THE OLIGOPOLY FILES — PART TWO OF THREE
The Retreat
THE OLD GUARDIAN
Investigative Journalism for the Public Interest
BCE Inc. is Canada’s oldest and largest telecommunications company. It owns CTV, TSN, Crave, and the country’s fastest fibre network. For decades, its dividend was the point — the reason cautious investors held the stock, the thing financial advisors called safe. On May 8, 2025, BCE’s board cut it by 56.1 percent. The investigation that follows examines what that decision revealed about everything that had been building underneath — and what it means for the Canadians on hold, in grief, with a company that never built a system for them.
By Christopher Allen
The Old Guardian • June 2026
I. The Call
Someone called Bell the other day to cancel their late mother’s home internet service.
Bell’s system transferred them to the loyalty team. The agent asked whether they lived at the address. Whether they wanted to transfer the account into their name. The mother had lived alone. Then the agent asked about the caller’s own home internet — who their provider was. The caller cut them off and reminded them they were calling to cancel a dead woman’s internet.
The agent closed the account. Told them where to return the equipment. Then immediately pitched a wireless plan.
The account of this exchange was posted publicly to r/bell, Reddit’s Bell Canada community forum, in May 2026. The poster’s framing was precise: “I know the agent was doing their job, and they did it well. But whoever designed this system is a parasite.”
This is not a story about one agent. The agent was following the script. Bell’s customer retention systems are designed to extract revenue at every contact point — including the ones that happen because someone’s mother just died. A separate commenter on the same thread, identifying themselves as a current Bell representative, explained the mechanism plainly: Bell uses AI to monitor whether agents are pitching on calls. Context is not part of the evaluation. If you don’t pitch every call, your job is on the line.
When The Old Guardian asked Bell Canada whether its customer retention systems include a sales pitch protocol that activates during bereavement calls, and whether any exception handling exists for such calls, Bell Canada’s Senior Manager of Media Relations, Elise von Scheel, responded on May 16, 2026: “Bell has clearly defined scenarios where sales pitches should not occur, including bereavement-related customer service calls. These expectations are regularly reinforced with frontline teams to ensure sensitive situations are handled appropriately.”
Bell Canada did not describe the specific content of those scenarios. It did not explain why multiple independent accounts document representatives as unaware of or failing to apply any such policy. It did not address whether its AI-powered call monitoring system accounts for call context when evaluating agent performance.
A policy asserted is not a policy demonstrated. The r/bell forum contains a catalogue of what Bell’s bereavement systems look like in practice. A widow trying to access her late husband’s Sympatico email found the password reset routed to a phone number cut off after his death, with no clear path through Bell’s account management systems. A family cancelling a deceased grandmother’s phone plan spent twenty minutes on hold before finding a representative who knew what Bell’s death policies were — and then discovered the plan hadn’t actually been cancelled after the first call, so another month’s payment went through. Credits were issued that will never be used because the grandmother is, as the poster wrote, “all ashes now.” An estate executor in Ontario spent months navigating five representatives, three hangups, and one agent who demanded a power of attorney — which ceases to exist at death — before making any progress. Mail continued to arrive addressed to the deceased’s name months after the executor had submitted proof of authority over the estate.
A commenter in that final thread noted that their father went through the same experience in 2011 — faxed three death certificates plus all required documentation, received identical treatment, then had a collection agency pursue his posthumous credit rating because Bell kept billing a dead man.
That was fifteen years ago. Bell’s policy, it says, is clearly defined. The system, the accounts suggest, has not changed.
The financial stakes beneath this pattern are not incidental. Under Bell’s own published policy, the estate of a deceased account holder is responsible for all outstanding charges accrued until the service is cancelled. Charges that accumulate because Bell’s cancellation system failed — because a representative gave incorrect information, because a confirmation number didn’t actually close the account, because a family member was hung up on and had to start over — are legally enforceable against the estate. The executor who couldn’t get through to Bell, or who received a confirmation that meant nothing, may be administering an estate that is simultaneously being billed by a company whose own system made cancellation impossible. In 2017, CBC News documented a case in which Bell Mobility continued drawing from a dead man’s bank account after his daughter, the named executor, had called to cancel the account and received a confirmation number. The confirmation number was meaningless. The system kept running.
