Yukoner. So that, in my mind, underscores a particular problem that is faced by Yukon First Nation citizens.

67 THE CHAIRPERSON: Great. Thank you for that. I think that’s a nice segue into affordability and a proposed internet subsidy.

68 So you’ve said or CYFN has said that they would support an internet subsidy if it would bring prices in line with southern Canada.

69 Would you be able to share at all how you would see that subsidy working?

70 MR. TURNER: I would like to actually ask you to pose that question to the representatives from the individual First Nations who will participate later this week because I think that they will have more immediate and specific ideas on that front.

71 I look at things from a territory-wide perspective and, you know, I know there are options -- well, potentially there are options like, you know, do we subsidize every citizen in the Yukon, do we have a formula for it as a percentage of, I don’t know, household income or -- I think the benchmark comparison needs to be, what does it cost for similar service in the south. And you know, I don’t think that northerners should be penalized for that at all.

72 And then there may be another tier of overlay when we’re talking about First Nations communities, particularly outside of Whitehorse, because I should tell you that internet connectivity is a very different animal in Whitehorse than it is in other communities across the Territory as far as the packages that are available, the technology that’s available, and the performance.

73 THE CHAIRPERSON: Great. Thank you.

74 Along similar lines, I know that CYFN has indicated support for an affordability standard. I’m wondering if you can speak at all to that, you know, how would we use a standard to improve affordability?

75 MR. TURNER: It would be interesting to look at figures like household income and again recognizing, you know, that First Nations can be disadvantaged in that environment. That’s essentially, I think, all I’ve got for you at this point.

76 THE CHAIRPERSON: And if the CRTC did introduce a new subsidy for internet services, do you think that the affordability standard would add something on top of that? If we did have a subsidy, do we also need an affordability standard?

77 And part of the context for that question is we’ve seen through other submissions there are arguments that a standard would be very complex, would require -- you know, that there’s no agreement on the standard. It would require a lot of not only work, but it would need to be updated regularly. So do you think we need both?

78 MR. TURNER: I think we could use both. And I would also encourage you to engage with First Nations representatives across the three Territories to participate in that contemplation.

79 I think, honestly, there probably needs to be representation from the consumer side, from the business side, from First Nations, and also non-Indigenous northerners, I think, would be very valuable.

80 The other element I should say is that I’m hoping that some of our representatives from the Northwest Territories or Nunavut will speak because 14 of our -- 13 of our 14 communities here in the Yukon are serviced by a fibre optics connection, which is excellent.

81 The fifth -- the last community, Old Crow, is a satellite-only community, and I think the Northwest Territories and certainly Nunavut have sufficiently more expertise to delve into that side of the equation. I would leave it -- I would defer to their perspectives in terms of what the needs are specifically associated with that technology.

82 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.

83 In terms of outages, I know that CYFN has said that refunds for outages might be considered. Can you talk a little bit about CYFN’s position? Would you support automatic refunds in certain cases if it’s over an hour, affects multiple households, and also maybe as part of that do you have any other views about requirements that could be imposed to increase the transparency around outages?

84 MR. TURNER: There are really two elements of that.

85 One is the -- is outages that entire communities experience or, in some cases, the entire Territory when some idiot with a backhoe down in Fort St. John rips out the fibre optics cable. The good news is that with the completion of the Dempster fibre connection in a year to a year and a half, whenever that’s going to be, hopefully that will be alleviated.

86 But I would certainly support after a certain period of time, if we have an outage that exceeds, I don’t know, four hours --I don’t know what the threshold is -- that certainly some sort of adjustment to billing should be considered.

87 The other element really has to do with, if an individual or business has an outage in their community, that’s almost more problematic in the sense that that can take a week to two weeks in some cases to alleviate. We recognize that, you know, it’s a truck roll in all likelihood to most of those communities, but that’s an important consideration because I do hear from people in communities that they literally are waiting weeks for a response to an internet outage which, as I said during my comments, is no longer a nice-to-have like, you know, cable TV, particularly, you know, during COVID if you’re trying to have your children educated and you don’t have connectivity for a week or two.

88 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you for that. Maybe we can just briefly move to competition.

89 MR. TURNER: M’hmm.

90 THE CHAIRPERSON: Do you have any thoughts that you can share with us in terms of whether LEO and the introduction of LEO will intensify competition? What have you been seeing?

91 We’ve certainly read in your submissions concerns about the initial hardware costs being around $800 and that that could be a significant barrier to entry.

92 And so you’ve also mentioned a possible affordability program. So I’m wondering if you could speak to competition, LEO, and perhaps if you want to add anything on the affordability program, what you think that could look like.

93 MR. TURNER: Sure. The lower satellite solution is, I think, a welcome alternative. I did notice at least regionally there were some advertisements going on from one of the providers of that service to actually at least temporarily have a sale price on the setup costs associated with that, which brought it from about $800 down to about, I think, $400. That’s still a significant chunk of change. Add 25 percent to that in terms of the percentage of household income if you’re looking at it from a First Nations perspective, but encouraging that those sorts of technologies, you know, are emerging and are becoming more available.

94 Yeah. So I think that’s pretty much, I think, what I’ve got to share with you on that.

95 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.

96 Do you have a view -- so, again, staying with competition, do you have a view as to whether the CRTC should be looking to make changes to both the retail side of things -- you know, so for example, an affordability subsidy -- and the wholesale side at the same time?

97 MR. TURNER: Yes. So part of my role, as I mentioned, is to essentially look for economic development opportunities for Yukon First Nations and it may be and certainly it’s happened in other parts of this country that a consortium of First Nations or an individual First Nation might want to get into the internet service provider business. And so having wholesale access to internet could be part of that solution. That could also go back, in my mind, to being part of a solution to subsidize rates. Perhaps that’s done at an individual First Nation’s level if they are the internet service provider.

98 It might also potentially, over time, build capacity and technical expertise within the communities themselves and that, in turn, might address the timeframe for having service outages addressed at an individual business or consumer level.

99 There is opportunity there, and I think it should be looked at.

100 THE CHAIRPERSON: Okay. Which I think is a nice segue to reconciliation.

101 Would you be able to speak to how we could ensure that an internet subsidy would support economic reconciliation?

102 MR. TURNER: I think on that one, I’m thinking about the people who will be speaking on behalf of individual First Nations during the testimony this week, and I think I would like to defer the response to that question to them. I’m non-Indigenous and I think that the insights and the perspective that could be offered by some of my colleagues who are First Nations descent and who will be speaking later this week might be better qualified to speak to that subject.

103 THE CHAIRPERSON: Okay, great. Thank you.

104 And what about maybe coming at it from a bit of a different perspective? There was reference to targeted subsidies to encourage the development of Yukon First Nation run or owned ISPs. Could you speak a little bit more about that?

105 MR. TURNER: Sure. As noted, elsewhere in Canada I understand there are First Nations that have undertaken to provide internet service provider services to their respective communities. This could be -- if the wholesale pricing were set properly, this could be an opportunity, at least for some of the larger communities outside of Whitehorse, to potentially actually have an economic development opportunity.

106 Part of the challenge for any First Nation in a small community is both attracting and retaining their own citizens within their communities, and part of the reason for that is because there aren’t a whole lot of jobs and, if there are jobs, they’re driving a water truck quite often or something like that, whereas in reality if you’ve got somebody who gains the training to actually be a service technician supporting ISP service in their own community, that’s a very powerful thing.

107 And you know, I could imagine if two or three First Nations communities and Nations had that expertise, then they start to be able to train other First Nations communities and citizens in that. So it could be the very beginning of an Indigenous technology expertise that would be a huge game-changer in the north and something that could be presumably replicated across all three of the territories and, in fact, all of Canada.

108 THE CHAIRPERSON: Great. Thank you for that.

109 You may say that perhaps we should defer these for later in the week, which is fine, we can do that, but I will just ask if you have anything to add in terms of what are the key outcomes we should be looking to prioritize to further economic reconciliation.

110 And the other area I would ask about, which again I think you may say perhaps we defer, is about engagement and how we can do more to improve --

111 MR. TURNER: Yeah, I think engagement is a critical piece not only for the work that you’re doing this week, and I'm pleased that you’re doing it. I invite you the next time you come to host this outside of Whitehorse because the landscape there is one tier removed technologically from what we all benefit from here in Whitehorse. So that would be a learning experience, probably a terrible one for your technicians, but in any event, an opportunity.

112 Yeah, I think it -- I think there is opportunity just for -- the critical thing here is for First Nations to be able to work directly with the service providers. I’ve heard stories about communities where there were plans made to expand the service network and they kind of missed entire portions of the communities in a couple of cases where there were a dozen or half a dozen First Nations homes and they just kind of weren’t aware of that until it was pointed out to them by the First Nation themselves.

113 So I think everybody benefits from further engagement between the service providers and representatives from the individual communities. I know from firsthand experience it’s harder to do when you’re looking at a map in downtown Whitehorse in your office than it is if you’re actually out there in Pelley Crossing or Haines Junction talking to representatives from the communities, “Oh, yeah, we’re going to be building half a dozen new houses out in this area. Let’s put the infrastructure in at the same time”.

114 So it’s to the benefit of everyone. Everybody wins, the service provider and the citizens, if there’s that ongoing engagement.

115 THE CHAIRPERSON: Great. Thank you.

116 Would you be able to speak for a moment about shared pathways? Because there is reference in your submission to it being purely a financial deal.

117 Can you talk about how you see it impacting affordability, competition and reconciliation?

118 MR. TURNER: You know, that one I don’t have a lot of expertise on, so I don’t feel qualified to respond to that. Sorry.

119 THE CHAIRPERSON: So maybe I can just ask one final question. You’re not off the hook entirely yet because I will ask my colleagues if they would like to jump in.

120 Obviously, there’s a fairly substantial record of these proceedings and so I’m not sure that you’ve had the opportunity to read everything that has been submitted -- it’s a lot -- but is there anything that you have seen or read in submissions of Northwestel or other parties that jumped out at you?

121 MR. TURNER: Only -- I mean, I’m generally encouraged by the direction that things are going when I look at this from the perspective of having been here for 18 years. It’s just the speed at which progress is being made is challenging.

122 I worked at Northwestel 12 years ago when we were talking about redundant fibre connections, and I think we may have one next year. I get that it takes a long time, but it’s a challenge and it’s a challenge that First Nations communities and citizens outside of Whitehorse in particular are more painfully aware of than those of us who have the benefit of living in the capital city.

123 Thank you.

124 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you. So not quite off the hook yet.

125 I will turn things over to Commissioner Anderson first and then Commissioner Desmond.

126 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Thank you for your submissions, Mr. Turner. Very much appreciated.

127 So I want to go back to your opening statement when you spoke about the Mackenzie Valley connection line and how First Nations whose traditional territory was affected by the line were unhappy because there wasn’t an opportunity to participate.

128 I was wondering, in your view, when should telecom service provider engagement occur? Should it be, for instance, when territory is affected, and if so, what territory?

129 MR. TURNER: I would say, you know, right at the beginning of the process, on day one when we map out where a fibre -- any sort of connection is going to go or facility is going to go, there should be engagement with the First Nation at that point. They’ll have insights into the physical positioning, the terrain, you know, the potential customers that they’re going to service, challenges, wildlife. You know, it will all be to the benefit of everyone to have that engagement significantly early and then ongoing through the process because where there’s opportunity, there’s opportunity for employment by First Nations in those projects, you know, they’re not flying in people from 1,000 kilometres away. Those are people that are on the ground just down the road, potentially, who may be ready and interested in working. And of course, that also builds the potential for First Nations capacity development within those communities.

130 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Okay. Thank you.

131 And in terms of engagement, if a project were to happen on specific territories, would that require engagement from telecom service providers? Like what is the connection between First Nation communities and their land and when they want engagement to occur?

132 Because I know in the Yukon, for instance, First Nations have traditional territories. They also have settlement lands if they’ve signed final agreements.

133 MR. TURNER: Right.

134 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: I wonder if you could provide any insight into that?

135 MR. TURNER: That area of First Nations governance isn’t necessarily within my area of expertise. I would just sort of go back to early and full engagement, you know, probably with the lands department at the very least, but also with whoever the economic development folks would be within the individual First Nations governments.

136 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Okay. Thank you.

137 And then just going to the depth of engagement that you think would be satisfactory generally across the landscape as you’ve got experience with Yukon First Nations. I know, for instance, the Yukon Environmental and Socioeconomic Assessment Board, our territorial assessment Board, says that, at minimum, proponents who are developing projects have to provide notification to First Nations whose territories stand to be affected and provide enough notification about the project so that First Nations have an opportunity to provide their responses or views on the project and then adequate consideration of the views that are presented by the First Nations.

138 Do you think that that would be adequate in terms of the level of engagement that First Nations in the Yukon would be entitled to?

139 MR. TURNER: I don’t know whether I would use the word “entitled to”.

140 I would say that virtually all First Nations are challenged by capacity. A lot of opportunities come across people’s desks with a finite number of people to pay attention to them and focus on them.

141 In my mind, it shouldn’t be a one-and-done thing. It should be very much an ongoing working relationship, and again, I think that’s to the benefit of both the First Nations and to the technology provider or telecom provider as well.

142 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Okay. Thank you.

143 Several intervenors have suggested that there ought to be reporting requirements on consultation and engagement activities. Do you see any issue with making that type of information public from a privacy standpoint?

144 MR. TURNER: I don’t think so. I think there’s value in the public, in all First Nation citizens knowing what’s going on in the conversations, you know, because they will hold their leadership and government accountable as well if they have questions about what’s -- the subjects being raised or the positions being taken.

145 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Thank you for that.

146 And then my last question goes to transparency. Do you think there are any ways that service providers could make information more accessible or transparent to First Nation communities in a way that would help foster reconciliation? Because that’s been proposed by several intervenors on the record.

147 MR. TURNER: I think that it would be really valuable to have -- you know, there’s communications expertise both within Northwestel and other service providers, as well as within the First Nations governments themselves, and indeed with Council of Yukon First Nations as well. Those are all communications channels that we should be looking to leverage to try and disseminate information to First Nation citizens, to get feedback from them, to inform the whole process.

148 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Okay. Thank you.

149 Sorry, I had one quick question about something you stated in your opening submission, and it was just that the CRTC has a responsibility to address reconciliation on behalf of the Crown and in the area of telecommunications responsibility. This has yet to be fully met.

150 And I was wondering if you could please elaborate on that?

151 MR. TURNER: Sure. The airwaves, the bandwidth, the -- there are certain elements that the government licences to providers, and historically First Nations have not been terribly participatory in that process, and yet First Nations own those airwaves, land rights, whatever, as much as any other Canadian, if not more given the final agreements that are in place, particularly here in the Yukon.

152 So I think it is incumbent upon the federal government to acknowledge that and to, you know, maybe encourage broader participation by First Nations than other Canadians by virtue of that historic imbalance and also the difference in the -- the differences emerging from the final agreements and the relationship between the land and First Nations governance.

153 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Thank you very much for your responses.

154 MR. TURNER: Thank you very much.

155 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you. So we have you in the hot seat for another 14 minutes. We’ll go to Commissioner Desmond and then I know Vice-Chair Scott has some questions as well.

156 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Thank you for your presentation this morning, which was very useful. I just have two questions for you, and they relate both to your submission of October.

157 MR. TURNER: Okay.

158 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: So the first question is specifically related to paragraph 33 of your submission.

159 MR. TURNER: I’m sorry?

160 COMMISSIONER DESOMND: Paragraph 33 of your submission.

161 MR. TURNER: Okay. I don’t have it in front of me.

162 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Okay. And it relates specifically to shared pathways. The Chair asked a question about that, but her question I think was from the lens of economic reconciliation. But I was curious more specifically, when I look at your submission, as it relates to the rollout of fibre as a result of the shared pathway agreement. You comment that in your view this will speed the rollout of fibre to the home and that in addition to that, options may need to be developed for communities other than in the Yukon area.

163 So I’m just curious if you could speak to your thinking as to the rollout of fibre as a result of the shared pathways agreement.

164 MR. TURNER: Sure. So as I mentioned, the infrastructure technology in the communities is very different than what it is here in Whitehorse. So if you were to look at the pricing of available packages for internet access in communities where currently there’s only DSL service, versus those communities here in Whitehorse, you will see not only obviously performance disparities but also bit cap disparities, for example.

165 You can subscribe to unlimited use packages here in Whitehorse that are not available out in the communities, and as we saw during Covid, there could be significant use if we were having entire businesses run out of homes as well as children being educated remotely and things like that, that disproportionately penalized people in First Nations communities, and as I talked about the household income disparity, it was effectively more expensive for First Nations households than it was even for non-Indigenous households.

166 So to the degree that we can get fibre to the homes quickly and have an equitable set of service packages offered across the territory, and hopefully get rid of the whole bit cap penalty pricing regime, that will make a huge difference and it will make a disproportionate difference for people in communities, and even more so First Nations people and communities.

167 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Just as a follow-up to that and reading other submissions, there’s almost a suggestion that the solutions need to be very mindful of the differences between communities in terms of creating outcomes. Do you agree with that?

168 MR. TURNER: Yes. And a lot of it just has to do with the physical placement of populations within the communities. I mean, some communities are very spread out. Some communities are very concentrated and it’s easy to provision service, and they might have different needs. So, yeah, I mean, it needs -- a one-size-fits-all doesn’t work, even between communities.

169 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Thank you. And my last question, and I will try to keep it short, I know Vice-chair Scott has questions as well, just relates to paragraph 27 of your submission. And you talk about alternative models of competition. As we try to put together the different concepts that have been introduced in this hearing related to wholesale access, subsidies, standards, affordability standards, you make specific reference to allowing for alternative models of competition, such as the creation of non-profit or local or Indigenous businesses, and I’m just wondering if you could comment on what you see as alternative models of competition?

170 MR. TURNER: Sure, absolutely. I think one of them I already mentioned, which is basically if a First Nation wanted to become the primary provider of internet service to their citizens, that would be a very interesting one to at least contemplate. I know that in Atlin for example, down in northern British Columbia, I believe they had an internet service provider society that was not specifically Indigenous in nature, but that was a different model that was also looked at for -- at some point. But I think we need to be flexible in the solutions.

