Telecommunications Act of 1993, Canada
Telecommunications is the use of electronic communication in space and time and implies that messages are being sent and received. The acts of communication include the use of devices such as telephones, computers, cable and satellite televisions, and radio, among others. In the Canadian Telecommunications Act of 1993, telecommunications is defined as “the emission, transmission or reception of intelligence by any wire, cable, radio, optical or other electromagnetic system, or by any similar technical system” (S.C. 1993, c.38, s. 2). Intelligence, in this case, means information such as data or text, media including radio broadcasts, podcasts, video, and sound including voice and music. This entry provides an overview of Canada’s Telecommunications Act of 1993, including its history, its principal provisions, the relationship between telecommunications and media, and the contemporary tension between market forces and the public interest.
History of Telecommunications in Canada
Scholars such as Harold Innis connect telecommunications to the entire history of moving information across space and time, including the engraving of hieroglyphics on stone or the invention of paper. Others, including Armand Mattelart and Catherine Middleton, trace the beginning of North American telecommunications to the invention of the telegraph and telephone, in the early to mid-1800s, in order to connect it to the invention of electricity and thereby stress forms of transmission or emission. This emphasis permits an understanding of telecommunications as a two-way process, in contrast to understandings of broadcasting as a one-way process. Such a comparison suggests why telecommunications has traditionally been separated from broadcasting in regulatory terms in Canada, as is evident in the Telecommunications and Broadcasting Acts of 1993 and 1991, respectively. These two acts remain, however, vitally linked through their core functions (i.e., communication over distance) and the regulatory authority granted to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), as well as mandates to promote Canadian identity and sovereignty.
Telecommunications Act of 1993
The Telecommunications Act itself primarily speaks to the technical requirements for telecommunications in Canada, as well as specific aspects of service provided by domestic and international networks. Part I provides definitions and an overview of the powers of the CRTC in relation to telecommunications. Part II outlines a significant level of Canadian ownership and control that is required for service providers, as well as for international service licenses. Service provision and fee reporting requirements are delineated in Part III, including the right of Canadians to become part of a Do Not Call list which is also reflected in anti-spam legislation (S.C. 2010, c.23). Part IV details administrative requirements and the specific powers of the commission, the minister, and the governor in council, while Part V enables the CRTC to designate inspectors and inspections, as well as issue decisions on violations and monetary penalties. Part VI applied primarily to the 5 years following the enactment of the legislation (to accommodate the transition), while Part VII lists the repeals and amendments of certain clauses over time since the act came into force.
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The initial act was comprised of 76 sections and is regularly updated (more than 50 amendments have been made). Section 7 of the act begins with a statement of value that asserts the crucial role of telecommunications in Canadian identity and as a mode of affirming sovereignty. The nine key objectives that follow address infrastructure, affordability, technical and market efficiency and competitiveness, Canadian control, a commitment to research and development, social and economic impacts, and privacy. Section 4 of the Telecommunications Act plainly states that it is to be held separately from, though in relation to, the Broadcasting Act of 1991. Other acts explicitly referenced include the Marine (1998) and Oceans (1996) Acts (regarding international cables) and the Jobs, Growth, and Long-Term Prosperity Act (2012). The Telecommunications Act of 1993 was under review in 2018. Its final report was released in 2020.
Telecommunications and Media Convergence
In the 21st century, telecommunications is inescapably connected to the Internet. For example, media historian Lisa Gitelman demonstrates that considerable historical evidence links telecommunications to information and entertainment such as television, film, radio, and newspapers, demonstrating the artificial (albeit useful) nature of the separation between broadcasting and telecommunications. Many other scholars, including Marita Moll and Leslie Regan Shade, have noted the impact of converging technologies on society for users and viewers by bringing communication over distance together with the production and dissemination of media programming over telecommunications infrastructure and technology in Canada. Moll and Shade have analyzed how the digital divide that developed through convergence means that rural and marginalized groups have less access to (and often more costly) mobile and Internet services.
Other examples of media converging with telecommunications include audiences who produce (i.e., audiences who produce and use [also known as user-generated content or UGC] their own material for sharing with others [e.g., on the Internet]), as Rebecca Ann Lind has pointed out, building on the work of Axel Bruns. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green have explicitly promoted similar concepts, such as spreadable media, as business strategies. For media to be spreadable means it is easily shared and broadly accessible across a wide distribution system, such as Internet or on mobile devices. These examples help explain how traditional one-way broadcasting is becoming part of a multivoiced telecommunications system.
In Canada, critical arguments by researchers such as Catherine Middleton and Dwayne Winseck center on power dynamics and the political economy of telecommunications, suggesting that its roots lie in the global corporatization of media and markets, substantially predating the advent of electricity, and hewing closely to the promotion and protection of nation-state cultural identity coupled with free-market competitive principles. For example, an alliance of regional telephone monopolies (individually founded by the 1930s), combined with a Canadian government-owned international system of telephony in the late 1960s and early 1970s to develop and build a federated satellite service—one of the earliest in the world. As Gregory Taylor argues, access to satellites deeply influenced the ability of regional and national telephone and broadcasting corporations to deliver services, managed by this mix of private and government-owned companies. The growth of market-based technological capacity was deemed to require its own oversight by the mid-1970s, when the CRTC’s remit was expanded to include the telecommunications marketplace and infrastructure.
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Market Forces and the Public Interest
Starting in the mid-1980s, it became evident that the move toward a deregulated market environment was accelerating, made more desirable by the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1992, the year before the 1993 Telecommunications Act came into effect. This trajectory has only been strengthened by the 2020 United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement. It has also meant that there is considerable influence and pressure on telecommunications businesses and the regulator to minimize public interest, which had been carefully enshrined in earlier versions of what subsequently became the 1993 Telecommunications Act and the 1991 Broadcasting Act. The 1993 Telecommunications Act, stressing competition, and, to some degree, sovereignty and identity, both complements and pushes the limits of the earlier 1991 Broadcast Act, with prominence given to Canadian identity and sovereignty in the latter.
However, when the Telecommunications Act superseded the 1906 Railway Act, it established a direction toward an increasing emphasis on free-market competition in the telecommunications field in Canada. This has manifested as increasingly explicit directives by governments of the day to the CRTC to stimulate market competition, particularly for new technologies, and to eventual deregulation to the greatest degree possible, more notably after 2006 (as Paul Beaudry and Kevin G. Wilson have documented in detail), including how and when CRTC rulings were overthrown by the Minister of Canadian Heritage.
To some scholars, including Marc Raboy and Jonathan Shtern, the loss of focus on the public good must be reversed by affirming a Canadian right to communicate in the Telecommunications Act. Raboy and Shtern argue that this right is essential not only to Canadian values but also to core principles of global democracy. This part of telecommunications history can be traced back to Canada’s actions at the United Nations in the late 1940s, most particularly in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and through the work of the 1970’s government-sponsored Telecommission Group and the work of nonprofit and civic organizations taking up the language of rights embedded in the Canadian Constitution Act of 1982.
Post-2010, Catherine Middleton and Mary Elizabeth Luka found that the linkage between telecommunications and broadcasting entertainment is reinforced by practices simultaneously addressing public interest while attempting to encourage market competition. For example, during the 2013–2016 “Let’s Talk TV” initiative, the CRTC generated tremendously detailed direct feedback from more than 13,000 citizens (as well as the usual level of corporate and third-party participation in public hearings), through several publicly promoted consultation processes. The feedback confirmed that Canadians are interested in ways to more easily access Canadian and local content across Internet at reasonable cost, and they see this as part of the CRTC’s regulatory responsibility.
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society.