On a recent Thursday night in West-end Toronto, a passerby noticed an elderly man sitting on a concrete stoop outside his home at 9:30 p.m., clutching a cane, inconsolable in the dark.<\/p>\n
The stranger stopped to help.<\/p>\n
The man, who is 102 years old, had waited hours for a Good Samaritan.<\/p>\n
The Bell landline at his Swansea home, his literal lifeline to the world, died suddenly and he didn\u2019t know what to do. The stress so overwhelmed him that his words, to the stranger, sounded like jibberish. He was speaking a Slavic language from his youth.<\/p>\n
Figuring out how to help seemed impossible until the Samaritan flashed his cellphone and the man recited a phone number he knew by heart.<\/p>\n
Annie Pejovich Chant answered.<\/p>\n
Pejovich Chant, the man\u2019s daughter and a realtor\u00a0who gathers weekly\u00a0with a klatsch of neighbourhood seniors\u00a0to chew over\u00a0their personal headlines, had a hunch about what happened.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Earlier this month,\u00a0Bell Canada had circulated a letter to homes\u00a0across Swansea warning customers it was in the process of replacing the aging copper network that powers the company\u2019s landlines.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis means that effective Nov. 4, 2026, we will be shutting down your current Bell home phone service,\u201d the company\u2019s letter states. \u201cIf you do not take action by this date, your service will be disconnected.\u201d<\/p>\n
To avoid losing service \u2014 including 911 access \u2014 customers had to sign up for Bell\u2019s \u201cnewer 100 per cent Fibre\u201d network.<\/p>\n
Pejovich Chant couldn\u2019t figure out why Bell appeared to act pre-emptively in her dad\u2019s case. He received his own warning letter Aug. 4 with the November deadline still\u00a0months away. (The answer, she would soon learn, was a bit more complicated.)\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is totally unacceptable for all the seniors in Toronto who have a landline,\u201d Pejovich Chant wrote in an email to me. She asked the Star to not name her father to protect him from telemarketing scams.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Pejovich Chant\u2019s father is among a growing number of seniors aging in place who rely on a medical emergency\u00a0device that plugs into a phone\u00a0jack. Pushing a wearable button sends a distress signal through the landline to a 24\/7 monitoring station.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Pejovich Chant wondered how many other seniors were quietly losing their lifelines.<\/p>\n
A blind spot in emergency response<\/p>\n
Telecommunications companies are deactivating legacy copper lines without notifying emergency alert providers.\u00a0Connect America, parent company of Lifeline Canada, confirmed this\u00a0critical gap in Canada\u2019s telecom network transition.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt this time, we have not received direct proactive notifications or co-ordinated transition plans from major telecommunications providers regarding copper-network decommissioning,\u201d Aaron Nye, COO of Connect America, wrote in an email to the Star.<\/p>\n
Nearly 40 per cent of Lifeline\u2019s Canadian subscribers still rely on traditional landline connections to transmit life-saving signals to monitoring centres, Nye confirmed.<\/p>\n
While other countries have decommissioned aging copper networks for technological and economic reasons, they\u2019ve taken greater care in ensuring the process protects vulnerable citizens like Pejovich Chant\u2019s dad and her coffee mates.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Canada\u2019s hands-off approach has elicited concern and criticism from consumer advocacy groups and even from within the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIn many countries, a regulatory framework is established to oversee and manage copper decommissioning,\u201d writes Bram Abramson, a CRTC commissioner, in a 2024\u00a0policy decision order.<\/a> \u201cNot in Canada. Here, copper decommissioning has proceeded without active regulatory oversight.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Canada\u2019s approach, Abramson adds, \u201cshifted certain risk costs from those conducting the decommissioning \u2014 where other regulatory frameworks might place them \u2014 onto those impacted by it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The downside of fibre phone lines<\/p>\n For more than a century, traditional copper phone lines carried their own low-voltage electrical current straight from a telecom company\u2019s central utility office. If an ice storm brought down the power grid across an entire city, an old-fashioned landline kept working.\u00a0<\/p>\n Fibre optic cables transmit data using pulses of light, not electricity. Because light cannot carry power, a fibre landline relies on an electrically powered modem inside the customer\u2019s home to convert those light pulses into a dial tone.<\/p>\n During a power outage, the modem shuts off and the landline dies unless homeowners source, install and maintain their own Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) or backup battery.<\/p>\n Bell Canada sells a portable one on its website for $299.99. It promises up to nine hours of backup power for a modem.<\/p>\n Abramson, appears to be the only one within the CRTC actively warning the public of the risks of retiring copper landlines \u2014 \u201cthat lifeline for so long.\u201d<\/p>\n