Cormier ready to sue for service
HALIFAX — Sad songs are OK for J.P. Cormier but he says sad internet speeds are threatening his livelihood.
The prolific Nova Scotia songwriter and singer who lives in the rural Cooks Brook area of Halifax Regional Municipality says he’s fed up with the province’s failure to live up to highspeed internet promises.
“We don’t have any internet,” said a frustrated Cormier. “There is something you can call internet which is a wireless service like North Nova Cable that we have. It doesn’t actually provide anything. … The speed is atrocious.”
Cormier says the internet speed is not nearly enough to support the business he runs out of a recently built $100,000 studio on his property. With the COVID-19 pandemic cancelling live performances, the studio work and Youtube recordings are his livelihood.
“Now it’s just about useless,” Cormier said of the studio. “We can’t change our upload schedules because that completely disrupts your income. We do a show on Monday, we do a show on Wednesday and we do a live show every second Friday but in order to make money on Youtube, you have to be consistent and you have to have a certain number of content going up each month. If you are not doing that, it just falls apart.”
Cormier and a neighbour, lawyer Rob Pineo who works out of Halifax, sent formal notice recently to the province, Develop Nova Scotia and HRM of a class action to be launched in less than two months on behalf of rural Nova Scotians who have been denied the essential service of high-speed internet.
“In 2006, the province of Nova Scotia declared that high-speed internet is an essential service in today’s world, just as important as electricity, garbage removal or telephone service,” the notice reads.
“Here we are, 14 years later, and still no service.”
The goal of the class action is to compel the province to provide high-speed internet service to the remaining citizens of the province who are currently doing without.”
Develop Nova Scotia is the Crown corporation responsible for developing and implementing a strategy to provide high-speed internet access to unserved and underserved Nova Scotians.
Develop Nova Scotia stated in a Feb. 7 website post that Nova Scotians deserve access to reliable, high-speed internet service so they can live where they choose while staying connected and helping to grow the economy.
In that announcement, Develop Nova Scotia stated that 70 per cent of homes and businesses now have access to high-speed internet but that number would increase to 86 per cent with new contracts signed, bringing access close to the goal of more than 95 per cent.
Contracts with five internet service providers including Cross Country in Canning, Kings County, Mainland Telecom in Middleton, Seaside Communications in Sydney, Bell Canada and Xplornet, based in Woodstock, N.B., have been signed with Develop Nova Scotia, the post said.
Multiple communities are captured under independent projects by Cross Country, Mainland, Seaside and Bell Canada using wired technology while Xplornet will cover about 16,000 unserved homes and businesses in Cumberland and Colchester counties through a mix of wired and fixed wireless services.
“Overall, the projects provide access to connections for more than 42,000 homes and businesses.”
Almost $45 million of the $193-million fund established in 2018 by the government has been committed to these projects that will be substantially completed over the next year, the announcement said.
The announcement does little to help Cormier, who is one of 727 members of the Facebook group Internet Equity for All Nova Scotia that was created just two months ago.
“This studio is a way for me to make my living but if I can’t produce an album from here, which requires me to send huge files to other studios in other countries …,” Cormier said. “I’m producing an album for a guy in Maryland right now. The file transfer process is a nightmare. I have to send recordings down to him, he records his vocals on them and sends them back to me. Downloading them is a nightmare, uploading is a nightmare. “It’s so frustrating.” Cormier said he tried to send a compressed performance video by North Nova Cable to an event in Winnipeg that he had been hired to play for and was advised that it would take the equivalent of 41 days to upload. He was able to upload it from a laptop sitting in his sister-inlaw’s nearby driveway in 90 seconds.
Cormier said Bell and Eastlink are available within four kilometres on either side of his property but they won’t run the lines to his house. If they did, 400 people in the area would buy the service immediately, he said.
Cormier puts the blame on Develop Nova Scotia, not Bell or Eastlink.
“It’s Develop Nova Scotia’s tender system,” he said. “They are making it so Bell can’t win these things. I know Bell bid on this area but they are not going to win this contract. How can they when these other companies say they will come in 50 per cent under Bell. Of course they will, but they are going to deliver a service that doesn’t actually work.”