THE OLIGOPOLY FILES — PART ONE OF THREE
The Dam and the Death
THE OLD GUARDIAN
Investigative Journalism for the Public Interest
Rogers Communications controls a third of Canada’s digital infrastructure. It owns the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Toronto Blue Jays, and the country’s most valuable NHL broadcast rights. It has invested $70 billion in its networks over two decades. And on the morning of July 8, 2022, a single maintenance employee deleted a traffic filter from a router — and twelve million Canadians lost the ability to call for help.
By Christopher Allen
The Old Guardian • March 2026
I. The Morning
Gregg Eby was doing his weekly errands with his sister Linda when she sat down in a Hamilton parking lot and wouldn’t get back up.
It was just past 10 a.m. on a Friday. Gregg could see she was in distress. He reached for his phone.
Nothing.
He flagged down a security guard from a nearby bank. The security guard tried too. Nothing. Gregg started running through the parking lot — past the parking lot, past the bank, down the street — looking for anyone who could get through to 911. He kept leaving his sister to search for help. He couldn’t find anyone with service.
First responders eventually arrived, likely through a landline inside the bank. By the time Gregg reached the hospital, he was involved in the decision to take Linda off life support. She had suffered a fatal aneurysm.
Doctors would later tell the family that Linda’s aneurysm likely would have been fatal regardless. Shane Eby, her nephew, told CBC News what the family had been left with anyway: “Every minute counts when something like that happens, and when it’s not available, it seems to be something that could be worked on.”
It is not known whether faster emergency response would have saved Linda Eby’s life. What is known is this: at the moment her family needed to reach emergency services, Rogers Communications had taken down 911 access for more than twelve million Canadians. And the number of people who tried to call 911 that morning and couldn’t get through — that number is classified.
Rogers withheld it. The CRTC accepted that. The public was never told.
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II. The Filter
At 4:43 a.m. on July 8, 2022, a Rogers Communications technician deleted a policy filter from a distribution router as part of a routine network upgrade. The change had been classified as “Low risk.”
Within fifteen minutes, Canada’s largest telecommunications network had collapsed.
The technical cause, documented in forensic detail by the independent engineering firm Xona Partners in a report commissioned by the CRTC, was straightforward: when the filter was removed, a single distribution router released more than 900,000 routing entries into Rogers’ core network. The core routers — normally receiving approximately 10,000 entries — were overwhelmed within minutes and crashed. When the core routers crashed, everything crashed. Wireless service. Home internet. Business connectivity. 911 calling. Emergency alert distribution. All of it.
The network would not be substantially restored for more than 26 hours.
The Xona Partners report, delivered to the CRTC in December 2023 and not released in any form to the public until July 2024, identified the precise sequence of institutional failures that turned a routine maintenance task into a national emergency:
Rogers had been executing a seven-phase core network upgrade process for weeks. The first five phases had completed without incident. Because they had, the company’s risk assessment algorithm automatically downgraded Phase Six from “High” risk to “Low” risk. That downgrade meant no additional scrutiny, no higher-level approvals, no laboratory testing before the change was deployed to the live network.
This, the forensic report concluded, “contravenes industry norms, which require high scrutiny for such configuration changes, including laboratory testing before deploying in the production network.”
Five successful phases had made Rogers trust its own algorithm more than its own engineers. The algorithm said: you’ve done this before. The engineers never asked: but have we done this particular thing?
“The outage demanded a serious investigation shedding light on Rogers’ handling of emergency calls. But that is not what has happened.” — Professor Matt Malone, Thompson Rivers University Faculty of Law
What followed the crash revealed a second layer of failure beneath the technical one.
Rogers staff could not communicate with each other. They relied on Rogers’ own wireless and wireline networks to coordinate — networks that were now down. The company had a limited supply of SIM cards from third-party carriers for precisely this contingency. They were not sufficient. In the early hours of the crisis, Rogers engineers were physically driving SIM cards to remote network sites so that staff could communicate by phone. More than five hours after the outage began, staff were still being dispatched with SIM cards.