171 And as I said it’s not a one-size-fits-all situation. What might work for one -- I mean, if an individual First Nation had one person who had the technological expertise and wanted to disseminate it and help train up some people in their own community, then that should be applauded and encouraged because it just builds capacity within the First Nation. It alleviates the need for a service provider necessarily to roll a truck from Whitehorse, and again, everybody wins on it.

172 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Thank you so much.

173 MR. TURNER: Thank you.

174 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you. So we’ll go to Vice-chair Scott and then Commissioner Naidoo.

175 VICE CHAIRPERSON SCOTT: Good morning. I only have a few questions.

176 MR. TURNER: Okay.

177 VICE CHAIRPERSON SCOTT: And the first, a number of submissions discuss various infrastructure programs for deploying physical infrastructure on connectivity. My question is whether you’ve seen those programs and projects have an impact on affordability as well as connectivity, or how those type of programs might fit within the broader discussion of affordability?

178 MR. TURNER: I believe we’ve seen some progress on affordability in terms of the overage price costs per gig, and perhaps a slight decrease in the service package pricing. It’s still nowhere close to what you would get in downtown Calgary or Toronto, and I recognize that we’re 2,000 kilometres from downtown Calgary. But we have the infrastructure in place at least into the Yukon and we are -- and effectively to each of the communities as well. That’s a cost that was invested in 10, 15, 20 years ago in some cases.

179 So I think it’s probably about time that we should be able to offer comparable pricing.

180 When I was in my tenure at working at Northwestel, I believe we had potentially the ability to provision a higher percentage of our population in the Yukon than any other geographic region in North America. There were people 30 kilometres outside of Ottawa that could only get dial-up. At the time we were able to provision them at least with DSL out in the communities.

181 And so I think we’re well past the point where the infrastructure investment -- it’s a sunk cost. It’s been made. And so there seems to be a bit of a lag between having installed the fibre up the Alaska highway and the pricing beginning to reflect what you would find in any of the provinces in Southern Canada.

182 VICE CHAIRPERSON SCOTT: Thank you. My second question is on the issue of Indigenous ownership of telecom service providers. You specifically referenced that opening up markets to wholesale creates opportunity for Indigenous ownership. Are there other regulatory measures the CRTC should consider that would have the impact of improving ownership opportunities?

183 MR. TURNER: Well, I think it could be an entire spectrum of opportunities. I don’t know if any of you flew in on Air North when you flew into the Yukon, but that’s an airline that is 50 percent owned by the Gwich‘in First Nation and it was invested in because they fly in daily into Old Crow, which is a fly-in community and the citizens saw that as an immediate -- owning the infrastructure that they used on a daily basis and say fly into their community on a daily basis was tremendously attractive to them.

184 So at the one end of the spectrum it absolutely could be wholesale pricing to allow a First Nation to provision internet or get into the ISP business in their individual community. We should look at the full range of opportunities, you know, I mean, the First Nations have a lot of capital that they want to invest, and they have a preference to invest it locally in Yukon Territory and across the North. So I think we should look for every potential opportunity for participation by First Nations in the telecom space, not only in the Yukon but across the entire north, thank you.

185 VICE CHAIRPERSON SCOTT: And my last question jumps back to the issue of outages. So we’re certainly well aware of the massive impact that outages have on the North. When it comes to options for refunds or for improved reporting, is the situation in the north distinct enough that it would require an independent framework or would it fit within a broader national framework addressing those same types of issues?

186 MR. TURNER: I think it’s significantly different. I’ve never lived in a community where we would lose -- literally, you know, the debit cards wouldn’t work, you couldn’t go to the bank and pull out cash because their system was down, the cell phones were down. People were literally writing IOUs in Dawson to the grocery store. That’s literally what we’re down to.

187 And particularly as we get into the third decade of the 21st century, how many of us are actually carrying a lot of cash in our pockets? But if we can’t even go to the bank to take it out, we’re really hooped. And that’s a real-world example that I’ve seen happen a number of times over my 18 years here in the Yukon.

188 So in that respect, I think it’s very different than if you were having the same sort of experience in Vancouver or Toronto or something like that.

189 VICE CHAIRPERSON SCOTT: Thank you very much. Those are my questions.

190 THE CHAIRPERSON: So we’ll go to Commissioner Naidoo for the final questions and then we will give you the last word if you’d like to add anything.

191 MR. TURNER: Thank you.

192 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Thank you so much for being here, Mr. Turner.

193 MR. TURNER: My pleasure.

194 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: I wanted to talk about improving engagement. You had mentioned that First Nations must be able to work directly with service providers, and I’m wondering what can be done to improve communication or -- basically, why isn’t that happening now?

195 MR. TURNER: I will give Northwestel credit that they make efforts to have that happen, and I think it just needs to be an ongoing working relationship.

196 I have ongoing meetings with a representative of Northwestel where we sort of share concerns and hear what plans are from them and disseminate that out to First Nations. But it really -- I don’t know what the needs of the individual communities are, and that’s where both the service provider and the First Nations would benefit from an ongoing working relationship, and not just one-off when they’re going to expand the footprint of DSL or fibre connection or something like that. So to the degree that we can all undertake that work together, it’s a very small community. We’ve got 43,000 people in the entire territory. We all know each other and have about one and a half degrees of separation.

197 This should not be a challenge. It should be something we do almost naturally, and so I encourage the continuance and the enhancement of those efforts.

198 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: All right. Thank you.

199 And then I wanted to ask you about outages. You had said that it can take weeks for consumers to get a response about, you know, how long an outage is going to last. And if you could expand on that, yes, thank you.

200 MR. TURNER: Sure. And these are anecdotal concerns that have been expressed to me by various people in First Nations communities. And they would literally be waiting for, you know, a week, perhaps two weeks. They lose their internet connectivity and then they’ve got to wait a week to two weeks for that to be repaired.

201 And I acknowledge that it’s a truck roll in most cases from Whitehorse probably, but it’s something that I hear persistently from people in communities.

202 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: So we’ve talked about transparency. Do you think that improved communication or some sort of guideline for response times and so on to queries for people who are in an outage situation would be of benefit?

203 MR. TURNER: I think so, yes, and I think essentially maybe an annual report card or something like that and, you know, maybe on a community-by-community basis because it would help a service provider to identify where they have a particular deficit or challenge, whether it be an infrastructure challenge or just a resource to be able to allocate to repair it. As I said, the landscape from community to community varies, so it could be an opportunity -- it could be a tool for a service provider and a community to work together to identify where there are particular challenges and to maybe focus more resources to address that particular community’s needs.

204 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Thank you very much. That’s all I have. Thanks.

205 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much, Mr. Turner. Is there anything else you would like to add before we let you out of the hot seat?

206 MR. TURNER: Not really. I just want to thank you for the opportunity to meet with you and speak today, and I look forward to hearing submissions on the conversations that you have later in the week with representatives from individual First Nations because they will be able to speak with greater granularity and specificity to some of the issues that I’ve sort of tried to give you a broad landscape view of today. Thank you very much.

207 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much. Thank you for being here. And thank you for so bravely agreeing to go first.

208 MS. ROY: We will now take a 15-minute break and be back at 10:55. Thank you.

--- Upon recessing at 10:41 a.m.

--- Upon resuming at 10:59 a.m.

209 MS. ROY: We are back. Thank you very much.

210 We will now hear the presentation of the Government of the Northwest Territories appearing in person and remotely via Zoom. Please introduce yourselves, and you have 15 minutes for your presentation.

211 MR. MacKAY: Thank you, Jade, and thank you, Commissioners, for having us here today.

212 Good morning to everybody and welcome, Commission and staff, to what the Commission calls the far north and which most of the people in this room call home, including the Northwest Territories in Canada.

213 I’ll just introduce myself and then my colleagues here and then I can move into my opening statement and then we’re pleased to take any questions that the Commission may have.

Presentation

214 MR. MacKAY: My name is William MacKay. I’m the Deputy Minister for the Department of Finance of the Government of Northwest Territories.

215 With me today are Dave Heffernan, who’s the Chief Information Officer for the GNWT, and Jason Doiron, who’s the Director of Governance, Planning and Security. Also, Madam Chair, joining us remotely is Edgardo Sepulveda, who leads our team of regulatory consultants, so he’s here as well to answer any questions that the Commission may have that we need his expertise on.

216 Commissioners, the GNWT is a long-time participant in these proceedings before the CRTC. We have consistently made submissions in support of services for residents and businesses of the Northwest Territories that compare favourably to those in the south in terms of affordability, quality and reliability, so this has been a long-time goal of the GNWT.

217 Our vision is to have a telecommunications sector in the far north that provides reliable and affordable broadband services along with genuine choice of service providers that can promote local and Indigenous entrepreneurship.

218 Telecommunications services are integral to many northerners in ways not always appreciated in the south. They shape our ability to communicate with one another and the world. This is especially the case with our most remote communities, many of which are only accessible by plane and where telecommunications provide the only means of accessing government health care, financial, education and training services.

219 And Commissioners, this was particularly underscored by the COVID-19 pandemic and which was referred to by my colleague from the Council of Yukon First Nations.

220 Accordingly, we understand the critical need for high quality, reliable services. It is for this reason that, during the hearing, the CRTC held to review Northwestel’s regulatory framework 10 years ago, the GNWT said it was, quote, “looking to build a fibre line through the Mackenzie Valley because the area is inadequately served.”

221 Commissioners, we followed up on that pledge and the GNWT partnered with Ledcor and Northwestel to design, finance, build and operate the Mackenzie Valley Fibre Link, a 1,154-kilometre link from McGill Lake to Inuvik. This was completed in 2017 at a cost to the GNWT of over $100 million.

222 In the rest of our time today, I want to focus on what we consider to be the four key themes in this proceeding and, Madam Chair, these overlap with the seven themes you also identified at the beginning. These are Indigenous reconciliation, affordability and subsidies, quality and reliability, and finally, competition and wholesale access.

223 So Commissioners, turning first to our first theme, which relates to Indigenous reconciliation. I would just point out, firstly, that half the population of the Northwest Territories is Indigenous.

224 High broadband prices in the far north exacerbate the considerable affordability challenges faced by Indigenous households. The GNWT’s two broadband subsidies proposals, which we will cover in a few minutes, would improve affordability for northerners in general, but also Indigenous households in particular.

225 As you are aware, on March 27th, the Auditor General of Canada released four performance audit reports and one of these was titled, “Connectivity in Rural and Remote Areas”. In this report, the Auditor General looked at whether ISED and the CRTC had improved the accessibility, affordability and quality of high-speed internet.

226 The Auditor General found that, while connectivity improved in urban areas, the federal government’s 2019 Connectivity Strategy has yet to deliver comparable results in many rural, remote and Indigenous communities. The Auditor General made a number of recommendations, all of which were accepted by ISED and the CRTC.

227 One recommendation, which the GNWT welcomes, was to improve the collection of data in rural, remote and Indigenous communities to measure progress against the connectivity strategy’s affordability objective. The GNWT’s Bureau of Statistics collects some of these telecommunications and related data not generally collected by federal entities. We therefore encourage the CRTC, ISED and Statistics Canada to increase their collaboration and coordination with our Bureau of Statistics. And in my opening comments, I’ll refer to some of these statistics we’ve collected and which are outlined in our written submissions.

228 These types of specialized units like the NWT Bureau of Statistics matter. That’s why the GNWT supports the call made by many Indigenous organizations to establish a dedicated Indigenous unit within the CRTC. Such a unit could lead and consult on Indigenous matters of data collection and could help to support the recently proposed Indigenous Set-aside for Broadband Fund.

229 Projects. The far north likewise has unique telecommunications challenges that deserve the attention of a dedicated team that fully understands them. Accordingly, we propose that the CRTC establish a far north unit that could coordinate data collection and offer leadership on northern policy matters. For reasons of efficiency, we propose that the two functions be combined into one Indigenous and far north unit.

230 Commissioners, our second theme today is affordability and subsidies. Broadband prices are much higher in the Northwest Territories than in the south. We are only now getting a full picture of the magnitude of the difference. Until this year, the annual ISED commissioned price comparison study included data for six southern cities and seven other countries. So while we could compare prices in Montreal to those in, say, Sydney, Australia or Berlin, Germany, we could not compare prices in Yellowknife or Inuvik to those in Montreal or Toronto.

231 To close this gap, the GNWT collected pricing data for the Northwest Territories that were directly comparable to the ISED 2021 study. Commissioners, the results were illuminating.

232 We found that residential broadband prices were 37 percent higher in Yellowknife than in the south, a difference that has increased to 48 percent in ISED’s latest 2022 price comparison study, which I might add included the territorial capitals for the first time, so their data has moved up to that standard that I mentioned. But the study only covered residential services.

233 Our analysis also looked at small business internet packages and found them to be priced 130 percent higher in Yellowknife than in the south, so more than double.

234 Some of our residents and small businesses have the means to pay such high prices, but in a country that aspires to equity, they should not have to. For many northerners, including Indigenous people, these higher prices constitute an economic hardship. Far too many go without, resulting in internet take-up rates much lower than in the south.

235 The Auditor General’s connectivity report noted that, although ISED had recognized affordability as the number one challenge in rural and remote areas, its Connectivity Strategy did not include any national indicators or targets to evaluate whether its affordability outcomes were being achieved. Consequently, she recommended that ISED and the CRTC collect and analyze data, including on household income, to measure progress against this affordability objective.

236 The GNWT wholeheartedly agrees. That is why we’ve provided a number of metrics in our submission that could form the basis for an affordability standard, including household income, expenditures, and general cost of living.

237 Commissioners, we think these metrics provide evidence of two distinct affordability challenges in the Northwest Territories that merit attention from the CRTC. Such an intervention would be consistent with the recently issued policy direction to the CRTC that requires the Commission to promote affordable access “in all regions of Canada, including rural areas, remote areas, and Indigenous communities”.

238 The first challenge arises because internet prices are much higher in the north than in the south. While it is true that residents of the Northwest Territories have higher average income, we also pay more for food, shelter and other essentials. Compared to the south, this means we spend a greater part of our remaining income on broadband. That is not equitable. It is why we are proposing that the Commission establish a portable, universal internet subsidy in the far north financed by the National Contribution Fund.

239 The second affordability challenge is faced significantly by low-income houses. Simply put, the burden of higher internet prices is often too overwhelming. A recent digital NWT survey showed that price rather than a lack of interest or availability is the main reason why households in smaller communities in the Northwest Territories do not have internet service. This especially applies in the case of Indigenous households that have a low internet take-up rate of only 63 percent compared to 94 percent for other households.

240 Our preferred option is for this low-income challenge to be addressed by operators themselves. In the south, eligible households have access to the discounted internet services available via the Connecting Families program. To date, however, Northwestel has indicated that it would not voluntarily join this program or implement a similar program in the far north.

241 Commissioners, we do not find it acceptable that while southern low-income households have access to such a program, low-income households in the far north do not, even though many are Indigenous and face unique challenges because of remoteness and environmental conditions. It is for this reason in the absence of Northwestel committing to participating in Connecting Families, we are proposing that the Commission establish a portable low-income internet subsidy financed by the National Contribution Fund to cover the far north.

242 This program, Commissioners, would be additional to and separate from the universal internet subsidy we had proposed earlier.

243 Our third theme today, Commissioners, is quality and reliability. Because telecommunications are integral to the lives of northerners, being cut off from the outside world due to system outages can be dire. In fact, some residents from communities have noted that outages can be potentially life-threatening. Improving service and reliability is one of the reasons why the GNWT built the Mackenzie Valley Fibre Link. But no one party can do it all. That is why we have made a number of improvements to -- made a number of proposals to the CRTC to improve reliability. This includes measures that improve responses to network outages and supporting investments and redundancies to reduce service disruptions.

244 The GNWT calls on the Commission to consider the implementation of a more comprehensive approach to addressing network outages. For example, this would require network operators to maintain monitoring systems that automatically register outages, initiate specific processes for alerting users and help to remediate root causes.

245 Because many NWT residents and Indigenous organizations have voiced concerns about transparency, such a framework would also prioritize communications about the restoration of services as well as help customers to better understand the steps that will be taken to identify and resolve root causes.

246 In addition, the GNWT supports the Great Slave Fibre Redundancy Project that is critical to maintaining resilient connectivity for 75 percent of the population of the Northwest Territories, including Yellowknife. We also support the exploration of other initiatives that will improve redundancy in the Northwest Territories and the far north.

247 Our fourth and final theme is competition and wholesale services. We welcome the Commission’s objective of exploring ways to enhance competition in the far north. We think that increased competitive choice is not only needed, but also demanded by northerners. Geographic, economic and environmental conditions in the far north limit the potential for competitive new entry.

248 While we welcome the promise of Low Earth Orbit satellite services, we believe there must be greater competitive choice in the provision of terrestrial, especially fibre based services that offer faster speeds, higher capacity, and greater reliability. In our view, the only practical and feasible means of achieving this objective in the far north is by introducing a comprehensive wholesale regime comparable to that in the south. Indeed, the 2023 federal government’s policy direction requires the Commission to foster fixed broadband competition and, more specifically, to maintain a wholesale broadband services regime for this purpose.

249 In response, the Commission has launched a proceeding to review and improve the wholesale broadband services regime in the south, which includes the objectives of better fostering wholesale-based competition not only in urban areas, but also rural, remote and Indigenous communities. We support the objectives of this proceeding and believe a similar wholesale regime covering both high-speed access and transport services should apply in the far north.

250 We believe that wholesale services competition will provide not only greater choice in the far north, but also lower prices, better quality, greater innovation and investment, and new opportunities for local and Indigenous entrepreneurs.

251 So those are my opening statements, Commissioners. So to conclude, we thank you for your attention and we’re happy now to answer any questions you might have of us. Thank you.

252 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much for your submissions and also for being here with us today. Really appreciate it.

253 I will turn things over to Commissioner Naidoo to kick off the questions.

254 Thank you.

255 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Thank you so much for being here today.

256 I want to say that when I was appointed in 2020, I was really hoping that I could make it up to the Northwest Territories to meet some of you folks in person, but due to the pandemic, that just didn’t happen. So it’s an overdue meeting that we’re having today and I’m really glad to have you here. Thank you for the presentation as well.

257 Many parties -- you’ve probably read submissions from many parties to this effect, that they submitted that the CRTC should introduce a new subsidy to address affordability of internet services in the north, in the far north.

