The Supreme Court of Canada will not hear Bell Mobility’s case on charging northern customers for non-existent 911 service.

The phone company sought to have the country’s top court rule on the issue of whether it was allowed to charge a fee for 911 service when the service doesn’t exist in much of the North.

Both the Northwest Territories Supreme Court and Court of Appeal ruled Bell was in the wrong by charging the 75-cent fee to customers in the Yukon, N.W.T., and Nunavut.

The Supreme Court of Canada gave no reasons for its decision not to hear the appeal, as is typical.

The class-action lawsuit filed by Yellowknife residents James and Samuel Anderson also involves several thousand Bell subscribers across the North.

The majority – roughly 20,000 – are based in the N.W.T., while between 7,000 and 8,000 live in the Yukon and Nunavut.

His clients are “very pleased,” Samuel Marr, the plaintiffs’ Toronto-based lawyer told the Star this morning.

“It’s a vindication of our long position that Bell Mobility was charging our clients in the class for service that didn’t exist.”

A Bell spokesman said today the company is "disappointed with the decision and will now move forward with the next phase of the proceeding."

Now, the plaintiffs and Bell’s lawyers will begin discussing the appropriate amount of damages. If they can’t agree, the matter will go to trial.

Marr estimates the amount of money owed to Bell customers across the North is between $3 million and $5 million.

Dialling 911 in much of the North, not including Whitehorse, will result in a recorded message.

“[T]o seek to charge for that by calling it 911 service, seems to me very unreasonable,” N.W.T. Court of Appeal Justice Jean Côté wrote on behalf of the three-judge panel.

“It is like delivering to a starving person a photograph of a turkey dinner, and then charging him or her for a turkey dinner (or delivery of one).”

Bell argued its contracts clearly stated a monthly fee must be paid for some form of 911 service. But the judges pointed out the contracts said the fees “may” be included.

Because of the lawsuit, Bell dropped the fee for contracts signed after November 2009.

“In my respectful view, connecting someone to nothing is still nothing,” the appeal court decision states.

An interim 911 service was approved for the Yukon’s communities last December by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which would see 911 calls answered by an automated recording that would then direct callers to dial 1 for police, 2 for the fire department or 3 for paramedics.

However, this approval came with “unexpected conditions,” according to the Yukon government.

Instead, the government decided in March to focus on implementing basic 911 service by July 2016, and not use the interim service.

Until that time, the current system remains in place: residents outside of Whitehorse can dial one of three seven-digit numbers, different in each community, to reach one of the three emergency responders.