Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, colleagues, for the opportunity to be here today.
I had a few questions for Jacob. We've had a chance to work on another committee before, but I think that we have the people here who might be able to answer a few of my questions.
I'm the member of Parliament for the great Kenora riding. At over 326,000 square kilometres, we may actually be at the rural/remote divide. I want to be clear that the term “rural“ is used somewhat categorically and technically in different departments to describe just how far we are from city centres, and what have you. In any event, about 35,000 people live in communities that have no access to roads in my riding in the province of Ontario. That said, I have two questions.
I want to speak in the most general terms about the key challenges facing isolated remote communities, beyond of course the incredible commitment that our government has made to the region through the Broadband Canada fund. Our first step actually was to get good broadband service in there. I apologize for just saying “good broadband”, as I realize you have other technical terms for it.
Besides issues like our rates of adoption of these technologies and our digital literacy, and residual key issues facing the remote and isolated regions, are there other ones? And in responding, could you avoid talking about the unlicensed spectrum, because if that is an issue, I'd like to just focus on it as a second part of my questions here today.