By Denis Carmel
OTTAWA – The House of Commons INDU committee heard from a series of witnesses today about the July 8 Rogers Communications outage that impacted Canadians across the country, including those trying to access emergency services.
Both meetings the committee decided to hold before the end of July were held today back-to-back.
First among the witnesses there were older white men in suits including François-Philippe Champagne, minister of Innovation, Science and Industry. While the soon fired Rogers CTO, Jorge Fernandes was in Portugal, the minister was in Japan when he heard in the middle of the night (Ottawa time) that there was a major outage of Rogers’ networks.
He reached out to Rogers’ president and CEO, Tony Staffieri (above) and asked what was going on.
The following Monday, he convened a meeting with the major telecom CEOs to outline his three-pronged plan: “I did not ask, I demanded,” he repeated to the committee a few times.
Within 60 days, he wants to see a formal plan to address three issues: Emergency roaming, mutual assistance, and a communications protocol to ensure communications with the public and public authorities is done well.
“It should not be to the minister to chase the CEO of a telecom company, it should be the other way around,” he told the committee.
Champagne was followed by the other men in suits: Rogers’ CEO and its new CTO, Ron McKenzie, who took full responsibility for the outage.
“I appear before you today because, as Rogers CEO, I’m accountable for the outage that occurred on July 8,” he offered at the top of his presentation.
Staffieri indicated they narrowed the problem down to a coding error during a routine update of the company’s core network. They were careful not to assign blame to their vendors who were assisting during the update (Cisco and Juniper were mentioned by an MP on the committee). It was clear in their description another outage could happen at any time, especially as the telecom companies are deploying 5G.
The measures they offered had to do more with mitigating the effect of another outage rather than preventing it – including separating the wireline and wireless networks so their customers could have an alternative if and when it happens. As was mentioned to the committee, a future outage could be the result of a cyberattack or a weather phenomenon.
Of course, Staffieri was in full apology mode, as he said he would fully collaborate with the minister, the CRTC and Rogers’ competitors. But we had a feeling his neck was on the line, having recently contributed to the ouster of his predecessor, by promising better financial performance. Furthermore, the acquisition of Shaw could have been compromised by this accident.
Next to appear, was the chair of the CRTC, Ian Scott – probably his last appearance in front of a committee as his term ends in September. He indicated they requested information from Rogers on the details of the outage, which were provided last Friday and were, uncharacteristically, posted immediately on the CRTC website. Of course, the CRTC did not have time to fully assess if the responses were adequate and what the next steps will be.
One take away is the sense of inevitability of such an outage with different scopes and different providers, which the NDP critic alluded to when he said that after 17 years on the industry committee, he found summer sittings to be an inevitability – as was his losing his stuff whenever the chairman of the CRTC has been a witness.
Finally, Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, Ben Klass, PhD candidate at Carleton University, and senior research associate, Canadian Media Concentration Research Project, Dwayne Winseck, professor at Carleton University, and director of the Global Media and Internet Concentration Project and John Lawford, executive director and general counsel at Public Interest Advocacy Centre offered ideas that will feed into the report the committee will produce with possibly a focus on changes in the legislation and recommendations on the appointment of a new CRTC chair (although this could be too late).
It is not clear if the committee will produce a report at this point or if it will hear other witnesses during the fall.
