I think the basic issue is how much competition is enough, and if we do want more competition, how should we manage that? Should it be with very deliberate steps of allowing x% of ownership in a staged manner for different stages of the industry, or should we truly open up the market to whichever investors want to put their money at risk? If they deliver the product to the customer, they're going to make profits and be successful.
As an economist, it's hard to favour anything except allowing the market to determine how much competition there should be, subject to the Competition Act, which is there protecting all industries from abuse of dominance and monopolization. I don't think there is a magic number. I don't think anyone can credibly defend any magic number for foreign ownership as being "optimal", whether it's 49% arbitrarily because that's the limit before you get control, 23%, or 22%. I don't think there is a magic number.
There's one thing that should be very clear, and I think it was mentioned a moment ago. It's that the telecommunications industry is truly dynamic. New technologies are being made available. Comparisons of Canada's performance to other countries based on terrestrial models of telecommunications are really irrelevant, because we're moving away from those models rapidly, and in broadcasting as well. It's really impossible to predict where the future is going to be, but we know that the future is going to look a lot different from the past.
Do we want to try to manage this whole technological change process through a regulatory infrastructure, where the primary goal is some arbitrary number for foreign ownership? Or do we want to be able to take advantage of any technology out there that's superior in a meaningful way? That can certainly come through foreign ownership, or maybe it won't come through foreign ownership. But we should be open to those possibilities.