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It could be the most costly piece of punctuation in Canada.

A grammatical blunder may force Rogers Communications Inc. to pay an extra $2.13-million to use utility poles in the Maritimes after the placement of a comma in a contract permitted the deal's cancellation.

The controversial comma sent lawyers and telecommunications regulators scrambling for their English textbooks in a bitter 18-month dispute that serves as an expensive reminder of the importance of punctuation.

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The result of the ruling is that the contract can be cancelled at any time on a year's notice. This result renders meaningless the reference in the agreement to five-year terms.

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This agreement shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.

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"This agreement shall continue in perpetuity unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party."

[ 07 August 2006: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

That makes the thorny passage read both: 1) "This agreement shall ... continue in force for a period of five (5) years from the date it is made unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party" and 2) "This agreement shall ... continue in force for a period of five (5) years from the date it is made and thereafter for successive five (5) year terms unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party."

Anyway, here's another costly punctuation error from the annals of history (Source Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots, and Leaves:

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The Transvaal was a Boer republic at the time, and it was believed that the British and other settlers around Johannesburg (who were denied civil rights) would rise up if Jameson invaded. But unfortunately, when the settlers sent their telegraphic invitation to Jameson, it included a tragic ambiguity:

It is under these circumstances that we feel constrained to call upon you to come to our aid should a disturbance arise here the circumstances are so extreme that we cannot but believe that you and the men under you will not fail to come to the rescue of people who are so situated.

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Alas, a period was inserted after "aid" (Come at once, Jameson!) rather than after "here" (Come when you're needed! We'll let you know!) and as a result, Jameson launched his disastrous raid, it ended badly, no one came to help him, and he started the second Boer War. Pity.

[ 07 August 2006: Message edited by: Catchfire ]

But how then does the cancellation clause operate? That's the real issue here.

Could the agreement be cancelled, say, 18 months after it was signed, if one party gave a year's written notice to that effect after the first six months? That's what Aliant said, but I think that's ignoring the real meaning of the words - specifically the refernce to five-year terms.

From the point of view of punctuation, the Aliant interpretation is exactly correct. However, punctuation is not the only basis of interpretation. We also have to interpret in such a way that, as Spector says, whole clauses deliberately drafted and included by the authors are not made otiose by our interpretation: they must communicate something that would not have been communicated were they not there. What purpose is served by mentioning the five year contract if this can be broken at any time with one year's notice? The effect of adding this language to the agreement is exactly nothing, on the Aliant interpretation. If the five-year clause is to be more than sheer pleonasm, if it is to have any force, then the Rogers' interpretation must be correct. And the court is wrong.

[ 08 August 2006: Message edited by: rasmus raven ]

But in this case, the resulting pleonasm is not of that nature, quite obviously. It is purely and utterly useless, like a bicycle for a fish.

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Rogers, which lost a debate this summer over the placement of a comma in a contract to lease thousands of poles in New Brunswick, is now turning to the French language to make its case.

Federal regulators ruled in July that a single comma in a 14-page contract meant the deal could be scrapped by Aliant, potentially resulting in as much as $2.13-million in extra costs for Rogers.

After parsing the wording, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission determined the contract spelled out in plain English that Aliant could exit the deal.

Au contraire, Rogers' lawyers say. The company has spent the past two months hunting down a French version of the same contract. And because that document doesn't use the same punctuation, the decision should be overturned, Rogers says.

The matter is now heading back to the CRTC, pitting the country's two official languages against each other.

"Because we're an officially bilingual country, documents like this have a French version and an English version -- and both are equally valid," said Ken Englehart, Rogers' vice-president of regulatory affairs. "It's kind of one of the advantages of having two official languages."
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Rogers has since marshalled a number of grammatical and legal sources to argue that the comma doesn't matter.

But the French contract and the slightly different wording in that document form the bulk of the company's appeal.

The case of the tele-comma, as it has been dubbed in legal circles, has drawn widespread attention. Several law schools in Canada and the U.S. have flagged the dispute as a cautionary tale about the importance of proper grammar in law.

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The French language has trumped the comma in a contract dispute between Rogers Communications Inc. and Bell Aliant Regional Communications LP.

Rogers claimed victory yesterday after the French version of a five-year contract convinced the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to overturn an earlier decision in which the regulator said the placement of a comma justified Bell Aliant's decision to terminate the contract early.

In the English version, the CRTC said last year, the insertion of a comma to separate a termination clause from a clause about future renewals of the contract suggested the contract could be terminated before it expired in 2007. Had there been no comma, it would have been clear that the right to termination applied only to the end of the contract that set telephone pole access fees and future renewals. In the French version, the commission concluded yesterday, there were no errant commas to cloud the termination rights. - Fin. Post

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