Thank you, Madam Chair.
Ms. Laizner and Mr. Hutton, for your information, the statements I referred to were taken from testimony given at the May 10 meeting.
My colleague Mr. Vandal had put this question to Mr. Jagdish Grewal, from the Canadian Punjabi Post:
“Where is your competition?”
Mr. Grewal replied the following:
“There's the IPTV box. The last two weeks, about five or six daily 24/7 channels have started in the Punjabi language here in greater Toronto and they are going after our business people to promote their stuff on TV.”
Earlier, Mr. Blais provided a good answer to the question put by the chair of the committee about the taxes that are applied to circumvention services. He said that that question would have to be put to the Department of Finance, which we understand.
Next November 22, you will be launching your study on the large conventional television consortiums like Bell, Shaw and Rogers. We hope that they will not try to conclude an agreement based on the fact that since the other services do not pay taxes they should not pay any either, and that, like Netflix, they do not want to provide Canadian content, or would like to have smaller quotas.
Dare we hope that you will not entertain this tax argument in the negotiation of an agreement? I want to say to my good friends in the telecommunications sector that they are quite right and that we are a very mediocre society if we do not make it our business to collect taxes on circumvention services. That said, can we be sure that that will not be used as a bargaining chip in negotiations?