COOP-Shaw-Rogers

In November 2014 Shaw signed a deal with the City of Campbell River to put Shaw Go WiFi in seven public sites — City Hall, Tidemark Theatre, Willow Point SportsPlex, the Community Centre, the Museum, the Maritime Heritage Centre, and Discovery Pier.

But the network is gone. Rogers shut down the entire Shaw Go WiFi / RogersOpen hotspot network on July 21, 2025 — not a partial trim, the whole thing, across Western Canada, after more than a decade. The reason given was a "dramatic" drop in usage. So if you're still seeing an SSID around town, it's orphaned hardware or a stale saved network, not a working service.

Which makes the arc fairly stark: community-owned co-op, sold to a regional cable company, absorbed into a national carrier, and the free public wireless layer switched off in a usage review. Nobody in Campbell River was consulted about that last step.

Your point about the vote lands. It's easy to dismiss the 2008 co-op vote as compromised — 93 members out of 13,780, after a bylaw change that lowered the threshold — and the CACTUS objection that it violated the 75%-written-approval rule wasn't frivolous. But a contested vote and no vote are different in kind, not degree. A bad vote is a governance failure you can point at and argue about. Rogers–Shaw offered nothing to point at: Shaw's shareholders voted, and Campbell River subscribers got the CRTC intervention process — voice without a ballot. You can file a submission; you can't withhold consent.

That's the thing the co-op structure actually held, whatever else it got wrong. Once the asset moved into shareholder hands, the question of whether Campbell River wanted this stopped being a question anyone was obligated to ask.

The actual numbers, per the CACTUS intervention:

At the November 2007 AGM, 443 members attended and voted down Shaw's offer almost unanimously. That was the high-water mark for turnout.

At the August 23, 2008 meeting, fewer than 300 members were present out of a total membership of 13,780 — under 1% of the co-op. Of those present, 93% voted to sell, after first voting to amend the bylaws so that 75% of members present at the meeting would suffice, replacing the original requirement of written authorization from 75% of the entire membership.

The part I'd missed entirely: on August 28, 2008, the BC Registrar of Societies rejected that bylaw amendment, on the grounds that it purported to apply retroactively to special resolutions contrary to s. 23(1)(a) of the Society Act. CACTUS's position was that no valid vote authorizing the sale ever occurred. The CRTC approved the transfer in January 2009 regardless — the Commission assesses the broadcasting public interest, not whether a BC society followed its own constitution.

One caveat on sourcing: these figures come from CACTUS, an intervener actively opposing the deal. The CRTC decision itself records no attendance numbers. The 443 and the sub-300 are plausible and specific, but they're one side's count. If your papers in theFlux folder include the meeting minutes or the notice packages, those would settle it — and given you were in the room for at least one of these, your recollection is worth more than my search results.