Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Minister, for appearing today.
You'll forgive me for some skepticism. I think you're very good at talking the talk, but you have a less than stellar performance in terms of walking the talk.
I have also listened to a great many Canadians and many of the players in the telecom sector. You mentioned thousands, and I trust we're not simply talking about tweets here, that we're actually having serious conversations—you, being the Minster of Industry.
I sense a giant policy vacuum in this country. Your government has been in power for five years, and what I'm hearing from the telecommunications sector is a crying demand for some policy direction. It is not that surprising that you frequently overturn the CRTC when they make a decision because they themselves are working in a policy vacuum. They are also in need of direction from you and from Industry Canada, so when they do make a ruling it is not something that ends up being overturned; you in fact are speaking to them and you're on the same wavelength. In the proper order of things, overruling of the CRTC should be an extremely rare event.
Passing over the issue of UBB itself, I would like to ask about the procedure by which you notified the president of the CRTC that you were going to object to his ruling.
I spoke to Konrad von Finckenstein when he appeared in front of our committee a little while ago, and I asked him how he was notified that you did not agree with the CRTC's ruling. He told me that neither you nor the ministry were in contact with him, but that he found out like everybody else, through one of your tweets.
Are we in fact setting government policy and decisions by means of 140 characters that you send out in the middle of the night to tell the CRTC, a respected regulatory body, how decisions are made in this country?