The Rogers Network Operations Centre lost remote access to critical network infrastructure. Staff had to be physically dispatched to data centres and remote sites to troubleshoot equipment they could not reach electronically. Rogers engineers could not definitively identify the root cause of the outage for fourteen hours.
Multiple configuration changes had been made during the same maintenance window, compounding the diagnosis problem. Technicians initially focused on the wrong change entirely.
Emergency roaming — the mechanism by which Rogers customers could theoretically connect to Bell or Telus networks to access 911 during an outage — did not function as intended. The radio network remained operational while the core network was down, meaning customer devices did not automatically attempt to roam to alternative carriers. Rogers had signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Telecommunications Reliability in September 2022 that included emergency roaming provisions. Testing of those provisions, the Xona report found, had not been conducted under the specific failure scenario that actually occurred on July 8.
At 8:39 a.m. — three hours and fifty-six minutes after the outage began — Rogers notified 911 network providers that its network was down. The regulatory requirement, which the CRTC had established in earlier decisions, called for notification within thirty minutes. Rogers missed that requirement by more than three and a half hours.
Pelmorex — the administrator of Canada’s National Alert Aggregation and Dissemination System, which distributes emergency alerts including tornado warnings and notifications about dangerous persons at large — was not contacted by Rogers. Pelmorex found out from media reports and called Rogers at 9:25 a.m., nearly five hours into the outage. By then, 42 emergency alerts had been blocked from reaching Rogers customers. The contents of those alerts — what they warned about, whom they concerned, what dangers they described — have never been made public.
The CRTC was notified at 11:19 a.m. Six and a half hours after the crash.
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III. The Classified Number
The most important fact about the Rogers outage of July 8, 2022 is a number that has never been published.
Rogers has acknowledged that successful 911 calls during the outage represented approximately 60 percent of its typical daily average. That means roughly 40 percent of attempted emergency calls failed to connect. On a network serving more than twelve million Canadians, on a Friday morning when people were driving to work, dropping children at school, and running errands with aging relatives, the arithmetic of that percentage is not abstract.
But Rogers has refused to disclose how many calls were attempted. The company’s stated reason: disclosing the number “could be exploited by malicious actors to disrupt our systems.”
Professor Matt Malone, a law professor at Thompson Rivers University who has pursued this question through multiple Access to Information requests, described Rogers’ position plainly: “Rogers invokes these safety concerns in a very broad manner to prevent disclosure of really basic information like how many 911 calls were disrupted.”
The CRTC, which had the legal authority to compel disclosure, accepted Rogers’ reasoning. No independent assessment of Rogers’ security rationale was conducted. No public interest test was applied rigorously. The number was classified, and the CRTC moved on.
Internal CRTC correspondence obtained by Professor Malone through Access to Information requests revealed something more troubling than regulatory timidity. Six months after the outage, a CRTC emergency services manager wrote internally: “Other than an email chain … there was no formal analysis done.” No formal analysis of Rogers’ obligations regarding the 911 failures that had occurred on its network.
On February 21, 2023 — the day before the CRTC issued a public note stating that no further inquiry into the outage was necessary — another CRTC public servant revived the question in the same email chain. “To confirm,” they wrote, “was there any requirement re: 911 that the outage affected?”
There was no response. The CRTC published its note dismissing further inquiry the next day.
Two days after that, the same emergency services manager who had said no formal analysis had been done responded to the email chain: “I cannot recall what I meant by the statements below.” He added a sad-face emoji.
The CRTC’s public position, when Professor Malone subsequently asked for comment, was that “the responsibility to ensure the reliability and resiliency of the services applies only to 911 network providers” — not Rogers, which the regulator classified as merely a telecommunications service provider rather than a 911 network provider. “Accordingly,” the CRTC stated, “there was no specific formal investigation.”
Professor Malone’s assessment in the Globe and Mail was direct: “But that is nonsense.” Rogers had long-standing obligations under CRTC rules to take all reasonable measures to ensure the security and integrity of its interconnection with 911 networks. Rogers also had obligations to notify 911 providers of outages within thirty minutes. It had missed that requirement by nearly four hours.
Neither obligation was formally investigated. The number of Canadians who picked up their phones that morning and could not reach emergency services remains unknown to the public. It is known to Rogers. Rogers has chosen not to say.
