Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm so glad you are here today, having launched the hearings in Timmins last week, where I was expected to be. However, in the world of politics, the person who is higher up than I am in the food chain is the whip, and he said it didn't matter that there were national CRTC things happening in my hometown. He said I was to take my spade and get back in my trench and keep digging here in Parliament, so that's where I was dutifully doing my work.
If I had been in Timmins, I probably would have started off telling the story of my daughter, who was in Kigali, Rwanda, on an education program and who came back and said, “Gee, Dad, it was amazing being in Rwanda, because they have free Wi-Fi in Rwanda and much better high-speed Internet and than I can get in downtown Ottawa.” Of course we expand that out into the jurisdictions.
Like my colleague Mr. Simms, I represent a riding bigger than Great Britain. It is true that for perhaps 95%, broadband is available, although I would certainly question that number. When I talk to the telcos, they tell me that in terms of obligation to serve, dial-up is as far as they want to go. Dial-up--why don't we just use tin cans and string? I'm sorry, but 1.5 megabits is not high speed. It's not. If we are doing long-distance education programs with anything less than a 5-megabit download, people can't access their programs. In my region, where I have people in isolated little communities who want to get retooled in education, if they can't do this online program, then it doesn't really exist.
I'm looking at the role, and clearly it is an obligation of industry. It's an obligation of government to put the standards in place. When we look at Australia, which is undertaking the largest infrastructure program in their history, to have 93% hooked up at 100 megabits per second, it seems to me we're saying that we're going to go from the horse and buggy to the Model T, and we're going to get it up and working in 95% of our communities across Canada while Australia is at 100 megabits, Sweden is at 100 megabits, Korea.... Do you think, from what you're hearing, that we just have a really meagre vision of what is possible in terms of broadband speeds?