258 So I want to preface that, you know, the CRTC has not yet determined whether we would or would not introduce any subsidy, whether or not it’s realistic, but I would like to know a little bit more about your suggestion. And in your intervention, you appear to propose a two-subsidy approach.

259 So you suggest specifically a portable low-income and also a portable universal internet subsidy.

260 So to clarify, I’m wondering, are you proposing two separate subsidies?

261 MR. MacKAY: Thank you, Commissioner Naidoo. To clarify and put simply, yes, we are proposing two subsidies, a universal subsidy, portable subsidy, as well as a low-income subsidy that’s comparable to what’s provided by Connecting Families in the south. So -- and these would be stackable and we would need to work out more of the details as to how that would work and what level of service that would be subsidizing, but at its simplest, that’s what we’re proposing.

262 Thank you.

263 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: So how might the two proposed models work together? Have you put some thought into that?

264 MR. MacKAY: Thank you, Commissioner. We have put some thought into that, but we are hoping the CRTC will also put some thought into that. But I would just turn it over to one of our consultants, Edgardo Sepulveda, if he could answer that question specifically. Thank you.

265 He’s appearing via Zoom.

266 MS. ROY: One minute, Edgardo. You are on mute.

267 MR. SEPULVEDA: Great. All right.

268 MS. ROY: We are working on the -- can you hear me well?

269 MR. SEPULVEDA: I can.

270 MS. ROY: We are just working on the sound coming out of the Zoom. Can you speak?

271 MR. SEPULVEDA: You can hear me now?

272 We can hear you well. Thank you.

273 MR. SEPULVEDA: Thank you. Thank you.

274 Good morning, everyone. It’s Edgardo Sepulveda. I’m happy to join you remotely.

275 Yes. We are indeed proposing two separate stackable portable subsidies to deal specifically with two affordability challenges that we have identified as a result of our research on a series of metrics that we presented in response to Question 9 of our response.

276 The way they would work is the universal service subsidy is -- the objective is to deal with the generally higher prices that everyone in the Northwest Territories faces, and whether that be low income as well as middle and high-income households, and we will also include small businesses as well in that universal subsidy.

277 The idea being is not necessarily to reach for parity in terms of prices with the south but, rather, for the prices to be equitable; that is to say, that we recognize that, on average, households in the Northwest Territories have incomes that are higher than those in the south, but we also have cost of living, specifically shelter and food and other basic expenses, that are also higher. So we recognize that there has to be some kind of affordability metric and perhaps this is a question we’ll get into later, dealing with how is it that we can have equitable prices across the board for all households and small businesses in the Northwest Territories, which is what we were proposing. Obviously, that would apply generally to the far north. So that’s on the one subsidy.

278 The other subsidy is a specifically targeted subsidy for low income. Again, as Dave mentioned, our preferred approach is to have Northwestel to volunteer to join Connecting Families, which is, as you’re well aware, a program set up by operators whereby they volunteer to provide below-market internet access of a designated nature, that is to say, a 50/10 with 200 gig to eligible households.

279 So those would be the two specific subsidies that we are proposing to deal with two specific and separate affordability challenges that we’ve identified.

280 MS. ROY: Edgardo, I’m sorry, it’s Jade.

281 We have a sound issue with the court reporter, so we will just try to fix it and keep your thought.

282 MR. SEPULVEDA: Okay.

--- Pause

283 THE CHAIRPERSON: Madam Secretary, maybe I could propose that we keep going with some questions because I think there are a number of other questions, so perhaps we can keep rolling and circle back.

284 MS. ROY: It’s just that the sound is not going through our system, so we have to hear everybody, yes.

285 THE CHAIRPERSON: Not just virtually.

286 MS. ROY: Not, exactly. Thank you.

--- Pause

287 MS. ROY: So we will continue. It’s not fixed, but we have a solution.

288 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: All right.

289 I had a little bit of trouble hearing the last answer, so my apologies if this is a bit redundant.

290 But I’m wondering if you’re suggesting that any subsidy be paid to the telcos or to consumers as a rebate.

291 MR. SEPULVEDA: Thank you, Commissioner.

292 We are open to a number of options as to how do we implement the subsidy, whether it is to operators or to the -- or a rebate directly sort of on the bill to consumers.

293 Our specific suggestion in our October comments were focused on that the subsidy would be paid directly to the operators, and the reason that we were thinking that would work in terms of coordinating both types of subsidies is that we think that probably makes more sense in the case where Northwestel were to participate voluntarily in Connecting Families and, if that is not the case, our proposal that the Commission implement its own type of low-income subsidy. But we’re open to the mechanics.

294 There are certainly pros and cons to each of those options, whether it is a rebate to consumers, a type of voucher, which is kind of being done in the United States either through the Lifeline or the recently initiated Affordability Connectivity Program passed by President Biden. There’s a series of options.

295 We think that, given the relatively modest size of the far north in terms of population, that whatever is to be implemented should be proportionate to its size and should be as simple as possible to make sure that it is workable.

296 Again, we are very much focused on the objectives, which is to provide equitable and affordable internet to the residents of the Northwest Territories.

297 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: All right. Thank you very much.

298 In the far north, some communities, of course, are satellite-dependent communities. Again, just to preface, the CRTC has not yet determined whether a subsidy is the best idea. But do you think that if the CRTC were to create an internet affordability subsidy that the objectives of the subsidy should include reducing rates in satellite-dependent communities?

299 MR. SEPULVEDA: Shall I answer that, Dave?

300 MR. MacKAY: Edgardo, I can start, if you don’t mind, and then we can...

301 So our -- sorry. Just to take your question, Commissioner Naidoo, even in the satellite communities we anticipate that there would be a subsidy available and then -- and that would be available to all citizens in the far north. Now, whether they get it through fibre or a different means, that’s what our vision is.

302 But I could maybe turn it over again to Edgardo if he has anything to add. Thank you.

303 MR. SEPULVEDA: Yes, the idea being that the subsidies would be available to -- again, whether it’s the universal subsidy or the low-income subsidy, it would be available to all communities. There are, obviously, wrinkles associated with, you know, moving into the -- you know, the community -- sorry, the satellite-dependent communities, whether it’s in the Northwest Territories or Nunavut or Yukon, and we would have to make certain adjustments in terms of the design of either of those two subsidies to take into account those kind of community specific factors.

304 But yes, in principle and I think in terms of fairness, the answer is yes, we expect that that would also be available for communities who are served by satellite right now.

305 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: All right. Thank you for that answer.

306 You also proposed a condition of the subsidy would be for telecom service providers to be held to a quality of service standard matching -- the universal service objective of, of course, is 50/10. Can you tell us more about why you propose that a subsidized internet service in the far north should be held to a quality of service standard at the USO level?

307 MR. MacKAY: Thank you, Commissioner Naidoo. Again, I’ll refer that over to Edgardo. Thank you.

308 MR. SEPULVEDA: Thank you, Dave.

309 Well, we think that we’re trying to -- through the subsidies, is we’re trying to hit a number of objectives. One of them is for quality communications, and we -- the other one is affordability. There’s others in terms of promoting competition. I’m sure we‘ll get into each of those objectives as we advance our discussions.

310 But in terms of the 50/10, we found that if that is the objective that the government has established for -- you know, as the universal service objective, we have found that to be a good benchmark against which both subsidies should be measured against, and so both from a costing perspective and a pricing perspective, we consider just an appropriate benchmark against which we can propose a specific set of eligible services.

311 There has to be, I think, consistent with international practice and certainly in the south, in the United States, there has to be some kind of minimum quality established for both sets of subsidies, and we think that it would be appropriate that it would be the USO.

312 Now, obviously there’s going to be some communities in the far north that at this point do not have that quality of service, including some of the satellite communities, for example. And obviously, again, we would have to make adjustments on a community-by-community basis whereby that, ultimately, the universal service or the affordability low-income subsidy would be available to, at a minimum, or as at a base, at the 50/10 and, in those communities where it is not available at that quality level, you’d go down to the next level down available and then, obviously, you would have to make adjustments on both the pricing side and perhaps even on the subsidy side to take into account that slightly lower level.

313 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Let me just jump in here.

314 Some have submitted on the record that if only plans that meet USO speeds or higher are subsidized, that that could mean that some communities with lower speeds wouldn’t be eligible for any subsidy. So what do you say to that argument?

315 MR. SEPULVEDA: Yes, agreed. That’s not our intention. Our intention is that it would be available -- the subsidy would be available to all communities, that we would obviously aim to have as many of those communities at 50/10 or more. But in those communities that do not have 50/10, we would also make the subsidy available at the next available lowest level -- or highest level.

316 So that if a community only has, for example, 10/2, we would make the subsidy available or we would propose to make the subsidy available at that level, hopefully, you know, whereby eventually in two or three years or four years we would eventually reach the 50/10. But again, the objective is to reach a minimum of the 50/10 but also to make it available in those other communities who are probably the most neediest and who do not have access to 50/10 right now, but the subsidy would also be applicable in those communities.

317 Thank you.

318 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Okay. Certain parties have also discussed technical constraints for speed of satellite internet services compared to terrestrial internet services. Do you have any thoughts at all on how your proposed subsidy model might be adapted for satellite services?

319 MR. MacKAY: Thank you, Commissioner. I’ll refer that again to Edgardo. Thank you.

320 MR. SEPULVEDA: Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Commissioner.

321 Again, I think the satellite communities are going to require special consideration in the context of these broad objectives in terms of making internet affordable to increase sort of the quality and also to increase competitive choice. And so those are sort of our main objectives in the design or that we’re proposing to design this type of subsidy.

322 I think that for -- for satellite-dependent communities, I think we would have to make, like I said, adjustments. I’m not sure exactly. We haven’t worked through the numbers in terms of what we expect the prices to be, for example, or the type of or the amount of the subsidy that may be required. But we would expect the subsidy to be at least as much as it is available in non-satellite communities, again, the objective being everyone having was eligible or access to, you know, affordable internet.

323 And again, if -- with the objective that, ultimately, some of those satellite communities may be served by other means, but again, the idea being is that the subsidies have been designed to be applicable to as many communities as possible, with the understanding that some communities are going to have to require their own special pricing or special subsidy amounts.

324 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Thank you for that.

325 Certain parties, you’ve probably seen, have proposed that the CRTC should establish an internet affordability standard for the purpose of improving availability of data on telecom affordability in the far north.

326 So can you tell us more about whether you think the CRTC should establish an internet affordability standard for the far north and, also, what objectives do you think an affordability standard would achieve beyond those achieved by a subsidy?

327 MR. MacKAY: Thank you, Commissioner Naidoo.

328 Yes, we do think the CRTC should adopt an affordability standard. And in our written submissions, we outline that in a fairly detailed way. But basically, what we think the affordability standard should take into account in the far north is, first of all, the increased cost of internet service. And we recognize also in our submission that there are higher household incomes in the north, but they should -- that affordability standard should recognize not only the higher incomes, but also the higher cost of living.

329 So we’ve put in place -- we’ve outlined some data to show that even if you take into account that the disposable income that the average household in the north spends on internet is still much higher than it is in the south. So using an affordability standard that takes into account all those criteria would be the most appropriate.

330 And then I’ll pass it on to Mr. Heffernan for any additional information. Thank you.

331 MR. HEFFERNAN: Thank you. You’ll have to excuse my voice. I’ve lost my voice for the last week, so if it comes and goes, I apologize.

332 We think the affordability standard offers the Commission a way to sort of benchmark and be able to assess moving forward, so it’s similar to the universal service objective, gives you something that you can look at over time to see if the affordability standard and the subsidies that you put in place are actually working so you can benchmark it then against that affordability standard and then you can adjust your programs moving forward to meet if it’s not achieving what it was intended.

333 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Thank you.

334 Many parties in this proceeding have raised significant concerns about the frequency and duration of internet outages in the far north. Parties raised concerns not only about the impact of those outages, but also being required to pay for service that just isn’t available for sometimes weeks on end and so on.

335 In your presentation, you mention that transparency is important for residents of the Northwest Territories and that there needs to be better communication regarding outages. But what about refunds? I’m wondering if you have a view on whether the CRTC should require Northwestel or any other service providers in the far north to provide automatic refunds for outages?

336 MR. MacKAY: Thank you, Commissioner Naidoo.

337 The GNWT’s submissions don’t address the issue of refunds. We think that, at least for now, the issue can be addressed through two key areas. First, having specific protocols and identifications of root causes when outages do come and how they respond to outages and making that transparent for communities so they know how the service providers are going to respond and how long it will be before their service is back so that there is that kind of transparency.

338 The second point we would like to make in terms of addressing the service availability and the reliability is that we need to invest more money into redundancy, and we mentioned that in our submission.

339 There are a number of redundancy projects which are being proposed. One is the Great Slave Lake Redundancy Project, which will be fibre line under the lake. There’s also one which the Council for Yukon First Nations has addressed, too, the line to Inuvik on the Dempster Highway. So there are a lot of projects we think the CRTC should support to increase that redundancy and reduce the number of outages, but for now we’re not considering anything, any proposal for refunds.

340 Thank you.

341 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Thank you very much.

342 We discussed that many parties also proposed that the CRTC should introduce a new internet affordability subsidy to reduce retail rates, but some also propose that the CRTC should require Northwestel, for example, to introduce a new terrestrial wholesale high-speed internet access service in the far north and to make that available to competitors.

343 But if the CRTC were to reduce retail rates, this could, of course, impact margins for wholesale services. So in general, the lower the retail rates, the smaller the margins available for competitors, right.

344 So do you have views on this potential issue? In other words, just in layman’s terms, do you think the CRTC should make changes in both retail and wholesale at the same time?

345 MR. MacKAY: Thank you, Commissioner.

346 That is what we’re proposing. But in terms of your specific questions of how that might affect the market, I might turn it over to Edgardo.

347 MR. SEPULVEDA: Thank you, Bill, and sorry for earlier. Thank you, Commissioner.

348 Yes, I mean, we’re proposing -- in our initial submission and in our reply, we are proposing that the Commission implement a wholesale access regime and mandate wholesale access in the far north, and so we did give some thought to how that wholesale access regime could work with our proposed subsidy and it’s sort of one of the ways in that we kind of package from these very many options that exist as to how one implements these kind of subsidy regimes, how do we package one in the context of a wholesale access as well.

349 And ultimately, what we put on the record is that in the context of wholesale competition (stream lost / diffusion perdue) the uniform subsidy that would then be passed on to the competitor. So for example, if we’re thinking of our subscriber for the universal service subsidy, we can kind of discuss how we kind of came up with that number. Again, it’s not in the record, but we thought we would discuss it now during the hearings, would work in practice would be that in the wholesale tariff for the particular service that we’ve designated, for example the universal service, the 50/10, the wholesale provider would be able to offer that service at, say, $25 below their cost, and they would be able to receive that subsidy from the universal service fund or from the NCF and then the competitor who is purchasing that aggregated access would be then required to pass on that savings because they would be buying the service at, say, $25 below it would otherwise be. So that’s a way in which the wholesale access regime that promotes competition, that is portable, is also working together with the affordability subsidy or the universal subsidy that we’re proposing as well.

350 Thank you.

351 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Thank you very much.

352 In your presentation this morning, you mentioned data collection in rural and Indigenous communities and how important it is, and you pitch an Indigenous and far north unit to be established in the CRTC.

353 What are you hoping to address through that idea? And the reason that I’m asking that question is I’m wondering if there are other ways to achieve the outcomes that you’re hoping for.

354 MR. MacKAY: Thank you, Commissioner.

355 We are proposing that. There may be other ways to achieve that outcome, but we propose that because we know other regulators have adopted that. So for example, the FCC has an Indigenous division which collects data specific to that community and tries to provide services to that community and make regulations with respect to that community. So we think that that is a model which appears to be working with the FCC that the CRTC should look at. But I wouldn’t say that we think that’s the only model and if the CRTC sees some other way that they can better collect that data and implement it for specific regulation that is directed towards the north or regulation that’s maybe implemented more broadly, but if you had that division, you would be able to tell if that regulation would affect the far north in a detrimental way.

356 So I think just having the ability to put that lens on any actions that you’re doing is what we’re proposing. We think the office is a good way of doing it because we’ve seen it in place at the FCC, as I mentioned, but we don’t think it’s the only way.

357 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: So your reason for asking is basically that you -- you just want there to bean improved system for data collection.

358 MR. MacKAY: Yeah, that’s correct. And you’ll note in my opening comments I had suggested other means as well, like reaching out to territorial bureaus of statistics, which maybe they have to provide more granular data that -- and statistics with respect to household income and internet connectivity and access, so that could be a way you do it as well. But we think having someone that is dedicated to Indigenous and far north communities would be a way of staying in touch with those other entities that may have that information.

359 Thank you.

360 Sorry. I’m going to pass it over to my colleague here.

361 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Yes, I see your colleague has a comment.

362 MR. HEFFERNAN: So I’d add to that that it also goes a long way towards showing Indigenous peoples and our Indigenous communities that the CRTC is taking it seriously the manner of reconciliation and going a step towards ensuring that they have people dedicated to the engagement with the community and with the Indigenous people.

363 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Thank you.

364 I have two questions and then I’m going to hand it back to the Chair, so just so that you know how long I’m going to keep you on the hot seat for.

365 Do you have any concerns or issues or potential solutions that you would like to raise that I haven’t asked you about or that you haven’t had an opportunity to raise thus far regarding telecom in the far north?

366 MR. MacKAY: Thank you, Commissioner Naidoo. You might have opened a Pandora’s box there, but I’ll maybe pass that over to our Chief Information Officer, who would probably have a lot more ideas in that area. Thank you.

367 MR. HEFFERNAN: I really don’t. I mean, we’ve put forward a substantive amount in our submissions. I think a lot has been done by the CRTC and our providers over the last decade.

368 I’ve been involved in this for more than a decade now and I’ve seen some significant improvements over that time. Not to say that there’s not problems. There are still problems we need to resolve, but I think we’ve pretty much covered the majority of it here.

369 I’m not sure if Edgardo has anything technical perhaps that we might have missed that he might want to raise.

370 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: All right. Thank you.

371 Oh, sorry. Did you have a comment as well?

372 MR. SEPULVEDA: No, I didn’t. Thank you.

373 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: No, okay.

374 MR. SEPULVEDA: I think we’ve covered -- thank you, Commissioner.

375 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Okay last question.

