Cellphone users to help pay 911 costs
Nominal monthly fee coming soon, says province
Alberta Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths is set to announce a new charge to cellphone users to cover the costs of 911 emergency call centre services.
Griffiths is expected to announce in mid-January that Alberta will follow the lead of six other provinces enacting legislation to allow cellphone companies to charge cellphone users a nominal fee per month to offset the cost of 911 call services.
Although Griffiths was not available to comment, Municipal Affairs spokesman Michael Norris said Friday the minister will make the announcement in the Calgary area in the coming weeks.
“It’s going to be soon,” said Norris. “It’s going to be happening right away.”
Griffiths had told the Alberta Association of Municipal Districts and Counties in Edmonton last November he planned to make the announcement before the end of the year, but Norris said it was delayed to ensure stakeholders would be able to attend.
Griffiths will likely introduce legislation during the upcoming spring sitting to enable a 44-cent surcharge to be applied to the bills of cellphone users, Norris said.
Callers using land lines are already charged a 911 service fee, but the charge doesn’t apply to mobile phones.
Since many Albertans are using cellphones as a substitute for land lines in their homes, 911 call centres have been struggling to find the resources to service an increasing number of emergency calls, Griffiths told the Herald in November.
Calgary city council has been vocal in pushing for cellphone companies to help pay for the growing burden on 911 call centres.
Ward 10 Ald. Andre Chabot said collecting that fee is a critical issue for the city. The situation is exacerbated by the number of errant 911 calls from mobile devices, he added.
“It’s costing us money,” Chabot said. “We have no way of recovering those costs unless we get this kind of legislation through.”
He said some cellphone providers are already charging a fee for 911 service but are not remitting it to the municipalities.
Jim Stevenson, a vice-president of the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association, said the situation has taken some time to resolve because the minister believed the CRTC had jurisdiction, but that turned out not to be the case.
“It’s something we’ve been pushing for quite a while,” said Stevenson, a Calgary Ward 3 alderman. “We’re excited about the fact he has promised us he is going to push it through.”
Griffiths has promised to pass on the full amount collected from the cellphone providers to the municipalities without taking any off the top for collecting the fee and distributing it, he said.
Stevenson said it has been a big problem for Alberta municipalities — especially those that operate 911 call centres — that have been saddled with the full cost of handling those emergency cellphone calls. He said the cost of operating the Calgary call centre is in the millions of dollars.
Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Manitoba, Quebec and P.E.I. already collect a 911 fee from wireless subscribers, says Marc Choma, a spokesman for the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA).
Each government sets its respective fee, and the service providers collect it monthly from their subscribers and then remit the money to the provincial governments, he explained in an email.
“This provincial system, as opposed to a patchwork of different fee-collecting mechanisms by dozens of individual municipalities within individual provinces, is something that CWTA certainly supports,” he said.
Telus spokesman Chris Gerritsen said Telus, which has about 7.6 million wireless subscribers across Canada, also supports a provincewide collection initiative.
“I can say that we could make a provincewide system work as far as collecting the tax on behalf of the province,” he said. “It is a lot easier administratively than (distributing it to) individual municipalities.”
More than half of 911 calls in urban centres now come from cellphones, says the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association. It says there are more than 26.5 million cellphone users in Canada.