Chair, thank you very much.
On behalf of my party, the Liberal Party, I want to express our gratitude to you for taking time out of your very busy schedules. Many of you come from more distant areas and are of course operating much smaller firms. But your is a voice that would otherwise not have been given any consideration had this committee and its members not decided to hear from all players on this.
I want to ask most of you this, if I may. You can choose not to answer this. It will be a very simple question.
The minister decided to set aside what was called a telecom competition tribunal, which would have had both the expertise of the CRTC and the force of the Competition Bureau to look into cases after deregulation to prevent predatory pricing and to prevent a number of anti-competitive activities. It will not be the case now.
In my interpretation, the minister has instead proposed a very flimsy variant based on administrative monetary penalties contained in a bill that we're going to have to pass.
The bill says there will be a deterrence of some $15 million against anyone who engages in anti-competitive acts after deregulation, if the tribunal indeed agrees to it. From previous experience, it will take several months, if not a year, before a tribunal will be able to make a decision on an anti-competitive act.
Given the scale of your companies and the fact that you rely so heavily on the ILECs and the incumbents for much of your service, if $15 million goes back to the public treasury and it takes a year to resolve the problem, how long do you think you will survive? Can you tell us categorically whether or not you would be in business during that period of time?