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IV. The Company
Rogers Communications Incorporated is Canada’s largest telecommunications company by wireless subscribers. Its shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange. Its 2025 annual revenues exceeded $21.7 billion. It employs approximately 25,000 people. It owns Canada’s only Major League Baseball team, a controlling interest in Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment — which owns the Toronto Maple Leafs, Toronto Raptors, Toronto FC, and the Toronto Argonauts — and the national broadcast rights to NHL hockey through the 2037-38 season.
It is also, in its most essential form, a family company. The Rogers Control Trust holds 97.53 percent of the Class A voting shares of Rogers Communications. The Trust is controlled by the Rogers family. Edward Rogers, son of the company’s founder Ted Rogers, chairs both the Trust and the Rogers board. The Rogers family does not merely have influence over Canada’s largest telecom. The Rogers family is Canada’s largest telecom.
This governance structure — a dual-class share arrangement that gives the family effective permanent control regardless of public market sentiment — came to international attention in 2021 when Edward Rogers attempted to remove then-CEO Joe Natale without board approval, triggering a public boardroom coup that played out across Canadian courts and corporate filings. The episode raised questions about accountability at the highest levels of a company that operates critical national infrastructure. Those questions were never fully answered. The Rogers family retained control. The governance structure remained unchanged.
Under that structure, Rogers in 2025 completed two of the most significant financial transactions in its history. It acquired Bell’s 37.5 percent ownership stake in Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment for $4.7 billion, becoming the controlling shareholder at 75 percent. And it sold a 49.9 percent equity interest in a subsidiary called Backhaul Network Services Inc. — a company owning part of Rogers’ wireless backhaul network in Ontario and Alberta — to funds managed by Blackstone for US$4.85 billion.
The Blackstone transaction attracted attention for its scale. It deserves attention for its structure. Rogers retained 80 percent of the voting control in the new subsidiary. Rogers used the proceeds primarily to pay down debt. The transaction was classified as equity in Rogers’ consolidated financial statements, keeping it off the leverage ratio calculation. But Blackstone’s investment carries a targeted annual return of 7 percent during the first five years, with an effective cost to Rogers of approximately 6.26 percent. This is not equity in any ordinary sense. It is expensive structured financing dressed in equity clothing, secured against network infrastructure that Rogers needs to operate its wireless business.
As of December 31, 2025, Rogers carried a debt leverage ratio of 4.0 times adjusted EBITDA. Its weighted average cost of borrowings was 4.78 percent. Its weighted average term to maturity on its debt was 8.6 years. The company paid $913 million in dividends in 2025. It committed to capital expenditures of $3.3 to $3.5 billion in 2026 merely to maintain its competitive network position.
These are the obligations of a company that cannot afford to slow down.
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V. The Crack
For a decade, the story Rogers told its shareholders, its regulators, and itself was a story of growth. Canada’s population was expanding, driven overwhelmingly by immigration. New arrivals need phones immediately. Postpaid wireless net additions — the metric that most directly signals the health of a wireless business — reflected this reality. Growth was assumed. Growth was built into every model, every guidance range, every capital allocation decision.
In 2025, Rogers reported 145,000 postpaid wireless net additions. In 2024, it had reported 380,000. That is not a normal fluctuation. That is a structural change.
But net additions are only half the story. Rogers’ postpaid churn rate in 2025 was 1.11 percent monthly — meaning that every single month, roughly 135,000 existing subscribers left the network. Against that churn treadmill, Rogers’ 145,000 net additions for the entire year represent a company running as hard as it can just to stay approximately where it was. In a year when gross additions were collapsing due to immigration policy changes, Rogers was one bad quarter away from reporting net postpaid subscriber losses for the first time in its modern history.
The growth engine that justified thirty years of leverage, capital investment, and regulatory relationship-building is not slowing. It is approaching stall speed.
Canada’s federal government, responding to public pressure over housing affordability and strain on social services, has fundamentally restructured its immigration framework. New study permit arrivals fell 70 percent in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. New work permit arrivals fell 52 percent. The federal government’s own projections anticipated a marginal population decline in both 2025 and 2026 — which would be the first annual population declines in Canada’s modern history.
