Thank you so much, Madam Chair.
Of course, I just had a notice that my Internet connection is unstable, so hopefully I'll be able to get through this.
First of all, I want to thank everyone for appearing at this virtual committee hearing today. Those of us from rural areas have spent many hours trying to sort out these issues of our own connectivity. Of course, it's an ongoing battle made worse now that COVID-19 is forcing so many Canadians to try to adapt to a new paradigm of work, study and social connections from a computer monitor.
From my own perspective, hopefully the two geese that were trying to nest on my cell tower this morning have moved on to other parts, and we can go from there.
As the former vice-chair of the industry committee, I was honoured to help initiate the study on rural and remote broadband in the last Parliament. There was a great flurry of activity with respect to promises from this government regarding their connect to innovate program. There were some discussions about the connecting Canadians program that we had before. Well, that was five or six years ago.
We recognized the initial rollout that was associated with that, but of course, as Mr. Gay indicated earlier today, if you happen to have been fortunate enough, you might have been able to have some money come through the connect to innovate program, as many people in this country have, but there were a lot of places that were left out. I think that's really why we're so concerned about this.
Also, I believe there was some commentary about the consultation process that the Conservatives were doing on rural Internet access. One of the proposed recommendations we made had to do with the detailed strategy plan to address the geographical and economic disparities that exist as we embark on this goal to improve rural broadband access. One of the items preparing for further crises that might be part of that could be considering temporary deployment of cells on wheels to get out to some of these areas that have a lot of really serious problems.
When it comes to the disproportionate impact of rural broadband access to Canadian society, I'd like to get your thoughts on this and other measures that we could take to mitigate this inequality.
Perhaps I could have our folks from TekSavvy speak to this, please.