Bell Canada made more than $64 million in gross revenues from calls made by inmates at Ontario jails — at 'exorbitant' rates, lawyers allege in a lawsuit.
Bell Canada made more than $64 million in gross revenues from calls made by inmates at Ontario jails — at “exorbitant” rates, lawyers allege in a lawsuit — and gave nearly $39 million of that to the province as commission, according to new disclosures from the telecom giant.
One of the representative plaintiffs in a proposed class-action lawsuit against Bell and Ontario is the father of Adam Capay, an Indigenous man who was largely held in solitary confinement while imprisoned in northern Ontario jails between June 2012 and Dec. 2016.Ransome Capay frequently spoke with his son while he was in solitary, with the charges from the collect calls leading to phone bills between $250 and $500 — some over $1,000, he wrote in an affidavit.
“This confirms what we knew to be the case all along, which shows that Bell was gouging the families of the inmates,” he said in an interview. The lawsuit claims have not been proven in court and last year the Court of Appeal for Ontario put a temporary stay on the case, telling the lawyers to go before the CRTC instead to assess “the reasonableness of the rates.” The CRTC is set to decide whether it has jurisdiction in the matter, and if it decides it doesn’t, the case could go back to the courts.
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