376 Presumably you’ve read Northwestel’s submissions and some of the other intervenors’ as well. If you could, what would you ask any of those other intervenors or Northwestel specifically about what’s been put on the record?

377 MR. MacKAY: Thank you, Commissioner. We have reviewed their submissions, obviously.

378 I would, I guess -- and I'll turn it over to my colleagues as well because they have ideas, too -- but I guess the first thing I would raise is the Connecting Families and I would like to explore, I think, with Northwestel why that’s not feasible to implement that in the far north. And they’ve given us some reasons as well in their submissions, but I think it would be good to get a better handle on why that can’t be extended to the far north.

379 And then, as we’ve mentioned in our submission, if we could start looking at alternatives to that with Northwestel if it’s not feasible, that would be my preference.

380 But I’ll turn it over now to our Chief Information Officer. Thank you.

381 MR. HEFFERNAN: The only other thing I would -- it’s probably not even a question of Northwestel. It’s probably more support for the effort that they’re trying to do with the Great Slave Lake Fibre Project for the redundancy that would improve reliability and redundancy for more than 70 percent of our population. So I think there’s great support for that, for the Commission to consider that in future endeavours.

382 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Okay. You mentioned Connecting Families. I guess I have to follow up on that because Northwestel has made it quite clear that it cannot commit to a program like that because it wouldn’t work, according to Northwestel, in the north due to unique challenges and it says it would put the burden on private telecom companies to address systemic issues that cause higher prices on goods and services in the far north and if private companies like Northwestel were required to implement a Connecting Families type of program, it would alter the economics of serving such communities and Northwestel might not be able to continue investing in the far north. What do you say to that?

383 MR. MacKAY: Thank you, Commissioner.

384 And I guess my -- I‘m willing to hear that argument, I think. The Government of the Northwest Territories is willing to explore that argument and that’s why we proposed some alternative to the Connecting Families. A Connecting Families -- Connecting Northern Families is what we’re proposing, but it would be somewhat different than what is in the south and we think probably preferable for Northwestel.

385 But I could maybe turn it over to our Chief Information Officer to elaborate on that. Thank you.

386 MR. HEFFERNAN: So I guess we don’t have the data to assess that, and the Commission probably has the data that would be required to assess whether that impacts the market or their survivability and that sort of thing. But what I would say is that I would imagine every incumbent that’s ever been regulated to do something like that or been -- potential of being regulated to do something like that would probably have the same argument.

387 And so I think in the south, the big incumbents did this program on their own and we believe Northwestel should do that on its own but, in the absence of doing that, this obviously is our proposal for the CRTC to consider in the absence of such a program.

388 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Thank you all very much.

389 I hand it back to you, Madam Chair.

390 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much.

391 So maybe what we’ll do is we will go to Vice Chair Scott, then I will look to my left because I think there are additional questions.

392 Maybe we could try to keep it to the top two questions? Thank you.

393 VICE CHAIR SCOTT: Thanks very much for appearing today and for your submissions as well.

394 My first question, a number of other parties referenced the same broad affordability challenges that you did, recognizing that affordability in the north goes beyond telecom, strictly. Some parties reached a very different conclusion, and how would you respond to those who argue that, given that affordability extends beyond telecom, affordability challenges could be better addressed through broader income support mechanisms administered by a territorial government or other federal initiatives as opposed to a telecom-specific CRTC-driven solution?

395 MR. MacKAY: Thank you, Commissioner.

396 So we believe that internet service and access to connectivity is integral and it’s a service that’s essential, which maybe other services aren’t. So we’ve outlined that -- and I think I mentioned it before, but that we've outlined that as a percentage of disposable income, northern households spend specifically more on internet service, and internet service is essential for all communities, especially remote communities. So we think that the CRTC should make a special effort to improve connectivity in the far north and in Indigenous communities, and the numbers bear that out, as we mentioned in our submission.

397 The numbers of -- the access rates in terms of Indigenous communities is much lower in the far north, and I don’t know about the rest of Canada, but there’s that glaring example of the difference in the connectivity between Indigenous communities and the rest of the country, which is it’s about a 30 percent difference in terms of access to internet between those two communities.

398 So I think the CRTC should be specifically focusing in on affordability because we know that that is a barrier to accessibility and that there is a problem with accessibility.

399 I’ll turn it over to my Chief Information Officer.

400 MR. HEFFERNAN: Thank you.

401 I think it really comes down to equity. The prices for homes and supporting a home and all that is more expensive in the north for sure. The cost of internet is more expensive in the north for sure. But there’s a -- we’ve proven in the data collection that there is an inequity that needs to be addressed. It’s more unaffordable in the north than it is in the south, even when you take in the factors of all the additional costs.

402 We know it’s a high-cost serving area. We’re still advocating for equity and affordability, and I think that’s really the fundamental that we’re trying to get to.

403 MR. SEPULVEDA: If I could add to that. Thank you, Dave, and thank you, Bill.

404 You know, Commissioner Scott, you may be referring to the low-income affordability discussion that we saw a number of other intervenors take a different tack than the GNWT suggesting that low incomes are systemic issues and, therefore, should be necessarily dealt with systematically through government or other social assistance. Our affordability subsidies, our low-income subsidies, are not designed to solve the low-income problem in the Northwest Territories or in the far north, so we’re not trying to deal with those systemic issues.

405 What we are trying to deal with is the way in which those systemic issues apply specifically to telecommunications and to, you know, the Commission’s mandate to deal with its own objectives with respect to the affordability objective, which is how systemic issues like low income manifest themselves with respect to sectoral issues such as telecommunications.

406 So we are the first to recognize that there are systemic issues with respect to low income and of high cost in the north, in the Northwest Territories and in the far north generally, but we believe that there’s a role for sectoral regulation to deal with the negative effects to those systemic issues have on sectoral objectives. And if sectoral objectives are to have affordable internet, I think there’s a role for the Commission and ISED pursuant to the policy directive that something could be done in that regard.

407 So again, we’re not trying to solve low income, we’re not trying to solve poverty. What we’re trying to solve is the way in which those two systemic issues affect negatively affordability objectives in the telecommunications sector.

408 VICE CHAIR SCOTT: Great. Thank you both for those answers.

409 For my second question, I’ll ask again about outages. And listening to your opening remarks about the impact of the outages, many of the things you pointed to, I think, would resonate with Canadians across the country. Are we really looking at a difference of degree rather than a difference of type and is this something that could be encapsulated in a national framework or -- again, I’ve asked others and I will probably ask many -- does the north need a separate stand-alone framework for dealing with outages?

410 MR. MacKAY: Thank you, Commissioner.

411 I think what we’re proposing is that maybe it doesn’t have to be a northern-specific protocol on outages, but what we think communities in the north at least, as that’s who we serve, want is to know when there is an outage, what steps will be taken to bring the service back on, how long it will take, and then after the outage has been resolved, what were the root causes of that and how the service provider is addressing that.

412 So I think those would ring true across Canada, but that’s -- we found within our communities that those are the things people want to hear from service providers during an outage. Thank you.

413 VICE CHAIR SCOTT: Thank you very much, Madam Chairperson.

414 THE CHAIRPERSON: Let’s go over to Commissioner Desmond and then Commissioner Anderson.

415 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Thank you, and thank you for your presentation.

416 I do have two questions. Both of my questions really relate to page 35 of your submission, and in your submission you did provide two very useful tables. I appreciate you putting together your thoughts around a subsidy in the format of a table because I think it kind of outlines very nicely your thoughts around how the subsidy would work.

417 My first question is around the portability of the subsidy. And I think you’ve suggested in your submission that all eligible service providers could receive that subsidy. And in response to that, Northwestel talks about how that could be problematic from their view in that service providers could decide where they were going to offer that service and to whom, and because Northwestel is bound under certain conditions and terms and their rates are regulated, this could lead to a situation where service providers could pick and choose where they would serve and where they would use that subsidy, whereas Northwestel, in contrast, would be bound by particular terms and conditions.

418 And I’m just curious if you could comment on that, whether or not that would be fair in terms of allowing other service providers to use the subsidy in the way they felt was most appropriate, whereas Northwestel, in contrast, would be required to follow the regulatory framework and offer rates that are set by the Commission.

419 MR. MacKAY: Thank you, Commissioner.

420 I will refer that to Edgardo to answer. Thank you.

421 MR. SEPULVEDA: Thank you, Bill. Good morning, Commissioner. Thank you for the question.

422 We read with interest Northwestel’s and I think also Telus were making the case that the objective of portability in any subsidy design complicates matters and, in their view, makes it not workable, so we’re very cognizant of that.

423 And so when we were first proposing and, as you said, taking the time to prepare the table because we had to kind of think about it, how it would work and we know some parties would be critical of having such a specific proposal, but we thought it was important to move the discussion forward for those parties that believe that one or two subsidies would be important and also to provide guidance to the Commission as to how they could start to think about the design, if they were so minded.

424 So we recognize that the portability is a complicating factor. So we recognize -- we’ve read with interest, and we’ll respond to both Northwestel and Telus on the portability. It certainly would be easier to do this if it was only going to Northwestel. So we recognize that. Certainly the local service subsidy as it was implemented in the second half of its life for the high-cost service areas, was not portable, even though the first time it was portable, for the very same reason which is that there was a form of cream skimming by some of the collects -- that we’re required to provide, you know, at the very high cost.

425 We do note, however, that in the United States and in other jurisdictions they have managed to have a working, very large subsidy regime, where it is competitively portable, and so -- and we think that our subsidy regime is -- strikes the right balance between the fairness to a Northwestel, or to others that would have additional regulatory burdens, which we recognize, and also the objective of having portable; right?

426 I mean, if one looks at either Lifeline or the Affordability Connectivity Program in the United States implemented by President Biden, one sees that there are dozens of operators who are providing these services. That’s our objective. Our objective is to have as many people offer the service as possible, to basically meet Northerners’ demands that they have greater competitive choice. So we recognize again that portability does complicate the design aspect, but we think that we’ve achieved the right balance between having the objective of portability while also being fair to a Northwestel, for example. Thank you.

427 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Okay. Thank you. My second question again relates to the two tables you’ve provided. And in the first table, Table 19.1, it talks about the portability of a subsidy and that it could be available to businesses as well. Do you see that as potentially complicated, in terms of determining whether or not a business would be eligible for a subsidy? And how, like what would be the mechanics of putting in place a subsidy and determining eligibility as it relates to particular businesses?

428 MR. MacKAY: Thank you, Commissioner.

429 Yeah, I might turn that over to Edgardo as well. Thank you.

430 MR. SEPULVEDA: Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Commissioner.

431 When we first started looking at preparing this, our submission, and understanding what are sort of the pain points faced by residents and businesses in the Northwest Territories, in addition to clearly the much higher prices that are being paid for by households compared to the south, we hadn’t really fully understood how much higher those prices were for small businesses in the North compared to the south. And so, we were surprised that, according to again the application of the same methodology put forward by the ISED sponsor report, or the price monitoring report, we found that small business internet prices were 130 percent higher on average in Yellowknife, for example, compared to the South. So more than double.

432 So that‘s our objective, is to try to resolve that. Our objective is to design some kind of subsidy that ameliorates that particular situation which we consider to be unfair and inequitable, and also a detriment to economic development in the north. And so that’s the objective. Now, in terms of who would be eligible, it’s universal. Our objective is that it would be universal. It wouldn’t be means tested, for example.

433 Our idea would be that, for example, to use the same methodology that the Commission uses to define what a small business is, which I think from looking at our notes was defined as any business that has less than -- and, again, I can check this later, confirm it -- but from memory with telecom bills less than $2,500 per month. So that would be defined as a small business. That is the current definition from the CRTC. And so that would be in theory, our cut-off point, in terms of eligible small businesses.

434 Obviously, we would have to undertake more analysis in terms of, what is the price. It would not be the same as, for example, for households. The subsidy calculation would have to be different. But that’s our objective and our eligibility in theory would be something like that, the same, using the same definition as the CRTC to define a small business. Thank you, Commissioner.

435 THE CHAIRPERSON: Commissioner Anderson?

436 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Thank you. I wanted to clarify your position and talk a little bit about wholesale high speed access services, because I understand in your submissions that you have suggested that wholesale HSA services should be mandated, I believe across access and transport infrastructure. Is that right? Okay. I see nodding.

437 And then at one point there was a suggestion on maybe using a retail-minus approach just as a check-in. Can you please discuss that and what the other rate-setting method you’d suggest would be?

438 MR. MacKAY: Thank you, Commissioner Anderson. I’ll refer that over to Edgardo to answer. Thank you.

439 MR. SEPULVEDA: Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Commissioner. Good morning.

440 We again, looking through our submissions, I don’t think we went into specifically -- and again I would have to check on this -- I don’t think specifically we had a very strong view on pricing on the wholesale access regime. I think our preference would be to do a phase two in terms of pricing methodology. But beyond that, we have not developed a strong position on this. Our general approach is we think that Northerners want and deserve greater competitive choice. And so, in that context, you know, and given sort of our own emphasis on subsidies and affordability metrics, beyond a general support for the principle of wholesale access. I don’t think we really got into the pricing.

441 But we would obviously -- some of the other parties, for example, CNOC or SSi, who is also from the north, are proposing phase two costing approaches, and so we would think that we would be -- have a slight preference for that. But, again, we’re not taking a strong position on pricing.

442 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Okay. Thank you. And then my second question also relates to a wholesale HSA framework, and we’ve heard this morning from Mr. Turner on behalf of CYFN that there are new opportunities for Indigenous entities to become owners or co-owners for some infrastructure. So I was wondering about your views on a mandated wholesale HSA service, in the event that Indigenous service providers or Indigenous entities become owners of part of the infrastructure, both access or transport? Would you have different views on whether or not a mandated service for wholesale high-speed access should be mandated or not, depending on the ownership?

443 MR. MacKAY: Thank you, Commissioner.

444 So certainly we’re hoping that mandating wholesale access will increase opportunities for Indigenous entrepreneurship. So that’s one of the reasons we’re advocating for that.

445 With respect to those specific comments, I might turn it over to Edgardo to give some further thoughts on that. Thank you.

446 MR. SEPULVEDA: Thank you, Bill. I don’t have anything further to add. Thank you, Commissioner.

447 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Thank you. Thank you very much.

448 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you. So maybe just one last question and we can throw it back to you if you’d like to add anything further.

449 So we appreciate you putting forward concrete proposals, because we are very much looking for solutions. As I said at the start, many of the challenges are very well-established, so appreciate you coming forward with some proposals.

450 You have several proposals covering your four themes that you set out at the outset, which do overlap with ours, reconciliation, affordability, quality and reliability in competition. You’ve proposed two subsidies, we have the universal subsidy, the low-income subsidy. You know, you said we need a comprehensive wholesale regime. You talked about investing in redundancy, that we need an affordability standard, we need data collection and others. As you point out, a lot of this is very much aligned with the telecom policy direction that we received from the government in February, as well as the Auditor General report that came out on broadband programs last month.

451 But, you know, looking at all of these things, and similar to questions that we asked earlier this morning, is there something here that we need to prioritize?

452 MR. MacKAY: Thank you, Madam Chair.

453 I would say that the area -- at least talking to our communities, the area that they have the most concerns with, is the affordability piece. So I would say if the CRTC was going to prioritize anything, it would be affordability. And that touches on all the other themes as well. It improves access, it improves reliability -- or potentially -- it also improves reconciliation, because if you reduce affordability -- if you make the rates more affordable, then Indigenous communities are more likely to be connected and improve their connectivity, which is lower than the rest of the country. So I think affordability would be the area that I would urge the CRTC to move on that first. Thank you.

454 THE CHAIRPERSON: Great, thank you. Any final words before we let you off the hook?

455 MR. MacKAY: Well, thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to thank you again, and your colleagues, for inviting us to come present at this. We think this is an important issue, a very important issue for the far north for reasons we’ve outlined before. But we think we have demonstrated that connectivity in the north is very important in terms of delivering services, and there are problems with connectivity in terms of access and reliability. So we are happy to have the opportunity to provide our thoughts on how the Commission can address those concerns.

456 And I also would just like to thank my colleagues for appearing with me and providing more information for the CRTC on behalf of the GNWT with respect to these issues.

457 So thank you very much for your time this morning.

458 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much for being here with us in person and virtually. Thank you.

459 MS. ROY: Thank you. We will now take a lunch break and be back at 1:30. Thank you very much.

--- Upon recessing at 12:13 p.m.

--- Upon resuming at 1:30 p.m.

460 MS. ROY: Welcome back, everybody. We will now hear the presentation of First Mile Connectivity Consortium. Please introduce yourselves and your colleagues, and you have 30 minutes for your presentation. Thank you.

Presentation

461 MR. MURDOCH: Good afternoon. Thank you.

462 My name is Bill Murdoch, the acting Executive Director from Clear Sky Connections. I’m also the chair of the First Mile Connectivity Consortium, the FFMC, who will be speaking to you today.

463 I want to recognize that we’re on the land of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation, and we appreciate being welcomed to their Kwanlin Dün cultural centre.

464 First Mile Connectivity Consortium is an incorporated, independent, not-for-profit national association. Our members are First Nation internet service providers known as community regional intermediary organizations. In these proceedings the FMCC is joined by several organizations based in the far north. Our intervention in these proceedings are supported by these groups and the digital NWT member organizations including Gwich’in Tribal council, Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, Sahtú Renewable Resources Board, Dene Nation, and the Smart Communities Society NWT.

465 On this panel we’re not trying to speak for everyone in the. We acknowledge and recognize that Inuvialuit and Dene people and their land base, the distinct areas and nations impacted by these proceedings.

466 We’re all covered by land claim obligations and rights outlined in section 35 of the Canadian Constitution. Those rights are supported to protect our language, and our culture, and our identity. We’re trying to present what we know and what we think is relevant. We know that you’ll be hearing from others as well.

467 Our panel represents both end user consumers and providers of telecommunication services in the North and in Northern regions of provinces. It is important that we are here advocating for better services and for the ability and opportunity to deliver services to our own people in our own territories. These are the lands that the CRTC, and Northwestel, and others are working in, and the people that you serve.

468 We’re speaking about challenges we are living with as well as opportunities that will help the telecommunication companies and the Commission do better.

