Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• Dispute over whether Bell’s packaging of French-language sports channels (RDS vs TVA Sports) breached contractual and extra-contractual obligations by creating an undue competitive advantage for RDS.
• Scope and timing of Bell’s obligation to disclose internal subscription and packaging data (MSTR reports) for the “Bon” and “Départ” packages became central to quantifying TVA’s alleged lost subscription and advertising revenues.
• Extent to which expert evidence (from St-Laurent Faucher and PwC, plus media placement experts) must be based on symmetrical access to underlying Bell data for both RDS and TVA Sports.
• Tension between Bell’s claims of commercial confidentiality and the Code of Civil Procedure rules on relevance, necessity, and proportionality, including treatment of “intérêt légitime important” and the court’s power to impose confidentiality safeguards.
• Relationship between the CRTC’s 2019 decision on undue preference (RDS vs TVA Sports) and the civil action for damages in Superior Court, particularly regarding proof of causation and quantum over an expanded time period.
• Management of litigation procedure, including permission for Groupe TVA to serve complementary expert reports and the impact of prior interlocutory rulings on expert disclosure and renunciation of confidentiality.

Factual background and commercial context

Groupe TVA inc. and Bell (Bell Canada and Bell ExpressVu Limited Partnership) compete directly in the French-language sports broadcasting market in Canada. Groupe TVA operates TVA Sports and its multiplex channels, while Bell, through Bell Média and RDS inc., owns and distributes the competing French-language sports channel RDS. Both sides are part of vertically integrated media groups: Québecor (via Vidéotron) for TVA, and BCE (via Bell Canada and Bell ExpressVu) for RDS and Bell’s distribution platforms.
TVA Sports, launched in 2011, is a discretionary French-language sports service carried by Bell’s TV distribution undertakings. RDS, in operation since 1989, is also a national discretionary French-language sports service. The central commercial battlefield concerns how Bell assembles and sells its television packages: notably the “Bon” package (a popular, high-penetration pre-assembled bundle) and later the “Départ” starter package accompanied by build-your-own channel options.

Underlying dispute on packaging and market advantage

Groupe TVA’s main lawsuit seeks approximately $35 million in damages, alleging that Bell structured its programming bundles to give RDS an undue advantage and to hinder TVA Sports’ ability to fairly compete for subscribers and advertising dollars. According to TVA, Bell included RDS inside the popular “Bon” package but excluded TVA Sports, which was only available in higher, more expensive, and less-penetrated packages (“Mieux” and “Meilleur”) or on an à-la-carte basis. TVA argues that this asymmetrical treatment diverted a large pool of potential subscribers and depressed TVA Sports’ penetration and audience ratings, which in turn influenced wholesale rates and advertising revenues.
Contractually, TVA points to a letter agreement (and a fourth amendment) governing the carriage of TVA Sports. It alleges Bell abused the discretion granted under that agreement, acting contrary to the parties’ intentions by failing to give TVA Sports bundling and promotional treatment at least as favourable as RDS. In the alternative, TVA pleads extra-contractual fault (civil liability), relying in part on regulatory findings of undue preference in favour of RDS and against TVA Sports under the CRTC’s Broadcasting Distribution Regulations.
Bell denies any breach of contractual or extra-contractual obligations and invokes a contractual limitation of liability clause (article 14 of the letter of understanding) to restrict or eliminate damages exposure. It further argues that CRTC proceedings, conducted under specific regulatory rules and burdens, are distinct from civil liability in Superior Court and cannot simply be transposed into a private damages award.

