TELECOMMUNICATION POLICY FOR WHOM? AN ANALYSIS OF RECENT CRTC DECISIONS

This paper critically examines political and sociological relations in public telecommunication policy by arguing that the Canadian state has and continues to play an important role in forging and shaping a competitive telecommunication environment. Federal telecommunication decisions approved by the state regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), are examined from the years 1977 to 1990. The pro-competitive policies approved by the CRTC reflect the state's shift from regulating rates and capital expansion programs by monopoly telecommunication providers (Bell Canada and BC Tel), toward permitting competition for an array of business services supplied by monopoly, as well as new, telecommunication providers. Competition in telecommunication business services has, paradoxically, resulted in a more regulated telecommunication environment; one in which there is less regulation in the public interest but more regulation to manage market forces. Structural theory (Poulantzas, 1973, 1978; Offe, 1984; Mahon 1980, 1984; Jessop, 1991) best allows us to analyze the role that the CRTC takes in formulating pro-competitive telecommunication policy. To get a more complete picture of this it is necessary to interpret and analyze the state's responses to changes in the nature of capitalism. Structural state theory reveals that the primary function of the state in a capitalist society is to serve the interests of the ruling class by creating and maintaining conditions favourable for capital accumulation. The state must also reduce the inherent conflicts between fractions of capital, the working class, and forces within civil society'. Furthermore, the state has to create and maintain conditions of social harmony by producing policies which legitimize capitalist social relations. Structural theory, therefore, explains how the relationship between the ruling class and the state is a complex one in which the state serves the capitalist class without appearing to do so. As part of its ideological function, the state re-defincs workers