469 The people who will be speaking with you today, there’s a pre-recorded video from Brenda Norris, former Executive Director, Native Women’s Association of NWT, as well as a pre-recorded video and will be available virtually for questions after. Leanne Goose, a singer/songwriter, artist, and digital NWT researcher from Inuvik. Lyle Fabian, owner of KatloTech Communications, an Indigenous service provider based in Yellowknife. And Jason Neepin, Executive Director of Broadband Communications North, also an Indigenous service provider.

470 Then I will make a short concluding statement. Members of our team are available to answer your questions. Directly behind me there is Dr. Rob McMahon, Associate Professor of Media and Technical Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. And Dr. Heather Hudson, a dual Canadian-U.S. citizen who is Affiliate Professor and former Director of the Institute of Social and Economic research at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

471 Our first presentation is a short video by Brenda Norris who was not able to participate today in person. Brenda is an Inupiat woman, originally from Inuvik. Brenda’s mother travelled to the Delta by dog team from Alaska and her parents settled in Aklavik. Brenda also has Cree/Metis roots from Alberta. Her father was born in Waterways, Alberta. He came north with his parents in the late 1920s and the family settled in Aklivik. Brenda currently directs projects for the Native Women’s Association of the MWT, including their new Indigenous Family Connection internet initiative.

472 Here’s the video.

“Current environment for internet in at least 29 of our small communities in the Northwest Territories is they either don't have access or, when they do, it's very slow. Definitely it affects their ability to do banking, to get help if they need to to get counselling. There's just a whole list of things they miss out on by not having the internet, and one of them is our territorial government does a lot of online programs for residents. People in the communities don't have access because they don't have the bandwidth to watch the videos so they don't have access at all.

I think it's a safety issue. I think if something were to happen -- for example, about a few months ago, Northwestel lost -- was losing -- I think they lost service for 24 hours for parts of the Beaufort Delta and parts of the Saw, too. So there was no way anybody could communicate with anyone unless somebody had a shortwave radio or -- that they used to have in the old days. So if something would have happened, if there was an emergency, no one would have known there would have been no way for them to have gotten help there. There's no way anyone would have known, and that is a safety issue.

It's a safety issue in the communities when there are women who are trying to escape violence and have nowhere to go. We all know that, that they have nowhere to go, but they also have no one to call. There's no way for them to get out, so they're basically imprisoned, some of them. So that's a big huge issue as far as safety goes.

There's a certain unfairness in the fact that these communities are at least 15 years behind everyone else.

I think if you were to go out and you were to take a look at the families that are like the ones in the Northwest Territories, you would find that most of them are Indigenous. It's mostly the Indigenous people who don't have these services, and those are the people that need it the most. I mean, most of them don't even have water and they don't have health care. They don't have a lot of things and just -- why don’t you just throw in they don't have internet, either.

Yeah, I believe it should be no cost for Indigenous families across the Northwest Territories in the small communities, and I'll tell you why. A lot of those families are the ears and the eyes of the north. They're the ones that are going to tell us what's going on. Having internet available in the communities for Indigenous people is the least we can do. We've taken so much from the Northwest Territories with all the resources, residential schools, you name it, and just give it to them. Watch. Let's just say five years. Let's see what happens in five years.

I think amazing things will happen in five years. There's so much that we could do with an internet connection. And I know that our people, who have always been resilient and have always survived and have always found a way to make it that they would take the internet in their communities and they would make something of it, and it is the least that we can do to give it to them.”

473 THE CHAIRPERSON: Perhaps I could jump in for a moment. I think that some of us had a difficult time hearing the early part of that. It did get better at the end, and I am wondering if people would indulge us, if we could replay that? We will have additional time.

“Current environment for internet in at least 29 of our small communities in the Northwest Territories is they either don't have access or, when they do, it's very slow. Definitely it affects their ability to do banking, to get help if they need to to get counselling. There's just a whole list of things they miss out on by not having the internet, and one of them is our territorial government does a lot of online programs for residents. People in the communities don't have access because they don't have the bandwidth to watch the videos so they don't have access at all.

I think it's a safety issue. I think if something were to happen -- for example, about a few months ago, Northwestel lost -- was losing -- I think they lost service for 24 hours for parts of the Beaufort Delta and parts of the Saw, too. So there was no way anybody could communicate with anyone unless somebody had a shortwave radio or -- that they used to have in the old days. So if something would have happened, if there was an emergency, no one would have known there would have been no way for them to have gotten help there. There's no way anyone would have known, and that is a safety issue.

It's a safety issue in the communities when there are women who are trying to escape violence and have nowhere to go. We all know that, that they have nowhere to go, but they also have no one to call. There's no way for them to get out, so they're basically imprisoned, some of them. So that's a big huge issue as far as safety goes.

There's a certain unfairness in the fact that these communities are at least 15 years behind everyone else.

I think if you were to go out and you were to take a look at the families that are like the ones in the Northwest Territories, you would find that most of them are Indigenous. It's mostly the Indigenous people who don't have these services, and those are the people that need it the most. I mean, most of them don't even have water and they don't have health care. They don't have a lot of things and just -- why don’t you just throw in they don't have internet, either.

Yeah, I believe it should be no cost for Indigenous families across the Northwest Territories in the small communities, and I'll tell you why. A lot of those families are the ears and the eyes of the north. They're the ones that are going to tell us what's going on. Having internet available in the communities for Indigenous people is the least we can do. We've taken so much from the Northwest Territories with all the resources, residential schools, you name it, and just give it to them. Watch. Let's just say five years. Let's see what happens in five years.

I think amazing things will happen in five years. There's so much that we could do with an internet connection. And I know that our people, who have always been resilient and have always survived and have always found a way to make it that they would take the internet in their communities and they would make something of it, and it is the least that we can do to give it to them.”

474 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you for indulging us. I think it was worthwhile to hear that in Brenda Norris’ voice. Thank you.

475 MR. MURDOCH: There’s also the second video, from Leanne Goose.

“Good afternoon. Good morning. Hello.

Hello. My name is Leanne Goose. I'm an Inuvialuit and Satu Dene, originally from Inuvik, Northwest Territories, where I grew up in a traditional home until I began playing music with my father at the age of 12.

Today, I'm a singer-songwriter, musician, producer, storyteller, arts manager and communicator. I'm a dedicated advocate for artists and organizations such as the Northern Arts and Cultural Centre, which is the only performing arts and cultural institution in the Northwest Territories.

I'm also a graduate student at the University of Alberta and a member of the Digital NWT Research Team.

We conducted surveys and interviews about internet access in several rural and remote Northwest Territories communities. Further details about our research are available in our written submission to the Commission.

I want to talk today about the challenges that Northerners experience during the pandemic, how limiting Northwestel’s services are and how it has affected households in the north.

Our research found that people in rural NWT communities face significant challenges accessing public and banking services and working online as well as attending school. I know families with children in school and employees at local organizations who are expected to learn and work online, but cannot due to the limited internet connectivity or low speeds or sometimes no reliable internet connection at all.

Also, the Northwest Territories government uses the internet to share information with communities and provide services like online mental health counselling, but these public services are not available to many people in small communities. The reality is that many don't have internet and, if they do, they can't access digital services because of low bandwidth.

People in small villages like Paulatuk have told me and Digital NWT researchers that they have paid hundreds of dollars for a monthly internet bill because of data overages fees, but most times cannot access these or, at most times, can't access services that match the fees.

As pointed out in the recent report of the Auditor General of Canada, income inequalities in our communities also affect affordability. Almost one-third of the total population and communities like Aklavik, Tuktoyaktuk and Kátł’odeeche First Nation is classified as a low-income family according to Statistics Canada.

Reliability is another problem. I remember when Ulukhaktok lost internet service for eight days, significantly limiting the community's ability to use debit cards or withdraw cash, or when Jean Marie River’s internet infrastructure was wiped out by floods until Katlotech arrived to fix their local wireless network.

But if we northerners want to be able to connect to the larger world from our communities, we still don't have a choice. In most places, we must use Northwestel.

Northwestel’s customer service must be improved. Information and support should be made available in Indigenous languages.

Some people get their service cut off because they can't pay large overage charges and can’t get help from Northwestel.

Northwestel’s web site does provide a link to how to monitor internet usage, but the steps are very complicated.

Overall, there is very limited public available information about digital challenges experienced by people living in the north, and particularly people in small rural communities.

Northwestel’s services must be monitored both by the CRTC and by an independent researchers and, in particular, by northern organizations and residents. This is a key aspect to engaging in a good way.

I also know Indigenous entrepreneurs and innovators working to provide services in our communities. You'll be hearing from some of them in our presentation today.

Why is Northwestel competing with them? Why isn’t Northwestel supporting Indigenous providers like Katlotech to work in our home communities?

This is our land, and Northwestel is a guest here, and they and their parent company, Bell Canada, are making a considerable profit. There is an expectation that they give back to community and reinvest in the area that they are profiting from.

We keep doing research and keep taking speed tests, and they keep showing the same data over and over again, slow, expensive internet, frustrated customers and end users and we keep presenting at these hearings.

We figured out how to partner, how to connect and how to collect information about services in the north and presented back to policymakers to try and inspire positive action. At some point in time, something has to give and the CRTC has to take action.

We see opportunities to do good for our people and our communities, and now the rest lies with you.

Qujannamik. Thank you for having me.”

476 MR. MURDOCH: Thank you. Now Lyle Fabian.

477 MR. FABIAN: Hello, hi. My name is Lyle Fabian. I am the founder of a small company called Katlotech Communications, an Indigenous Dene owned and operated broadband provider where we’ve -- you know, I would say broadband solutions provider.

478 We’re based out of Yellowknife, and we service communities and businesses in the NWT and other places, too, such as northern Saskatchewan, et cetera.

479 Ten years ago, I testified in the CRTC hearing here in Whitehorse and told the Commission about a community fibre optic network that was installed with Kettler DG First Nation, which was the first and only broadband project in the north where they, themselves, were actually owners of this infrastructure, and the idea was to open the ability to lease its infrastructure to Northwestel.

480 Today I’m here to tell you that competition is possible in the Northwest Territories, but also I’ll talk about how the challenges remain for service providers in the Northwest Territories and for their customers.

481 My first example is Jean Marie River First Nation, a small community around 40 households and less than 100 people. Katlo -- you know, we’ve been supporting the community of Jean Marie, you know, through wireless solutions and also a PBX phone line deployment system.

482 In 2008, I worked with the communities to install wireless access points, to distribute community internet connection throughout -- you know, to the community during a flood and also maintaining the need for broadband connectivity where the value of other solutions are needed.

483 When the community again -- when it flooded, the internet and electrical power was out for three days, and during that time, leadership was trying to get their systems going and I had to come back into the community and fix their solution -- or their system and making sure that they didn’t lose any of their financial data on a localized network.

484 Since the community owned and maintained their own network, we were not dependent on Northwestel’s technicians who can take days to arrive and, during that time, it did take a phone call that I had to do to Mr. Curtis Shaw via Facebook. It was that phone call that rushed a technician to come to the community.

485 Such local services in the community may have helped in two ways, through both lowering the cost of capital costs and lower ongoing operational costs compared to Northwestel services. For the PBS system, I purchased and refurbished equipment on behalf of the First Nation to save money. Our equipment costs were just $100 per phone line compared to $200 and $300 phone line PBX phone system handsets.

486 I also used existing low-cost VPN switching technology to connect the phones over a wireless network. Katlotech was the -- you know, our charges for Jean Marie per month is $398 per month for a full system, which is unlimited long distance calling anywhere in Canada. And the total cost of the system that we installed was approximately about $2,000 for the entire First Nation band office, office phone system compared to $10,000 from Northwestel.

487 The band can also maintain and operate its own phone system themselves with Katlotech’s support to avoid Northwestel technician charges. However, there are always challenges in mitigating the system. For example, there are costs involving porting numbers over to your PBX phone system from Northwestel phone lines and since the calls needed to be forwarded to your new PBX number provided by, again, Bell.

488 The purpose of the technology and challenges along -- you know, with -- are necessary added costs, particularly when it comes to community like unlimited long distance in Canada and the United States. In the NWT, it’s always been possible to gain access to non-portable numbers so the First Nations have to pay additional charges. To support cost effective solutions for communities, the CRTC should require that any charges for porting numbers to access local networks are waived.

489 My second example is the challenges that the NWT businesses in urban areas experience are adequate and affordable broadband from Northwestel and how competitive ISPs can provide solutions. For example, Northern Cultivation, located in Yellowknife, which is a Yellowknife business in a district in a new area which is focused on growing medical marijuana. It is located in a new building and new district in the City of Yellowknife. The company only had access to unreliable DSL and were paying high charges for limited to maximum of 2 megs down and 512 kilobytes up and they asked Northwestel to upgrade their broadband service. According to them, you know, they quoted an $18,000 upgrade to the infrastructure, which had to be paid by the local business.

490 So when -- they approached me and said they wanted an alternative solution and I came up with a point-to-point connection, which was connected from another existing business three kilometres away. And this shared connection allowed access to 200 megabytes like symmetrical speeds, improving their service 100 times over. And again, finding solutions is our expertise.

491 Now that the company shares the cost of broadband connectivity with other businesses, the total cost of the solution was $10,000, and the business owns and manages their own equipment, shared monthly service costs and existing businesses own the tower. This is just one example of how businesses in Yellowknife operating to find solutions to improve internet access to reduce costs.

492 I can provide other examples where Katlotech can obtain equipment and install and operate networks at lower costs than those charged by Northwestel and their contractors and we operate as a profitable business. Northwestel has demonstrated that they simply are not feasible for a monopoly incumbent to meet all the demands of remote communities and urban businesses for high-speed and affordable broadband. The result is that many northern residences and businesses are left out. The Commission should support competition and remove any barriers that small and Indigenous providers who live and work in the north can meet these needs.

493 And I would like to thank you for your opportunity and me sharing my experience to the Commission and I am available to answer any of your questions.

494 MR. MURDOCH: Thank you.

495 Now Jason Neepin.

496 MR. NEEPIN: My name is Jason Neepin. I’m the Executive Director for Broadband Communications North, also known as BCN.

497 BCN is owned by six of the seven tribal councils of Manitoba. We are Indigenous owned, we have Indigenous management, and our customers are Indigenous.

498 BCN is a First Nations non-profit service provider. We provide internet service to more than 50 rural, northern and remote communities in Manitoba. All of our operations are paid for by revenue that BCN generates as an ISP. We support First Nations in developing and operating local ISPs as well.

499 While we do not operate a Northwestel service area, many of our Indigenous communities are remote and face similar barriers to connectivity to those described by others in these proceedings. Today I want to focus on satellite service communities and our transition to LEO services.

500 We currently provide C band satellite to 18 communities. Connectivity is locally distributed from a C band point of presence through wireless connections. Ninety (90) percent of our costs for the C band service is covered currently by ISED funding agreements at $2.1 million per year. Currently, our current agreement is over the next two more years, so 6.3 million.

501 The C band connections are slow, unreliable and expensive. Nursing stations and other public services in the communities have told us that the C band connections are not adequate for their needs.

502 Of our 18 satellite communities, the majority are now preparing for transition to fibre connections through the ISED EBF. These infrastructure upgrades are funded through ISED EBF and CRTC’s Broadband Fund. However, at least three, possibly four of these communities are too expensive to connect to a regional fibre backhaul, and so we have to rely on satellite services at least until 2030. Three of these communities are just south of the Nunavut border.

503 The main issue we have right now is when it’s -40 plus, the system freezes for days. We have outages of five to seven days at a time. We have to send our techs in. And the community is very unsatisfied with the performance from the telesat service we have.

504 We are now exploring LEO satellite options to connect these communities, which continue to receive inadequate C band services that have limited capacity, are outdated and fail to meet the 50/10 standard.

505 We are hoping to transition telesat subsidized LEO option NorthernLights solution, which we understood would cost $15 a megabit at a subsidy per month. However, we are unsure when or if these options will be available.

506 In contrast, the OneWeb system we proposed to ISED would cost $1,000 per megabit per month. Even with the EBF subsidy to cover 90 percent of our connectivity costs, reducing our cost to $100 per megabit per month, these bandwidth costs would be almost seven times higher than telesat’s subsidized plan charged.

507 In the meantime, we are running a pilot project delivering OneWeb LEO services to God’s Lake First Nation, known as Manto Sipi First Nation.

508 So far, the experience has been positive. These LEO systems support our community deployment model, which involves a satellite backup point of presence combined with local distribution.

509 This allows First Nations the opportunity to set up and manage a locally operated ISP. FMCC has reached out to some communities in the far north where Northwestel has migrated services to OneWeb.

510 Local residents have told us that Northwestel’s OneWeb service has not resulted in any material changes to their internet services, with prices and speed remaining the same as before the transition to OneWeb. Based upon our experience, we think that Indigenous ISPs could operate LEO satellite services in some remote communities in the far north, rather than relying on LEO satellite services from Northwestel. Thank you, and I’m available to answer any of your questions?

511 MR. MURDOCH: Thank you, Jason. So we would like to conclude by briefly listing several recommendations to the Commission. More detail on these and other recommendations can be found in our written submissions.

512 For quality of service -- well, it’s been 10 years since the Commission’s last hearing in the North, yet there are still significant problems with inadequate speed, reliability, and affordability of services. According to a survey commissioned by Northwestel itself, more than half of Northern residents say their service is the same or worse than it was five years ago.

513 The Commission should enforce its basic service decision that all Canadians, including those in the far north, have access to 50/10 broadband service. It should require Northwestel to meet these targets. It should also require Northwestel to improve its overall quality of service and to submit a publicly available network improvement plan.

514 Affordability. As we and others have pointed out, most residents in remote and Indigenous communities have low or seasonal incomes, and often many family members share a single connection. We believe that it should be at a discount for all low-income residents to make broadband affordable for everyone in the far north, and that overage charges should be eliminated. We have suggested models for user subsidies in our written submissions.

515 Competition. We have demonstrated that competition is possible in the far north and small Indigenous ISPs can provide local broadband services at lower prices and with better technical support than are available from Northwestel. However, the Commission needs to address the barriers that limit competition, especially by Indigenous and small providers. For example, competitors need access to detailed technical specifications that are required to connect to Northwestel’s network, timely access to its network, and waiving of some charges such as porting numbers to local networks. Wholesale high speed access from Northwestel should also be required so that competitors do not have to construct duplicate facilities.