Bell created the liability. Bell’s legal framework collects it. The family pays it out of what their relative left behind. The credits issued when Bell eventually acknowledges the error — as in the case of the grandmother whose family was told the credits “will never be used” — are Bell’s solution to Bell’s problem. The estate gets nothing back. The family absorbs the cost of navigating a system that was never designed to let them out.
Bell is not alone in this. The r/Rogers and r/TELUS forums contain their own parallel records. A deceased man’s Rogers account sent to collections with interest. A family hit with a $320 early cancellation fee after notifying Rogers of a death, returning the equipment, and believing the account was closed — then told to call back the following week to confirm the reversal. A TELUS customer trying to cancel a deceased family member’s service: one hour on hold, four transfers, contradictory information at each layer, then a hangup. Another TELUS customer trying to shift a bill into her name after her husband’s death — told it couldn’t be done without increasing her bill. A family in British Columbia whose father’s twenty-four years of email correspondence were permanently deleted by TELUS after a representative migrated the account, was explicitly warned this might delete the emails, said it wouldn’t, and did it anyway.
Between August 2025 and January 2026, the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services accepted 2,505 complaints about Bell Canada — up 26 percent from the same period the prior year. The CCTS’s mid-year report documented a 61 percent industry-wide surge in accepted complaints, more than double the rate of consumer protection code breaches compared to the prior year. The CCTS’s mandate does not cover customer service complaints, which it categorizes as out-of-mandate. The complaints that reach the CCTS are the ones customers know they can file. The ones involving grief, confusion, and systems that simply keep running because nobody turned them off — those don’t make the count.
The reason these systems work this way is not mystery. It is arithmetic. Bell’s customer experience infrastructure was built to acquire customers, retain customers, and extract revenue from customers. Death does not appear in any of those optimization functions. It was never optimized. And because Bell, Rogers, and TELUS operate in a market with no meaningful competition that would punish this failure — because a grieving family leaving Bell finds Rogers and TELUS waiting with the same non-system — the incentive to build something better has never materialized.
The oligopoly doesn’t just harm Canadians through high prices and slow networks. It harms them by removing the competitive pressure that would force any of these companies to treat the worst moments of their customers’ lives with basic institutional competence.
What follows is an investigation into how BCE arrived at the financial and strategic position that makes that competence increasingly unlikely to develop.
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II. The Cut
For most of its modern existence, BCE Inc. paid its investors to wait. The dividend was the promise — a reliable quarterly return that grew almost every year, the financial equivalent of a utility’s stability attached to a company whose name was on hockey arenas, news broadcasts, and the side of every Bell truck in the country. The dividend was not incidental to BCE’s investment thesis. The dividend was the investment thesis.
In February 2023, BCE raised it 5.2 percent, from $3.68 to $3.87 per share annually. In February 2024, it raised it again, 3.1 percent, to $3.99. In February 2025, it held it flat, still $3.99, still safe. Eleven weeks later, BCE’s board established the annualized dividend at $1.75 per common share.
That is a reduction of 56.1 percent. Effective July 15, 2025.
The announcement came with the language of strategic discipline. BCE described the cut as a reflection of its “focus on enhancing financial flexibility, supporting accelerated deleveraging and optimizing BCE’s cost of capital in the current operating and capital market environment.” The board, it said, remained committed to “maintaining a meaningful and sustainable dividend for shareholders.”
What it did not say is what kind of shareholder BCE had spent decades cultivating, and what the cut meant to them. BCE was not primarily owned by traders seeking capital appreciation. Its shareholder base had been built on the promise of income: pension funds, retirees, retail investors holding BCE in registered accounts because a financial advisor had told them, correctly until recently, that Canada’s largest telecom didn’t cut its dividend.
