Evidence of meeting #85 for Industry, Science and Technology in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was broadband.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
How many other communities do you anticipate will be tackled in the rest of Canada?
Director General, Connecting Canadians Branch, Department of Industry
It's hard to tell.
Liberal
Director General, Connecting Canadians Branch, Department of Industry
We have to wait for decisions to be made.
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
If I do the math with 3,700 communities, assuming we hit it out of the park and we double what Quebec did, we might be down to about 3,000 communities. Can I say this is the size of the challenge for rural and remote Canada?
Director General, Connecting Canadians Branch, Department of Industry
For backbone, yes.
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
Backbone.
Ms. Hart, you used the words “drop in the bucket”. How many drops in a bucket do we need? I'll leave you and Mr. Seidl to let us know about how much you would perceive. Do we even have an idea of the cost of capturing those other 3,000 communities that Mr. Delorme is looking at?
Director General, Connecting Canadians Branch, Department of Industry
We haven't done a detailed costing because it's difficult to do, but we're talking about billions of dollars. I think at one point we had estimated $5 billion for rural Canada, and then we were thinking the north would cost $2 billion. I think we want to revisit those numbers once we get over the hump of having all projects selected, because we have a little bit more intelligence now of some of the costs. There have been trends and differences in some of the costs in terms of whether the cost of fibre is going up or down.
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
When will you have that clarity? When will you have a better sense of what's left to be done?
Director General, Connecting Canadians Branch, Department of Industry
I think we'll definitely have a ballpark figure by January, I would say.
Remember that this is still ballpark. What we're seeing is that the north probably costs more than what we thought, and then it could be that the rural part of what I'll call the south may not be quite as expensive as we thought. However, in all of this we need to get over this hump of work to be able to look at what the remaining gaps are and—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy
It's already over. All right. Thank you.
I've only asked for 12 minutes on their part. Sorry.
For the final two minutes, we have Mr. Johns.
NDP
Gord Johns NDP Courtenay—Alberni, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I understand that you're relying heavily on the private Internet service providers to get a lot of the work done. How is Industry Canada assisting in this process, and what is being done by Industry Canada to encourage the ISPs to bring in their services to the rural communities for a reasonable price?
I know that right now in Ahousaht they're just working on a partnership with Telus, so a lot of this is going to be working with the ISPs.
Could you talk about that?
Acting Director, Connecting Canadians Branch, Program and Engineering, Department of Industry
In terms of pricing, first of all, it's not just the large ones. We got lots of applications from regional districts, municipalities, and community groups, so it's not just the large telcos. I think many of our announced projects are not with large telcos.
On the backbone portion, as we go now, we have this open access stipulation that's part of the contribution agreements, and that's definitely going to regulate the access part. As part of the application, one of the comparative criteria that Susan mentioned earlier is that applicants needed to give us the pricing they will charge on that open access. As decisions are made about which projects get supported, that is definitely a factor. We don't want to bring fibre to a community and then find that no one can use it because it's entirely unaffordable. We have that information and we take that into account.
NDP
Gord Johns NDP Courtenay—Alberni, BC
Super.
My next question is around timeline. I think you're focused on Ontario and Quebec as a first priority. Where do B.C. coastal communities fit in? I'm staying there, so as you can imagine, it's a priority for me and for the people in my riding.
Director General, Connecting Canadians Branch, Department of Industry
We'll hear about decisions and announcements over the next couple of weeks. I really can't comment on which province is next. I can just say that over the next few weeks, you will hear about other provinces and you will hear about B.C.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy
—I would like to thank our witnesses for coming today and sharing all this information with us.
We're going to take a two-minute break so that we can go in camera. Anybody who's not supposed to be here should not be here after that.
We're suspended.
[Proceedings continue in camera]