‘Shockingly high’: Bell got $64M from Ontario jail calls at issue in 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.

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.

Bell charged $1 per minute plus a $2.50 connection fee for long-distance calls through the Offender Telephone Management System that it operated in Ontario jails from 2013 to 2021.

The phone system only allowed inmates to place collect calls, and lawyers are seeking compensation for the families who had to foot those bills. More than 80 per cent of the people in Ontario’s correctional facilities are awaiting trial and are presumptively innocent.

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. He had to take on extra work such as chopping firewood to pay the bills, he wrote.

Both Bell and the province of Ontario have previously refused to disclose how much they benefitted from those calls, but Bell was recently ordered by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to reveal the amounts.

Lawyer David Sterns said the numbers are “shockingly high.”

“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.