The BCE 2025 Annual Information Form records the dividend history without commentary. The table is sufficient commentary on its own. The company raised its payout in 2023. It raised it again in 2024. Then it cut it by more than half.
What changed was not BCE’s strategy. What changed was BCE’s situation.
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III. The Company
BCE Inc. — Bell Canada Enterprises — was incorporated in 1970 and traces its operational lineage through Bell Canada to 1880. It is Canada’s largest communications company by total revenue and total combined customer connections. Its shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange. Its 2025 annual revenues were $24.47 billion. At year-end 2025, it employed 38,683 people.
Unlike Rogers Communications, which operates under the effective permanent control of the Rogers family through a dual-class share structure, BCE has no controlling shareholder. It is a conventionally governed public company, overseen by a board of fourteen directors, led since 2020 by President and Chief Executive Officer Mirko Bibic.
BCE operates through three segments. Bell CTS Canada provides wireless and wireline services to residential, business, and government customers across Canada. Bell CTS U.S., a new segment created in 2025, comprises Ziply Fiber, the Pacific Northwest fibre Internet provider BCE acquired for approximately $7.6 billion Canadian in August 2025. Bell Media holds a portfolio of television, radio, out-of-home advertising, and streaming assets, including CTV, TSN, RDS, Crave, and the iHeartRadio Canada brand.
At its October 2025 Investor Day, BCE unveiled a three-year strategic plan built on four priorities: put the customer first, deliver the best fibre and wireless networks, lead in enterprise with AI-powered solutions, and build a digital media and content powerhouse. The refreshed brand platform — “Connection is everything” — was introduced the same day.
The plan was announced while three credit rating agencies had the company under negative pressure, while its core Canadian telecom revenues were declining, while Bell Media had recognized nearly $2 billion in asset impairments over the prior twelve months, and while BCE was simultaneously executing the largest acquisition in its recent history.
The strategy is coherent on paper. The question is whether BCE has the financial runway to execute it.
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IV. The Retreat
The most revealing single fact about BCE’s strategic posture in 2025 is not what it bought. It is what it sold.
In May 2023, Bell Media completed the sale of its 63 percent ownership in certain production studios for net cash proceeds of $211 million. In June 2024, Bell Canada entered into an agreement to sell Northwestel — its northern telecommunications subsidiary serving the Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut — to Sixty North Unity, a consortium of Indigenous communities, for up to $1 billion. That transaction has not yet closed.
In July 2025, BCE completed the sale of its 37.5 percent ownership stake in Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment to Rogers Communications for $4.7 billion. BCE retained long-term content rights for the Toronto Maple Leafs and Toronto Raptors on TSN through the 2043-44 season — the broadcast relationship without the equity.
In the first half of 2025, Bell Media completed the sale of substantially all of its 45 radio stations for expected proceeds of approximately $53 million. In October 2025, BCE completed the sale of substantially all of its home security and monitored alarm assets to a.p.i. ALARM Inc. for $170 million. In April 2025, Bell Media sold 669 out-of-home advertising displays in Quebec and Ontario for $14 million, required by a Competition Bureau consent agreement.
On March 26, 2026 — three weeks after BCE’s annual report was filed — BCE announced that Motorola Solutions Canada Networks Inc. had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Bell Mobility’s land mobile radio networks services business for CAD $675 million. Bell and Motorola Solutions Canada have operated this infrastructure together for more than thirty years. Following the sale, Bell will remain as a service delivery partner. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026.
The complete disposition inventory across roughly three years: production studios, MLSE stake, 45 radio stations, home security assets, OOH advertising displays, and the land mobile radio business. Combined announced or completed proceeds exceed $6.8 billion. Northwestel, if it closes, adds up to $1 billion more.
Against this, BCE made one major acquisition: Ziply Fiber, at approximately $7.6 billion Canadian all-in including assumed debt. BCE is trading its Canadian legacy asset portfolio for a single American growth bet.
