Antitrust regulator Competition Bureau Canada, has blocked Rogers Communications’ proposed C$20 billion acquisition of Shaw Communications until the government is sure that the country’s telecom networks have built resilience,in light of the outage in service in early July 2022. 

While the merger has been blocked by the regulator, ultimately Industry Minister Francois Philippe Champagne will have the final say. The deal is on hold until the government can definitely conclude that the country’s telecom networks are resilient and failure-proof. Champagne told a parliamentary committee which included officials from the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) on Monday that the country needed to strengthen its network resiliency. 

However, according to Roger’s CEO Tony Staffieri, the merger would put the company in a better position to meet the requirements of the government and would help improve network capabilities, adding that the neither company would be able to do it on their own. He called it a “necessary investment.”

Telecom experts have decried the investigation, saying that the Rogers-Shaw deal needed to be scuttled for the health of the industry while also criticising the CRTC for its decision to not launch a full scale investigation into the outage. 

The Competition Bureau Canada had earlier blocked the Rogers-Shaw deal saying that the merger would reduce competition in a telecom market which is largely monopolistic. 

Rogers, along with BCE Inc and Telus have cornered roughly 95% of the telecom market. Days after the outage, Champagne had asked the three to come together to build a robust framework of communications protocols so that users aren’t affected in the future. 

The Rogers outage caused services across several industries to go down for 19 hours affecting banking, businesses, emergency services and even flights. It affected 10 million wireless subscribers and 2.25 million retail internet subscribers. This isn’t the first time Rogers has had an outage. The company had suffered another stoppage in service roughly a year and a half ago.