516 Consultation and engagement. Northwestel should be required to engage in meaningful consultation with communities concerning any proposed new installation or upgrades. Consultation should be in person with adequate notice and deadlines to address any unanswered questions. Northwestel should also be required to provide regular publicly available reports on its community consultations. Northwestel and other providers should be required to train and hire local residents to operate and maintain their facilities.

517 For customer service, Northwestel should improve communication with its customers. Northerners whose service is cut off because they can’t pay high charges not only lose access to critical services, but the result is a loss of revenue for Northwestel. It’s a lose-lose situation for both the customer and company.

518 Northwestel customer service should be available in several Indigenous languages. Indigenous language speakers could be hired and trained as teleworkers to provide information interpreted from their home communities.

519 Transparency. Finally, we urge the Commission to require Northwestel to meet its public interest obligations by making information publicly available on their improvement plans, overage revenues, community engagement, and other matters important to customer and service providers. We appreciate the opportunity to participate in this hearing and are available to answer your questions.

520 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much to First Mile Community Consortium. Thank you for your detailed submissions before today. Thank you for appearing before us today, and thank you as well for those prerecorded videos. I will turn things over to Commissioner Anderson who will lead the questions for us. Thank you.

521 QUESTIONS FROM THE PANEL

522 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Thank you. Hi there. I’m Claire Anderson. I’m Taku River Tlingit First Nation from the Crow Moiety, and I want to thank you for being here today.

523 I had a list of questions that is following the same format as everybody else to talk about affordability, then the affordability standard and subsidy engagement, economic reconciliation, and then Indigenous ISPs and supporting competition.

524 But hearing the opening remarks just makes me want to jump in and hear about what you think the priorities should be with respect to this regulatory proceeding. Because we’ve certainly heard a lot of people focus on competition and reducing barriers to entry for competitive service providers, including Indigenous service providers. We’ve also heard about issues relating to affordability, and consultation, and engagement, and another issue that FMCC has brought up has been transparency and access to either the incumbent’s network or information that would be useful to communities to deploy their own connections or broadband.

525 So I’m just wondering, would somebody feel comfortable just sharing what you view as the top priority in this proceeding?

526 MR. NEEPIN: Thank you for the community, Commissioner Anderson. Really, we would like equality. The way I describe my position with BCN is that we want city internet for Northern Manitoba. Currently, we’re in some -- just four communities under UBF that were approved in Manitoba. It’s approximately $20 million. It hasn’t been publicly announced yet. However, our request for an Indigenous network in Manitoba is 400 million. Twenty million is good, but it’s only 5 percent of what we need. We’re looking for equality. We’re looking for a fibre backbone. We want to be equal to all Canadians. That is transparency.

527 One thing that I would like to share is we had a LEO submission with UBF for Telesat. A Telesat solution, Northern Lights, 130 million. We asked if we could resubmit with a OneWeb solution. It came out to 158 million, and we requested 130 million. We were denied based upon the technical aspect of 50/10 and they because the LEO solution couldn’t afford that. They would rather invest in a -- rather invest in the fibre. However, the one carrot they gave us while we might have five to seven million for mobility, and if we do that, get the equipment in, we might be able to apply for CRTC funding for airtime.

528 So it’s a piecemeal approach, it’s not comprehensive. We are trying to find solutions now and the programs that are offered right now are very inadequate. I’ll take any deal I can get, but there has to be a better solution for First Nation communities. Thank you.

529 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: On that note, do you think that LEO plays an important role in making up for the infrastructure? Because you had mentioned both satellite internet, but also fibre backbone. So I was wondering, do you think that LEO provides a suitable alternative to fibre?

530 MR. NEEPIN: I’ll say from a practical standpoint, the three most northern communities in Manitoba might not be feasible for a fibre backbone. In the meantime, I’m hearing of communities’ connectivity going down for days, for weeks, and there’s public safety issues, and there’s emergencies and people’s lives are being lost. So I’m getting a lot of information from the Chiefs. The Chiefs are giving me a hard time because we are providing a terrible service and it’s directed at BCN, we’re the face, but it’s really Telesat information. So we’re providing a terrible service, we’re offering like the bare bones, and we’re just looking for equality. We would like to get any solution as possible. That’s what I’m looking for. Thank you.

531 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Thank you -- sorry, go ahead.

532 MR. MURDOCH: Sorry, if I could just answer that?

533 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Please, please do.

534 MR. MURDOCH: I see LEO as a Band-Aid, it’s a Band-Aid fix. The LEO service is a direct-to-consumer model, so it provides limited opportunity for a local community to become their own internet service provider, it provides -- provide them ownership in the infrastructure and the service, and the benefits of revenue, and then hiring local people to support that infrastructure.

535 The LEO is for internet service, which I know is the focus. Fibre is infrastructure that supports communications. That communication could be internet, cell service, television, health care, distance, education -- I mean, the list is endless.

536 So the fibre -- the available bandwidth that you could push over a fibre connection far exceeds what is available or projected to be available over a LEO system. So over a LEO system, there’s also limitations in the backhaul. So at this current point in time, there is X number of customers and there’s a huge backhaul available for the LEO. But as more and more customers come online, that backhaul in the LEO system would become less available per customer. So that will be a future challenge.

537 With fibre, it’s different shades of red. So you can typically push -- relatively cheaply, you can put nine shades of red over a single fibre strand. So that single fibre strand then becomes virtually nine fibre strands. With each connection more and more bandwidth could be supported. So that’s just upgrading the electronics on either end. But once the fibre is in the ground, I mean, it’s there for a very long time. Depending on which study you look at, it could be a 40-year life. Some major telcos consider it a 200-year life. So if it’s a 40-year life, you may have to replace the fibre, but you may not have to replace the entire fibre, just might be five kilometre sections.

538 Having local ISPs to operate and support that infrastructure, then they could provide the training to do that, provide local business opportunities. And when there is an outage, a fibre break or other technical outage, if there’s local boots on the ground to actually do that work, the time to intervene, to do that fix, is much shorter than having to do a truck roll from 100 miles away if you have somebody local. And if there’s problems with the service, then the local community could look at the ISP. Well, if the ISP is the local community, then they’re looking at their Chief and council. They’re looking at locally, so they know exactly who to complain to.

539 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: That kind of brings me to my next question then which is about KatloTech, and I’ve heard submissions about KatloTech being extremely responsive in the instance of an outage, I believe, in Mary -- Marie Peace River -- Jean Marie River.

540 Why do you suppose the response time was so much quicker? Was it because there was monitoring being done within the community? Was it an issue about proximity?

541 I was wondering if you could just maybe talk or provide some insight into that.

542 MR. FABIAN: Jean Marie in comparison to the distance from Yellowknife is a seven-hour drive in comparison to the nearest technician, which is Fort Smith, which is an hour and 20-minute drive.

543 The First Nation requested during the flood that the internet be brought back online, huge challenges during a flood, right, major challenges, and I applaud that Northwestel did make huge attempts to get things done and going. But one of the biggest issues that I have seen was the fact that availability to technicians was the major factor of deployment, and it took them to call me, you know, to react, to get a technician on the ground to get the infrastructure up and going.

544 You know, Curtis and I have known each other for many years, many, many years, and he is always willing to take my call and my criticism with a -- you know, with thick skin. And for me to show up in a community that takes me seven hours to show up to do a wireless distribution from a single access point where a single access point is providing the internet which is required for them to bring connectivity to the majority of a small community, both wirelessly was just -- you know, mainly for key institutions such as the health centre, the youth centre, basically anything and everything that had to do with keeping everybody apprised of what’s happening during a flood and during an emergency.

545 I can hop in a vehicle same day and be there six hours later and be ready to understand what needs to be done and what needs to be deployed.

546 There is no disconnect between what I understand is on the ground and what is required in order for a service that needs to be fixed or a wireless network that needs to be -- because I have intimate knowledge of all the equipment that I put in. I know all aspects of it in order for it to work, and so it doesn’t take me long to look at a solution, to find a solution to a problem.

547 You know, people call me an internet service provider. I don’t provide internet. I provide solutions. I provide technical solutions that are challenging for other people, and that’s all we’ve done is we’ve come in with fibre for K’atlodeeche First Nation. We’ve come in with point-to-point multi-point wireless distribution networks for the YK Dene. We look at a problem and we find an alternative solution.

548 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Thank you.

549 I’m going to go through the questions a bit more quickly just because I’ve got a lot to get through, so I’m going to go through as quickly as I can, but if you feel as though there was something that I missed at the end, I’d like to give you a few minutes at the end to address anything that I haven’t brought up.

550 So if you’ll just bear with me, what I’m going to do is I’m going to go through the questions about the subsidy because I see that in your submissions you propose to have what I think is two distinct subsidies, low income household subsidy, similar to FCC’s Lifeline, but then it also sounds as though you’ve proposed subsidies for service providers that are working at a disadvantage. Is that right?

551 MS. HUDSON: Thank you, Commissioners.

552 I think not exactly. I think there might be two strategies to get there.

553 What we’ve proposed is a subsidy primarily aimed at providing affordable service for Northerners, but especially low-income people, which would be targeted and perhaps could be similar to but not exactly the same as the Lifeline and affordable broadband programs in the U.S.

554 And the reason we say that is that they’re not flawless, but basically they work. I have seen them work in Alaska and other tribal regions, and the issue is to get the subsidy right. The subsidy goes to the end user, but the carrier has an incentive to get participation.

555 Some have testified that it’s too complicated. Well, from the user perspective, it doesn’t have to be. You can certify a person as low income as anyone who gets some kind of social assistance from their territorial government, for example. And there’s always a person in the community who’s responsible for either allocating those claims or signing people up, so getting people signed up is not a problem. The carriers have the incentive to do that because they’re not going to get the money to provide the service unless the subsidy, which goes to them, in a sense, to reduce the cost to the end user unless the people are signed up.

556 There is an option of doing a general --increasing general high-cost fund support, too, which we could talk about later, if you want.

557 But we think that the subsidies have to be mandatory, that voluntary subsidies, although well intentioned, really just aren’t going to cut it in really high-cost, low-income regions.

558 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Thank you for that clarification.

559 I would be interested to note if you had specific recommendations for social assistance programs that could provide a nice baseline. I think that you provided two social assistance programs, one from Nunavut and one from NWT. But if there are other programs that you can think of which would be useful in which we could turn to to consider what constitutes low income or who would meet that threshold, that would be great.

560 MS. NORRIS: Thank you, yeah. We’ll take that as an undertaking. We’re just looking for existing proxies that are fair and in place and don’t require a lot of new paperwork.

561 (Undertaking)

562 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Right, yes, of course. And potentially maybe there would be social assistance programs -- we would have to make sure that it was inclusive of Indigenous communities anyway. Okay.

563 That’s very helpful.

564 Next I wanted to talk about the interaction between internet affordability subsidies and the affordability standard. And I know that in your submissions you discussed creating an affordability standard using metrics such as geography, household income, household size, bandwidth and data usage requirements for essential public services and economic activities online.

565 I was wondering, then, does the affordability standard provide something more than what a low-income subsidy would provide? What other objectivity -- sorry, I’m saying this wrong. But what other objectives could the internet affordability sub -- standard achieve beyond those of a subsidy?

566 Sorry; I’m mixing up the two. What can the standard achieve that the subsidy can’t?

567 MS. HUDSON: Thank you.

568 I think they’re two related questions and my colleague can address them. One is to say how would you implement a subsidy, and how do we determine what that should be. One is, who qualifies, and that’s one set of conditions. The others will -- you know, what do we mean by affordable, which you’ve asked -- the Commission has asked several times in various ways. And so we were trying to address that, but my colleague can help with some specifics.

569 MR. McMAHON: I was just going to speak to -- any kind of affordability standard, as you mentioned, Commissioner, I understand there’s distinctions between the communities, like within the regions. There’s distinctions between the cities within a particular region. For example, the rural remote communities in the Northwest Territories are very different than the urban centres with respect to equity and then, of course, distinctions inside of the communities. And so a standard may help sort out some of those specifics in a way that a subsidy may be more challenging to do so.

570 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: So I wonder about the level of granularity that you’re proposing because you’re making a lot of distinctions. I wonder if the metric would be very cumbersome and difficult to measure and constantly changing. So I wonder if you could comment on that, if it would be too complex to measure in a way that is efficient that will provide us with guidance in an efficient manner.

571 MR. McMAHON: I think -- you know, there’s always that question about the efficiency of measuring it. I would just say that, from the perspective of consumers or end users, there’s a lot of complexity in trying to sort through the types of service that they could use, how to manage their bandwidth in a way that is not going to go over overage rates, so it’s incumbent on them to visit a website and try to figure out what their usage would be using a calculator that’s online in terms of the type of uses that they use the internet for and so on in order to predict how much data that they may use in a specific month and then manage their usage in a way that wouldn’t exceed their data cap.

572 So I would say there’s a high level of complexity already that’s placed on the end user or consumer. So that would be one response there.

573 MS. HUDSON: Yeah, I think just briefly that the DigitalNWT study tried to do an estimate of what’s a reasonable amount -- affordability, if you just say, well, sign up and you get something that looks relatively cheap but it gives you very limited bandwidth, we know that families, there are multiple users and there are overage charges.

574 So we tried to estimate, I think DigitalNWT used, you know, one hour streaming a day, for example, and said it was more than $230 a month a household would have to pay for that. So the point is to try to simplify, but to be realistic that it’s not just bare bones, a few emails and voice calls.

575 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Right, yeah. Thank you. Thank you for that.

576 I wanted to move on to engagement with Indigenous rightsholders, and some parties, including yourself, have proposed that the CRTC should impose new requirements on telecom service providers to address how they engage with Indigenous communities, for instance, when providing or planning to provide services.

577 Can you tell us more about what actions you think the CRTC should take to ensure that the engagement between telecom service providers and Indigenous rights-holders is transparent, meaningful, and better supports reconciliation?

578 MR. MURDOCH: Well, to start the -- for the consultation process, it should be a meaningful consultation process. It should be a face-to-face meeting, ideally in communities so that the people offering the service can see the realities on the ground of what’s in the community. Obviously, it should be documented. And there should be mutual understanding between both parties, obviously. Rather than an engagement simply being, “Well, here’s a survey, fill it out.” They receive no response, or they receive a response that is not a meaningful consultation.

579 MR. FABIAN: On that note, you know, Indigenous communities, when it comes to consultation, they themselves, you know, are always worried about what constitutes consultation; right? Even in their own groups, in their own communities, and so therefore each and every individual First Nation community, they themselves define what is meaningful consultation, and so we cannot dictate, you know, what is meaningful consultation, other than you know, what does it mean to a First Nation that is fair and equitable consultation between an ISP and a First Nation government.

580 And so therefore, you know, it can be very similar across the board, but at the same time the need for direct face-to-face meetings has always been how preferred -- Indigenous groups like to operate, and so therefore, it’s the same question that a lot of First Nation communities in the Northwest Territories, during the Berger inquiry, was they themselves were defining what is meaningful consultation.

581 Therefore, you know, under the Canadian Constitution, under section 35 rights, you know, the consultation has not been defined in regards to -- you know, in the legal system, but it has been stated by the Berger that, you know, there’s each and every consultation method needs to be defined by the First Nation themselves. And so therefore, has the ISP, let’s say. But you know, I’m taking references from oil and gas. What meaningful consultation has the ISP taken on behalf of, you know, the said First Nation? And so therefore have they met those requirements for that First Nation. It could be varied across the board, and so therefore it’s a huge undertaking, and I know that under the Mackenzie gas project, you know, the proponents spent billions of dollars just up and down the Mackenzie Valley trying to decipher meaningful consultation. And so they can take a lot of direction from that example of what means meaningful consultation.

582 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Thank you so much. Did you want to go ahead? Yeah, of course.

583 MR. NEEPIN: I’d like to add just one more comment. I recently did a site survey up in Pukatawagan and I learned there area lot of predatory ISPs going to First Nation asking for collateral, asking for businesses to be -- give us your four businesses on reserve as collateral and we can give you internet and you’re on the hook for all the costs.

584 So when we show up trying to, as an Indigenous ISP, we’re here to upgrade the system, they are very suspicious of us as well saying, “Okay, what do you need? What are you asking for?”

585 We’re here with $600,000 to fix your tower. The tower is going to cost $1.2 million. Let’s work together. Let’s ask Indian Affairs for the other half. But they’re very suspicious. They’re asking us, “Okay, who are you, what do you want from us?” Because of other predatory practices from ISPs in Manitoba.

586 So you know, to get to consultation, the practices are very predatory in First Nations’ communities. I just want to share that experience with you. Thank you.

587 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Thank you. So one of the proposals that was put forward by the territorial governments, well, I think it was Yukon government and the government of Northwest Territories, had suggested coming up with either guidelines about how to undertake meaningful consultation as something that the Commission could do. And another suggestion was creating like, a list of best practices when it comes to engagement.

588 Do you think that either of those initiatives, either the CRTC coming up with a set of best practices, would be useful to telecom service providers, or do you think that given that you said that there’s no one-size-fits-all, it would have limited utility, but maybe it would be a good place to start? I’d love to hear what you have to say about a set of guidelines for a set of best practices.

589 MS. GOOSE: I’d like to speak to that, please. Thank you. Hello?

590 MR. MURDOCH: For the best -- it kind of touches on all the questions that have been asked so far.

591 UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Just a moment please, we need to put you into the room. Standby.

592 MR. MURDOCH: So around the affordability piece, some transparency into actually what the actual costs are would be helpful.

593 The three main business pieces that provide connectivity to the community, you have gateway, which is a connection from a major centre to the global internet. You have transit, which is a connection from the major centre to the community. And then you have distribution. So the distribution piece would be your internet service provider. Transit would be your backhaul or transport piece. And then gateway. The gateway is fixed costs and there’s no overage charges for gateway. So why are there overage -- that’s why part of it -- I find it confusing that there’s an overage charge when it gets to the customer, but at the source there’s no overage charge. So some transparency in what those costs actually are would be a benefit.

594 Having a local ownership or stake in the game by the local community will give them access to those financial pieces so that they could see what the actual true costs are. Also provides -- if they have a local ownership or local benefit, then they have a stake in the game. The local community, they answer to the customer, what is their local community members. So they want to provide what’s best for their local community, and they’re answering to the customer. They’re not answering to a shareholder in a for-profit organization. So they answer to the local community, and what that model looks like has been spoken before, it’s defined by the community.

