Thank you, Mr. Rodriguez.
First I would say I do see limits, so as I suggested, there should be a clear delineation between the production and exhibition of programming content that is broadcasting today--CTV, TVA, Astral--and carriage.
A witness from Rogers earlier on suggested that carriers in many respects are the plumbing. They provide the pipe that signals go over, and the signals that go over that today are really inseparable, as you pointed out. You can't say we will only allow foreign ownership of carriers of voice and data service but not video services, because they all travel on the same pipe. I think they are inseparable.
You have to start from where we started from, which is we do not think it is appropriate for the government to introduce changes to foreign ownership that would only favour, perhaps in their mind, stand-alone carriers, perhaps like the new wireless entrants. I would even argue that today, as we roll out broadband wireless, video that travels over wireless networks will travel over the next-generation satellite Internet networks just as it does today over cable and telecommunications networks.
Our starting principle is if you're going to change the law, you cannot do it in a way that favours foreign carriers relative to Canadian, because if you do that, even if you think you're talking about small entrants, as we saw.... Take the case of Globalive today. Orascom, their Egyptian shareholder, is being taken over by a Russian company. That company, Orascom-VimpelCom, will have 174 million subscribers. That's who we compete with. So if you intend to change the act at all, you have to do it in a way that is at least as fair to Canadian carriers as foreign ones.
That is my starting point, and we can separate carriage from content, because integrated broadcasters today already separate them in terms of their business structure.