Canadians’ fury over Rogers outage may complicate its merger hopes

TORONTO: Rogers Communications complicated its chances of getting antitrust approval for a C$20 billion telecom merger after Friday’s massive outage highlighted the perils of Canada’s effective telecom monopoly and sparked a backlash against its industry dominance.

The Rogers network outage disrupted nearly every aspect of daily life, cutting banking, transport and government access for millions, and hitting the country’s cashless payments system and Air Canada’s call center.

Consumers and opposition politicians called on the government to allow more competition and enact policy changes to curb telecom companies’ power. Rogers, BCE Inc and Telus Corp control 90% of the market share in Canada.