An essential service

Less than three weeks from now, a federal body that’s supposed to act as a watchdog on our behalf will meet in Yellowknife for a public hearing.

At that June 24 gathering, they and others will talk about a new and complex telecommunications proposal that could take a lot of money out of our pockets for years to come.

The body we’re talking about, of course, is the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, know more conveniently as the CRTC.

The proposal they’ll be talking about in Yellowknife was handed to them on May 30 by Northwestel.

In it, our phone company is proposing the means by which competing long-distance only telephone companies would offer services in Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and Yukon.

To be fair, that’s not what Northwestel wants to do just yet, even though they’ve been preparing for competition in the long distance market for several years.

Northwestel ­ along with the CRTC ­ have been forced into the process by a company called Call-Net Enterprises Inc., which made a complaint to the CRTC on October 15, 1996.

Call-Net made two complaints. The first was that the CRTC is unfairly preventing Northwestel customers from gaining access to the benefits of long distance competition. The second was that the CRTC is unfairly preventing Call-Net from doing business in northern Canada.

Both of these, Call-Net asserts, violate the CRTC’s own rules.

Call-Net is better known as Sprint Canada. If you watch a lot of cable television, you’ll know that Sprint is the company that’s flooding the southern airwaves with commercials advertising 10 cent a minute phone calls anywhere in the world.

So far so good. Don’t we all want access to those kinds of rates? After all, southerners have enjoyed them for several years now. But there’s a price.

That price is higher local phone rates. And in our small, fragile, high-cost market, that price could turn out to be too much too bear.

In Northwestel’s May 30 plan, which we’ve just had a chance to look at, the company proposes that the basic monthly cost of having a telephone should rise to about $30 a month by the year 2000.

That includes a $4 a month local rate increase that Northwestel has aready applied for, and more local rate increases intended to offset the revenue they would lose when they begin to offer cheaper long distance rates.

In return, Northwestel says their long distance rates could be cut in half. By then, long distance only companies like Sprint could be offering long distance rates that are even cheaper ­ at least, to people who are lucky enough to live in large centres like Iqaluit, Yellowknife or Whitehorse.

The CRTC has given Nunavut residents less than three weeks notice if they want to make oral submissions on Northwestel’s plan. If you want to speak at the June 24 meeting in Yellowknife, you have to inform the CRTC by June 19.

Two days later, there’s another “regional consulation” meeting, in Whitehorse, Yukon.

But CRTC officials aren’t even bothering to hold a meeting in Nunavut, northern Canada’s third territory ­ the territory that depends upon telecommunications more than any other region of the country.

Yes, they say they’ll connect interested Iqaluit residents to the gathering via a videoconferencing link ­ that is, we suppose, if Northwestel’s videoconference link actually works this time.

The CRTC needs to do better than to ignore the territory that’s most affected by the decision they’re now contemplating.

They need to hear that, although many businesses, organizations and individuals are likely to benefit from lower long distance rates, many ordinary people could be hurt by higher local phone rates.

The telephone is not just a tool for businesses and big government bureaucracies. It’s an essential service to which all residents ought to have access. That includes access for the ailing elder who needs a phone that so he or she can call the nursing station, or the single mother on social assistance who needs a phone to call the police.

If local phone rates are too high, that access will be effectively denied to those who need it the most.

Companies like Sprint don’t care much about those kinds of people. They’re clearly interested only in skimming easy profits from large, relatively affluent communities like Yellowknife and Iqaluit.

But if they want to compete in our market, they should nonetheless be allowed. But only if the cheaper long distance rates they offer to the business person in Iqaluit are also available to the hunter’s family in Grise Fiord.

And if the price of cheaper long distance means local phone rates that are more than most can pay, the whole idea should be either delayed, scrapped or re-evaluated.