Mr. Desilets, thank you for your question, which is very relevant.
Last Wednesday, I submitted a brief to the CRTC that describes all the obstacles we are facing in Matawinie related to telecommunications giants like Bell Canada. Those issues are experienced by the RCMs you mentioned, but also by the Bécancour RCM.
Bell is really lengthening the process we have to follow and thereby slowing down the permit-obtaining process. With a project like ours, which covers a distance of 2,700 kilometres in the Matawinie region, we have to ask Bell for a building permit for each of the 55,000 planned telephone poles. We are rather putting in requests for groups of 50 poles, but you can calculate that the number of requests we must submit remains huge. Bell has three months to respond to us.
So the speed at which permits are obtained is not very high. I would say that what is slowing down the project the most is not the obtaining of governments' or MPs' support, but rather the difficulties we are having in connecting to the telephone poles that belong to Bell Canada.
I know that Maskicom has appeared in the media. We decided to take another approach and to document our problems in a public brief that we sent to the CRTC and that anyone can read. It is a 36-page novel, with supporting photos and charts. Since April 2019, we have applied for more than 600 permits from Bell, but we have only received 68.
So our project is being slowed down by telecommunications giants, which are creating obstacles for us.