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As we described in this space last year, that should have been the end of the great Sugar “innovation.” It wasn’t. Somehow, Bishay’s strategy infiltrated the federal Liberal cabinet. Two months after the CRTC issued its decision against Sugar, the commission received an order-in-council telling it to “reconsider” its decision to prevent Sugar from freeloading off Rogers facilities.

The CRTC came back with a reconsideration that essentially failed to give Sugar what it wanted. Uproar ensued among consumer groups because, in effect, the CRTC turned down the cabinet order. And so the cabinet is back with another plan, this time for a directive that would change the CRTC’s policy options and force it to accommodate Sugar. And so is the CRTC. In its announcement Thursday, it seemed to backtrack on its earlier decision. While the commission recently ruled against “wholesale roaming” by operators that do not own facilities, a.k.a. “mobile virtual network operators” (MVNOs), it now says there is “a larger problem … that a sustainable retail MVNO market has failed to develop on its own.”

Do all these demands for special accommodation for favoured players sound kind of familiar as a Liberal government process?

The Bains order, by shifting the CRTC’s objectives, would cover more activity than wireless resellers. More generally, it would undo a 2006 directive issued by the then Conservative government, when its industry minister, Maxime Bernier, delivered a mandate to the CRTC to foster competition among the major telecom companies. He called it “facilities-based” competition, a plan grounded in the logical market idea that innovation and competition only really occur when real companies compete by managing massive investments in the facilities and technologies that drive wireless and telecom service growth. In the telecom industry, the investment runs into the billions of dollars annually and will be even more intensive with 5G networks.