OTTAWA — Lawyer and competition expert Vicky Eatrides will be the next chair and CEO of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez announced Monday morning.

The CRTC’s duties overseeing the multibillion-dollar telecom, television and radio industries are never simple—especially not with Rogers’s proposed $26-billion buyout of Shaw in the offing—but the federal government is seeking to expand its reach into internet content and news funding, too.

“The type of work that I like doing is really where I can see tangible results for Canadians,” Eatrides said in an interview with The Logic Monday. Affordable telecom services and strong Canadian cultural products are (ideally) the results of good work at the CRTC, she said, and that’s what appealed to her about the post.

Rodriguez also named two new vice-chairs for the CRTC: Alicia Barin, a former broadcasting executive at Astral Media who became a regional CRTC commissioner for Quebec in 2019; and Adam Scott, currently the director general for wireless spectrum policy at the Innovation Department.

On competition: Although Eatrides spent time as a regulatory lawyer at Stikeman Elliott early in her career, she’s spent most of her professional life in the federal government.

Eatrides moves to the CRTC from the Innovation Department (where she’s an assistant deputy minister for strategic communications and marketing) but much of her career has been at the Competition Bureau. She led its work on mergers, on general competition promotion, and finally on cartels and deceptive marketing as a senior deputy commissioner until October 2019. That gave her a lot of opportunity to do tangible work, she said.

“At the bureau, that meant lower prices and stopping misleading advertising, challenging mergers that would increase prices, [and] seeing, as a result, cheaper prices, more choice, more innovation,” Eatrides said.

The new new job: Bills the Liberals have before Parliament will give the CRTC authority over Canadian content levels on streaming services (by ordering companies like Netflix to modify their presentation algorithms, or maybe not) and to decide which Big Tech platforms owe money to Canadian news outlets.

Adapting to those changes and new responsibilities will be a top priority for her as the CRTC’s leader, Eatrides said.

The last guy: Eatrides’s professional history is almost the mirror image of outgoing chair Ian Scott’s—he worked in government briefly and then went to the private sector, where he was a top lobbyist for satellite company Telesat and for telecom company Telus before being named to head the CRTC.

Although he was cleared of formal ethics violations, Scott’s friendly off-hours drink at an Ottawa bar with Bell executive Mirko Bibic dogged the latter part of Scott’s term, especially after the CRTC reversed itself on a regulatory decision that had favoured smaller telecom competitors.

The reactions: “The new chair and vice-chairs inherit a very troubled CRTC and deeply damaged regulatory frameworks. Vicky Eatrides has a lot of work to do to restore public faith and competitiveness to the industry,” said a statement from TekSavvy, a small internet provider and fierce critic of Scott’s. But it noted her history in competition law could help a great deal.

Another small provider, Oxio, called Eatrides a strong choice. “Her extensive background in competition law and innovation will ultimately benefit all Canadians,” CEO Marc-André Campagna said.

Dwayne Winseck, a communications professor at Carleton University who studies telecom and media, called the trio of appointments “inspired,” as long as Eatrides, Barin and Scott reset the CRTC’s approach to telcos and broadcasters, and act wisely in the commission’s new fields.

“We look forward to working with incoming chairperson Eatrides as we continue to build and upgrade Canada’s networks, including bridging the digital divide in rural, remote and Indigenous communities, and as the commission modernizes broadcasting regulations to build a strong Canadian cultural economy,” said a statement from Rogers Communications.