Crees demand quality internet at CRTC hearing

Quality telecommunications services are essential to the success of Aboriginal communities, according to a brief presented by the Cree Nation Government and the Eeyou Communications Network to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).

Representing a broad range of groups in Eeyou Istchee, they insisted large telecoms provide the same quality of telecommunication services to rural towns and communities in the north as they would to bigger centres in the south. One way to guarantee the service would be to make broadband a universal service.

François Turgeon, the director of IT at the Cree School Board and a board member of the ECN, said the CRTC should obligate broadband technology as a basic service for all homes in Eeyou Istchee. “Please consider this,” Turgeon said, “Eeyou Istchee is situated far from higher learning centres, colleges and universities. Now that the schools with ECN service have made the internet an integral part of the learning experience, what happens when students go home?”

Turgeon says that a solution would be to make quality internet service universal and affordable to everyone in the northern communities. There is no equivalent service for students to access homework through internet or to complete their assignments electronically.

“Online tutoring is also not available either because there is no internet access offered in our communities,” he added. “Web portal services to parents and students to follow and monitor the progress of the children is also difficult to implement when internet is, again, not available.”

Ted Moses, former Grand Chief of the Crees and the initiator of a fibre-optic project in James Bay, said that making broadband a universal service would address these disparities.

“It will help eliminate the education deficit,” Moses said. “It will encourage Canadian innovation. It will advance literacy, travel and enterprise. It will ensure that all Canadians north and south have a greater opportunity to be part of social governance.”

“We don’t see telecommunications as disconnected from everything else,” said Hyman Glustein, a telecommunications advisor for the Cree Nation Government. “We see it as a part of the whole of society. So when we do an improvement in telecommunications, it improves police services, it improves justice services. There are local courthouses in all the communities now. These things were never possible before.”

Discrimination by large telecommunications companies against remote northern communities happens when they offer a lower quality of service for the same price others receive high speed internet.

“I have worked in the Cree Board of Health and Social Services for most of my adult life and I know how important the internet is in the delivery of these services,” said Bella Moses Petawabano, chairperson of the Cree Board of Health and Social Services. “My community deserves to be more than in a line entry on the phone economy books. It is the social fabric of our lives. If our young people have to leave in order to lead their lives, if they cannot conduct what today are considered basic skills to work, it is our loss.”

Petawabano noted that if the CRTC were to make internet a basic service for Cree consumers, the local economy would benefit. “Since the internet there is limited by unreliable speed and dropped connections my children and grandchildren, some of whom are in schools and universities in Montreal and Gatineau, often find these prolonged visits interfere with their studies and their friendships. Like all young people, they need access to modern internet telecommunications,” she said.