Rogers’ 2025 MD&A acknowledged the shift in a single sentence buried among its risk disclosures: “current slowing population growth as a result of changes to government immigration policies is now leading to a less active market, resulting in lower gross and net additions.”
Its 2026 guidance assumes “continued net growth in wireless subscribers in the Canadian market.” It is unclear on what demographic basis that assumption rests.
The wireless story is not Rogers’ only deteriorating narrative. Cable television — once the anchor of bundled customer relationships and a reliable source of high-margin revenue — is in structural decline. Rogers lost 114,000 video subscribers in 2025. Home Phone lost another 118,000. These are not customers who will return. They are customers who have made permanent decisions about how they consume media and communicate, and those decisions do not include a $160 monthly cable television package.
The financial data confirms what the subscriber numbers suggest. Rogers’ average revenue per wireless user fell $1.56 per month year-over-year. Its average revenue per cable account fell $3.82 per month. Adjusted EBITDA margin contracted 150 basis points to 45.2 percent. Adjusted net income — the measure that strips out one-time items — was essentially flat: $2.720 billion in 2025 versus $2.719 billion in 2024.
The headline numbers — total revenue up 5 percent, free cash flow up 10 percent — are real. They are also substantially a function of consolidating MLSE’s revenues following the July 2025 acquisition, and of capital expenditure discipline rather than organic growth. The $5 billion non-cash accounting gain that drove the reported net income surge to $6.9 billion was a one-time revaluation of Rogers’ existing MLSE interest at fair value. It will not recur.
Rogers is a company executing competently against a deteriorating structural position. Its core growth engines — wireless subscriber growth and cable television, the two businesses that justified its leverage, its capital intensity, and its regulatory relationships for thirty years — are both declining simultaneously.
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VI. The Backbone
In 2024, Rogers Communications Canada Inc. completed a corporate amalgamation that absorbed Shaw Communications and multiple legacy entities into a single streamlined federal corporation. What followed, documented in job postings, corporate filings, and vendor relationships that The Old Guardian has been tracking, was a systematic restructuring of how Rogers’ operational backbone is staffed.
Rogers’ vendor spend in recent years has grown faster than its employee costs. The names appearing in Rogers’ ecosystem of third-party contractors include HCL Technologies, Concentrix, Wipro, and Infosys — global technology outsourcing firms whose core business is providing offshore and nearshore labour at a fraction of domestic Canadian labour costs. Job postings have reflected this shift: technical support roles without clear connections to Rogers’ internal HR pipelines, Concentrix listings with duties closely mirroring Rogers call centre responsibilities, cloud-based hybrid architecture work that is remote, borderless, and no longer tied to Canadian job sites.
HCL Technologies’ own website states that three top North American telecom companies are its clients. In the Canadian context, that means the firm performing outsourced operational functions for Rogers is almost certainly performing the same functions for Bell and Telus. The same contractor holds intimate knowledge of all three networks simultaneously — the change management processes, the network architecture, the incident response procedures of Canada’s entire critical telecommunications infrastructure, all resident in a single offshore vendor’s service delivery centres.
HCLTech describes its value proposition to telecom clients in language that maps precisely onto what Rogers has been executing: “Automate and monitor performance — quickly scale and reduce costs through automation.” Their approach is framed around what they call “proactive obsolescence” — systematically replacing client workforces as a competitive advantage, not a regrettable necessity. In March 2026, HCLTech announced it would establish an AI Collaboration Centre in Calgary under a Canada-India trade agreement, expanding its Canadian footprint with active government facilitation.
The irony is compounding. The Canadian government is simultaneously expressing concern about telecommunications reliability and actively subsidizing the expansion of the offshore vendor model that hollows out the workforce responsible for that reliability. The CRTC has no framework addressing this. The trade desk apparently has no awareness of the connection.
