Industry and Technology Committee on Sept. 24th, 2026

[Matthew Kellison]

An analysis in what regard...? I'm sorry.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Riding Mountain, MB]

By the department as far as going to a higher spectrum...and what that means for coverage in rural areas.

[Matthew Kellison]

We know it means that higher frequencies mean more data and less coverage. It means that basically for someone—

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Riding Mountain, MB]

Does it actually mean more infrastructure, though? I think we can both agree that we need more infrastructure to support that.

[Matthew Kellison]

It does, because if a spectrum doesn't travel as far, it requires more towers to be built. With that said, low frequency spectrum in some cases cannot offer the data speeds that Canadians expect. When putting a network together, network operators will typically use a range of spectrum both for coverage and for throughput.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Riding Mountain, MB]

I know I'm short on time, Mr. Chair, but—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

You're not short on time, Mr. Mazier, but your—

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Riding Mountain, MB]

—just so the department knows, we have massive holes in our rural areas—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

Mr. Mazier, the floor is no longer yours, sir.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Riding Mountain, MB]

—and this is happening all across Canada.

Thank you very much for coming today.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

I appreciate your abiding by the rules of the committee, which say that it's the prerogative of the chair to determine whose time it is, and I gave you some additional time.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Riding Mountain, MB]

Thank you, Chair. Thank you for the extra time. I really do like being a guest here.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

You're certainly very welcome, Mr. Mazier.

All right, colleagues, we're going to go to the next questions, which will come from Madame O'Rourke.

You'll have the same five minutes allotted to our colleagues across the way.

[Dominique O'Rourke, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thank you so much, Chair Carr.

Welcome to our witnesses.

We heard from the sponsor of the bill and from a lot of people at this committee, thanks to some quite nice cross-party collaboration and agreement, that connectivity for rural and remote areas is really about equity. It's about safety. It's about economic development. It's about access to education or to police officers.

We want to get to a place where all Canadians have equal access to connectivity. Subclause 3(4) of this bill says, “When setting out changes that are to be made to the Framework, the Minister must give priority to connectivity, including for rural and remote areas and numbered roads, taking into account the fact that competition and market forces have so far been insufficient to ensure connectivity across Canada”.

How would ISED operationalize the requirement in the bill to give priority to connectivity when making changes to the spectrum policy framework? I ask the question because my colleague raised the point about whether there are enough people there to make the ROI attractive. When we're talking about equity, if one person's stranded on a road, it doesn't matter whether the ROI works for the company or not.

How can you operationalize that requirement to hit the goal that we're seeking?

[Matthew Kellison]

Thank you for the question.

I'll take the first part, and then I will turn to my colleague to answer the broader question.

With respect to the way that we would operationalize the bill, we would basically instigate a consultation on the spectrum policy framework, and we would look to make changes to include rural connectivity as one of its objectives, for sure.

Right now, it is a broad framework. It is the overarching policy. Like I said, the overarching objective is to maximize benefits for Canadians. Within that, you have a number of enabling guidelines. You have a guideline that says that you should rely on market forces to the extent possible. Notwithstanding that, spectrum policy needs to take into account national sovereignty. It needs to take into account public safety. It needs to take into account security. Spectrum should be released as quickly as you're able to do so. Spectrum licensing should be flexible so that spectrum can be used and shared for a variety of purposes. Those are all enabling guidelines. Obviously, connectivity would be a key piece of that as well.

Then what we would do when we are releasing spectrum, whether we're consulting on a framework for a spectrum auction or whether we're putting in place something like our local licensing framework, where there's a system online and you can just go punch a button and get a spectrum licence in a given area, is ask, when designing those frameworks, how we take connectivity into account. Given that it's one of the objectives in our framework that we need to figure out, how do we build it into this framework? How do we balance it against objectives related to competition investment? All of that will be subject to public consultation, and all of it will depend on the nature of the spectrum in question. It will depend on whether it's being used for Internet connectivity, whether it's intended to be used primarily as commercial mobile spectrum or whether it's for something else.

There are a variety of spectrum bands that have very little to do with public connectivity. They're used for military purposes, they're used for ship to shore or they're used for garage door openers. There are a lot of things that fall within the ambit of spectrum policy and under this framework that are not necessarily specifically related to public connectivity. That is the first thing I'd say.

The second thing I would say is that having that in spectrum policy is clearly very important. Spectrum policy is one piece of the overall connectivity puzzle. There are always going to be situations where it may not be economic to build in a particular area regardless of the conditions you put on a spectrum licence. If you're looking at building a tower along a rural highway, there may be no power there. There are going to be a variety of things that need to happen in order to ensure that once you've identified a coverage gap, you have spectrum policy in place that supports connectivity. If there are other things that are required to ensure that the neighbourhood or road gets connected as it relates to funding and anything else required in terms of capacity, it may require a broader government solution than simply a spectrum licence.

