Alberta court rules city bylaw lacks jurisdiction over telecom builds

Canada’s major telecoms have succeeded in getting an Alberta court to rule that a municipal access bylaw in Calgary can’t regulate the building of telecommunications networks. Until 2014, the relationship between Canada’s four major telecoms -- BCE Inc., Rogers Communications Inc., Shaw Communications Inc., and Telus Corp. -- and the city of Calgary was governed by a municipal access agreement. When they failed to get another agreement, the city proposed its own model, which intended to assert authority over the rights-of-way and to manage the environmental, safety and other risks that occurred from utility work. What that bylaw entailed was the regulation of “what, when, where and how of the location, construction, maintenance, operation and preservation” of those telecom networks, a court found. Part of what drove the decision to enact the bylaw was the city’s concern, which was in the midst of a fibre strategy, about “competitors forcing multiple installations rather than sharing existing infrastructure, thereby degrading or exhausting rights-of-way.” On Friday, however, the Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta ruled that the federal Telecommunications Act has sole authority over the building of telecom networks, court documents said. Before the decision, Calgary argued that under the Telecommunications Act, “the ability of Telecoms to use rights-of-way is subject to municipal consent.” But the court determined that such a bylaw -- which was passed by the city in Nov. 2016 and only came into force on Jan. 1, 2018 -- would overstep its boundaries. “A dominant purpose of the legislators was to create an alternate scheme by which the City could exert greater control over Telecoms,” the decision read. “In effect, the Bylaw minutely regulates telecommunications operations in City rights-of-way, allowing the City to determine essential matters such as the siting of networks and the schedule of construction and maintenance is to supplant the federal procedural scheme and to assume a significant measure of regulatory control over the location, construction, operation, maintenance and preservation of telecommunications." It concluded that these “are matters over which Parliament has exclusive jurisdiction.” The ruling comes after Rogers and Shaw, who filed submissions for the government’s pre-budget consultations, have asked the federal government to make it easier for telecoms to access infrastructure such as utility poles in preparation for 5G communications.

Alberta court rules city bylaw lacks jurisdiction over telecom builds

Brief | October 22, 2018

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Alberta court rules city bylaw lacks jurisdiction over telecom builds

Brief | October 22, 2018

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