His Bell scare exposes Canada’s unregulated end to landlines

The man, who is 102 years old, had waited hours for a Good Samaritan.

The Bell landline at his Swansea home, his literal lifeline to the world, died suddenly and he didn’t 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.

Figuring out how to help seemed impossible until the Samaritan flashed his cellphone and the man recited a phone number he knew by heart.

Annie Pejovich Chant answered.

Pejovich Chant, the man’s daughter and a realtor who gathers weekly with a klatsch of neighbourhood seniors to chew over their personal headlines, had a hunch about what happened. 

Earlier this month, Bell Canada had circulated a letter to homes across Swansea warning customers it was in the process of replacing the aging copper network that powers the company’s landlines.

“This means that effective Nov. 4, 2026, we will be shutting down your current Bell home phone service,” the company’s letter states. “If you do not take action by this date, your service will be disconnected.”

To avoid losing service — including 911 access — customers had to sign up for Bell’s “newer 100 per cent Fibre” network.

Pejovich Chant couldn’t figure out why Bell appeared to act pre-emptively in her dad’s case. He received his own warning letter Aug. 4 with the November deadline still months away. (The answer, she would soon learn, was a bit more complicated.) 

“This is totally unacceptable for all the seniors in Toronto who have a landline,” Pejovich Chant wrote in an email to me. She asked the Star to not name her father to protect him from telemarketing scams. 

Pejovich Chant’s father is among a growing number of seniors aging in place who rely on a medical emergency device that plugs into a phone jack. Pushing a wearable button sends a distress signal through the landline to a 24/7 monitoring station. 

Pejovich Chant wondered how many other seniors were quietly losing their lifelines.

Telecommunications companies are deactivating legacy copper lines without notifying emergency alert providers. Connect America, parent company of Lifeline Canada, confirmed this critical gap in Canada’s telecom network transition.

“At this time, we have not received direct proactive notifications or co-ordinated transition plans from major telecommunications providers regarding copper-network decommissioning,” Aaron Nye, COO of Connect America, wrote in an email to the Star.

Nearly 40 per cent of Lifeline’s Canadian subscribers still rely on traditional landline connections to transmit life-saving signals to monitoring centres, Nye confirmed.

While other countries have decommissioned aging copper networks for technological and economic reasons, they’ve taken greater care in ensuring the process protects vulnerable citizens like Pejovich Chant’s dad and her coffee mates. 

Canada’s hands-off approach has elicited concern and criticism from consumer advocacy groups and even from within the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). 

“In many countries, a regulatory framework is established to oversee and manage copper decommissioning,” writes Bram Abramson, a CRTC commissioner, in a 2024 policy decision order. “Not in Canada. Here, copper decommissioning has proceeded without active regulatory oversight.” 

Canada’s approach, Abramson adds, “shifted certain risk costs from those conducting the decommissioning — where other regulatory frameworks might place them — onto those impacted by it.” 

For more than a century, traditional copper phone lines carried their own low-voltage electrical current straight from a telecom company’s central utility office. If an ice storm brought down the power grid across an entire city, an old-fashioned landline kept working. 

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’s home to convert those light pulses into a dial tone.

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.

Bell Canada sells a portable one on its website for $299.99. It promises up to nine hours of backup power for a modem.

Abramson, appears to be the only one within the CRTC actively warning the public of the risks of retiring copper landlines — “that lifeline for so long.”

“When Canadians think of landline voice,” he wrote in a 2026 policy order, “they often assume it continues to work when household power fails. For generations that expectation reflected how the network was engineered and regulated.”

As these trusted telephone networks fade, so must consumers’ assumptions about the reliability of the modern landline, he noted.

“The service has changed,” Abramson writes. “Especially where phone lines remain a service of last resort, the public deserves a clearer discussion of how.”

The rush to decommission copper networks began more than a decade ago.

In 2011, early CRTC proceedings discussed the shortcomings of the technology and noted telecom companies should supply an eight-hour, in-home backup battery to subscribers. That provision, however, was never written into the official rule book as a mandatory condition. 

At a 2016 telecom conference, former BCE chief financial officer Glen LeBlanc explained the financial rationale behind shifting to fibre optics. Converting premises to fibre was projected to slash technician dispatches by 40 to 50 per cent.

“The great savings — the ultimate euphoria — is when you can shut down your copper network,” LeBlanc said. “That’s where I think you see the telco of tomorrow.”

Fast forward to today, Pejovich Chant escalated her dad’s landline emergency to Bell executive management. I also reached out to Bell senior media relations manager Elise Von Scheel who confirmed in an email that Pejovich Chant’s father’s neighbourhood is scheduled to lose its legacy copper infrastructure this fall. She added that his particular disconnection was caused by a faulty aging copper connector. 

“This was not a proactive decommissioning of the service by Bell,” von Scheel told the Star, “but rather an isolated equipment issue that was repaired and the connection subsequently restored.”

Pejovich Chant told me she asked the Bell technician if the company could install a fibre line while keeping the copper line as a backup. She said she was told they’ll look into it. She also asked if Bell could supply and install a backup battery for her father to keep the fibre line working during a power outage. She said she was told such requests are approved on a case-by-case basis.

“In rare scenarios,” von Scheel shared in an email to the Star, “Bell has occasionally provided assistance in securing a one-time UPS backup when a customer’s medical monitoring device was only compatible with a copper network.”

Von Scheel said Bell is “continuing conversations with the customer to support a transition to fibre.” 

I asked the CRTC for an interview with Abramson and if it could explain its hands-off approach on copper decommissioning.

“Commissioners speak through their decisions,” CRTC spokesperson Megan McLean wrote in an email, rejecting my request.

“The CRTC is taking a number of actions to address service outages and ensure Canadians are connected to the services they need,” McLean added. “This includes an ongoing proceeding that aims to help make telecommunications networks more resilient and reduce outages.”

Last Friday, Pejovich Chant’s father opened his mail to find a second notice from Bell Canada, warning him he was on the verge of losing his home phone service, for which he pays $70 monthly. 

Pejovich Chant is frustrated by the regulator’s apparent indifference and hopes public pressure will compel the CRTC and telecom companies to re-evaluate their approach here. 

“There aren’t many opportunities in life to make a difference,” she says. “I think this is one of them.”