There may be a big transaction on the horizon for our neighbours in Manitoba, with Bell Canada Enterprises Inc. fixing to purchase the Manitoba Telecom Services (MTS) for $3.9 billion. Hearing about that, Brad Wall is against selling our Crown corporation, SaskTel, to Bell until a proper risk analysis takes place. That's good, because if anything is at risk with the prospect of a giant, privately owned Canadian communications company taking over, it's the money of customers in Saskatchewan. There's been talk of having a referendum in Saskatchewan, to see what people think of the idea, given that SaskTel already shares infrastructure with private competitors. SaskTel undergoing a merger with Bell is not privatization I'd like to see.
Privatizing, say, liquor stores is one thing. It adds diversity to the market, and actually makes things competitive, which benefits the customers in the long run. There'll be no such competitive benefit if SaskTel goes the way MTS may be going, by becoming part of Bell.
A caveat: I may have a slanted perspective, but during the two years I spent paying a monthly phone bill for a large national carrier, I saw charge after additional charge heaped onto what was originally, quite a small manageable bill.
These unannounced rate hikes had an assortment of rationales which included phrases like "price updates," and words like like "optimize" and "leverage" in their descriptions, when I called customer support to ask why a monthly bill that was a little over $50 suddenly was $75. This, by the way, was when I barely used any data and never left Canada. Bell, and the other large telecom companies, Rogers and Telus, are known for their regular rate hikes. The most recent of which took place this past January. “But that was only $5,” some will say. Yeah, $5 that time. These hikes happen with predictable regularity with all the large national carriers.
Also, there’s the issue of promotion. In 2014, UnMarketing, a company that criticizes unethical marketing, investigated a series of remarkably positive, successive reviews for the mobile apps of one giant national carrier. This investigation, which traced the comments back to LinkedIn accounts with the poster's actual names, eventually revealed that most of the reviews were written by Bell employees, themselves. Can anyone say, “Conflict of interest?”
All three carriers have gotten in trouble with the law, getting grilled by watchdog organizations for misleading advertising campaigns.
I'm not saying it'll be the end of the world if SaskTel lets a major national carrier purchase it, but it's definitely not a win for SaskTel's customers. According to Canada's telecom regulator, Canadians pay among the highest rates in the industrialized world for cell service, with the exception being in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, where companies like SaskTel and MTS have kept the market competitive and forced national carriers to adjust their rates just as low. In other words, they are provinces where Rogers, Telus and Bell don't have a stranglehold on the market.
Saskatchewan and Manitoba are, and were, known throughout the country for their comparatively cheap mobile phone service plans. It got to the point, a couple of years ago, at which people started selling comparatively cheap Saskatchewanian and Manitoban plans to people in other provinces, where equivalent plans from large, national private telecom companies were almost twice as much.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and Competition Bureau have already bemoaned the lack of sufficient competition in Canada. There’s absolutely no reason to allow the situation to get worse by narrowing the competitive field in Saskatchewan, following Manitoba’s example.
One thing that both MTS and SaskTel have going for them is their lack of a data cap when it comes to Internet. They have what is referred to as “unlimited use” for their home Internet, while most larger carriers increase the price of your bill even more, if you exceed a certain amount of Internet use. So, in other words, if a large national carrier starts calling the shots on how Internet is billed, it’s going to be difficult to watch Netflix without watching your bill grow at the end of the month.
Yes, I realize SaskTel probably isn’t cheap to keep in business, and if anything we’re in an era where belt tightening is the order of the day with that upcoming budget. But let’s not punish SaskTel’s customers by selling out to a giant national carrier. We have a competitive edge — let’s keep it.
