OTTAWA — The City of Hamilton has been denied its application requesting the CRTC review and vary a 2017 telecom decision regarding the city’s municipal access agreement (MAA) with Bell Canada, an ongoing dispute that dates back to 2014.
In its Telecom Decision 2017-388, issued in October 2017, the CRTC revised the wording set out in its original decision of February 2016, in which the Commission had established the provisions of the MAA between the City of Hamilton and Bell. An MAA generally sets out the terms and conditions of a carrier’s access to highways and other public places under a municipality’s jurisdiction that is required to provide telecom services, including broadcasting services, to the public, the CRTC wrote in a footnote included in both decisions.
In the revision made in its October 2017 decision, the CRTC included provisions allowing the City of Hamilton to request information on the vertical location of Bell’s underground facilities, for pre-design purposes, when such information is reasonably necessary. The CRTC also set out a three-step process to be followed in the event the location information for underground facilities provided by Bell to the City of Hamilton did not contain sufficient design information and survey detail, and the city wished to request further information. If, as a last resort, Bell needed to undertake field investigations to verify the location of its underground facilities, the costs associated with the field investigations were to be split 50-50 between Bell and the City of Hamilton, the CRTC ruled.
In February 2018, the City of Hamilton submitted an application (jointly with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the City of Calgary) to request that the CRTC review and vary its October 2017 telecom decision. In the application, the City of Hamilton argued that certain wording in the revised decision was done in error and had created an unworkable process, and therefore required modification. In addition, the applicants requested an oral hearing take place to address the matter.
On August 8, in Telecom Decision 2018-277, the CRTC denied both the City of Hamilton’s request for an oral hearing and its request to review and vary Telecom Decision 2017-388, saying the applicants had failed to demonstrate that there is substantial doubt as to the correctness of the original decision.
