My name is Peter Lyman. I'm the senior partner of Nordicity Group. I want to clarify that I'm here on behalf of Nordicity itself and not with the CFTPA. CFTPA is a valued client of ours, among other clients, but we just happen to be, by coincidence, packaged together for this session.
I think what they have said, though, actually goes quite far into offering some specifics about a national digital strategy that we had considered in our publication of last fall, an issues discussion paper on a national digital strategy.
Just to give you a bit of background, our firm has been in business for 25 years, and we work for the CRTC, Canadian Heritage, Telefilm, all the agencies, the provincial governments, and so on, plus the telecom side of things, auctions, and spectrum valuations.
We've had a pretty broad exposure to a lot of the issues you're dealing with. About two years ago, we said to ourselves--with a bit of hubris, I suppose--that we could sell ourselves to the U.K. There's a similar structure, and we've been quite creative in Canada with a lot of our policy and tax initiatives, and so on, whereas they were to some extent stumbling along. We always had an international practice, but it tended to be more in the third world countries.
But when we got there, of course, it's a double-edged sword, or a two-way street. They do lots of things that we can learn from. When we read all about Creative Britain, and then a year ago there was the appearance of Digital Britain itself, we just said to ourselves that this was really neat. They've gotten together and collected themselves. Then we looked at other countries and found that, lo and behold, some of our major trading partners and western-based countries also had gone through the route of the digital strategy.
We looked a bit further and found that in all cases, the agendas of these countries were quite different. They all had digital literacy as a topic and something to do about it. They tended to have broadband access to the home and established various target levels, but they all were emanations of their own particular national characteristics. So it occurred to us that for Canada, it wasn't a question of just having a cookie cutter national digital strategy, but rather one that was fashioned along the issues that are pertinent to us.
So we were first going to do an op-ed page thing, saying let's get on with it, but the more we got into it, the more we figured that the best thing was to think through what all the issues would be in three what we call “buckets” or categories of concern, the first one being in a telecom or ICT area, the second one being in the cultural domain, and the third in the human resources and training side of thing. We put together this issues discussion paper and published it last fall, and now we are going through a process leading up to Canada 3.0 and other conferences that are having these sorts of debates.
At the law society conference two weeks ago in Ottawa, we gave a bit of an update on how far we have come in the six or eight months since we published the discussion paper. But the way it was fashioned, that particular debate, was again, what should be the agenda. That got us thinking about doing a little bit more than an update, and I can give the update in response to questions. You can see it.
Unfortunately, this is only in English, not in French, but we can get copies of the conference report.
So that is the kind of thinking we had, as a result of doing that, that the government seems to be approaching the national digital strategy with a bit of an assumption that we have an ICT broadband approach to it. And there it comes to, how do you frame the debate? How do you carve out the agenda?
If you start with ICT or broadband, even there, information and communications technology gives you kind of an industrial push. A broadband strategy, such as the Americans have—they don't necessarily have an ICT one and they don't have a cultural one—takes you down a certain road.
If you say, well, we should have a broadband or ICT strategy but bring culture into it, and with all the things that John and Marc have been talking about in specific terms, do you just sort of attach that to it? If you do that, you might end up really talking more about regulation. When you try to streamline regulation—and some people would seek to integrate the Broadcasting Act with the Telecommunications Act to make a new communications act, and so on—that's an issue certainly for debate, but you're led down that path if you say, “Let's do ICT, broadband, and branch into culture”.
If you start with the cultural dimension alone, we found ourselves thinking that there you have to look at the world as it's evolving. We've all heard about interactivity and the Internet and so on. That's obviously a characteristic that we don't need to talk about anymore, but it does feed back to what our assumptions are of what we're doing in culture.
Over the last two and a half decades of working in the cultural industry, the way I look at it is simply that we've created an independent production sector that's fantastic in the course of that period through a variety of interventions. So we've really created the creative industries. Why have we done that? We've done it for those economic reasons that Marc alluded to, the amount of GDP and jobs that are created, but we've also done it because of the essential cultural imperative.
Our way of expressing that often is that we want to have the means to tell stories to ourselves about ourselves, and in the connotation of that is kind of a one-way connotation. You create a story, you publish a book, you make a broadcast, and you tell your story—and that's great. But the way I think you have to look at it now is that the cultural expression in media is much more a participatory two-way street. So if you want to have a cultural first digital strategy, I think you have to examine how you frame the question at the beginning about what cultural values you're aspiring to. I would submit that you would have to now add some sort of notion about active engagement in global issues and global communication as part of the cultural strategy, not just that we create something and push it out there.
I could get into the agenda that we set up and say how far we are going on it, but I think I'll stop my remarks now and let it come up in questions.
Thank you very much.