Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.
Thank you for this opportunity to provide Cogeco Cable's views on the government's proposed order varying the CRTC's decision on regulatory forbearance for local access telephone services of incumbent telephone companies in Canada. The time allotted is short, and I will be brief.
First, let me voice our deep concern that political decision-making now appears to be the norm in Canadian telecommunications, taking precedence over quasi-judicial decision-making by the independent administrative body formally entrusted by Parliament with the job of ruling on telecommunications regulatory issues, including forbearance. As a result, independent fact-finding, proper evidentiary assessment, and due process have all taken a beating, in our view, with a resulting loss of trust in the due process.
The Canadian government' s official vision for smart regulation includes trust in addition to innovation and protection of the public interest. The proposed order, in our view, is at odds with that vision.
Second, the proposed order is also at odds with basic principles of competition law, as it completely ignores significant market power and market share of the incumbent telephone companies where SMP still prevails. As a result, incumbent telephone companies with up to 100% market share in some local geographic markets would be deregulated based on the mere presence of alternative wire line and wireless facilities providing alternative local access services.
Third, the proposed order would immediately eliminate the incumbent telephone companies 90-day win-back restrictions throughout Canada, even where alternative local access services are still not available. In practice, this means that in local exchange areas where Cogoco Cable has not been able to launch an alternative service yet due to facilities or interconnection constraints—and there are still a number of those in our footprint—the incumbent telephone company could immediately target in those local markets each and every new customer signing up for our alternative service with special and confidential offers, thus making it uneconomical for us to launch there.
Fourth, the proposed order is at odds, in our view, with several recommendations of the report of the government's own experts, the Telecommunications Policy Review Panel, published less than a year ago, on the way to manage the transition to deregulation of incumbent telephone companies.
But more importantly, when will the government focus on a new Telecommunications Act instead of rewriting the decisions of its regulator?
Thank you for hearing us out. We will be pleased to answer questions you may have on these issues.