The workforce tells a parallel story — and it is still being written. BCE has executed five rounds of job reductions since June 2023. First came 1,300 positions in June 2023, approximately three percent of the workforce at the time, accompanied by the closure of foreign news bureaus and nine radio stations. Then 4,800 positions in February 2024 — nine percent of the entire workforce — the largest single-round reduction in BCE’s recent history, accompanied by the sale of dozens of radio stations and the cancellation of multiple television newscasts. Then approximately 650 manager positions in November 2025. Then the year-end 2025 figures: a net reduction of 1,707 employees, from 40,390 to 38,683, with $517 million in severance, acquisition, and other costs recorded for the year. And then, on June 15, 2026 — as this investigation was being finalized — BCE confirmed a further 690 positions eliminated: 460 non-union employees and 230 unionized roles targeted through voluntary departure packages.
BCE described the June 2026 round as part of Bell’s three-year strategy to “drive sustainable growth in a highly competitive market,” telling CBC News the changes reflect “the migration of customers to a more resilient, easier-to-maintain fibre network and ongoing operating efficiencies.” The fibre network that Bell is cutting Canadian capital investment to build is simultaneously cited as the reason to cut the Canadian workforce that maintains what it replaces. The logic is internally coherent. Its human cost is not abstract.
Taken together, the reductions since June 2023 represent thousands of positions eliminated across Bell’s Canadian operations — engineering, network operations, management, media, and now unionized front-line roles. The restructuring is not decelerating. Each round is described as part of a plan. The plan keeps requiring another round.
The fibre network tells a third story. In November 2023, the CRTC issued an interim decision requiring BCE to provide wholesale aggregated access to its fibre-to-the-premise network — meaning Bell’s competitors, including Rogers and TELUS, could resell services on BCE’s own fibre infrastructure at mandated rates. In August 2024, the CRTC made the obligation final and expanded its geographic scope.
Bell’s response was unambiguous. Its 2025 annual report states that the CRTC’s decision “undermined Bell Canada’s incentives to invest in next-generation wireline networks” and that “as a direct result, Bell Canada has reduced its capital expenditures in Canada by $593 million in 2025 alone and by over $1.2 billion since the interim decision in November 2023.”
What the annual report does not state plainly, but what the capital expenditure tables confirm, is the directional shift embedded in those numbers. Bell CTS Canada’s capital spending fell by $593 million in 2025. Bell CTS U.S. — Ziply Fiber — added $388 million in capital investment in the same year. BCE is not simply cutting capital spending. It is rebalancing capital from Canada to the United States. The regulatory environment it built its business inside for 145 years has become, in its own assessment, a disincentive to invest. So it is investing elsewhere.
Bell missed its near-term fibre build target of 8.3 million locations by the end of 2025. Its FTTP footprint reached approximately 8 million homes and businesses at December 31, 2025. A $593 million shortfall in investment translated directly into fewer Canadians connected to its best network.
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V. The Numbers
BCE’s 2025 annual report contains a line in its financial performance summary table worth isolating: “Net earnings growth: n.m.” Not meaningful. The category was abandoned because the comparison — $6.3 billion in reported net earnings in 2025 against $163 million in 2024 — is structurally misleading. The 2025 number includes a $5.2 billion gain on the MLSE sale. Strip that out, and 2025 net earnings are substantially lower. Strip out the 2024 impairment charges of $2.19 billion, and 2024 looks worse than its headline. The reported numbers are less a picture of BCE’s financial health than a catalogue of extraordinary items.
The underlying business tells a more legible story.
Bell CTS Canada operating revenues — the core Canadian telecom business — declined 1.5 percent in 2025. Wireless revenues fell 0.4 percent. Wireline voice revenues fell further, continuing a structural decline driven by technology substitution that will not reverse. Bell CTS Canada adjusted EBITDA declined year over year.