595 Three typical business models that we use in Manitoba, either a local ISP, so it’s providing the backhaul to local ISP. They own it, control it, they set the price for their customers, or perhaps they farm it out to a third party. So in Manitoba a lot of the First Nations they go with BCN, because BCN is also a not-for-profit internet service provider. As a non-profit, they have to be transparent in their finances, or perhaps some sort of a hybrid model where it’s branded as a community ISP, so any boots on the ground work is done by the local community, but all the technical pieces such as managing the router switches, the backhaul, gateway, those pieces are done by some other technical provider such as BCN.

596 So with all those pieces in play, at the end it would be to provide an affordable, reliable service to the customer, which is the individuals in the First Nation communities.

597 For a financially sustainable model, anchor tenants. So the anchor tenants could potentially cover a majority of the cost for providing service to the community. That would reduce the cost for the individual consumer by having anchor tenants bear most of the cost to provide the service for the community.

598 MS. ROY: I’m sorry, I think Leanne on Zoom would like to answer also this question. Can you hear us?

599 MS. GOOSE: No, I can’t. No.

600 MS. ROY: Now can you hear us?

601 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Could we move to Dr. Rob McMahon in the interim because we are running lower on time? So I just -- I say your mic come on.

602 MR. McMAHON: Yeah, thank you. Just in response to your question about the best practices, or set of guidelines, and you said that was sort of oriented towards service providers, and I just wanted to point to a couple of things that the FCC implements. So there’s a tribal engagement obligation there, as one potential model that implies an obligation versus a set of best practices or guidelines. And then another program by the FCC actually focuses as well on folks in communities receiving training with respect to consultation. So I think any such practice or process could benefit from not just posting things for service providers, but also working with folks in the communities to help support their work on the consultation side as well.

603 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Thank you. And in your experience do you find that the requirements to obtain under the tribal -- sorry, the tribal engagement obligation are too onerous, or are they fairly manageable to perform?

604 MS. HUDSON: I guess I would say that from what we heard from talking to a small sample of community or representatives, they have to do that before they get any federal funding. But I would say -- I can't remember who said it initially, but trust but verify. It doesn’t always happen. And even though they’re supposed to submit a report from what we’ve heard. So that’s why we’re saying, yes, this is really important to do, but then there has to be some accountability either through regulator, or through some certification that it has happened. But, yes, the guidelines I think are very useful, and training community engagement part is also important.

605 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Great. Thank you. And one of the questions we asked was what action the CRTC should take to apply UNDRIP principles. And you noted UNDRIP requires every level of federal to align Canadian laws with the standard set forth in the Declaration. And so I was wondering if you could maybe talk about whether UNDRIP applies to the CRTC?

606 MR. McMAHON: Well, I would say the consensus among the group is, but I think that that’s something that maybe we would request an undertaking because –

607 (Undertaking)

608 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Sure. Yes, please.

609 MR. McMAHON: Can I add one more point about what we were talking about with respect to the earlier piece on consultation and engagement --

610 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Yes, of course.

611 MR. McMAHON: -- because you had raised the issue of community monitoring.

612 So Lyle gave the great example of Jean Marie River First Nation and how that community contacted him when they were facing reliability challenges and, therefore, that resulted in fixing the problem.

613 And I just wanted to stress that consultation and engagement, if it’s set up in a manner that happens throughout the life of a project, so it’s not just in terms of the initial setup and deployment but also in the ongoing maintenance, operations and sustainability of the infrastructure and services in these regions, can really be helpful, I think, both to service providers and communities.

614 And the FCC does play a role through the Broadband Data Act that helps manage the process of community-based data collection in this regard and works with local community members to assess and monitor the quality of service and so on. And I think that could help fill some gaps, especially in the very limited data available in what we might consider geographically remote communities. They’re often the ones, you know, as we’re all hearing, the highest cost services, the lowest quality services, and the biggest challenges with respect to reliability.

615 So I just really encourage that consideration of engagement and consultation, monitoring and evaluation, to really engage communities throughout that process, too.

616 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Yeah, thank you. That was one of my questions that I wanted to ask was about doing regular monitoring as well as monitoring under exceptional circumstances, like in response to outages.

617 It sounds as though regular monitoring would be useful to shorten the time and shorten the frequency of outages, I’m guessing. Yeah.

618 How often do you think regular monitoring would have to be done, or would that depend on the circumstances of each case?

619 MR. McMAHON: I was just going to say, I think it depends on what specifically is being monitored because you can set up, as you know, such as a Sam Knows program, like passive ongoing monitoring of quality of service. Of course, it would have to apply to all communities and all types of infrastructure, and not just cable and fibre, but of course, consider satellite and DSL. And also, of course, distribution throughout communities as well as throughout regions, perhaps with a particular focus on the more remote areas, and then other aspects of monitoring such as affordability and so on could be set up in regular intervals.

620 The technology exists to do it in a really low-cost manner. At the University of Alberta, in DigitalNWT research, we had local researchers going door to door using tablets. They’re offline, free mobile application. It’s very easy to transmit the data back to the folks analyzing it, whether that’s the CRTC or another agency or organization.

621 So the technology exists. It’s very low cost to do so. And I would imagine that communities would definitely find people interested in participating.

622 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Thank you very much.

623 MR. MURDOCH: Just to add to that, to monitor reports and to verify, very important.

624 The current measurement is the 25-kilometre hexagons. While First Nation communities either follow the road or follow the river, so you may have a property within that 25-kilometre hexagon, but the rest of the community is not connected. But by definition, the whole community is connected because one house in that hexagon has service.

625 You may have a situation where there’s fibre across the road from a community. That fibre is utilized by the major telco to provide cell service, but the community does not have access to that fibre to provide internet service and the community is not eligible for funding because they’re considered a serviced community and they’re within -- you know, across the road, literally, from fibre.

626 Also, with the speed tests, I know the performance that’s here, that CA speed test, with the current terrestrial satellite solution, the speed test defaults to where the ground station is, so if you have a remote community, they run the speed test, it goes to the satellite, from the satellite it goes to a ground station and then goes to global internet.

627 So when you try to run the speed test from the community, it defaults to where that ground station is, and that ground station may be in a separate province, it may be 100 miles, 200 miles away. So it’s not a reflection of what the speed is in the community. It looks like i’s from this other part of the country, depending where it is.

628 And the -- also, the front end of the performance on the speed test is so graphic intensive, we have communities that are not able to run the speed test because the graphics on the front end don’t load. It freezes. So the information’s not accurate.

629 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: I just have questions relating to wholesale. And so we’ve talked about changes to retail rate and we’ve talked about subsidies to reduce retail internet rates and we’ve also talked about the fact that -- or we’ve talked about the proposal that CRTC should require Northwestel to introduce a new wholesale internet service for competitors.

630 How do you see these two at play with each other? Because now we’ve got -- we’re talking about a subsidy versus wholesale services. Are these two initiatives that can work in conjunction with each other? Do you think that one should be prioritized over the other?

631 MR. FABIAN: I guess, you know, wholesale challenges in the Northwest Territories, it really comes down to the access to broadband, right. Like that’s where wholesale really benefits, is over a terrestrial link that is hosted by fibre.

632 Wholesale transport services over a fibre network makes more economic sense for a First Nation to gain access to a fibre optic network, but in order to gain access to a fibre optic network, you need that fibre optic network within reach in order for wholesale pricing to benefit and so, therefore, the majority of the communities in the Northwest Territories may or may not have access to a fibre optic link or a backbone, and so therefore wholesale broadband pricing will not benefit said community without the need for a direct link over fibre. And so therefore, if the wholesale pricing, broadband pricing is enforced, then what about the need for funding to gain access to that infrastructure, you know, also needs to be supplied to the First Nation because right now that is the major component that I see as a huge challenge for a lot of Indigenous communities in the Northwest Territories, is that you can provide said wholesale broadband pricing but, really, there is no -- almost no benefit if it’s being transported over a satellite system. It just doesn’t work.

633 And so, therefore, First Nations communities need to look at ownership in order for them to take a look at wholesale broadband pricing in order for them to become an economic sustainable model to operate within its own region. If they own the infrastructure and gain access to wholesale broadband pricing, that is the model that benefits Indigenous groups.

634 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Thank you.

635 MS. HUDSON: Can I answer very briefly?

636 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Yes.

637 MS. HUDSON: I think that the question you’re raising, you know, these are all strategies to get more affordable service and we’re saying speed and affordability, quality of service, competition has to be part of the solution somehow. You know, if we have more competition, maybe eventually you reassess the subsidy and there’s less need for a subsidy.

638 I mean, nobody is trying to say a subsidy should be the only -- a long-term solution. But at the moment because it’s hard to get more innovative pricing in the market, that’s fine. But if you’re going to introduce the wholesale access, which I think we are saying you should, then it has to be regulated according to price.

639 In Alaska, after 2010, there was a federal program that was the first to provide significant infrastructure funding for broadband, and one of the requirements of the recipients was that they had to provide wholesale access, so they did. But they priced it so high that local companies -- and there are some in small towns in Alaska -- said, “We can’t possibly compete. There’s no way we could put together a package that we think would be more affordable or targeted at some of our customers because we have to pay so much. We can get access now, but the pricing is too high”.

640 So just a warning that there needs to be some oversight. Otherwise, you can say, yes, it exists, but it won’t help solve the affordability problem.

641 MR. MURDOCH: Also, just to add to that, it has to make financial sense. The pricing model cannot be, as you have more customers getting onto the network, it becomes more expensive, which economies of scale, it just simply doesn’t make sense, although there are pricing models like that out there. So the more customers you have on, the more expensive the service becomes.

642 And we were negotiating with a major telco to get access to their fibre infrastructure, and their costs were high but somewhat reasonable within our pricing model, within our financial sustainability model for the program. Then at the last minute, they decided to throw in, “Well, if we need access in the wintertime in case there’s a fibre break, you also have to cover snow clearing”. Well, how much is snow clearing? Oh, 40,000 a month.

643 Then it made zero sense to go with that if there’s an additional 40,000 a month to access the fibre infrastructure.

644 THE CHAIRPERSON: Maybe I’ll just do a quick check to see if there’s any pressing things.

645 Commissioner Desmond, maybe? We’ll turn it over to you.

646 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Thank you. And thank you so much for your presentation today. It’s been very helpful.

647 I did want to ask just a couple of questions. One is around the subsidy and whether it should be permanent.

648 And Ms. Hudson, I think a moment ago you had suggested that perhaps it did not need to be permanent, but when I read your submission, I think the suggestion was originally maybe that the subsidy should be in place on a permanent basis. So I’m just curious if you could just speak to that and then, if competition evolves and we see Aboriginal and Indigenous owned ISPs, how would the subsidy be -- would there still be a need for a permanent subsidy in that instance if the ISP is Indigenous owned?

649 MS. HUDSON: Yes, thank you for the question.

650 I think, you know, Bill’s point is -- Bill’s point about snow removal, you know, what we’re trying to do is figure out a way to provide incentives for more customers paying reasonable rates to get better service. So definitely, you know, an operational subsidy, it seems necessary at this point in the North. Maybe in some ways it will be -- but it should certainly be reassessed. Nobody is saying put this in place, set it in stone forever. This is a very changing environment in terms of technology, in terms of bandwidth requirements. So reassessment is important.

651 I think, you know, as we get more partners involved, get more innovative and locally reasonable solutions to providing and maintaining service. So hopefully we’re trying to push the incentives in the right direction.

652 MR. NEEPIN: If I could add, some of our satellite communities, our radios only service maybe 10 to 15 percent of the households. So when the pandemic hits, there is -- the households don’t even have connectivity, they have no radios. Some of our C-band satellites. So when you say is a subsidy necessary, some of our customers can’t even connect to the internet. It doesn’t exist, the C-band. So we need more connectivity to even talk about subsidies in some of our communities. It’s a big challenge. Thanks.

653 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Okay. And just a second question, if I could, and that’s around the conditions of service. So if a subsidy was available and it’s provided to a service provider, how then could we assure that there is -- that service is acceptable, that there are conditions of service that are met so that the end user has reasonable connectivity?

654 MR. NEEPIN: Yeah, I’ll just add to my point. We need a bigger spigot, we need connectivity, we don’t have it. So to talk about subsidies, it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t work. For some of our satellite communities it’s really challenging, and I feel for them, and the Chiefs are hard on myself personally, BCN, we have a black eye in regards to our connectivity issues. So it’s putting the cart before the horse from my perspective. Thanks.

655 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Thank you so much.

656 MS. GOOSE: Madam Commissioner I’d like to speak to points about UNDRIP and how it relates to some of the challenges that our team has witnessed throughout their work experience.

657 THE CHAIRPERSON: Yeah. Commissioner Anderson just wanted to jump back in for a moment.

658 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Oh, I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to travel here. I know that you came from all across the country, and from the United States. And so I wanted to say thanks. And I also wanted to give you a few minutes as promised at the beginning of this discussion in case there were any issues that I missed in my questioning.

659 MS. HUDSON: First did you hear that our colleague Leanne Goose was trying to respond on audio just then and asked if she could address a couple comments? So could we hear from her first?

660 MS. ROY: Leanne, can you hear me?

661 MS. GOOSE: I certainly can.

662 MS. ROY: Perfect. So you may answer. You can say what you wanted to say.

663 MS. GOOSE: Thank you. (SPeakign in Indigenous language) Well, all of this is about the well-being of a person. The well-being of one person inside a small community, and this is their only lifeline. Internet and digital connectivity is important to the way of life and to help us come into an age where we can actively participate.

664 Now, part of UNDRIP says Article 3 the right to self determination by virtue of that. They freely determine their own political status and freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development. Article 23 also says for First Nations to have the right to determine and develop priorities and strategies for exercising the right to development, a right to be actively involved in developing and determining health, housing, and other economic resources of social development programs such as connectivity to the internet and other communication services, which are programs or services that affect them on a daily basis, as far as possible to administer such programs through their own institutions.

665 And so in this respect, you know, this is a cross-cutting issue that impacts the implementation of every UNDRIP article. This means that data and the use of infrastructure or these information services must be addressed simultaneously and as a part of honouring other rights. It also means that data must be considered across all the federal government departments and agencies like Northwestel, as a holistic and systemic part of our way of life.

666 And for the North, many of us have been considered on a bias, that for a long, long time Northwestel has held a conglomerate, has locked out many of our participants and provided limitations so that we cannot grow in an economic way using our own people to train and deliver programs and services that are directed to us. And coming right back to the well-being of one person. That is the purpose of UNDRIP, is improving the lives of those people that we are here to advocate for.

667 And I think when we look at the three-prong purpose of our presentation today, one was to have Northwestel include us in the ways that they design and manage programs and services that are offered in our home territories. So that means education and outreach to people on either how to better manage their equipment and services and learn about what those mean, providing education and training to those people who are interested in telecoms or this type of infrastructure, communication technology; three, to be able to provide affordable, sustainable service that matches even a rural farm in the southern parts of Canada, that is equal to so that every child or every person who is at home can access regular services offered by Canada or those around the world.

668 And three, provide a space for healthy competition and growth within the industry. Because right now there is not a lot of opportunity, and youth don’t see the viability of getting a job at Northwestel or in the information technology sector that will help them sustain and grow for the future. And that is a big problem, that this company has profited from our people for a long, long time and there is no development programs or community outreach and they haven’t even gone in to ask, “How can we help you? How can we do better? And what would you like to see?” And that is the key to engagement in a healthy way.

669 And as First Nations, Inuit and Metis, we have an inherent, and treaty, and constitutional rights to these services. That on these principles of OCAP -- ownership, access, control, and possession -- that on our lands we have on our lands, that we have the opportunity and the same rights and opportunities as other people, and that there’s a way to ensure that our human resources match our economic resources, so that we improve our cultural and social standing. So (speaking Indigenous language) thank you.

670 COMMISSIONER ANDERSON: Thank you. Thank you very much.

671 Any more time?

672 THE CHAIRPERSON: I think we’re okay in terms of questions. Are we -- we’re good. Okay. So maybe I can just jump in for a moment.

673 Let me start by just apologizing to Leanne Goose. We are having a lot of trouble up here hearing, and so I know that we’re working on getting that fixed, so I do apologize, because I hadn’t appreciated that you were trying to jump in. So thank you very much.

674 I would just say again, we will give you the last word if you would like to add anything. Maybe what I could just say from my perspective is that we really do appreciate -- and just to reiterate what Commissioner Anderson has said, we appreciate you coming before us, sharing some of those practical, real-life examples, you know, about people getting cut off because they’re not paying their overage charges, possible confusion on the website, snow removal, everything else, the floods. So really appreciate you sharing those with us and also proposing solutions. So thank you for that.

675 We will give you the last word.

676 MR. MURDOCH: Just to add to Leanne’s point.

677 In the end it’s to benefit the individual and community, to try and find a solution that benefits the entire -- all First Nations. That’s a grand plan, to bring it down to focus, to benefit the individual in the community, once you benefit the individual, it benefits their family and then the community. So to focus on who that individual in the community is.

678 The education piece. To become a doctor or nurse, you need Grade 12 biology. Well, a lot of First Nation communities do not offer Grade 12 biology, they just offer the core catalogue. If you want to be hired by Hydro, you need Grade 12 physics. None of the First Nation community schools in Manitoba offer Grade 12 physics. The only way to take that would be online. Access to health, e-health, telehealth, doctor and medical records, HER, etcetera. To be able to talk to a psychologist or psychiatrist virtually over a telehealth system that provides them obviously mental health benefits.

679 With that kind of access, that reduces other costs, such as medical transportation. In Manitoba, when I was working in the health area, it was $110 million a year for Medtrans. So that’s to transport a person from a community to a hospital. It might be for a 15-minute consultation. If you can eliminate that and do it virtually, if you can do a 10 percent savigins, well, that’s $10 million a year right there just in Medtrans. That’s based on probably 10-year-old numbers. I’m sure it’s over $150 million a year now for Medtrans.

680 The finance, online banking, has already been discussed.

681 Safety. If there’s a forest fire or some other event that requires notifying the community, to have some sort of system such as -- I know Ottawa uses the AtHoc system. So if you have somebody running around Ottawa with a gun, they can send out a message through AtHoc. But to be able to manage that system, you need a high-speed connection to the server and then that server has to be connected to your communication system in the community. So that could be a way to warn the community for forest fires or other events that may happen.

