MPs to invite Rogers execs, CRTC and Champagne amid study on outage

Parliamentarians on the House of Commons Industry and Technology committee voted unanimously on Friday to study the Rogers Communications outage, with at least two meetings scheduled before July 30.

Members will invite company executives, representatives from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), and Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne to speak about the outage that saw millions of customers lose internet and wireless services a week ago.

They will review the causes of the disruption and the impact on Canadians, consumers, businesses as it relates to health care, law enforcement and financial sectors, as well as the best practices to prevent a similar situation from happening again.

The meeting is in response to requests by Liberal, Conservative and NDP MPs.

“The Liberal members of this committee share the frustration millions of Canadians experienced last week when Rogers experienced an unprecedented system failure and seek to examine this issue in a fair comprehensive manner on their behalf,” reads a letter penned by Liberal MPs.

Rogers says the “network system failure” was triggered by a maintenance update to the core network, which caused routers to malfunction.

In a status update about the situation on Wednesday, Rogers president and CEO Tony Staffieri called the network outage “unacceptable” and said the company is doing everything it can to ensure it won’t happen again.

“Our customer service representatives are working around the clock and have caught up on the backlog of issues. We have also increased the credit on all our customers’ bills, as some of you experienced longer delays in resuming services,” the statement reads.

The company announced this week it would reimburse customers for up to five days of service for the inconvenience.

A Rogers spokesperson confirmed to CTVNews.ca on Friday executives will attend and provide testimony to the committee to aid in the study.

“We will work collaboratively with the members on the Standing Committee on Industry, Science, and Technology to provide details on the cause of the outage and the actions we are taking to enhance the reliability of each of our networks moving forward, including through formal mutual support agreements,” said Nilani Logeswaran.

Bloq Quebecois MP Martin Champoux and NDP MP Alexandre Boulerice proposed to also invite Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino to testify in relation to cyber security threats.

“There are questions of national security and safety. We cannot disregard the idea that there could also be potential cyber threats from various hostile nation states now and in the future,” said Boulerice.

However, Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith objected to the move.

“I think we're allowing ourselves to blow this thing up unnecessarily,” said Erskine-Smith.

“The importance of a narrow focus here is accountability, so we understand what happened and ensuring that it will not happen again and network resiliency is the responsibility ultimately here of CRTC and the industry minister.”

The committee decided they would punt the proposal to invite Mendicino to the fall, if they still feel it’s necessary.

Champagne met with the CEO of Rogers and the heads of other telecommunications service providers on Monday. During the meeting, he tasked them with creating a formal agreement -- within 60 days -- to pool resources, guarantee emergency roaming, and come up with a communications plan to better inform Canadians during crises.

A spokesperson for Champagne’s office said they are “aware” of the invitation to appear before the committee and will “continue to collaborate” with members.

The CRTC is also studying the issue and has requested several responses from Rogers about the cause of the outage by July 22.