Michael Kram, Member of Parliament for Regina-Wascana, will be helping to lead a federal investigation into last week’s nationwide Rogers Communications outage.
Kram and the three other Conservative MPs on the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry and Technology sent a joint letter to Parliament demanding an emergency committee meeting to investigate the outage. An initial meeting to consider an investigation has been set for July 15.
“There will be two components to this investigation. We will be calling on Rogers executives to testify before the industry committee to explain what went wrong and what they are doing to fix the situation, so it doesn’t happen again,” he said. “We will also be having the representatives from the CRTC come to the committee to explain how they are going to prevent Rogers or other telecoms from having other disasters like this again in the future.”
The announcement comes after the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry of Canada, François-Philippe Champagne, launched his investigation. Kram, currently the committee’s vice-chair, said this would include members from all parties.
“The industry is an all-party committee, so we want this to be a non-partisan investigation to make sure everyone is on board, and everything is transparent.”
Kram said that the outage outlines a bigger problem that Canada is facing: a need for more competition in the telecoms sector.
“It would be nice if we had a few other major telecoms in this country. If one is suffering bad customer service, people can transition to one of the other competitors,” he said. “We certainly want more consumers so that they have more options in case something like this happens again.”
“We need to look at mobile-virtual network operations to allow more choices for consumers, and the end goal is to have lower prices and more reliability for consumers and right now, it’s a debate to whether they have either right now,” he added.
