Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I think I will start with a point of agreement.
I think I heard you acknowledge, Mr. Pineau, that competition is just one piece of the puzzle and regulation is another. I think you'd get some agreement from our side on that. I think we definitely have to find the balance, and that's the approach that the government has taken.
Certainly any company that operates in Canada is going to be operating under Canadian law. We have to remember that. We control the laws in this country, and any foreign company that is operating in Canada is going to be following Canadian law as it relates to anything, including broadcasting.
I've heard a lot of arguments. A lot of things have been thrown up against the wall here. One that caught my ear was the issue of spectrum. Just to clarify, we license the use of spectrum, and the licence is the asset in bankruptcy matters, not the spectrum itself. Spectrum use must follow the Broadcasting Act and other legislation. In the case of a foreign owner who goes into bankruptcy, spectrum sales are still subject to the Investment Canada Act, the national security net benefit reviews, all of those things. So I'll make a clarification there.
I want to go to something that I believe Mr. Murdoch was talking about as it related to foreign investment.
You said that with any new research and development that a foreign company undertakes in Canada, consumers might at some point benefit from it. But the foreign companies will hold the patent rights to this technology, not Canadians.
Would you also say that the converse is true? If a Canadian company is operating in another country, would Canadian companies benefit from that? Is that fair to say?