Good afternoon.
Thank you for the opportunity to address the committee today. Our president, Karen Leibovici, from Edmonton, Alberta, sends her best wishes.
As you know, FCM has been the national voice of municipal governments since 1901. We represent close to 2,000 municipalities, which in turn represent over 90% of Canada's population.
FCM and its board of directors have been engaged with a variety of issues related to broadband and telecommunications. I'll name a few quickly: the siting of antenna systems and cell towers in our communities; the impact of telecommunications infrastructure on the management of the municipal rights-of-way; the need for 20 megahertz of dedicated 700-megahertz spectrum for public safety broadband; the importance of robust and accessible broadband services for rural communities; and the unique challenges of providing telecommunications services in northern and remote communities.
We are happy to answer any questions you may have on any of these issues, but we'd like to focus our opening remarks on two areas—rural broadband and northern telecommunications.
FCM's members are in the business of building essential infrastructure that supports our communities—from roads and bridges to water and waste water and to recreation and cultural facilities. In today's digital world, broadband connectivity has become as critical as this core municipal infrastructure to the sustainability and prosperity of our communities and of Canada as a whole.
This is Industry Canada's description of the Broadband Canada program:
Broadband Internet access is viewed as essential infrastructure for participating in today's economy, as it enables citizens, businesses and institutions to access information, services and opportunities that could otherwise be out of reach.
For rural communities, the absence of broadband Internet significantly impedes economic development and denies communities such competitive advantages as the electronic delivery of health and education services and the ability to gain access to markets for products that are produced in their regions.
FCM's 2009 report on the federal role in rural sustainability highlighted the need for federal investments in rural broadband infrastructure in order to close the digital divide between rural and urban Canada.
This is consistent with Canada's telecommunications policy objectives as stated in section 7 of the Telecommunications Act. Paragraph 7(b) lists this objective for Canada:
to render reliable and affordable telecommunications services of high quality accessible to Canadians in both urban and rural areas in all regions of Canada;
Over the past several years, the Government of Canada has made some important investments in rural broadband, including through Broadband Canada: Connecting Rural Canadians, a program that was part of the economic action plan; as well as, for example, the Eastern Ontario Regional Network, which was funded through the major infrastructure component of the Building Canada fund.
These programs have brought a minimum level of broadband access to eligible rural communities. In the case of Broadband Canada, broadband is defined as a minimum 1.5 megabits per second, and the Eastern Ontario Regional Network is bringing speeds up to 10 megabits per second. However, with the rate of technological change, the rapid transition to electronic delivery of government services, and the widespread adoption of business offerings that require real-time and robust broadband access, there is much more that must be done to ensure that the digital divide between rural and urban does not widen further.
As the committee is aware, two recent decisions by Industry Canada on spectrum management will have a significant impact on the deployment of rural broadband networks going forward. These were spoken about in the last hour.
First, the Government of Canada has included a rural deployment requirement in the final conditions of licence for the upcoming 700-megahertz spectrum auction.
In FCM's submission to Industry Canada's consultation on this issue, we expressed our concerns about the effectiveness of the rural deployment requirement, as it only applies to carriers with two paired blocks of spectrum, and includes targets that are based on HSPA network footprints that were in effect in March of 2012.
In our submission, we encouraged Industry Canada to reconsider the decision to use the HSPA footprint, as we believe it offers no guarantee of rural deployment.
We also recommended that Industry Canada include measures to ensure unused rural spectrum is used in a timely fashion.
We note that the final conditions of licence released last week do not address these concerns, which, in our opinion, may require the federal government to introduce future measures or incentives down the road to ensure that 700-megahertz networks are in fact deployed in rural Canada.
Second, as was discussed earlier, the federal government has announced it will be allowing licence-exempt use of what's called “TV white space” spectrum, which takes advantage of the unused spectrum created by the conversion to digital television.
Based on trials that have already occurred in the U.S. and the U.K., there appears to be significant potential for TV white space to bring broadband to rural communities at a lower cost than networks using licensed spectrum. We encourage the government to introduce its final technical requirements for TV white space as soon as possible so that trials can begin in Canada.
On the issue of northern and remote communications infrastructure, we have several recommendations that are consistent with the 2011 “Arctic Communications Infrastructure Assessment Report”—ACIA—which we encourage the committee to consider during the study.
We agree with the ACIA report's conclusion that:
an inadequate communications infrastructure [in the North] cannot be allowed to cause more important things to fail, like emergency services, health, education, housing, industry, opportunity and sovereignty.
In the interests of time, I'm going to go through our recommendations quickly, but I'm happy to elaborate further during the questions.
First, the Government of Canada should develop a north-specific strategy with clearly defined rules that articulate a sustained, multi-year funding commitment for communications network development to meet connectivity standards both for Internet and voice in the north. The need for a holistic strategy is extremely important as existing federal subsidies for northern ICT services, information communications technology services, are set to expire in 2016.
Second, the government should commit to service parity both among northern communities and also between the south and the north.
Third, the government should ensure there is a redundant connection into every arctic community to avoid gaps in the provision of essential services.
Fourth, the government should ensure that investment strategies for arctic communication networks include provisions for the increasing rate of technological change and the continuous introduction of new consumer services and devices.
Fifth, government policy should foster competition in ICT services in the north, including through a restructuring of the National Contribution Fund, which is administered by the CRTC, to allow for portable contributions.
Finally, the government should work with northern municipalities in developing its strategy for ICT development in the north. Now is the time to re-evaluate Canada's policies for ICT development in both rural Canada and in the north, so that all Canadians not only have access to broadband, but have sufficient bandwidth to take advantage of new technologies and participate in the global economy.
That concludes our remarks. We're happy to answer your questions.