The wireless subscriber numbers are where the structural break is most visible. Mobile phone postpaid net subscriber activations — the metric that most directly measures wireless business health — fell 51.9 percent in 2025 compared to 2024. BCE’s own annual MD&A explains why: “slowing population growth mainly attributable to government immigration policies, fewer lower-value bring-your-own-device activations.”
This is the same structural shift documented in Part One of this series. Rogers Communications reported postpaid wireless net additions of 145,000 in full-year 2025, down from 380,000 in 2024. BCE’s full-year 2025 figures show a parallel collapse. Both companies confirm independently, in their own regulatory filings, that the immigration-driven demographic engine powering a decade of wireless subscriber growth has stopped.
Bell CTS Canada’s retail high-speed Internet subscriber base was essentially flat year-over-year. BCE’s filings attribute this directly to “slowing market growth, driven by lower immigration and slowing housing starts.” The Internet business that Bell spent billions building its fibre network to serve is no longer growing in Canada.
Bell Media is a separate category of deterioration. When a company pays for an asset — a broadcast licence, a television network, a portfolio of radio stations — it records that asset on its balance sheet at the price it paid. If the business environment changes and that asset is now worth less than what was originally paid for it, accounting rules require the company to formally recognize the loss. That recognition is called an impairment charge, or a write-down: the company is writing down the value of what it owns to reflect what it is actually worth today. It is not a cash expense. It is a formal admission, required by accounting standards, that something BCE bought is worth less than BCE paid for it — and that the gap between those two numbers is large enough that it can no longer be ignored.
In the third quarter of 2025, BCE identified those indicators of loss in its Bell Media TV services, radio markets, and out-of-home advertising business, citing “a decline in legacy advertising demand and spending in the linear advertising market.” The impairment testing that followed produced $976 million in write-downs in a single quarter — against $958 million in impairment charges in the same quarter of 2024, plus a further $1.132 billion in goodwill impairment in 2024. Goodwill is the premium a company pays above the assessed market value of an asset when it acquires it — the extra amount paid in anticipation of future earnings that, in Bell Media’s case, did not fully arrive. Writing down goodwill is an admission that those expected earnings will not come.
Two consecutive years of nine-figure impairment charges against the same asset class is not a market fluctuation. It is a balance sheet declaration that Bell Media’s legacy assets — the broadcast licences, the program rights, the physical infrastructure of conventional television — are worth materially less than BCE paid for them, and less again each year.
The dividend payout ratio completes the picture. For the year ended December 31, 2025, BCE’s implied dividend payout ratio based on free cash flow after payment of lease liabilities was approximately 99 percent. The company cut its dividend by more than half and still paid out nearly every dollar of free cash flow after lease obligations in the transitional year. The 2026 target payout range is 40 to 55 percent of free cash flow. Whether BCE reaches that range will depend on free cash flow growth that its Canadian business is not currently generating.
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VI. The Ratings
Between August 2024 and May 2025, three major credit rating agencies took negative action on BCE and Bell Canada. The sequence and stated rationale document an external assessment of BCE’s financial trajectory that predates and contextualizes the strategic pivot BCE announced in October 2025.
In August 2024, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Bell Canada’s issuer rating to Baa2 from Baa1, and BCE’s issuer rating to Baa3 from Baa2. Stated reason: ongoing debt leverage above Moody’s thresholds for the prior ratings.
In September 2024, S&P Global Ratings downgraded BCE and its subsidiaries to BBB from BBB+, and lowered BCE’s preferred shares to BB+ on the global scale — below investment grade by S&P’s own definition. Stated reason: ongoing debt leverage above S&P’s thresholds.
In November 2024, DBRS placed all its BCE and Bell Canada credit ratings under review with negative implications, following BCE’s announcement of the Ziply Fiber acquisition. The message was explicit: BCE was proposing to acquire a large U.S. asset while already carrying leverage above its own internal targets.
