OTTAWA – Bell Canada’s application to the Federal Court of Appeal over the Commission’s fee-for-carriage decision, as reported by Cartt.ca this morning, has led to a week’s delay in the deadline to file comments on for the September 29th hearing.
The “policy proceeding on a group-based approach to the licensing of television services and on certain issues relating to conventional television” is still set to begin at 10 a.m. on September 29th but the deadline to file comments for that hearing has now been extended by a week, to August 17th.
Yesterday, “the Commission was served by Bell Canada and related companies with a Notice of Application for judicial review and a Notice of Motion for Leave to Appeal to the Federal Court of Appeal with regard to paragraphs 37 through 39 of Broadcasting Notice of Consultation 2009-411. In these documents, Bell Canada alleges that the Commission has denied it and other parties the opportunity to make submissions on the issue of whether a negotiated, free market value for local conventional signals is appropriate,” reads the Commission’s release today.
So, in order to consider that, the comments deadline has been extended by seven days and, the “Commission intends to issue an amended Broadcasting Notice of Consultation, if appropriate, on or before 14 August 2009,” it added.
That could mean fee-for-carriage will be off the table for September 29th, but we believe that would be a very unlikely outcome from this delay.
(Ed Note: Can anyone see CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein backing down? Yeah, we can’t either...)
