Bram Abramson to the Ontario Small Urban Municipalities conference

Parry Sound, Ontario
April 30, 2026

Bram Abramson, Commissioner for Ontario
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC)

Check against delivery

I’m glad to be at this conference today on the traditional territory of the Anishinabek under the Robinson-Huron Treaty. I thank them and pay respect to their Elders.

Thank you, as well, for the invitation to speak at the conference. And thank you to the community of Parry Sound for hosting us this weekend. So I know that while Parry Sound is home to perhaps the greatest defenceman of all time – and I say that as a Habs fan! -- there’s much more to Parry Sound than Bobby Orr or even the waterfront. This is a beautiful place.

I am three years and change into a five-year term as Commissioner for the Ontario region at the CRTC – the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. Our Ontario regional office is in Toronto, where I’m based. I have five colleagues who similarly serve for the other regions of Canada, and three more who act as the CRTC’s chair and two vice-chairs, based at our main office in Gatineau.

That makes nine Commissioners who make the CRTC’s decisions, supported by a much larger team of expert staff who bring us recommendations we vet, review, and vote for or against. The decisions that we make mostly relate to our marching orders under our primary statutes, the Telecommunications Act and Broadcasting Act; as well as the Online News Act, Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation, and the Voter Contact Registry.

Some of this should sound familiar. Our role as Commissioners is a little bit like those of municipal counsellors. Our staff’s advisory and recommendation role is similar to the role of municipal staff. All of our decisions and all of our rules come only after public proceedings where interveners appear and create a record as to their views on what we should do, which structure what we can and can’t decide on the basis of that record.

I’m going to spend the next few minutes talking about some of what we do under those marching orders and on the basis of those proceedings; where there may be points of intersection with your communities; and where there is perhaps some work to be done.

Local Broadcasting

I’ll start, briefly, with broadcasting. Historically, radio and television have been primary vectors for local audio and audiovisual journalism. It’s no secret that radio and television journalism have been challenged in recent years. The CRTC plays a role in supporting and licensing local broadcasting outlets, including commercial, public, and community media in Indigenous, English, French, and other languages. We support audio and audiovisual journalism through collective funds that redistribute resources within the broadcasting system.

Our role under the Online News Act is limited to an oversight role facilitating the bargaining process between news organizations and online platforms. As part of our role implementing the amended Broadcasting Act, we’re also engaged in determining if online media should have a role in supporting the Canadian media landscape. This work is in full swing.

In doing that work one of the questions that has preoccupied me has been not just content discoverability but legibility. More than ever, the media environment is a complex ecosystem. Consider a radio station that broadcasts local news capsules that run over the air and maybe through their website. Then consider the same radio station automatically transcribing its news capsules onto its web in textual format, making the news legible. Suddenly it’s being picked up by search engine crawlers and AI bots, resurfacing in various forms and refracted in various ways across the Web. Information that is legible becomes spreadable.

As municipalities, this should ring bells. You are engines of local information. It seems to me that the opportunity to make that information available online in legible, machine-readable ways helps unlock a new generation of tools and opportunities. I was glad to see that I was to follow a panel this afternoon on civic knowledge, local journalism, and the media. Our work at the CRTC remains, and will remain, focussed on audio and audiovisual programming, including local news and information, and excluding user-uploaded content. At the same time, that work now contends with a broader information ecosystem of which local municipalities are part and parcel, too. I look forward to hearing more on this topic.

Local connectivity

As much as the information ecosystem has been evolving, so too has the underlying connectivity that supports it.

Once upon a time, the CRTC’s job was to make sure all Canadians had reliable, fairly-priced landline service delivered by telephone incumbents. Then came long-distance and local competition, mobile phones, the Internet.

Phone companies who believe that local coverage and competition have hit the right thresholds have, for some time, been applying to us to forbear from most regulation of their local phone services. What sort of telephone service should remain mandated in your communities? What level of mobile and broadband connectivity? Whose job is it to deliver those? How do we accurately measure who has mobile and broadband coverage and who doesn’t?

What about the backhaul, or transport, that allows networks reaching your community to connect to the broader Internet? Is there competition for that backhaul? In age of Low Earth Orbit satellites which increasingly provide connectivity everywhere, does that matter? On the other hand, if we rely on those LEO satellite services, which are frequently foreign-owned, as our carriers of last resort, what questions does this raise for our sovereignty?

Those are all questions we are either currently engaged with, or soon will be. We work with our federal counterparts to improve the way we track broadband infrastructure and how that information is shared with the public. We recently decided that the public interest requires that information to be published by governmental departments and agencies at a provider-by-provider level. We have an ongoing consultation to help us develop a standardized, evidence-based methodology for mobile coverage reporting that will help us to better identify and address gaps in coverage. We have another ongoing consultation to determine how best we can help make networks more resilient and reduce outages.

In the meantime, networks continue to be built out. Over the last two years we completely overhauled our rules on access to poles owned or operated by telecommunications companies—as opposed to hydro poles, over which we do not have jurisdiction. We tightened timelines, assigned responsibilities more clearly, and ensured that competitors could attach the “small cells” that drive 5G mobile and beyond to those poles.

