House of Commons Industry Committee to Investigate Rogers Outage

A man stands outside a locked Rogers wireless store in Toronto amid a country wide outage of the telecommunication company's services, on July 8, 2022. (The Canadian Press/Cole Burston)

The House of Commons industry and technology committee is starting an investigation into the Rogers nationwide network outage by bringing in federal minister, officials, and business representatives for testimony.

On July 15, Liberal MP Han Dong introduced a motion during a House of Commons committee meeting requesting an investigation into the outage, which affected Rogers mobile and internet users, knocking out ATMs, shutting down the Interac payments system and preventing calls to 911 services in some Canadian cities.

Travellers coming into the country were also affected as they were unable to access the government’s ArriveCan mobile app to submit information as required to go through customs.

The committee will hold at least two meetings to look into the issue before the end of the month, and invite witnesses from Rogers Communication Inc. and the Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Commission.

The motion, passed unanimously, was amended to also bring in Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne to testify before the committee.

However, a debate was sparked when Conservative MP Martin Champoux sought to also invite Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino to testify, citing the need to look into the impact of the outage on emergency services.

Champoux was supported by NDP MP Alexandre Boulerice, who said the incident also raises concerns for other public safety issues.

“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—and so we need a strong and robust system. We have to be able to ask questions to all pertinent ministers,” Boulerice said.

But Liberals MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, who previously served in the House of Commons public safety and national security committee, said inviting Mendicino as witness would “blow this thing up unnecessarily,” citing the importance of  having “a narrow focus” on accountability in addressing the Rogers outage.

Champoux defended his amendment, saying that “some people were victims, dramatic of victims, of this outage,” as they were left with no access to 911 and other emergency services.

“When there are such important public safety issues, I don’t think that we are straying from our objective by asking the pertinent minister to talk to us about what he has in mind with regards to failsafes,” he said. He noted he doesn’t have an issue with the committee’s decision to reserve the discussion for later, but remained firm on the need to study the “collateral impacts” of such a widespread network outage.

This amendment to invite Mendicino as witness was ultimately dropped.

The Canadian Press contributed to this report.