682 Business online, writing code, code writers, people that speak -- anecdotally, people that speak more than one language, which many in First Nation communities do, gives them additional -- gives them the skill-set to take on additional languages because they already have that skill of multiple languages, so to be able to write code.

683 Customer service, voice over IP. A lot of call centres are opening up in low-cost countries like the Philippines. Well, that’s all done over the internet. So to have those Indigenous speakers and people in the community employed as customer service representatives, that provides local business opportunity.

684 I know there’s actually one lady in B.C., she has an online business. She buys and sells tea. She sources the tea, she purchases it, and then has it shipped directly to the business. So she actually never receives the inventory. She just coordinates that.

685 I’m sure there’s many, many more opportunities that I’m not touching on, but just to highlight what connectivity can benefit in the community. It’s not just health, education. It’s the community as a whole once you benefit the individual.

686 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much.

687 MS. HUDSON: I would just say that those are wonderful examples, and they show that there’s not only economic development opportunities by getting better and affordable service out there, but it shows that there’s a lot of different customers for these services, including many of the government service providers, health, education, public safety that are potential customers and potential anchor tenants that are also part of the solution for driving down the cost and the price to the customers.

688 So you know, I think you’re hearing a variety of ways to help the communities and the users, but also show that there’s more potential revenue and opportunities for the providers, too. Multiple pieces to the problem, but thank you very much.

689 MS. ROY: Thank you very much for your presentation. We’ll now take a 15-minute break and be back at 3:20. Thank you.

--- Upon recessing at 3:02 p.m.

--- Upon resuming at 3:20 p.m.

690 MS. ROY: We will now hear the presentation of G&V Global Developments appearing remotely via Zoom.

691 Mr. Gerry Nesbitt, can you hear me correctly?

692 MR. NESBITT: Yes, I can. If you can hear me.

693 MS. ROY: Thank you very much. You may begin your presentation.

Presentation

694 MR. NESBITT: Thank you, Commissioners and Madam Speaker and fellow people interested in the internet services of the Arctic north and other locations similar.

695 So I guess to start, I mean, just a quick little bit about myself and with this presentation. I’ve been involved with communications for a number of years and been helping with services and ideas with residents and small business, but a big part has really been with satellite and being with people that are in remote locations similar to, as an example, off grid, which through some of the talks that we’ve already gone through now and perhaps will be brought up again through the week, is to -- when we're talking about communities and cities, I think it’s also important to recognize that there are people that live outside of these communities, which one term could be off grid, but where it’s not just a couple of homes but can be several, as an example, in the Ingram Trail, which is outside of Yellowknife, and has no fixed wire system of internet or anything and a very poor, unfortunately, in these days, cell data service. But I’ll start now with a little bit of the presentation I have.

696 It has become obvious over the past 15 years that the Government of Canada and the communication arm, CRTC, have lost sight of keeping Canadians in the north connected with a system that is affordable and compares to what is available in the world at any given time.

697 If we look back when the fibre optic lines were being installed across Canada by Bell as well as across the world, it was time to plan for the future and how to network this technology to all Canadians in every corner of the country, not just the most popular areas where the private companies and their investors could make the biggest profit.

698 This is where the government and the CRTC must step in and make sure a foundation could be laid to make sure that small providers and backbone systems could be put into place to provide this new communication to all, which includes fibre line, satellite, and other related systems.

699 If we look at how the government funds have been distributed over the last 10 years as an example, it is clear to show that Bell and companies like Northwestel and a few others have taken the most and provided the least in terms of when it comes to affordability with good service to all the communities.

700 The amount of times we have talked to residents and small businesses across the territories and heard of poor service, large overage costs for internet data use that were not controlled properly by the provider, or poor communication on the way the system worked for users came up thousands of times over the years as we would go to different locations. With any large-scale project in the north there needs to be many checks in place to ensure that the money and management of providing a service is done with the public best interests. Northern First Nations group and small businesses are in the position to provide this service in just that manner for the best interests of people, as well as to meet with them on the street and other gatherings every day and week, and are held accountable.

701 A good example is the extra cost that was paid out by the GNWT to the Mackenzie fibre line contractors, as was mentioned earlier in this meeting, plus or minus $100 million. The project should have been never this high, including with the QA and QC of the installation.

702 Another example would be NWTel was asked in 2014 to provide internet service to the Ingram Trail off-grid residents, plus or minus 100 homes, which is roughly about 30, 40 kilometres outside Yellowknife. The only system available was cell service data plans which cost is very excessive. NWT estimated to provide a point-to-point tower system and then be omni directional to residential pockets, nor did they have the existing towers, was in excess of $50,000. Direct cost to the resident would [stream lost / diffusion perdue] given what’s available from satellite service to date and will be in the next few years which will come, satellite providers is a mix of some providing individual -- [stream lost / diffusion perdue].

703 MS. ROY: Mr. Nesbitt, if you can hear me, maybe turn off your video? We just lost you -- your internet, your satellite internet issues. Perfect.

704 MR. NESBITT: Are you still able to hear now?

705 MS. ROY: Yes, absolutely.

706 MR. NESBITT: Okay. It is believed the CRTC should step up -- set up a system that will allow for funding or fixed rates for these services to all Northern users, wholesale competition is one possible solution.

707 With all of these systems available and future fibre projects, there’s a strong position that the CRTC should take to make sure First Nations and small business from the North are given the opportunity to supply these services to their communities. And thus, creating a fair competition network across the North and removing the dominant control of the few, which has seen in the past and recently, similar to as an example Rogers taking over Shaw.

708 In summary, it is a well-known fact globally that Canada has one of the most expensive cost rates for internet access and only a few providers. The time for operating -- opening up competition for the CRTC to take a stronger role in ensuring funds are distributed more equally to smaller providers that have close connection to the communities they provide with fair rates for all as similar to the south.

709 That concludes what I had to say.

710 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much, Mr. Nesbitt, not just for participating in this public hearing but for your participation at the proceeding more broadly.

711 I will turn things over to Vice-chair Scott for questions. Thank you.

712 VICE CHAIRPESON SCOTT: Thank you, Madam Chairperson. Mr. Nesbitt, my first question is, can you hear me okay?

713 MR. NESBITT: Yes, I can.

714 VICE CHAIRPERSON SCOTT: Fantastic. Jumping right into substance, then. Like a number of our presenters, you focused on affordability. Would you find it useful if the CRTC were to establish a standard that would help us define affordability, and do you have thoughts on factors that could inform what that standard would look like?

715 MR. NESBITT: Well, I think like my other fellow presenters, I mean, there has to be some system put in place for sure that would be involved to that fact. But, I mean, as I said before, there certainly is going to be a requirement for consultation with various groups to make sure that that is an acceptable outcome of whatever might be discussed and what would be the best solution to that.

716 VICE CHAIRPERSON SCOTT: If we were able to reach such a standard, we’ve certainly heard a lot about the idea of subsidies. In addition to subsidies, are there other ways where you think having such a standard would be helpful? Are there other regulatory measures we could take that would be well-informed by an affordability standard?

717 MR. NESBITT: The only thing I can think of, to be honest with you, from listening to those past talks about that, was one thing in regard to subsidy I think we need to be careful about is -- I mean, when you talk about -- I think it was universal and fixed income. As an example, that I can give you many examples of people that I have visited to do installations and talking to people all across the board of different incomes.

718 And when it comes toa family and especially living in the North, with the cost that it is to live up here for oil and everything else, even a family that has some fixed income models usually work. That you could have a family making $30,000, you could have a family making $70,000, and surprisingly enough, sometimes even the higher income family ends up at the end of the day, if they’re paying a lot of money for communications, because let’s say as an example, again, they’re off grid, that there’s not much left in the pocket to take care of that. So I think you have to be very careful in respect to how that model is put together.

719 But otherwise, I mean, the generation of income I think was also talked about, where over the years to come, of where there’s more competition, I think obviously it would help that in terms of the -- the cost would -- for a subsidy could slowly start to disappear if there’s enough economy going on from, you know, the availability of cheap internet for small business and others.

720 VICE CHAIRPERSON SCOTT: Thank you. Your answers are going in exactly the direction that my questions were going to go, so I think we’re well aligned there.

721 So on subsidy, so there are certainly at least two broad directions we could go, one being kind of a cost-based subsidy, recognizing that prices are high across the North, and the other is that more targeted approach, which you and I think others have noted could be complex to establish and there could be some difficulties in administering.

722 Do you have additional thoughts on the merits of one approach versus the other?

723 MR. NESBITT: To be honest with you, I think I could, but at this very moment, that’s something I would definitely have to think a little bit about, you know, to give a real solid answer.

724 VICE CHAIRPERSON SCOTT: That’s no problem at all.

725 Maybe I’ll jump then to LEO solutions and Starlink in particular, because you referenced it in your written submission as well. Is Starlink meeting the needs of the people of the North? Is the service Goodnough to do it, or are the prospects positive enough that you’re optimistic?

726 MR. NESBITT: Well, to be honest with you, that was one hope, I thought, with a lot of people, that it would be something helpful, especially because their data is almost to the point of unlimited. But they are having their own unfortunate troubles when it comes to just the upload/download and -- which possibly I don’t know all the technical details of their problems right now but, you know, it isn’t -- it isn’t foolproof, that’s for sure, so there’s still a ways to go and maybe they’re working those bugs out over time, you know, with added ground stations closer to where they’re providing from and that type of thing.

727 So it’s, you know, there’s that balancing act where you say one is better than the other. It’s unfortunate. It’s still a work-in-progress.

728 VICE CHAIRPERSON SCOTT: Thank you. On the issue of outages, we’ve got multiple submissions calling for either a refund regime and/or better transparency with regards to sharing information pertaining to outages. I’d be interested in your thoughts on the importance of those and, again, the question I’ve asked a few times today about whether the north is experiencing outages maybe more severely but they’re still the same type of issues that are dealt with in an outage in the south, and whether the north needs a particular framework unto itself or whether it could be incorporated in a national framework dealing with outages?

729 MR. NESBITT: Well, I think, as it’s been brought up from my other fellow presenters, that there’s certainly the simple fact, if you’re in a remote location, you’re talking about some critical issues. And if you don’t have communication, you could be talking about some very serious matters, whether it’s medical or otherwise. I mean, it’s one thing to be down the street, or 20 kilometres away from another town, and up here you’re not. You’re not around anybody. You know, that’s something that you have to take a very serious consideration to when it comes to that and then -- so, you know, as a backup system is something that has to be looked at because having a week without -- or whatever, even one day -- is just too much.

730 VICE CHAIRPERSON SCOTT: In your written submission and in your opening remarks today you spoke about opportunities for Indigenous ownership and Indigenous participation in providing services. Beyond opening up markets to wholesale, are there other regulatory measures that the CRTC could consider that would result in easier opportunity for Indigenous operators?

731 MR. NESBITT: Well, I mean, I wouldn’t want to per se speak too much about it other than when, you know, my involvement with some groups that I meet through my travels and day-to-day. And, I mean, obviously things like education are really big importance to help people to gain that kind of education, to utilize being involved in that type of business. So I mean, I think that that would be, you know, one of the steps that would be taken to do something like that.

732 VICE CHAIRPERSON SCOTT: Okay. A point of clarification I wanted to make.

733 In your opening remarks, you spoke about ensuring that a greater percentage of funds went to smaller providers as opposed to the large incumbents. Was that specifically in the context of the variety of funds that exist for supporting broadband infrastructure investment, or were there other funds that you were referencing?

734 MR. NESBITT: I think in general when I just looked, when you go back through the archives about the amount of money that’s been given to, as an example, Northwestel for putting together some infrastructure plan that they’ve put a presentation towards, it’s just the fact that there are so many little points of that that could be done by a local business. It doesn’t have to be done by a large conglomerate to provide the same service, and that was brought up again from some of my fellow presenters about just being able to do more affordable installations for people.

735 The only thing I can think of on top of something like that would be when it comes to funds, I mean, is it -- I don’t know if it has because I -- my apologies. My internet’s been going in and out.

736 But as an example, I remember an article a while back about the fact that if another provider wanted to bring a fibre link to the north and NWTel complained that if that happened, they would not be able to affordably service some of the small communities any more. So I don’t know if that’s accurate. But you know, just as an example that might be another aspect of funds to get another provider involved whether it’s Telus or someone else, to bring a fibre link across that lake and be somebody else instead of Northwestel.

737 I mean, that just creates the competition that we need.

738 VICE CHAIR SCOTT: Thank you for that.

739 So here’s a -- it’s a big question, but I’m getting towards the end of mine. We’ve got so many proposals before us, everything from introducing wholesale, adjustments to retail rate regulation, the potential for subsidies, any one of those could be configured any number of ways. Do you have any concerns about the sequencing, the interactions between those types of regulations, any thoughts on what needs to continue, what works well together, whether some of those proposals might replace the need for others? What’s the package of things that makes sense, I think is the nature of my question.

740 MR. NESBITT: Well, certainly, I mean, the fact of the subsidy -- sorry, the funding and how that’s laid out to initiate other chains of events is an important thing, but I guess, again, if I was -- I think just the fact of what you just said as this package of how these things can interact and what’s the first step, I think it’s just a little more consultation would be probably a great idea to talk about that to the different groups that could be involved and then kind of work that out just to what might be the best steps.

741 VICE CHAIR SCOTT: And then my last question, kind the other side of that coin. If we were only to do one thing or what’s the one thing we should focus on doing most quickly that’s most likely to lead to an immediate benefit in terms of affordability?

742 MR. NESBITT: Well, again, I guess I think that the fact of consulting with everyone, you know, groups that are involved directly in this, I think that is a good start just so that you’re not spending too much time on one area when there might be another one that’s got more importance to it to resolving a lot of things. But I mean, given what we’re existing -- using right now and with the LEO coming into play and that, I guess the --yeah, I’d still say that it’s getting involved with people and having a little bit more discussion.

743 VICE CHAIR SCOTT: That was my final question, Mr. Nesbitt. I would like to thank you very much for your written submissions and for taking the extra step of agreeing to appear before us today.

744 So with those thanks, I’ll turn it over to the Chairperson and my colleagues to see if there are any other questions.

745 MR. NESBITT: Thank you, Commissioner Scott.

746 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you. I think you covered a lot of ground there. Glad to see that Vice Chair Scott left the easy questions for the end.

747 I will just look around the table. So I see Commissioner Desmond.

748 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Thank you. And thank you for being here. I just have one question, actually, and it relates to your written submission.

749 You did make a comment on the ownership of assets being passed to the Yukon Development Corporation as a first small step but that you had concerns that this would be quite expensive over time, difficult to maintain. So I just wondered if you could speak a little bit more about your thoughts as it relates to the shared pathways agreement and the impact of that.

750 MR. NESBITT: Yeah, my apologies. I hadn’t looked at my submission in a while.

751 But I think that -- I suppose the line of thought was just the fact that when you’re -- the transition. So just making sure that in terms of what’s being passed over that, you know, there’s time to be able to review all the mechanisms and how it needs to be handled and operated just to make sure that there isn’t any gaps in that. So I think it’s -- you know, to summarize in a short view, it’s just really a handover that’s well thought through and well communicated.

752 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Okay. Thank you.

753 THE CHAIRPERSON: We’ll turn over to Commissioner Naidoo.

754 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Yes. Thank you so much for your presentation.

755 I just have two questions. One is, do you think that a subsidy should help telcos to offset costs, or do you think that a potential subsidy should go to consumers in the form of a rebate type of model?

756 MR. NESBITT: Well, it’s always difficult I find when you -- like you had mentioned passing on the subsidy to the telecoms. It’s hard sometimes where things get put to being more critical and how transparent that becomes to everyone else so they see what that’s being used for as opposed to, you know, if they are operating at the best efficiency as possible, then you’re switching that back to, you know, the end users or consumers that can take advantage of being able to afford that system. So I guess it kind of goes two ways there.

757 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Thank you for that.

758 And then my second question is -- and you may have answered this. I just want to make sure that I completely got your answer.

759 When it comes to subsidies, if we were to look at a subsidy -- and we haven’t decided on that at all yet -- do you think that any potential subsidy should go to low-income residents, or do you think that it should go to all residents of the north, or possibly both? What’s your opinion on that?

760 MR. NESBITT: I think that the -- I mean, there’s going to certainly be like many communities that my fellow presenters talked about that sometimes have little to nothing, and I think that’s very important to look at right off the bat because there are others that still can survive on what they have until such time that there’s more equity -- or more equal quality that is brought up to a level so that everyone has what is needed to be able to move forward. So maybe a little bit of both is the best answer for that, but special attention, obviously, to communities that are in greater need because there’s just such a poor setup of infrastructure at this time.

761 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Thank you very much.

762 THE CHAIRPERSON: I think you’re off the hook, Mr. Nesbitt. I would like to thank you and I would like to give you the opportunity to add anything. I know certainly you’ve referred to some of the other submissions that we’ve heard. If there’s anything else that you would like to add, we are quite happy to hear it.

763 MR. NESBITT: Yeah, in closing there I guess, really, the only thing that I can think of, I mean, I applaud my other fellow presenters and those to come for the points that they have brought up. I mean, everyone’s really done their homework and it’s great to hear such a thing as well as just the education. I’m even learning, listening to a lot of them.

764 But I would want to point out one thing that I did already bring up again, which is just making sure we don’t lose sight of however this gets rolled out in the end, that there is -- not everyone is in the same level field when it comes to like a typical model, like I referred to earlier as far as low income or not. So I think we just need to be careful of that when we’re looking at making sure that everybody is getting the benefit of improved internet and how it applied to each individual, which was brought up by my earlier presenter there. So I think that’s the big key word, individual, and how that all helps the community.

765 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you again, Mr. Nesbitt.

MR. NESBITT: Thank you.

766 MS. ROY: Thank you very much, and this concludes today’s hearing.

767 I would like to remind everyone that the deadline to submit undertakings is May 9th. The hearing will resume at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow. Thank you, and have a nice evening.

--- Whereupon the hearing adjourned at 3:48 p.m.

Reporters

Kristin Johansson

Monique Mahoney

Bill Curley

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Tania Mahoney

Brian Denton