FairPlay meeting with legal staff, not commissioners: CRTC

An anti-internet piracy coalition did not end up meeting with CRTC commissioners but it did meet with commission lawyers, representatives of the CRTC and BCE Inc. said after documents revealed that the coalition tried to organize such a meeting in July 2017. In January 2018, the CRTC published FairPlay’s Part 1 application to create a website-blocking regime to fight piracy, which drew opposition from various sources and high engagement from the public. FairPlay filed its response Monday. Critics of the plan were incensed again on Wednesday, after a Forum for Research and Policy in Communications (FPRC) access to information request included emails from the summer of 2017 indicating that Bell sought to present details of the site-blocking coalition to a full commissioner meeting (FCM) scheduled for September 19 and 20. An FCM is a meeting where every commissioner is present, while also being open to CRTC staff, CRTC spokeswoman Patricia Valladao said in an email. That didn’t end up happening, but two Bell lawyers did meet with “CRTC legal staff” on Sept. 21, Valladao said. “Legal analysis is a normal part of the Commission’s work. Commission lawyers are part of the teams established to work on every file,” she added. The FPRC documents included a slide presentation, dated September 21, that outlined the scope of the piracy problem in Canada, pointing out the global trend of states using website blocking to combat piracy, the plan for the coalition and creation of the proposed website-blocking regime, as well as the ways that the proposal would be compatible with current telecommunications policy at the CRTC. According to an email found in the documents, Rob Malcolmson, senior vice-president of regulatory affairs at Bell, sent the slide deck to Steven Millington, senior legal counsel at the CRTC, as an email attachment. There’s no indication if the deck was or was not presented during the Sept. 21 meeting. Bell spokesman Marc Choma told The Wire Report in an email that “Bell has not met with CRTC commissioners to review the FairPlay application.” Choma did not offer any detail about what happened at the Sept. 21 meeting, including whether the slide deck was presented to CRTC legal staff, when asked by The Wire Report. Valladao said that there were no other meetings to discuss the proposal with Bell or any of the other coalition members, before or after the application was submitted. “Once there's an application before the commission, both the staff and the commissioners do not communicate with the parties outside of the proceeding,” said Valladao. But John Lawford, executive director of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC), said the meeting still brings up the issue of “the transparency and fairness of the regulatory hearing process for a public body that exists only to be open, fair and transparent,” he told The Wire Report in a phone interview. Lawford said the meeting “indicates that at the very least Bell, and all those guys, get an extra procedural opportunity to convince the commission that their idea is a good one and it was not something given to the other parties.” Additionally, the meeting wasn’t reported as a communication on the federal lobby registry. Choma said that Bell didn’t need to report that meeting because it was not held with a designated public office holder (DPOH) in the CRTC. According to the CRTC’s website, the DPOHs in the CRTC are the chair, vice-chairs and secretary general. Co-founder of Democracy Watch Duff Conacher also said in a phone interview that Bell did not need to register details of the meeting if it wasn’t with one of previously mentioned positions. Having dialogue between the CRTC and stakeholders isn’t necessarily unusual. Former CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein said in a phone interview that a regular dialogue between stakeholders and the CRTC is par for the course during his tenure. However, he drew a distinction between having stakeholders run ideas past the commission and going to them with a “full-blown proposal.” “My point is you don’t want to dry run proposals,” he said, noting that he couldn’t comment on the specifics in the Bell case. “Talking about ideas and talking about concerns is perfectly fine. That’s the difference. I have no idea whether what happened here amounted to an effective dry run of the proposal or not.” Von Finckenstein also said that during his time at the helm of the commission, it was common to have visitors at full commissioner meetings, generally one per meeting, usually amounting to the first half hour or 45 of a meeting. “We used the FCM in order to educate ourselves and out what’s going on,” he said. While his successor, Jean-Pierre Blais put an end to practices like informal meetings and chats with industry representatives during a chairmanship marked by a sometimes-antagonistic relationship with industry, he also regularly met with stakeholders, with the lobbyist registry showing a total of 78 communications reports for the time period between Blais’ appointment in June 2012 and his departure in June 2017. There are 27 reports for communications with current chairman Ian Scott since his term began in September 2017, one of which was with Bell, in November. Lawford specifically took issue with the fact that the slides were very similar to what the coalition submitted to the CRTC as its public application. “If you file something that's 99 per cent the same, then you've gotten a dry run,” said Lawford. “You've gotten pre-hearing which is not available to other people, and that's the problem.” — With reporting by Bryson Masse at bmasse@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

FairPlay meeting with legal staff, not commissioners: CRTC

News | 05/17/2018 6:57 pm EDT

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