Federal budget plans to increase telecom competition

A few pages into the new federal budget, there’s a section detailing the government’s plan to increase telecom competition. That’s music to our ears over here, so let’s break down the promises.

The first item on the list is a new “dig once” strategy that aims to make existing telecoms work together and share more of their fibre optic networks. As we know, the CRTC is already working on that, and recently, Bell finally gave up its fight against the notion and started moving onto Telus’ turf in Western Canada. However, Bell has been very outspoken about reining in some of its previously promised infrastructure builds since it doesn’t want to share.

One way the government is hoping to entice the telcos to build is to streamline regulatory burdens, like existing rules for informing governments about tower construction.

There are also plans to release more spectrum and modernize the spectrum licensing and transferring framework. This should help newer players like Freedom grab some more spectrum, but it seems likely that the big three players will take up a huge chunk of this still.

The new budget also plans to implement a rule announced in Budget 2024 that will make it easier for people to self-cancel their phone/internet plans. This rule also mentions that the telecoms will need to inform people as their contract is set to expire. The final wording of the telecom section of the 2024 budget also planned to prohibit certain fees, but never clarified which ones.

There are a lot of promises here, and as someone who watches the telecom industry, I’m not sure if these promises, beyond the first ruling to try and create more infrastructure, go far enough to actually help Canadians. Right now, the most impactful thing for Canadian telecom is that Freedom was mandated to keep plans lower than the competition for two years when it was sold to Videotron. When that ruling expires, I wouldn’t be surprised if those prices increase to match Bell, Rogers, and Telus, eliminating one of the best forms of competition in the country.

That being said, as much as the telcos might fight against this, if laws can be put in place over time, the companies will need to start working within them. However, I don’t expect anything in the budget to fix problems today. These are going to be long-term solutions, if there are any solutions at all.

One thing the government will hopefully be wary of is the use of deceitful numbers surrounding the price of data. The carriers love to talk a big game about how the price-per-gigabyte has decreased over the years, but it does little to address that most people have been paying between $60-$80 per month for their data plans for the last ten years, regardless of the data. And most people likely don’t even use all the data they’re paying for. Hopefully, the current government can see the forest through the trees and really have an impact on the actual price Canadians have to pay.

Source: Budget 2025