Telecoms asking SCC to review Quebec bylaw case

The country’s biggest telecoms are asking the Supreme Court of Canada to review a decision by a lower court that determined the companies were not entitled to a reimbursement of fees they paid under municipal rights-of-way bylaws that were subsequently invalidated. Quebecor Inc.’s Videotron, Rogers Communications Inc., Telus Corp., BCE Inc., and Cogeco Inc. filed an appeal application with the Supreme Court of Canada on August 8, according to the court docket. It is currently unclear what exactly the telecoms will argue as there are no arguments available on the Supreme Court website and lawyers and telecoms involved in the case have refused to comment. The issue dates back to 2012, when the city of Gatineau adopted a bylaw which sought to manage the public rights-of-way with respect to telecom infrastructure by requiring the companies to get a permit, and to recover costs determined by the city to allow that access. In 2013, the municipality of Terrebonne adopted a similar bylaw to regulate that access. The bylaws gave the municipalities broad power to modify work schedule, work stoppages, corrections to work and relocation or removal of infrastructure. The telecoms challenged the validity of the bylaws in Quebec Superior Court, and asked that the court reimburse them the costs it gave the city under those bylaws in the event the court ruled in their favour. In August 2017, the trial judge ruled that the bylaws were invalid, but said the costs would not be reimbursed because the telecoms would’ve had to pay the city anyway under previous regulations or under the federal Telecommunications Act. It refused to rule on the Terrebonne bylaw because the city had already revoked it by 2014. In December 2017, Gatineau also repealed its bylaw. The Quebec Court of Appeal, in its May 2019 decision, upheld part of the Superior Court judge’s decision, saying the cost the companies paid to the cities -- as high as $500,000 in Bell’s case, the court said -- should not be reimbursed because the companies have been paying some variation of that under previous city regulations. The appeal court, however, declined to offer an opinion with respect to the lower court’s ruling that Parliament has jurisdiction over the cities with respect to the rights-of-way because the laws had been repealed at that point already. Federal primacy over telecommunications had been reinforced by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2016. That ruling prevented the Montreal suburb of Châteauguay from stopping Rogers from building its infrastructure on its preferred location. The two municipalities had also taken their disagreement with telecoms to the CRTC, which were among a string of similar access complaints brought to the regulator in 2017. In May of that year, Terrebonne filed a Part 1 application telling the CRTC it couldn’t reach an agreement with some of the major telecoms on a municipal access agreement. That application followed a similar one from Gatineau that year, which also included a dispute between Hamilton and Bell and the major telecoms and Calgary, which the federal court said it will not hear. The latest legal action also comes as a government-appointed panel with the mandate to review Canada’s communications laws is set to release its recommendations in January. Access to passive infrastructure -- which includes the issue of telecom technology on city infrastructure that will be important for 5G -- is one topic being looked at by the panel, which has commissioned research on it. The telecoms have argued jurisdiction over that access should be solely in the hands of the CRTC, which in turn argued that a single body should oversee that access. — With reporting by Ahmad Hathout at ahathout@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

Telecoms asking SCC to review Quebec bylaw case

News | August 19, 2019

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Telecoms asking SCC to review Quebec bylaw case

News | August 19, 2019

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