Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here today to talk about what I call the “reward the incumbent” order.
I'm so bloody mad at what's come down. It's absolutely ridiculous. What I recommend to all Canadians is that we all take out a full-page ad in The Globe and Mail that says, phone your telephone company and tell them you're moving to the cable company for your phone service; they'll drop their price and then short the stock. And you know what? If we do, we'll all make a ton of money, because that's what's happening.
I represent Persona, 650 systems across Canada. I am rural Canada: we have more systems in Canada than everyone else combined.
We launched a phone service in Sudbury last week. So a customer phones us and says, I'd like to take your phone service, but I'm going to call the phone company. He phones the phone company and here's what he's told: his $41.95 rate for Internet goes to $34.95; his phone rate, from $94.35, goes to $64.92; and his TV service goes from $57 to $45.60.
We have a policy that the minister is recommending whereby there's no win-back rule. I'll get a customer and I'll phone the telephone company and say, here's the customer. The phone company will go, great, thank you very much, we'll phone that customer. They will, and they'll tell the customer, hey, instead of switching over to Persona, here's your deal.
We have to figure this out. Either we're going to make a fortune by shorting the stock of the incumbents or we're going to really make competition happen. I can tell you that this order is a farce. It's an absolute farce. It cost us $8 million to launch service in Sudbury. I have another 649 systems I'd like to launch service in. But under these rules? Not a chance.
Rural Canada is getting screwed by this rule, and that is a fact.
Those are my comments. I can't wait to answer your questions.
Thank you.