Compliance with the CCTS’ Public Awareness Plan

2025 Compliance Report Cards

Canadians need to be aware of the CCTS and easily access information about it when they have unresolved disputes after trying to resolve them with their telecom and TV service providers. We recognize the ongoing importance of ensuring that the public knows about the services the CCTS provides and how to reach the CCTS when needed.

Participating Service Providers (PSPs) must comply with Developing Public Awareness of the CCTS (the Public Awareness Plan) and promote awareness about the CCTS to their customers.

To ensure PSP compliance, the CCTS conducts a review each year to:

assess compliance and identify any instances of non-compliance with the Public Awareness Plan;
engage with PSPs that have non-compliance issues to ensure that issues are addressed in a timely manner; and
take enforcement action against PSPs that do not comply.

This report card highlights our findings about PSP compliance with the Public Awareness Plan from Fall 2025.

Recent developments

In 2025, the telecommunications and broadcasting regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) initiated a public consultation on improving customer awareness of the CCTS. After a temporary pause, the CRTC reinstated the proceeding to understand the timing and manner in which service providers inform customers about the CCTS. Based on the CRTC-commissioned public opinion research survey data and the service providers’ explanations to the CRTC regarding their public awareness activities ^[1], the CRTC proposed its preliminary view that there is evidence of low awareness indicating that customers with unresolved complaints are not being informed of the CCTS effectively.^[2] The CRTC invited proposals from service providers regarding what changes would be effective and efficient regarding their customer complaint resolution processes. The CRTC also invited consumer groups to comment on why customers with unresolved complaints are insufficiently informed about the CCTS and what solutions would work. The CCTS will participate in the consultation.

The CCTS surveys customers that have used our services after their complaint is concluded to obtain customer feedback on our process and understand how they learned of the CCTS. We publish customer survey results in each of our Annual Reports. In 2024-25, few customers reported seeing information about the CCTS from their provider’s website (23%), on their bill (18%) or being told by their provider about the CCTS (7%).^[3] Moreover, 40% of customers reported that they tried for more than two months to resolve their problem directly with their service provider before turning to the CCTS for help.^[4] This feedback helps us assess the effectiveness of the PSP Public Awareness Plan.

Requirements

The Public Awareness Plan requires PSPs to inform their residential and small business customers about the CCTS in English and French as follows:

Our approach

Our goal is to encourage compliance through educating and engaging PSPs about the requirements of the Public Awareness Plan. This year, we sent several reminders about the Public Awareness Plan to all PSPs. In the reminders, we urged PSPs to self-assess their compliance with Public Awareness Plan requirements ahead of our scheduled audits and reminded them about how to find available CCTS guidance on ensuing compliance with requirements.

The CCTS annually audits:

PSP websites: a review of all PSPs that are audited to ensure that all the required CCTS information is available for customers on the PSP’s website.
PSP documentation: a review of PSP invoices, white pages, and internal documents about the PSP’s complaint-handling process for the 25 PSPs that generated the most CCTS complaints in the previous year.

The CCTS shares its audit results for each audited PSP with the PSP. When we find issues of non-compliance, we contact the PSP, provide an explanation, and request that the PSP identify how and when it will come into compliance. Our Compliance team works with PSPs until all identified issues have been resolved, and we publicly identify any service providers who refuse to comply.

PSP websites

In 2025, the CCTS audited 37 PSPs^[5] to ensure their customers have access to the required website information and found that 8 out of 37 audited PSPs (22%) did not have any information about the CCTS on their websites. This is lower than the results from the previous four years (28 – 32% non-compliance). The providers without information about the CCTS on their websites in 2025 were mostly small PSPs. We collaborated with service providers who did not comply with the CCTS website requirement. As a result, 21 out of 25 PSPs are either in the process of updating their website or have already updated their websites to comply with the CCTS website requirement.

Although most audited PSPs had some information about the CCTS on their websites prior to being audited, many of the issues we found were about how and where the CCTS information was presented. Overall audit results are in the graphic below.

Trends Observed

The CCTS highlights some of the trends seen in the past few years of our Compliance Program.

Trend 1: PSP compliance with website requirements is similar to 2024 observations

Compliance levels were similar to what we observed in 2024. The results showed that 11 of the top 24 PSPs^[6] (compared to 14 in 2024) were fully compliant from the onset. Of the 13 smaller PSPs audited, only 1 PSP was fully compliant from the onset.

For all 37 PSPs audited, 32% of the PSPs were fully compliant initially, compared to 32% in 2024 and 35% in 2023.

Figure 1.1: PSPs compliance with website requirements – year over year

Trend 2: Twelve of the top 24 PSPs have more than one complaints-handling webpage

The Public Awareness Plan requires PSPs to have a complaint-handling webpage that provides customers with information about their own complaint-handling process and information about the CCTS. The objective is to ensure that customers with concerns about their service will be able to inform themselves easily on the methods available to them to communicate with their provider, and, in the event of unresolved concerns after unsuccessfully raising those concerns with their provider, customers are informed about the CCTS.

The CCTS recently observed that 12 of the top 24 PSP websites have more than one complaints-handling page providing information to customers about the PSP’s own internal complaint-handling processes but only one of those pages has the CCTS information. This frustrates the Public Awareness Plan objective because it fragments information available to customers: customers who are trying to navigate provider websites to understand their options when they have a concern may not be provided with information about the CCTS. It is in the interest of PSPs to ensure that there is one complaints-handling page – as intended by the Public Awareness Plan – which consistently provides all of the appropriate information about the PSP’s complaint-handling process to all customers so that they are not confused about how they can address their complaints.

Moving forward, the CCTS expects PSPs to have one complaints-handling page – as required by the Public Awareness Plan – which also includes the CCTS information.

