Please forgive me that I'll respond in English. Je parle français, mais pas très bien.
My colleague responded to the R and D issue. I'll just add that R and D is an input to innovation; the output from innovation is productivity growth. You could actually spend a lot on R and D, but if it's not well spent, you don't get the productivity growth.
I'm not saying Bell is not spending its R and D well. I'm not going to talk about any given company. We have some companies in Canada that are very good, but the problem is economy-wide.
The point I was trying to make is that by regulating and taxing, implicitly or explicitly, the telecom sector, we're adding to the costs of every enterprise in Canada, including government, and that affects our productivity.
You made two other points. One was about population density, and I think that's a very legitimate issue. We may need to think about something akin to the rural electrification projects that we had many decades ago to get Internet access to smaller, more remote areas. But I think the way to do it is to use general federal tax revenue to subsidize it--not to tax the communication between different companies, basically tax the circulatory system of our economy. It's better just to tax general income, when you have something like that, rather than tax something that's so critical to so many industries.
On the Canadian culture issue...I'm a big fan of Canadian culture. I read Canadian history. I love reading about Louis Riel and I love reading about Jean Talon. Frontenac was much more interesting than George Washington, and the United Empire Loyalists are far more interesting than most Tudors and virtually any New England Puritan. One of the things I'm kind of disappointed about with Canadian culture is that our Canadian culture is stuff like Stargate SG-1 and programs about crusading coroners and sitcoms set in New York but produced in Canada. So I wonder whether our current policies really are all that effective at getting what we really want.
Now, they're certainly expensive. By taxing the telecom sector we're imposing huge costs on our economy, all across the economy. That's the work that Hausman has presented from the U.S., and I think it applies to Canada. Industry Canada certainly has economists capable of getting that data and giving you those exact numbers.
If we wanted to protect Canadian culture, I suspect that if we got rid of all of our regulations, our Canadian content rules, and our foreign ownership restrictions, our economic growth and productivity increase would support such an increase in tax revenue that you could probably increase the budgets of Radio-Canada, the CBC, and the National Film Board many times over and we'd still come out way ahead.