Thanks. I think it's sometimes helpful to remember the history of how this fund was put in place in the first instance.
What happened is that in the old days when the cable companies wanted to make an improvement to their capital infrastructure, whether they wanted to build more transmission capacity or put in better equipment or what not, they would go down to the CRTC and they would say, “We would like to do this. If you approve it, please also approve an increase in the basic cable rate to finance it.” The commission would say fine. The deal always was that when those capital improvements had been paid for, then the basic cable rate could go back down again, because now they had been paid for.
So in about 1993, when all of the basic cable rates were supposed to go back down again, the cable industry came to the commission and said, “Listen, we have a good idea. Instead of sending the money back to the cable customers, how about you let us keep the money and we will split it fifty-fifty. We'll keep 50¢ of every dollar by which the rates should have gone down and the other 50¢ we will put into the fund”.
Now, the commission said, “That's a good idea.” The long and the short of it is, first of all, that the entire dollar was originally scheduled to go back to the consumers. The 50¢ that the cable companies got to keep has probably put into their pockets somewhere between $750 million and $1 billion that they otherwise would not have had. And the other 50¢ that went to the fund, of course, was never their money in the first place.
After the deal was made, the commission then decided that they would strike the whole thing in regulation. So they put it in the regulation, and it's been in the regulation for a considerable period of time. CRTC regulations have the force of law.
So I'll come back to your question: what is the right solution in the longer term? It is to insist that people respect their regulatory obligations and that they respect the law. And if they do that, then these kinds of up-and-down crises of people pretending that somehow or another they can withdraw their money when they are in fact obligated to put it in will go away.