Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you for being here, Ms. Scott.
I've been listening to your questions and answers, as well as those of the representative from CRTC. If you look at the question of competition as opposed to a monopoly or a regulatory system, a regulated service, it sounds good. Everybody will agree that if I get people competing with me with equal or better services for an equal or better price, then as a consumer, I will have improved access. But it's not always the case. There tends to be a lot of competition on the low-hanging fruit, in the urban areas where the markets are good and very profitable. But that does not always translate or seldom translates to rural areas. We've seen that in airline travel. While it has improved maybe for a lot of people, in a lot of areas we've lost service.
On the question of telephony and these services, I have great concerns. In rural Nova Scotia, where I live, we don't have that competition out there. We don't have broadband. We don't have cable everywhere. In some areas, we've been able to negotiate with small cable companies to get broadband, with government assistance on the infrastructure costs, but it's still not there for everybody. Voice-over is not available. The incumbents are providing the telephone service at a very expensive price. Getting the wires and the switching equipment and those things in those rural areas is a lot more expensive, per revenue, than in the urban areas.
If we let competition go unregulated, with no interference, don't we risk at one point that the reinvestment in the less profitable areas by the incumbents will be at such a point that the service is not available or of very inferior quality to that of 50% of Canadians?