RE:Dividend safety As others have stated this monster is pretty much as strong as you can get for steady dividends in Canada.
Payout ratio is usually a metric used for calculing safety and you should use that for most other companies, unfortunately BCE has convoluted math involved and 'Net Income' is not really a proper number for this stock, I'm not an expert by any stretch but I believe it's because of the 'cash burn' that BCE uses for upgrading, maintaining and other things that make this metric unreliable for this rare situation.
As mentioned by anouther Q1 which should be announced first week of February should feature a dividend raise to .92 cents which is about 5% raise which has been the normal trend for the company.
That forward yeild would be 5.59% based on today's close. The 5 year average yeild is about 5.2%. Normally that average yeild is 4.5-4.8%.
Due to lower investor sedimate the company has been pretty much range bound since Aug 2016 which is why the 5 year average has crept up. But in the 8 years before that there was about 145% share price growth. I could argue that the price range in 2022 should be between $73-82, but unless that sedimate changes breaking $70 could be an issue, at $70 there's about 36.5% share price upside which is rather significant for this company, at $82 target that's 60% upside.