The customer-facing consequences of this restructuring are now visible. Canadians are widely reporting that customer service at Rogers, Bell, and Telus has deteriorated to the point where routine billing disputes require eight weeks of calls, multiple escalations, and inconsistent answers before resolution. Compared to a three-minute average wait time for customer service resolution in Europe — where genuine competition disciplines corporate behaviour — the gap is stark. What looks like indifference is in part the structural outcome of replacing institutional knowledge with rotating offshore contractors who lack the tools, authority, and accumulated expertise to resolve problems in a single interaction.
There are also emerging allegations, documented in Canadian social media accounts, of labour law violations by HCLTech operating within Canadian institutions — complaints of discrimination and toxic work environments that Canadian employees say go unaddressed. The Old Guardian is pursuing these allegations and cannot at this stage independently verify them. What can be stated is that the regulatory framework for monitoring offshore contractor conduct inside Canadian critical infrastructure does not currently exist.
Rogers added 1,000 employees in 2025. That number obscures rather than illuminates. The addition is almost entirely attributable to MLSE arena and sports entertainment staff following the July 2025 acquisition. Core telecom headcount — the engineers, technicians, and network operations professionals whose work keeps 12 million customers connected — is flat at best, declining at worst, with an increasing portion of that work performed by contractors rather than employees.
Unifor, Canada’s largest private sector union and the representative body for thousands of Rogers workers, was contacted for comment on the outsourcing pattern. They did not respond.
Their silence is worth noting. Unifor has historically been vocal on issues of labour erosion in the media and telecommunications sector. They challenged Omni layoffs. They fought subcontracting in broadcast. They have been willing to create friction when the political moment suited it. On the systematic offshoring of telecom infrastructure roles, they have said nothing.
The CRTC, for its part, has no active investigation into offshore labour practices in the telecommunications sector. A review of CRTC filings and decisions dating to 2015 reveals no regulatory framework addressing the domestic employment consequences of outsourcing arrangements at companies operating critical national infrastructure.
The Xona Partners forensic report, commissioned to understand what failed on July 8, 2022, contains a recommendation that speaks to this quietly: Rogers should “institutionalize learning from its own and other service providers’ network failures” and “maintain a workforce that possesses the required capabilities, skills and expertise to design, operate and maintain such systems.”
HCLTech’s own marketing material explicitly sells the elimination of that workforce as a service. Rogers took a forensic recommendation to build internal expertise and responded by deepening its relationship with the vendor selling the opposite.
A company that outsources the institutional memory of its network operations to rotating contractor relationships is a company for whom that recommendation has no natural home.ures” and “maintain a workforce that possesses the required capabilities, skills and expertise to design, operate and maintain such systems.”
A company that outsources the institutional memory of its network operations to rotating contractor relationships is a company for whom that recommendation has no natural home.
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VII. The Bet
Rogers’ strategic response to deteriorating core business fundamentals has been to make an enormous bet on sports.
The logic is defensible on its face. Live sports is the last category of television content that audiences reliably watch in real time, at scale, without time-shifting. It is resistant to streaming fragmentation in ways that scripted drama is not. It commands premium advertising rates and subscriber loyalty. Rogers, as both a broadcast rights holder and a team owner, sits at the centre of that value chain in ways its competitors cannot easily replicate.
The NHL national rights deal — extended in 2025 through the 2037-38 season — is genuinely valuable. The 2024-25 Toronto Blue Jays postseason run drew 10.9 million viewers for Game 7 of the World Series, the largest broadcast audience in Rogers’ history.
But the bet has a fundamental problem that no financial model captures cleanly: Rogers does not control whether the teams perform.
The Toronto Maple Leafs are the most valuable NHL franchise in Canada, possibly in the world. They are also a franchise that has not won a Stanley Cup since 1967 and has been eliminated in the first round of the playoffs with such regularity that it has become a cultural institution of disappointment. Rogers receives broadcast revenue regardless of playoff performance. But deep playoff runs — the ones that drive national audiences, advertising premiums, and the kind of cultural resonance that justifies sports asset valuations — are not within Rogers’ power to manufacture.
The Toronto Raptors, post-Kawhi Leonard, have been largely irrelevant. The Blue Jays’ 2024-25 postseason run was genuine and remarkable. It was also one season. The question of whether Vladimir Guerrero Jr. will remain a Blue Jay is a contract negotiation, not a corporate strategy.
