Thank you.
The loss of the court challenges program has had an impact on people with disabilities and other disadvantaged groups across the county in many different fora, but of concern for your hearings is that currently at the CRTC the public interest nature of groups like ours and Ms. MacDonald's—I'm not sure if you're a consumer group or not—is that we can litigate at the CRTC because of the cost awards that the CRTC provides. That is a very important aspect of the current system that we fear would be lost entirely if the deregulation goes through holus-bolus.
We work with a very experienced telecommunications lawyer who gives us lots of time pro bono. We get this little bit of cost and we hand it back to him and it helps tremendously. That's what's keeping the public interest at the CRTC. It's those costs awards.