CRTC complaint proceedings and their significance

The civil action is heavily coloured by prior regulatory proceedings. In 2019, Québecor (on behalf of TVA Sports) filed a complaint with the CRTC alleging that Bell had conferred an undue preference on RDS and imposed an undue disadvantage on TVA Sports, contrary to section 9 of the Broadcasting Distribution Regulations. At that time, RDS was included in Bell’s “Bon” package—the most popular and widely penetrated bundle—whereas TVA Sports appeared only in more expensive, less-penetrated packages. Québecor argued that TVA Sports would have had significantly higher subscription and advertising revenues if it too had been included in “Bon,” stressing that sports channels depend on broad distribution to finance expensive sports rights.
In its 2019-427 decision, the CRTC concluded that RDS and TVA Sports were comparable services aimed at the same French-language sports audience, with sufficiently similar programming. The Commission found that Bell’s packaging decisions gave RDS a preference and subjected TVA Sports to a disadvantage, which had a significant negative impact on TVA’s activities. Under section 9(2) of the Regulations, Bell bore the burden of proving that the preference or disadvantage was not “undue”; the CRTC determined that Bell had not discharged this burden, in part because it did not provide financial data sufficient to rebut Québecor’s estimates of lost subscription and advertising revenue, even as data on the “Bon” package showed large numbers of subscribers who automatically received RDS but not TVA Sports.
Following the decision, Bell modified its offerings. As of February 2020, it ceased offering the pre-assembled “Bon”, “Mieux”, and “Meilleur” to new subscribers, instead introducing the “Départ” starter package without any sports specialty channel included, plus customizable add-on packages. Existing “Bon” subscribers were “grandfathered” into their package, though RDS was in some cases removed from “Bon” to allow customers to choose their preferred sports channel; in other cases, TVA Sports was added to “Bon” so that both services were included. TVA contends that this transition, and the timing of Bell’s adjustments following further CRTC correspondence in August 2020, extended the period during which TVA Sports remained disadvantaged.

Expert evidence and quantification of damages

A core issue in the civil case is the causal link between Bell’s alleged faults (contractual abuse of discretion and/or regulatory-type unfair preference) and TVA’s losses, as well as how to quantify those losses. Both sides rely heavily on expert evidence.
For TVA, Johanne Faucher, a forensic accounting expert from St-Laurent Faucher, and Cathy Baier, a media-placement expert, have produced reports. Their analyses hinge on reconstructing what TVA Sports’ subscriber base and related advertising revenues would have looked like if TVA Sports had been bundled in the same way as RDS, particularly in the “Bon” package, during the disputed period. TVA’s theory is that exclusion from “Bon” reduced its penetration and audience, which in turn limited both wholesale subscription fees (since CRTC wholesale rate determinations consider penetration and ratings) and advertising yields.
Bell retained PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) experts Marie-Chantal Dréau and Esther Dumoulin, and a separate media placement expert, to critique TVA’s models and propose alternative scenarios. In earlier interlocutory proceedings, Bell successfully argued that its experts needed confidential TVA data—post-October 2020 subscriber counts, ratings, advertising revenues, internal financial breakdowns, and rate cards—to test TVA’s own claims about how inclusion in particular bundles supposedly affected performance over time. The court ordered TVA to disclose such information subject to confidentiality protections, emphasizing that TVA, as the party claiming lost revenues, could not simultaneously shield all revenue data as confidential while asking for a large damages award.

Disputed access to Bell’s internal subscription data

The decision at hand concerns a mirror-image request by TVA. After seeing PwC’s counter-expert reports, TVA argued that Bell’s experts had access to a wider universe of Bell’s internal subscription data—particularly detailed monthly MSTR reports on subscriber behaviour in the “Bon” and “Départ” packages—that TVA’s experts had never seen. While PwC said that it focused its analysis primarily on TVA Sports data, it acknowledged that its experts had access to MSTR data for both RDS and TVA Sports.
TVA sought five categories of MSTR information for the “Bon” and “Départ” packages, spanning March 2016 to June 2024, covering both RDS and TVA Sports. Faucher’s sworn declaration explained that Bell’s own methodology hinges on a hypothetical “choice” consumers would have made between RDS and TVA Sports had they been offered the same way in “Bon” between 2016 and 2020. Yet PwC did not actually analyze RDS behaviour, limiting its quantitative work to TVA Sports and to a shorter time window for the “Départ” package, even though, in PwC’s own report, behaviour in “Départ” was acknowledged as an “interesting reference” for what might have occurred in “Bon” under equal treatment.
Faucher explained that without symmetrical data on RDS and TVA Sports by package and over the full relevant period, she could not:

• verify the validity of PwC’s assumptions about subscriber choice;
• compute alternative percentages of subscribers who would likely have chosen TVA Sports if given a genuine RDS/TVA choice in “Bon”; and
• assess how those alternative percentages would translate into additional subscriptions and related advertising revenues.
  She also pointed out that Bell had already obtained, through Dumoulin’s earlier requests, extensive post-October-2020 data from TVA—on subscribers, ratings, advertising, and finances—specifically to compare TVA Sports’ performance before and after the CRTC-prompted packaging changes. In her view, fairness required that TVA’s experts be allowed to perform an equally robust analysis using Bell’s internal subscription data, especially now that Bell’s own experts had relied on those data to shape their methodologies and conclusions.

