I'm glad you raised again the issue of access. As I've been writing for some time, I've long believed that one of the real reasons that governments.... This is not a partisan issue at all. We've had successive governments struggle with this issue. One of the reasons that there's a need to make real investments in ensuring universal, affordable access is that the cost savings in being able to shift to more and more e-services from a government perspective, I believe, depends upon ensuring that you have universal, affordable access.
Until you reach that point, I think you're quite right that you basically have to run parallel service sets to ensure that everybody does have access. You can't have certain kinds of government services that some people are effectively excluded from being able to access because they don't have access to the network. It makes sense to invest where the private sector has been unwilling to do so, and for a myriad of reasons. One of them is that there is a payoff from a government perspective, because I think it better facilitates the shift to some of those more efficient electronic services.
We are clearly not there yet. Studies repeatedly have found that we do not have universal, affordable access on the broadband side, and on the wireless side we continue to pay some of the highest wireless fees in the world. That tells us that we continue to have a significant policy problem when it comes to affordable communications in Canada.