Lead Office

Toronto

McCarthy Tétrault is representing Bell Canada in a judicial review by TekSavvy at the Federal Court of Appeal from the CRTC’s decision to stay its high-speed access decision pending Bell’s review and vary the application before the CRTC.

Bell is addressing claims that the CRTC’s decision should be quashed because it was unreasonable in four key respects: 1) The CRTC made a finding of irreparable harm only with respect to retroactive harm asserted by Bell, yet applied a stay preventing implementation of the entire Final Rates Order; 2) The CRTC made a finding of irreparable harm only with respect to retroactive harm asserted by Bell regarding potentially unrecoverable retroactive payments from a limited number of independent ISP competitors; 3) The CRTC’s finding that the risk of unrecoverable retroactive payments was not speculative was unjustified in relation to the evidence before it, and therefore was unreasonable; and, 4) At the balance of convenience stage, it was unreasonable for the CRTC to find that the unquantified harm of unrecoverable payments, of a small magnitude, outweighed both the harm to the competitor ISPs as well as the public interest in implementing the Final Rates Order.

TekSavvy Solutions Inc. is a Canadian residential, business, and wholesale telecommunications company based in Chatham, Ontario. In most of the country, it is a wholesale-network-access-based service provider and voice reseller, connecting its service to existing last mile networks from telecom carriers Bell Canada (including Bell Aliant) and Telus Communications, and cable carriers Rogers Communications, Cogeco Cable, Shaw and Vidéotron.

McCarthy Tétrault is representing Bell with a team led by Steven Mason and Brandon Kain.