Federal officials say copper wire theft is on the rise in Canada, but it’s difficult to combat because the infrastructure usually lacks basic security and its identifiers can be easily erased.
Witnesses from Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, the RCMP, Public Safety Canada and the Department of Justice testified Tuesday at the Senate’s transport and communications committee as some telecoms continue to sound the alarm over vandalism targeting their infrastructure.
Wen Kwan, ISED’s senior director of spectrum and the telecommunications sector, says Canadian carriers have reported more than 1,300 incidents of these thefts since January 2022. The Canadian Telecommunications Association says acts of theft or vandalism of telecom sites have increased by more than 400 percent since that year.
Kwan says it takes an average of 10 to 12 hours for providers to fully restore internet access, television and phone services to their customers after copper wire theft incidents.
But RCMP chief Supt. Peter Tewfik says such cases are difficult to predict or stop as sites affected by scrap metal theft usually aren’t protected by security measures such as fencing, lights, cameras or patrols.
He says these crimes are also challenging to investigate because stolen copper can be melted down before it’s recycled and sold, which removes identifiers like serial numbers that would enable police to trace a wire strand back to its source.
