Sukh, I appreciate that. You're absolutely right, and I'd like to pick up where I left off the last time.
The minister's direction, the very proposal we're talking about, addresses the very concerns that we see in this motion: “That the Minister of Industry withdraw the order varying Telecom Decision CRTC 2006-15 and table in Parliament a comprehensive package of policy, statutory and regulatory...”. This is exactly what the minister has done. He has given us this. So what we've done here is take what the minister has proposed and we've said no, we don't want you to do that, we want you to do the exact same thing.
Where the area of discrepancy lies—and I think this is something we can agree on right here, tonight—is in the fact that as a committee we can talk about the areas that concern us.
Mr. Crête, you had some concerns. I'm reading, from your presentation, the areas that you wanted to talk about: “We agree the telecommunications sector needs in-depth reform. However, owing to the limited time provided, we are proposing change to the local telephone”—and I'm just reading what you've given us—“service only and would like to rework the report on the telecommunications regulatory framework and submit a more detailed version in the near future.”
Let's talk about the first recommendation: “The industry committee recommends using local forbearance regions as the geographic component for establishing levels of competition. The minister also defines new regions for the establishment of deregulation, known as local interconnection regions, LIRCs and local exchanges. In Quebec alone, there are 102 LIRs. In its surveillance report on the status of competition, the CRTC used only 20 local forbearance regions for local telephone service in Quebec. By using the LIRs rather than the LFRs”—with all these acronyms, one of the first things we have to do is determine what these are—“the order increases the number of reasons making it substantially easier to ensure minimal competition in simplifying the regulation forbearance requirements. It decreases the number of competitors. The surveillance report on telecommunications states that 11 LFRs where competition exceeds 10% account for 39% of all residential lines. The minister stated 60%–40%, not...”. I guess that means “60%, not 40%”.
All right. That's a good recommendation, and we've considered this. It's not like the government side is saying we're going to ram this thing through, that we're going to accept all these proposals. This is why we went through this procedure.
We could have saved two months' time. When we came back from China, Mr. McTeague, I know it was my recommendation that we start talking about the issue of China and trade. To my knowledge, that's a study no one in government has begun yet. Instead, we decided to take up all this time. It was very educational, but the result of all of it has been that we're not even listening to what the minister is saying. We're not even giving him any direction. Instead, we're going to try to embarrass the government.
We on the government side are offering our hands and are saying we should talk about it. My recommendation, Mr. Crête, is that we respond to your recommendation, first of all. We can go through these recommendations: “We believe local interconnection regions and local exchanges should be maintained. Local forbearance regions are too broad, in the sense that competitive conditions vary widely across the area. With such a geographic area, two types of regulatory errors can arise. Number one, deregulation is granted over an area where there are many customers that have few alternatives available. Number two, deregulation is denied even though there are many customers that have no need for regulatory protection and would benefit from a competitive process encumbered by regulations. These errors are avoidable if smaller areas, which have reasonable competitive conditions, are considered as a geographic market. Using smaller markets, the decision may be to continue to regulate or to refrain from regulation, but in either case, the risk of making an error is significantly reduced.”