Rogers paid $4.7 billion for Bell’s MLSE stake partly on the basis that sports asset valuations would continue to appreciate. The company has publicly stated it is evaluating options to “unlock additional value” from its sports assets, including a potential minority sale or public offering. It anticipates making a final decision within twelve months.
That timeline is important. Sports franchise valuations are heavily tied to recent performance and market sentiment. The window in which Rogers can credibly market these assets at maximum valuation is not infinite. If the Leafs continue their April tradition and the Jays regress to the mean, the conversation about what Rogers’ sports empire is actually worth becomes more complicated.
Rogers has $4.7 billion of leverage riding on a question that coaches, players, and playoff brackets will answer.
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VIII. The Ceiling
The Rogers Communications business model rests on a set of assumptions that have held, with varying reliability, for thirty years. Canadian telecom infrastructure requires massive capital investment and government-licensed spectrum. Foreign ownership rules restrict competition. The CRTC manages competitive dynamics in ways that have historically protected incumbent carriers. Population growth drives subscriber growth. Customers, once acquired, stay.
Each of those assumptions is under pressure. Some are breaking.
In January 2026, SpaceX’s Starlink restructured its Canadian residential internet pricing, introducing a tiered system starting at $70 per month for 100 Mbps service. A promotional offer dropped entry-level pricing to $55 per month through March 2026. Starlink is currently the sixth-largest internet service provider in Canada by subscribers, and its Generation 3 satellite constellation — which will dramatically increase capacity and performance — is scheduled for initial deployment in late 2026 with widespread availability anticipated by 2028.
Rogers has, with some strategic acuity, partnered with Starlink through its “Rogers Satellite” product, extending satellite-to-mobile coverage across 5.4 million square kilometres of Canadian geography that terrestrial towers cannot reach. The partnership has allowed Rogers to plug the coverage gaps its $70 billion infrastructure investment left unfilled.
It has also given Starlink something more valuable: Canadian market penetration, brand familiarity among Rogers’ customer base, and a detailed understanding of where Canadian demand for satellite connectivity exists — at Rogers’ expense. When Starlink moves to direct-to-consumer marketing of its mobile service in Canada, it will not be arriving as an unknown. It will be arriving as the technology that Rogers introduced to its own customers.
The CRTC’s jurisdiction does not extend to space. Canadian foreign ownership rules do not apply to satellites in low Earth orbit. Spectrum licensing frameworks do not constrain a company operating from 600 kilometres above the regulatory apparatus that has protected Rogers for three decades.
Rogers built its moat through regulatory capture, infrastructure investment, and political relationships cultivated over generations. That moat has walls on every side except one.
Elon Musk doesn’t need a province’s permission. He doesn’t negotiate with city councils. He doesn’t apply for spectrum licences. The satellites are already up.
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IX. The Pattern
The 2022 outage was not Rogers’ first. In April 2021, wireless calls, SMS, and data services went down across Canada for nearly a full day due to a software update failure. Rogers made improvements to its wireless network afterward. It did not extend those improvements to the IP core network. Fourteen months later, the IP core network failed catastrophically.
The Xona Partners report noted this directly: the April 2021 outage produced improvements that “were not fully extended to the IP core network.” The institutional lesson of the first outage was applied selectively. The second outage happened where the lesson wasn’t applied.
Rogers’ regulatory history shows a similar pattern of selective learning. In 2022, Rogers raised its activation fees, triggering a CRTC public proceeding. In March 2026, the CRTC banned activation and modification fees effective June 12, 2026. Rogers, through the Canadian Telecommunications Association, called the decision “an unwarranted and self-defeating regulatory intervention.”
Rogers fought MVNO access for regional carriers in the enterprise and IoT market. It lost. Rogers fought the CRTC’s expansion of wholesale access frameworks. It lost. Rogers has been consistently on the wrong side of consumer-facing regulatory decisions for years — not because the company is uniquely malicious, but because a company that has operated inside a protected oligopoly for decades loses the ability to experience regulation as signal rather than obstacle.