Figure 1.2: Rate of non-compliance with search function

Trend 3: Half of PSP websites did not return search results for CCTS

In 2025, the websites of 24 of the 37 PSPs we audited had a search function. The search function on a PSP website is a crucial tool for customers to find information. PSPs must ensure that using a search function on their websites results in providing the required CCTS information to customers on residential, small business, French, and English websites. If search results do not display CCTS information on all of a PSP’s websites, the CCTS considers the PSP non-compliant. We found that 12 of the 24 PSP websites (50%) that had a search function did not return CCTS information when searching for all keywords related to ‘‘CCTS’’ and “complaints.”

Although audited PSPs have become more compliant with the search requirement in the last few years, this remains an important area of focus for our compliance efforts going forward.

The CCTS has reminded PSPs about the search function requirement each year in our Compliance Report. We notified PSPs that they should check their websites to ensure compliance and that we would publicly name those PSPs which were repeatedly non-compliant. Despite this messaging, we continue to see at least half of PSPs not complying with the search function requirement.

In the past 3 years, we observed Koodo was non-compliant with the website search function requirement. In the past 2 years, Bell Canada and Virgin Plus were non-compliant with the requirement. The main issue for these PSPs was that searching their website (either business or residential) for all 6 keywords did not result in the required CCTS information.

Overall, this is concerning given that these PSPs have been audited for compliance with the Public Awareness Plan since 2017 and they are well aware of this requirement. When we have pointed out their deficiency over the past few years, PSPs have been responsive to remediate the non-compliance issue, but in the following annual audit, similar deficiencies were found.

PSPs can ensure compliance with the search function requirement by implementing an internal control process for website updates. We continue to urge all PSPs to implement internal processes and regular checks to ensure that website updates do not change the CCTS-related results that must be returned by the search function.

Trend 4: One third of the PSP complaint websites weren’t easy to find or clearly labelled

Service providers are required to have information about the CCTS on their websites that is easy to find and clearly labeled.

After auditing 37 PSP websites, we found:

13 PSP websites did not have the CCTS information or the CCTS info was not easy to find:
- 8 of these PSP websites had no information about the CCTS at all;
- 5 of the PSP websites had the CCTS information but the information was not easy to find or clearly labeled (the information was not located where customers would likely be able to find it easily, such as in the fine print of a Privacy Policy or Terms of Service); and,
24 PSP websites were fully compliant with this requirement.

We engaged all 13 PSPs whose websites were non-compliant with the requirement to have the CCTS information which was easy to find and clearly labelled. We’re pleased to report:

6 of the PSPs are now fully compliant;
3 PSPs are working on becoming compliant; and,
4 PSPs remain non-compliant with this requirement: Netfox Communications, Poynt360, Telemart and TNext Communications.

Over the years, we’ve provided guidance to all PSPs, including examples of how to clearly label the complaint page and make it easy for customers to find information about the CCTS. We continue to encourage all PSPs to carefully review the CCTS’ guidance and check that their websites adhere to those guidelines.

Conclusion

Ensuring PSPs are compliant with the CCTS’ public awareness requirements is fundamental for customers to easily find out how they can get help with unresolved disputes after trying to resolve them with their telecom and TV service providers. The CCTS has annually checked PSP compliance with this requirement and will continue to engage with more PSPs to ensure they fulfill their responsibilities to promote awareness of the CCTS.

Appendix: Developing Public Awareness of the CCTS

Appendix: Developing Public Awareness of CCTS (PDF)

Footnotes

The service providers’ responses to the CRTC are available on the CRTC’s website here: https://applications.crtc.gc.ca/TransferToWeb/2025/2025-274_Responses%20to%20requests%20for%20information.zip
CRTC. Broadcasting and Telecom Notice of Consultation CRTC 2025-274-2 Call for comments – Improving customer awareness of the Commission for Complains for Telecom-television Services Inc. – Reinstating the proceeding with changes to procedure, at para 11.
CCTS 2024-25 Annual Report, “Working with customers: What customers said about their attempts to resolve complaints with service providers” https://pub.ccts-cprst.ca/2024-2025-annual-report/working-with-customers/
Ibid.
In September 2025, we audited 37 PSPs which included:
- the top 24 PSPs that generated the most CCTS complaints in the previous year, as listed in the 2023-2024 Annual Report, including Shaw Communications Inc. which was combined with Rogers Communications Inc. in this report; (Shaw Communications Inc. was a separate telecom provider in the 2023-24 report and part of the top 25 PSPs. There is no longer operating a separate website for the PSP.)
- 3 PSPs previously identified as non-compliant; and
- 10 randomly selected PSPs (previously unaudited). This category ensures that all PSPs, regardless of their size and compliance status, can be reviewed from time to time to determine their compliance with the Public Awareness Plan requirements. Including this year, the CCTS has audited the websites of 273 PSP brands since 2018.
Shaw Communications Inc. – which was a separate telecom provider in the 2023-24 report and part of the top 25 PSPs – was acquired by Rogers and is no longer operating a separate website. For that reason, the top 25 PSP list for the purposes of this report is now 24 PSPs.
Public Opinion Research Report: “Understanding consumer awareness and satisfaction with the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services (CCTS).” April 2024. See Q17: https://epe.bac-lac.gc.ca/100/200/301/pwgsc-tpsgc/por-ef/crtc/2024/080-23-e/080-23-report.html#a1.5.
CCTS 2024-25 Annual Report, “Working with customers” https://pub.ccts-cprst.ca/2024-2025-annual-report/working-with-customers/#section3; and, CCTS 2023-24 Annual Report, “Working with customers: Listening to customers – What customers said about service provider public awareness activities” https://pub.ccts-cprst.ca/2023-2024-annual-report/working-with-customers/.