Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, and staff. My name is Richard Paradis, and I am president and CEO of Le Groupe CIC, a communications and telecommunications consulting firm based in Montreal, with clients in broadcasting, telecommunications, and the cultural se

Industry committee  Okay. Briefly, if you have any kids in the house, you know they're watching the Internet about 50 hours a week right now and they're listening to music about 40 hours a week, and you sort of wonder when they ever study or eat. The fact is that we're moving in an era, even yourse

Industry committee  To come back to the reference by Madame Lavallée to the advertisements, if you have an iPod and you're looking for applications in the Apple Store, it comes down to this: when you look at your screen and there are 16 options, how many of them are going to be Canadian? There is no

Industry committee  I don't want you to think I am against competition; I think it is extremely important and good for the marketplace. I was just trying to give caution. We have opened the market in Canada to competition over the last 20 years. It is taking maybe more time than we would have liked

Industry committee  Yes, there is. I agree with you that if we did open up the market, in ten years we could find ourselves with our major telecommunications companies being majority-owned by foreign interests. In reference to what you were asking about the relationship between telecom and broadcas

Industry committee  I think there is probably nothing underlying the financial model of the mobile providers that would stop them from lowering the amounts Canadians pay for their cell service. Mobile companies have found all sorts of ways of making money. They're making money with text messaging, a

Industry committee  I feel that, with the arrival of the Internet, CRTC, our regulating organization, was, for the first time in its existence, unsure of what to do and was even afraid to think about the possibilities. A number of foreign governments, including France and Australia, are currently c

Industry committee  You raised a number of issues that you will have to settle among yourselves. Let us consider what happened in the case of Globalive, as it is related to what I said. There will always be foreign investors interested in investing in Canada. As I have already said, nothing is curr

Industry committee  I would just like to add that every time a company buys frequencies, it must pay additional fees. When additional fees are paid, consumers end up with higher rates so that the company can turn a profit. When the government sold new frequencies a year and a half ago, it really ope

Industry committee  I could share with the committee some information I came across at the commission, where a study was conducted last year on the difference between costs of various types of mobile services—high-speed Internet and other services—in various countries like Canada, the United States,

Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee and staff. My name is Richard Paradis, and I'm president and CEO of Le Groupe CIC, a communications and telecommunications consulting firm based in Montreal, with clients in broadcasting, telecommunications, and the cultural indu