In May 2025 — the same month BCE cut its dividend — S&P revised its outlook on BCE and Bell Canada back to negative from stable, again citing ongoing leverage above thresholds. DBRS downgraded Bell Canada’s senior long-term debt to BBB from BBB (high), and its subordinated and junior subordinated debt to BB (high) — below investment grade by DBRS’s scale. Third agency. Third downgrade. Same diagnosis.
BCE’s net debt leverage ratio at December 31, 2025, was 3.78 times adjusted EBITDA. BCE’s internal leverage policy target is approximately 3.0 times. Its stated target for end of 2027 is 3.5 times. Its policy level of 3.0 times is now targeted for 2030 — without announcement, the goalposts moved in the annual report. BCE is giving itself until 2030 to reach its own internal leverage standard.
The instruments BCE has been issuing to refinance its debt compound the picture. The Series A and B junior subordinated notes issued in February 2025 carry initial rates of 6.875 percent and 7.0 percent. The Series C notes issued in March 2025 carry 5.625 percent. The February 2026 Series D and E notes carry 5.375 percent and 5.875 percent. BCE is refinancing legacy debt with new instruments that rating agencies partially classify as below investment grade, at rates that reflect that classification.
Three agencies. One diagnosis. BCE entered its strategic transformation while carrying more leverage than its own targets allow, rated partly below investment grade on the instruments it chose to fund that transformation.
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VII. The Bet
On August 1, 2025, BCE completed its acquisition of Ziply Fiber, the leading fibre Internet provider in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, for cash consideration of US$3.64 billion — approximately CAD$5.01 billion — plus the assumption of approximately CAD$2.6 billion in outstanding net debt at closing. BCE immediately redeemed all of Ziply’s outstanding debt securities, replacing them with Bell Canada’s own paper. The all-in Canadian dollar cost of the transaction was approximately $7.6 billion.
Ziply Fiber operates fibre-based and copper-based networks serving residential, business, and wholesale customers in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. At year-end 2025, it had approximately 435,000 retail high-speed Internet subscribers. In the five months BCE owned it in 2025, it generated $392 million in operating revenue at an EBITDA margin of approximately 44.4 percent.
The strategic logic is stated plainly in BCE’s filings: escape the slowing Canadian market, build scale in U.S. fibre, and position as the third-largest fibre Internet provider in North America. Through a separate partnership with PSP Investments — the Public Sector Pension Investment Board — BCE formed Network FiberCo to accelerate fibre expansion through Ziply into underserved U.S. markets, with the potential to reach up to 8 million fibre locations.
The counter-argument is equally plain. BCE acquired a U.S. growth asset while its Canadian subscriber growth had stopped, while its credit ratings were deteriorating, while it was cutting its dividend to free up cash flow, and while it was simultaneously shedding Canadian assets to finance the purchase. BCE is cutting Canadian network investment by $593 million while adding $388 million in U.S. network investment. It is not simply diversifying. It is defunding one geography to fund another.
Scotiabank analyst Maher Yaghi, commenting on the subsequent Motorola land mobile radio sale, described that transaction as focused on “a legacy asset that generates stable revenue but is not considered a primary growth area.” This framing — legacy versus growth, Canadian versus American, stable versus expanding — is the lens through which every BCE transaction in the past three years resolves. The question BCE’s filings cannot answer is whether U.S. growth materializes fast enough to offset Canadian decline.
Ziply Fiber’s internal controls were explicitly excluded from BCE’s 2025 disclosure controls certification — a standard carve-out for newly acquired businesses, but a reminder that BCE is operating an asset it does not yet fully understand in a regulatory environment to which it is unaccustomed. BCE has acknowledged in its own risk disclosures that Ziply Fiber “is subject to significant regulation in the U.S. which may reduce the amount of subsidies or revenues it receives, increase its compliance burdens or constrain its ability to compete.”
BCE is betting that a Pacific Northwest fibre operator can generate enough growth to justify $7.6 billion in capital deployed at a moment when its own leverage ratio sits above its internal policy target and its Canadian core is shrinking. The fibre thesis is structurally sound. U.S. broadband markets have room to grow. But the bet is being made with borrowed money, rated partly below investment grade, by a company that cut its dividend to make the numbers work.