I'll turn to my colleague on that.

[Andre Arbour, Director General, Telecommunications Policy Branch, Department of Industry]

Thank you.

Yes, this is certainly an important issue to Canadians, and it's one we hear about all the time, as you are hearing today. Spectrum is an important piece of the puzzle, but it's just one. There's a range of degrees of freedom in terms of what frequencies are prioritized, deployment conditions and related matters that can help move the needle in rural areas. However, as my colleague indicated, it's not sufficient just to build a tower. The infrastructure does need to be sustainable over the long term. In some of these areas, if there's not even access to electricity, that can become quite challenging, so there's a range of other considerations there.

There are complementary tools, including direct funding. Our department administers the universal broadband fund, which has a component for supporting the funding of cellular coverage. The CRTC also operates a fund called the broadband fund, for which cellular is also eligible.

There are other tools that can help with this to a certain degree as well.

Mr. Ste‑Marie asked a question about this.

There are rules around roaming, for instance, that enable better sharing of the infrastructure.

Then, finally—and this is a new issue that's just emerging, but it's quite promising and veers into the spectrum world as well—there is supporting connectivity between smart phones and satellites. Historically, you needed a big piece of equipment with a big antenna to be able to talk to a satellite hundreds or thousands of kilometres in space. However, now we have satellites in space that can do texting and low capacity data. It's still new. Some of it is being tested. Satellites are continuing to be launched to do this, but over the next two years or so, about three new big constellations will be launched with improved service.

ISED issued rules in 2025—they're some of the first in the world—to help facilitate this connectivity, so we will see some improvements via that method as well.

Thanks.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Ste‑Marie, you may go ahead. You have five minutes.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Kellison and Mr. Arbour, thank you for being here to answer our questions.

My first question is this: In your presentation, you talked about the importance of prioritizing rural areas and first nations, which you did in 2023, but why hasn't there been a formal review since 2007?

[Matthew Kellison]

Thank you for your question. It's a good one.

I'd say there are a few reasons, the first being that it's a general document.

It's a document that we have supplemented primarily over the last several years through our five-year spectrum outlook. Our spectrum outlook is basically a document that sets out our policy priorities for a five-year period. As I mentioned, rural and indigenous gaps were a big one in our last version. It also sets out what our spectrum release schedule looks like over the next couple of years, which industry uses for planning. The five-year planning cycle for industry is very important to ensure they know what spectrum is coming. They can design their networks around it, and they can decide where they're going to invest capital.

We've found that the spectrum outlook has been the policy signal that we've been able to use to complement the framework. It does not imply that the framework itself is not due for a refresh, but that has kind of been our policy statement over the last little while.

With regard to the point about five-year cycles, we actually issued an interim update to that outlook back in June, primarily because we do see the advantage of checking in more frequently than every five years to just say, “You know, we see some new things coming. We've seen that the U.S. is doing some things with spectrum that we may want to consider. We see that the space sector is growing. What do low-earth orbit satellites mean for connectivity? Here's essentially what else is coming that you should know about.”

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

You talked a lot about satellites. I had the opportunity to visit the plant in west Montreal and learn about upcoming projects.

Do you think we will still need new cell towers in three to five years, or will medium-orbit satellites have fully taken over by then?

[Matthew Kellison]

I think it will be a mix, because even though satellites provide universal connectivity, capacity remains an issue.

When we look at ensuring that we have full coverage for all Canadians, we see that it requires a mix of technologies. You heard in the last hour about fibre optics covering the entire province of Quebec. That is obviously where you have a line in the ground that is going to offer you the best speed, the most capacity. Terrestrial wireless, where you have a tower and a radio, is going to cover a lot of area, but it's not going to be quite as robust as fibre. Then satellite will be somewhere after that.

It won't be the case, I think, that satellite will replace towers. I think it will be the case that satellite will complement towers. As my colleague was saying about our supplemental mobile coverage to cell, we do think that, as that rolls out, it will provide an opportunity to close gaps where they exist in current networks and provide coverage outside of the current network footprint. This is primarily because in a lot of those cases, especially if you have no access to power or have no customer base, it may not be economical to build under any circumstances and the solution there may be satellite.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

I have a final question in this round.

You just referred to this: The agreement between Quebec City and Ottawa to deploy fibre-optic infrastructure, access to wired Internet, all over Quebec was a success. That's fair to say.

Could the co-operation model that was used in the case of fibre-optic connectivity be used for cell tower connectivity in Quebec?

[Matthew Kellison]

Thank you for your question. I'm going to ask Mr. Arbour to answer.

[Andre Arbour]

The answer is yes. When it comes to cellular connectivity investments, there are parallels with high-speed Internet. We are working with other governments, like the Quebec government, and a range of stakeholders to expand coverage.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

I see.

Mr. Chair, that's all my questions for this round.

Thank you very much, gentlemen.