Confidentiality, relevance, and the Code of Civil Procedure

Bell resisted disclosure of several of the requested data categories, particularly those relating to RDS, arguing that these were highly sensitive commercial secrets and that TVA was essentially seeking a deep intrusion into a rival’s business. It invoked the concept of “intérêt légitime important” under article 228 of the Code of Civil Procedure and also pointed to statutory confidentiality protections in the broadcasting and telecommunications regimes and in prior CRTC processes. Bell maintained that TVA’s experts already had all the data used in PwC’s calculations and that further disclosure was unnecessary and disproportionate.
The court rejected these objections. It held that at the pre-trial stage, relevance is to be assessed broadly and that the fairness of the trial process, especially where both sides rely on complex economic modelling, requires symmetric access to the critical underlying data. The judge stressed that PwC’s decision to focus its own analysis on TVA Sports did not prevent TVA’s experts from using the same database to analyze RDS performance, subscriber behaviour, and different time frames, particularly when the very comparison between the two services and the effect of their differential packaging lies at the heart of TVA’s damage theory and Bell’s defence.
On confidentiality, the court noted that both sides had already recognized the commercially sensitive nature of the data and had negotiated a confidentiality regime. The solution, therefore, is not to bar disclosure, but to tighten protective measures: limiting access to designated in-house counsel and regulatory personnel at TVA, and to its external counsel and experts, under an existing and enhanced confidentiality agreement. The court also observed that Bell itself had previously benefited from similar reasoning when it secured post-2020 TVA data over TVA’s confidentiality objections; those same legal principles now favoured TVA’s parallel request.

Procedural management and expert supplementation

Beyond ordering disclosure, the judgment addresses case management issues. TVA sought leave to serve supplementary expert reports from both Faucher (forensic accounting) and Baier (media placements) after receiving the newly ordered MSTR data, and requested corresponding extensions of time in the case protocol. Applying established factors for late or additional expert reports—necessity, prejudice, reasons for delay, conduct of the parties, and proportionality—the court held that TVA had met the threshold. The need for the reports flowed directly from the way Bell and PwC had framed their counter-expert analysis and from the newly revealed scope of MSTR data; denying TVA the opportunity to address these points would impair its ability to challenge PwC’s scenarios and to present a coherent damages case at trial.
The court therefore authorized TVA to file a complementary report from Faucher within ten weeks of receiving the full MSTR dataset, and a complementary report from Baier within ten weeks after Faucher’s updated numbers are available (recognizing that Baier’s advertising impact analysis depends on the subscription counts derived by Faucher). The procedural timetable and inscription date in the case protocol were adjusted accordingly. While Bell argued that it should automatically be allowed to reply to any TVA supplements, the court found this premature; Bell remains free to seek leave later if TVA’s new reports introduce genuinely new elements beyond the existing Bell counter-expertise.

Outcome of the decision and financial consequences

This rectified interlocutory judgment does not decide liability or quantify damages in the main action; the underlying claim for approximately $35 million in contractual and extra-contractual damages remains to be determined after trial. Instead, the Superior Court grants TVA’s case management motion in full: Bell is ordered to disclose specified MSTR data for both RDS and TVA Sports in the “Bon” and “Départ” packages over expanded periods; TVA is authorized to submit complementary expert reports from Johanne Faucher and Cathy Baier; the protocol of the instance is updated; and the confidentiality regime is reinforced but not used to block relevant disclosure. In terms of immediate financial consequence, Groupe TVA inc. is the successful party in this interlocutory ruling and is awarded its judicial costs (dépens) for the motion against Bell Canada and Bell ExpressVu; however, the exact monetary amount of those costs, and any eventual damages award on the merits, cannot be determined from this judgment alone.