Thank you very much.
I echo my colleague's support for the NAFTA agreement, and congratulations on that.
You may not have caught it, but on Friday there was an announcement that puts NAFTA to shame in the total economic impact it will have on the world. It is that India is now striving for a “broadband for all” policy. That will be huge. It will have 800 million people accessing the digital economy, and they are wonderful co-operators or competitors with Canadians. The access to that kind of economy is going to be huge. Remember that until the Second World War, our number one trading partner was the Commonwealth. This is just another global gateway to what was our natural advantage in dealing with the Commonwealth to begin with.
We have been advocating the Commonwealth approach—the Indian approach—for 10 years now. In India, for broadband for all, they are gathering all the stakeholders together. They're coming up with a national plan for the telecom providers, the ISPs, the government agencies and municipalities to come together and say, here's how we're going to do this, here's how it's going to work, and here's what it's going to cost.
A few years ago, we had the pleasure of having the head of the smart communities movement in India come to Canada and speak at one of our conferences. The plan he revealed was stunning to us, because we're not used to thinking on that scale. He said that this was going to be the number one public expenditure of any government anywhere in the next few years. That's what we're up against here.
They're taking off from the point that this is the number one thing people want these days. It's the Internet. This is a poll, not my own thought. They want it more than a car, more than chocolate, more than alcohol and more than sex. As I said, these are not my numbers, but there they are. It's the number one heartburn issue for everybody.
We are suggesting that we need two things. We're copying that Indian example, but we had the idea first. We'll pull the stakeholders together under a federal seed or catalyst, if you wish—it need not be a federal program—and then drive it forward and expect to spend, on a sustained basis, the kind of money that India would be putting into this. After all, we'd be creating a fourth utility, like the road system or the sewage system or the power system. This is the scale we have to think about. It goes coast to coast.
I used to live and work on the salmon boats in B.C., for example. I know that very well. I live in Nova Scotia right now, as does Tony. We cover the country. Right now, I'm the EVP of the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance, which is Canada's largest high-tech organization. I'm able to be here only because of connectivity. I can be anywhere in the world if I want to, at the push of a button. These are the kinds of things we need.
To get that task force of all providers together, we have to copy the SWIFT model in southwestern Ontario—which is a spend of about $300 million, divided among the federal, provincial and municipal governments, and public-private partnerships—for an open network providing equitable coverage to everybody, under municipal control.
Let me stress municipal control, because the age of private telecom companies owning the network is over. We're trying to build a road system now, and you don't build a road for Ford, a road for GM, and a road for Hyundai. You build a road and all the traffic passes on that road. What we have here now is a move away from a return-on-investment model that the companies have, to a return-on-community-value model that the communities have. This patient capital is what we're missing here. It's almost like the co-op model.
People talk about how we don't have networks in rural areas because the market has failed. The market hasn't failed. The market's working fine. The market says that rural areas don't count. I'm happy with that. I used to work for Bell Canada. I worked on a billion-dollar Saudi Arabian contract. If the market is saying that, that's okay. You need something other than the market to dictate your policy. That thing other than the market is a co-op or community values program where the returns for the community come away from the bottom line. They're not detected by providers on their bottom lines. That's what we have to do right now.
It has to be municipally controlled, because these days municipalities have the cheapest networks, the fastest networks and the networks most open to the future. Those are the ones we should be copying, because they are the strongest networks going. They have, for the past 20-odd years, won every Intelligent Community of the Year contest by the Intelligent Community Forum, including several Canadian cities. In fact, more Canadian cities have won that award than those in any other single country.
We know how to do this. The future has arrived in Canada, but it's unevenly distributed.
We need to copy the best, and it's a municipal model going across Canada—open access and citizen control.
I will now turn it over to my colleague Tony to talk about what we have actually done here in reality.
Tony, you might talk about Pictou.