Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for being here this morning.
Telecommunication networks are critical to the economy. It's becoming what telephone was years ago, and it's a basic service that has to be out there. We're finding more and more that if you don't have it, you're falling further and further behind. As parliamentarians, our goal is to ensure that services are widely available, modern, high quality, and reasonably priced. The argument I've been hearing, up until today, it seems, is that if you want better service, better coverage, you have to open up the markets and let the markets prevail. I believe, Mr. Engelhart, you mentioned that we have to work at it until markets take over and until we get to a certain point, and then it will be fine.
Now my concern is that by opening it up, we talk about foreign investment, and there's a difference between foreign investment and foreign ownership. I think Mr. Masse touched on it earlier, in that if we allow foreign ownership, then it's a whole different story. What ends up happening is we end up with a branch plant, and major centres will be covered but I'm not sure about rural Canada. That's an area that really interests me, being from a rural area.
How do you see the changes coming up affecting services in rural areas, or the changes that just happened, such as what happened with Globalive with the trust in the market?