Mr. Chair, members of the committee, good afternoon, or evening, I suppose, at this point.
I'm not working from prepared material, so I hope you'll accept my apology if I meander a little bit.
I want to acknowledge that we're in support of the bill. We think this is a critical, important precondition to fostering competition in an industry that is in dire need of it. We applaud the government for taking this initiative.
Wind's position in this area, as I'm sure you all know, has been very publicly kicked around for the last few years. We feel we're sort of specially qualified to talk to some of the negative consequences of the existing legislative regime.
The fact that our competitors put us through a regulatory proceeding that ultimately ended in vindication at the Supreme Court level doesn't eliminate the fact that the system allowed that to happen. It has to be acknowledged, as everyone has noted here, that the entirety of fostering competition, apart from some of the other policy initiatives, I'll call them, that have to be undertaken, the AWS set-aside being one example.... The recent spectrum policy that Mr. Bibic spoke to, in our view, actually didn't go far enough. But we don't intend to spend time on that today.
What we're talking about today is a necessary precondition, which is that you need to get capital into this company. It's a critical point just to understand the vast quantities of capital that are required, and also to understand that where that capital comes from should be and is irrelevant to government policy considerations.
The simple reality is that Canadian capital behind a Canadian company is not going to be deployed to roll out LTE in Parry Sound because that's where Bobby Orr is from. They are going to make commercial decisions based on economic factors, just like a corporation does that's funded by foreign capital.
The government has taken a cautious, incremental approach to resolving this issue, but they've done it where it matters most. And that's a conclusion that isn't something that came about in the course of the last couple of months. That's something the TPR came to. That's something the Red Wilson report came to. It is a necessary precondition to allowing the kind of capital to come in.
Let's just be very clear. This is not a magic bullet. This is not going to solve a massive competition issue in this country. You have an oligopoly, with 93% market share, a massive brand presence, a massive retail presence, and huge amounts of capital. They're snapping up all of the content in the country. Everyone recognizes that there is an issue. It's long been recognized. This doesn't solve it. It's a precondition to solving it.
I don't think there's any credible reason to say that we don't want that capital in this country and that we're going to artificially constrain the terms upon which it can be invested. That is a hurdle that simply won't be overcome.
Thank you.