Thirteen years ago we published a Model Municipal Access Agreement, on the advice of an industry working group, and continue to adjudicate disputes over telecommunications access, including disputes that involve municipalities. We likewise publish rules requiring competitive access to multi-tenant buildings, and adjudicate those disputes as well.

Two weeks ago, we released a decision that ensures customers receive notifications from their providers before their contracts, discounts, or promotions end. And we recently issued decisions to stop providers from charging fees when plans are cancelled or changed, improve self-service options available to Canadians when shopping for services, and make more information about plans available to Canadians.

Soon we will be launching another consultation on consolidating and simplifying our four consumer protection codes: the Internet Code, the Wireless Code, the Television Service Provider Code, and the Deposit and Disconnection Code that currently applies to landlines. They were all put in place to require consumer-friendly practices on the part of service providers. In today’s environment, we’re not convinced it makes sense to have multiple codes to keep track of what rights they have in respect to what service. So we have plans to consolidate and simplify those codes into a single, clear and cohesive code to the benefit of both service providers and consumers.

Emergency communications

And then there’s emergency communications.

Last September we issued a decision imposing outage notification requirements on service providers, which will improve coordination between service providers and public authorities in the event of an outage.

The CRTC also plays an oversight role over how service providers let Canadians access emergency services. Last year we concluded a consultation on improving the National Public Alerting System that we’ve required every cell phone provider, every radio station, every television station, and every cable and satellite and IPTV television distributor to participate in. We are deliberating on the evidence we received.

In the meantime, the turn-off date for Enhanced 9-1-1 is looming. March 31, 2027 is the switchover date from Enhanced to Next Generation 9-1-1. For those of you that have 9-1-1 service, this means that for it to continue to function as expected after that date, the Public Safety Answering Points that handle your 9-1-1 calls will have had to revamp their operations and switch over their equipment by March 31, 2027. I know that many of you have been engaged with this issue. As the date continues to approach, it will be important for those of you who know you will not make it to consider alternate arrangements.

Broadband Fund

So far, I’ve mostly been discussing the CRTC’s telecommunications and connectivity role in terms of rules and frameworks—our regulatory role. However, we also play a role directing industry funds towards ensuring continuing access by Canadians to basic telecommunications services. Until recently, that meant subsidizing telephone lines and their operation in high-cost serving areas. But in 2019 we moved to a competitively neutral Broadband Fund to instead foster the expansion of Internet and cellphone networks to rural, remote and Indigenous communities.

In that time the Broadband Fund has awarded more than $770 million across 326 communities in Canada. That number might sound large, but it is really a small part of the overall government-wide effort. And the nature of our smaller scale helps us pinpoint communities who may have been overlooked by the market and need help the most. More than half of the projects we have funded have been to independent providers. 81% of the projects we have funded have been for project amounts below $10 million. This funding has gone to Inuit communities in the North and to rural communities across the country, from the Yukon to Newfoundland, and many right here in Ontario. And a significant portion has gone to improving mobile coverage along hundreds of kilometres of major roads and thoroughfares in rural areas, including many in northern Ontario.

Earlier this month we opened the Broadband Fund’s fourth call for funding. It will remain open until mid-August. So we encourage you to look into this funding round and at potential partnerships with service providers to improve connectivity where it is needed in your communities.

Promoting competition and empowering citizens

As activity continues to shift online, everyone in your communities needs the ability to access reliable, affordable and high-quality fixed and mobile connectivity for every aspect of their lives. It is how we communicate, how we access work, healthcare and education, and how we create economic opportunities in our communities.

Our telecommunications work is focused on ensuring universal service, affordable prices, and competitive choice, which is provided both through stand-alone facilities that each carrier operates, and shared facilities that carriers share.

I’ve mentioned many of the questions we’re engaged with in doing that work, and the many public proceedings through which we do it. That’s something I want to underline to you.

We know that the kinds of decisions we make matter a great deal to the members of your communities. Your municipal associations do important work helping support you in addressing communications matters, and from time to time, in reflecting your collective views to us.

But I want to be honest. In most of our proceedings, it is very rare that we hear from municipalities or from your associations. That matters. Every regulatory framework, every set of rules, every decision we make is based on a public record. That’s the nature of an administrative tribunal. It means that when we make our decisions, we’re doing so based on the public record – the written arguments, and the tangible evidence – before us. As you can imagine, that means that how we decide depends substantially on who shows up.

Making decisions in the public interest requires us to understand how people in different communities experience their communications services. What you’re seeing in your community. What matters. What’s very obvious to you, but maybe not so obvious in Toronto or Gatineau.

Most of our proceedings are in writing. They usually follow a common format where we ask specific questions, and you are invited to provide your views and relate your experience on one or more of the questions.

I often say that the difference between sitting out a proceeding, versus spending a little bit of time writing a letter that answers even one of those questions, is much greater than the difference between spending a little versus a lot of time. In other words, even a little bit of input is valued, is vital, and may help shape what rules we make, what issues we turn our attention to, and ultimately, how communications services are delivered and governed in your communities.

So, I encourage you to monitor our website, stay abreast of what we’re working on, and make your voices heard. At the same time, not everything has to be formal. If you have questions, simply reach out. The CRTC staff has experts who are always willing to answer questions and guide you through our processes. And as your regional Commissioner, I am always an email or phone call away. With what time I have left, I would be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you.