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VIII. The Irony
BCE owns BNN Bloomberg.
The network that covers BCE’s stock price, BCE’s dividend cut, BCE’s credit rating downgrades, and BCE’s acquisition of Ziply Fiber — the primary financial news television channel in Canada — is a wholly owned asset of the subject of those stories, operating under the Bell Media umbrella.
When The Old Guardian raised this structural conflict with Bell Canada, Senior Manager of Media Relations Elise von Scheel responded: “Bell Media and CTV News are committed to upholding the principles of journalistic independence and integrity under all circumstances and at all times, without exception. CTV News, including BNN, clearly identifies its ownership in all reporting on BCE Inc. All CTV News properties, news directors, producers, editors, and journalists operate under a journalistic independence policy, which together with applicable industry codes — including the RTDNA Code of Journalistic Ethics and the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ Code of Ethics — govern impartiality and independence in CTV News’ newsgathering, reporting, and editorial decisions, and for ensuring the integrity of its news operations.”
The governance framework exists. The commitment is documented. The journalistic independence policy is real.
So is the structural conflict. BNN Bloomberg’s advertisers, anchor talent, and institutional relationships exist in a market where BCE’s financial health is a recurring news subject. The coverage of BCE by BNN Bloomberg may be entirely fair. It may also be subject to pressures — subtle, institutional, unremarkable — that are simply part of operating inside a conglomerate whose parent company is simultaneously a major news subject. Disclosure of ownership is not the same as independence from ownership. Bell Canada says the two are equivalent. The question is worth leaving open.
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IX. The Reckoning
BCE Inc. is not failing. Its free cash flow in 2025 was $3.18 billion, up 10 percent year over year. Its fibre network is the fastest in Canada by independent measurement. Crave is growing. Bell Cyber was launched. The AI infrastructure buildout — Bell AI Fabric, the partnerships with Cohere, Perplexity, SAP, and others — represents a coherent vision of what a Canadian telecom could become. BCE has raised its AI revenue target to $2 billion by 2028, up from $1.5 billion, and Mirko Bibic has said the company is confident in the path.
What BCE is experiencing 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. BCE’s own 2025 annual report confirms this in the present tense — not as a risk disclosure but as an explanation for why postpaid net additions fell 51.9 percent in a single year. The cable and conventional television bundle that anchored Bell Media’s advertising revenues has been abandoned by audiences at a pace that produced $2.19 billion in impairment charges in two consecutive years. The regulatory framework that protected BCE’s network investment by guaranteeing returns has been rewritten to mandate competitor access, and BCE has responded by withdrawing $1.2 billion in Canadian fibre investment. The dividend that defined BCE’s relationship with its shareholders for decades was cut in half when the underlying cash flows could no longer support it sustainably.
BCE’s response to this simultaneous expiration has been to retreat from declining Canadian positions and advance into a new geography. The Motorola land mobile radio sale, announced three weeks after BCE’s annual report was filed, adds $675 million to the disposition ledger and confirms the pattern is ongoing. BCE is monetizing every Canadian asset that generates stable revenue without offering growth prospects, and redeploying those proceeds toward U.S. fibre expansion and AI infrastructure.
Rogers built its moat and refused to believe the walls were falling. Bell looked at the same walls and started selling the stones.
There is a version of BCE’s strategy that looks like vision: a company that read the Canadian market clearly, recognized the structural deterioration before its competitors did, and made a disciplined decision to redeploy capital toward a geography with genuine growth potential. There is another version that looks like constrained desperation: a company with a leverage ratio above its own targets, credit ratings at the floor of investment grade, five rounds of workforce reductions in three years, and a Canadian core generating flat to declining revenues, making a $7.6 billion bet in a foreign regulatory environment because the alternative — staying in a market whose structural problems are not of its making and not within its power to fix — looked worse. Both versions are supported by the same set of facts. What separates them is not evidence. It is outcome. BCE has removed almost every financial cushion it had in order to execute a transformation that will take years to validate. If Ziply delivers, the strategy was bold. If it doesn’t, there will be very little left to catch the fall.
