A special House of Commons committee meeting to discuss a new study on the rise in price of cellphone plans had Tories accusing Liberals of running out the clock.
The Standing Committee on Industry and Technology held a session Jan. 11 to review a motion for a cellphone plan price study to be held and concluded by Jan. 26, but no vote took place after two hours.
“Liberal MPs filibustered at Industry Committee, allowing the Liberal chair to suspend the meeting, blocking a vote to call the Minister of Industry and CEO of Rogers to testify on Rogers plan to increase cell phone prices next week,” wrote Tory MPs in a statement after the meeting.
“Liberal committee tricks will allow Rogers to increase cell phone prices next week, less than one year after the Trudeau Government stifled competition by allowing Rogers to take over Shaw,” said the release by MP Rick Perkins, critic for industry, and MP Ryan Williams, critic for competition.
The motion to open a study comes in the wake of Rogers Communications, one of Canada’s largest cellphone plan providers, telling Global News last week it will raise the price of some plans.
This follows the 2023 cabinet approval for Rogers’ acquisition of Shaw Communications, based in Calgary, for $26 billion. Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne said the deal would help bring prices down.
“Listen, this is like going around in circles, it’s super frustrating,” Conservative MP Michelle Ferreri said midway through the session, which saw a series of Liberal, NDP, and Bloc Québécois MPs agree that cellphone prices in Canada were a problem but dispute the minutia on how the government should handle it.
“This new 2024 year was a kind of shocking way to greet the year that the most expensive cell phone provider in the world, Rogers, announced, apparently, that they’re not making enough money, that cell phone packages were going up,” said Mr. Perkins.
Mr. Perkins claimed that the average price per gigabyte of data on a cellphone in Canada is $5.37, while Russians, in a country of comparable size, only pay $0.25.
Liberal MP Ryan Turnbull disputed the claim that cellphone prices were going up, citing information from Statistics Canada that shows cellphone prices have dropped by 22.6 percent from November 2022 to November 2023, which took him “all of 10 seconds” to find on the internet.
Much of the debate was on a previous motion Bloc MP Sébastien Lemire tabled on Sept. 26. The motion, which had already been accepted by the committee, would allow them to do a “more fulsome” study, he said.
NDP MP Brian Masse called the newest Tory motion a “Hail Mary Pass.”
“There is very little time to even notify the witnesses to come and guarantee that they would be on our site,” he said.
In the last minutes of the meeting, Conservative MP Brad Vis suggested amending the Tory motion to achieve “unanimous consent” to bring only Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri and Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry François-Philippe Champagne before the committee for questioning prior to Jan. 26.
“My biggest fear is that we’re looking at doing one and a half things at the same time,” said Liberal MP Tony Van Bynen in response. He urged the group to do the right thing for the country, a “thorough analysis” and not “just grab media headlines.”
