At the CRTC we regulate according to the mandate given us by statute. That mandate requires an awful lot of discretion and judgment, because it is really stated in principles rather than in specific tasks what to do or what not to do. We're basically told to do whatever is necessary to achieve the objectives. We have various tools. One of them is licensing, if you're talking about broadcasting, but it's not the only tool.
Secondly, we are a collective. As you know, there are eleven commissioners right now. We make the decisions through due process, by which we ask people to make applications. They make some public notices. There are interventions. We then decide whether to hear them. If there are sufficient interventions and controversy, that requires a public hearing. When it's a relatively straightforward one, we have a paper hearing to deal with it. Then we publish our decisions and explain them. We're trying to follow that.
I had the opportunity last week to speak before the Canadian Film and Television Production Association, where I was basically asked the same thing. I said to them that as a regulator I really have four principles under which I operate. I did that as the competition commissioner, I will do that here, and my staff will follow those principles.
The first one is transparency. Everybody should know what we are doing, what our process is, how we come to decisions, and how they can interact with us.
The second one is fairness. What we are really being asked to do is choose between competing interests, and to do it in such a way as to attain the objectives of the Telecommunications Act or the Broadcasting Act, whichever it may be.
The third one is predictability. You can't have a regulator that goes all over the place. There have to be clear principles that you follow and apply from case to case. If you depart from them, you owe it to the people you are regulating to explain what it was in the economy or in this particular situation that caused you to depart from your stated principles; to what extent it was an isolated case; or whether you have, in effect, switched direction.
Finally is timeliness. In a bureaucracy, time is an ever-expanding quality and you can take as much time as you need to get it right. But of course in industry it's just the opposite: time means money and opportunity cost. Therefore as administrators it behoves us to make our decisions as quickly as possible, while still acting in a responsible manner.
That's how I intend to run the CRTC. Hopefully we'll make it clear to the industry what we do, how we do it, and why we do it.