Whether that makes Bell smarter or merely faster in its recognition of the same underlying reality is a question the next several years of quarterly filings will answer. What is already documented — in BCE’s own annual reports, its credit rating disclosures, its regulatory filings, and the press releases it issues when it sells another piece of itself — is that Canada’s largest and oldest telecommunications company is in the middle of a transformation it did not choose and cannot afford to get wrong.
In the meantime, the retention script runs. The pitch follows the estate call. The system keeps going, because nobody built it to stop.
Bell says its policy is clearly defined. The accounts say something else. The distance between those two things is where the story lives.
The dividend was $3.99. Then it was $1.75. The bereavement call ends with a wireless plan. The estate pays the bill.
The numbers say what the strategy documents cannot. The customers experience what the earnings releases don’t mention.
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Sources and Methodology
This investigation draws on the following primary sources:
BCE Inc. 2025 Annual Financial Report and Management’s Discussion and Analysis, filed with SEDAR+ March 5, 2026. BCE Inc. 2024 Integrated Annual Report and Management’s Discussion and Analysis, filed with SEDAR+ March 6, 2025. BCE Inc. 2023 Annual Financial Report and Management’s Discussion and Analysis, filed with SEDAR+. BCE Inc. Annual Information Form for the Year Ended December 31, 2025, filed March 5, 2026. BCE Inc. 2025 Third Quarter Management’s Discussion and Analysis, dated November 5, 2025. BCE Inc. news release, May 8, 2025: dividend reduction announcement. BCE Inc. news release, March 26, 2026: Motorola Solutions Canada Networks Inc. to Acquire Bell Canada’s Land Mobile Radio Networks Services Business. CRTC Telecom Decision CRTC 2023-358, November 6, 2023. CRTC Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2024-180, August 13, 2024. Telecom Notice of Consultation CRTC 2025-226, September 4, 2025. DBRS Limited credit rating announcements for BCE and Bell Canada, 2024 and 2025. Moody’s Investors Service credit rating announcement for BCE and Bell Canada, August 2024. S&P Global Ratings credit rating announcements for BCE and Bell Canada, September 2024 and May 2025. Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services, 2025-2026 Mid-Year Report. Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services, 2024-2025 Annual Report. Bell Canada, support.bell.ca/billing-and-accounts/what_to_do_after_a_death, BCE bereavement account policy. CBC News, March 2017: Bell Mobility charging deceased account holder’s bank account after cancellation confirmation. Canadian Press and CBC News, June 15, 2026: BCE confirms 690 job reductions. Canadian Press, March 27, 2026: Motorola Solutions transaction commentary including Scotiabank analyst Maher Yaghi. Public posts on r/bell, r/Rogers, and r/telus communities on Reddit, 2011 through May 2026, documenting bereavement account management experiences across Bell Canada, Rogers Communications, and TELUS. Posts verified as publicly accessible at time of publication.
The Old Guardian contacted Bell Canada Media Relations on May 11, 2026 with four specific questions regarding its customer retention and bereavement account management protocols, and sought comment on the financial analysis and BNN Bloomberg conflict of interest documented in this investigation. Bell Canada responded on May 16, 2026 via Senior Manager of Media Relations Elise von Scheel. Bell Canada’s responses are quoted in full in the relevant sections of this investigation.
The Old Guardian contacted BCE Inc. for comment on the broader financial analysis and asset disposition pattern documented in this article. BCE did not respond by publication deadline.
Part Three of The Oligopoly Files examines TELUS Corporation: the national expansion, the international workforce strategy, and what the third pillar of Canada’s telecom oligopoly reveals about the industry’s structural future.
The Old Guardian accepts confidential tips from BCE, Bell Media, and Bell Canada employees, contractors, and former staff at tips@theoldguardian.ca. Secure communications welcomed.