Good afternoon.
Thank you for the question, Mr. Champoux.
In our view, this is not the right vehicle for going too far too quickly in terms of what will and what won't be regulated.
Our preference would have been for the bill to be as flexible and as broad as possible to give the CRTC all the necessary tools to collect data and make informed decisions on what is actually happening—what the broadcasting services are actually doing.
What this bill does is help to allay fears by imposing reasonable limits; it represents an acceptable compromise. We hope those limits will truly help to allay the fears that have been raised.
We think it's essential that the bill not go any further in terms of tightening things up. Our concern is that doing so would result in outdated legislation and bake an underlying inequity into the bill. That would be quite the paradox since the original purpose of the bill is to finally restore equity.
The idea is to restore equity between conventional services and online services. However, if the bill excludes some online services, companies will try to use that exception, and that would introduce a new inequity. All of the work we are doing here would be meaningless.