Few and far between
Even if you have two quarters to call someone, it’s getting more and more difficult to find a pay phone
Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the number of pay phones across the country went from 93,771 in 2012 to 57,542 in 2016, nearly a 40 per cent drop. But, MacLeod says the Mount Stewart pay phone came in handy during the summer months as it was used by residents in Savage Harbour who didn’t have land lines hooked up in their cottages. Because of this, MacLeod wanted to get a replacement pay phone, but she was told there would be a monthly fee attached, which there wasn’t before. She opted not to. “If there was a payphone here, it would be used. Not every day, I mean it could sit there for I don’t know how long and be very lonely. But it was used.” While mobile devices such as cellphones, smart phones and tablets, provide convenience to the user, they aren’t always reliable. This was the situation Hans Reist found himself in this week. Reist, who has been coming to the Island with his wife each summer for the past decade, said they landed arrived in Charlottetown from Switzerland the day before and found themselves in a bit of a predicament. “Our cellphone (does) not work,” he told The Guardian, adding his prepaid cellular phone wasn’t working, and he went to a Bell Aliant representative where he was given a 1-800 number to call to activate his phone. “She (couldn’t) call to the 1-800 number, so she sent us to the public phone, she sent us here,” he said, pointing to the two pay phones in the mall’s entrance. A representative from the Bell Aliant store at the Charlottetown Mall confirmed that “a few times a day” customers are sent to use the payphones for 1-800 toll-free calls because the store doesn’t have a courtesy line. When vandals made away with a gas station’s ATM last year, they made sure no one could call the cops. Bonnie MacLeod, manager of the Mount Stewart Irving, said the store’s lone pay phone was damaged during the January 2017 theft. “When they ripped the machine out, the pay phone got caught in the crossfire and got ripped out in the middle of the parking lot,” she said. “It was a sad, sad morning when that phone was in the parking lot.” Despite the fact that Bell Aliant announced, as of Monday, it was doubling the cost for pay phones in all four Atlantic provinces — making a call now costs 50 cents instead of a quarter — there doesn’t seem to be much of a future for the units themselves. According to the 2017 Communications Monitoring Report from the Canadian