Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I guess there are a couple of things that I'm struggling to understand.
I think all of us, quite honestly, are here to try to do what we can do best for the consumer, not the advocacy groups and not the consumer associations, but the people who actually write the cheques for the services that are supplied every day.
This report talks about 127 recommendations. I guess we're going to have to repeat some of the stuff that came out almost two years ago. It's not intended that we implement all of them at once, but we need to put a priority on some of the issues that we can take action on to actually get something accomplished for our consumers on where it is best to deregulate and allow the markets to take effect.
I found it kind of interesting that we were talking about going too fast. Two years is not too fast. Today, in question period, the leader of the NDP said let's get moving. We need to take action. We cannot start to cherry-pick the things we should be taking action on and moving on. We should be taking action on all things that are good and rightfully done and studied.
This study had thousands of pages, over 200 submissions, and it came forward in June 2006. When we wanted to have some time at the start of this committee, we were turned down. It would seem that June 2006 would have been an opportune time, at the start of this committee, to have dealt with it. At that time, no one came forward. I'll say it again: no one from the opposition came forward to say there was an issue. I think there's a message that if no one comes forward, we should then continue to move ahead on it.
I think Mr. McTeague said the problems are more serious than we thought they would be. Well, if the problems are more serious than we thought they would be, there should have been an opportunity to come forward during the consultation process and put them on the table. We never heard that.
As a government, we actually want to fulfill the mandate of what is good for consumers--consumers being individuals and businesses that will take an open market and have the best value for the service that they can provide and that they will receive.
On rural areas, I come from a rural area. We're going to rely on the protection of rural areas where there isn't sufficient competition.
I think it's time we started to address those issues and move ahead with this report. It came forward, it was accepted, and there were 127 recommendations. We'll move on those in priority, obviously doing what is good for the consumer in terms of deregulation and in terms of savings to our consumers, not unlike what we did with the telephone service, which has clearly been a win-win situation for everyone.
Interestingly, when you look at long distance service, there is a little history. In 1983 we had long distance service. Less than 9 billion minutes were used in long distance service, but it was at a cost of over 30¢ per minute. It's now somewhere around the rate of 35 billion minutes in long distance, and the cost is somewhat less than 10¢. I think the deregulation of that and allowing competition were important.
This is not about deregulating it and opening it up where there's no protection. Obviously, protection has to be there for those areas that are underserved and don't have the competition. Ceilings will be in place to protect those areas, the rural areas and those areas that are less populated.
My comment, Mr. Chairman, is this. We need to be able to move ahead with these recommendations and do what is right for the consumers in this country.