Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.
When Parliament enacted section 8 of the Telecommunications Act, it intended to permit the Minister of Industry and the cabinet to take responsibility for a matter that should clearly be their responsibility, and that is the fundamental policy of the government in this critical sector of telecommunication.
The proposed policy direction is a means to allow the minister and the Cabinet to take the leadership role in regard to policy. It will provide guidance from the government to the CRTC regarding how it should exercise its day-to-day mandate as a regulatory agency.
TELUS supports the proposed policy direction and urges the government to proceed with finalization and formal issuance of the direction. In our view, the direction is both necessary and timely. It's necessary because the CRTC's actions in recent years have made it clear that without such a policy direction, the CRTC will not adopt a more market-based approach to implementing the Telecommunications Act.
Secondly, the direction is timely because it represents an important first step in the reform of Canada's telecommunications regulatory framework as set out in the TPR report.
As I mentioned, the CRTC has clearly demonstrated over the last few years that it would prefer to continue to regulate rather than moving forward with the reforms that most other advanced industrialized economies have adopted.
A couple of recent examples. In the spring of this year, the cabinet asked the CRTC to reconsider its decision to regulate voice-over-Internet services as if they were identical to traditional wire-line local telephone service. The cabinet noted the recommendations of the TPR report, which favoured no regulation of such services. Surprisingly, on September 1 of this year, the CRTC reported to cabinet that it would not change its policy of regulating voice-over-Internet services. Having been invited by the government to adopt a more modern approach, the CRTC refused.
Another illustration of the CRTC's reluctance to recognize and accept change is its policy regarding wireless or mobile telephone services. As you know, wireless services have been enormously successful in Canada and elsewhere, and there are now about 17 million wireless phone customers in Canada.
Many people now regard the wireless phone as their primary and most important phone service, and an increasing number of Canadians adopt wireless as their only form of phone service, giving up their wire-line service altogether. In our service area, in our largest urban market, greater Vancouver, Stats Can reports that 10% of households are now wireless only, and that number is growing every year. In spite of this, only in the last few months has the CRTC been willing to acknowledge that wireless phone services might be a substitute for and competitive with traditional wire-line service.
These examples, in our view, illustrate the clear need for policy direction by the government to the CRTC, and that proposed direction is well drafted; there's no question it's legally valid and falls squarely within what Parliament intended when it enacted section 8 of the Telecommunications Act.
So, in closing, I'd like to draw your attention to what the minister himself said on the day he released the proposed direction:
We want to ensure that Canada's telecommunications industry is internationally competitive and successful, and is shaped to best support our ever-evolving and rapidly changing telecommunications needs.
A critical first step in the fulfillment of that objective is to finalize that policy direction, and we urge the government to do it as quickly as possible.
Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for inviting Telus to provide you with its views on this important matter.