The CRTC, for its part, has repeatedly acknowledged limitations rather than enforced consequences. It commissioned the Xona Partners report in September 2023 — fourteen months after the outage — and held the findings for an additional year before releasing even a summary to the public. It declined to open a formal investigation into Rogers’ 911 obligations. It accepted Rogers’ claim that disclosing the number of failed emergency calls would aid malicious actors. It hired geomatics contractors to verify whether telecom companies are accurately reporting their network coverage because it cannot independently verify those claims itself.
This is not a regulatory body in control of the industry it regulates. This is a regulatory body managing the appearance of oversight while the industry manages the substance of it.
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X. The Reckoning
Rogers Communications is not failing. Let that be stated clearly. Its free cash flow is strong. Its leverage, while high, is declining. Its network is genuinely capable. Its sports assets are genuinely valuable. The company is managed by competent professionals executing a coherent strategy under difficult conditions.
What Rogers is experiencing is something more structurally significant than a bad year. It is the simultaneous expiration of the assumptions that made its business model work.
The immigration pipeline that drove a decade of wireless subscriber growth has been deliberately closed by the federal government. The cable television bundle that anchored customer relationships and justified infrastructure investment is being abandoned by consumers at a rate that will not reverse. The regulatory protections that kept foreign competition at bay do not extend to the sky. The family governance structure that insulated the company from external accountability is the same structure that insulated it from internal accountability when a maintenance employee deleted a filter on a Friday morning and nobody could reach an ambulance.
The number of Canadians who tried to call 911 on July 8, 2022, and could not get through is still classified. The Toronto Maple Leafs have still not won a Stanley Cup since 1967. Starlink’s Generation 3 satellites are scheduled for deployment in late 2026. The CRTC still does not have a mandatory framework requiring originating network providers to notify 911 services within thirty minutes of a major outage.
Gregg Eby ran through a parking lot looking for someone — anyone — who could reach help for his sister. He couldn’t find anyone. Rogers had taken the phones away.
Rogers later credited customers the equivalent of five days of service. For Gregg Eby, the credit arrived on his August bill.
The walls only work if everyone agrees they exist.
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Sources and Methodology
This investigation draws on the following primary sources:
Rogers Communications Inc. 2025 Annual Report and Management’s Discussion and Analysis, filed with SEDAR+ March 2026. Assessment of Rogers Networks for Resiliency and Reliability Following the 8 July 2022 Outage, Xona Partners Inc., December 12, 2023, commissioned by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. Telecom Notice of Consultation CRTC 2025-226, Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, September 4, 2025. Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2026-43, Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, March 12, 2026. CRTC General Information file 8000-C12-202203868, Rogers Service Outage, including staff letters, party submissions, and disclosure requests from 2022 through 2024. Statistics Canada quarterly population estimates, Q1 2025. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada 2025-2027 Immigration Levels Plan. Government of Canada 2025 Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration. CRTC Notice of Proposed Procurement 26-0167, Geomatic Specialists contract. Access to Information records obtained by Professor Matt Malone, Thompson Rivers University Faculty of Law, as reported in the Globe and Mail, August 2023. CBC News reporting on the Hamilton family of Gregg and Linda Eby, July 2022. MobileSyrup, iPhone in Canada, and TeslaCanada reporting on Starlink Canadian market developments, 2025-2026.
The Old Guardian contacted Rogers Communications for comment on the financial analysis, the 911 notification timeline, and the outsourcing pattern documented in this article. Rogers did not respond by publication deadline.
The Old Guardian contacted Unifor for comment on the outsourcing and offshoring of Rogers telecommunications roles. Unifor did not respond after four days.
The Old Guardian contacted the CRTC for comment on the regulatory gap in originating network 911 notification requirements. The CRTC referred to its public filings.
Professor Matt Malone, Thompson Rivers University Faculty of Law, provided guidance on the Access to Information records pertaining to the CRTC’s internal handling of the 911 question following the 2022 outage.
Part Two of The Oligopoly Files examines Bell Canada Enterprises: the retreat, the layoffs, and what happens when the dam starts to crack from the inside.
The Old Guardian accepts confidential tips from Rogers employees, contractors, and former staff at chrisjallen32@hotmail.com. Secure communications welcomed.