Thank you.
Good evening.
Welcome. It's my honour to present to you this evening. I certainly appreciate all the work you're doing. I really have to build a little bit on what Mr. Thomson and Ms. Tribe have said. I'm going to make exactly the same points, but more in a regional forum.
I'm from East Kootenay in British Columbia, in the extreme southeast corner of British Columbia. I've been involved in local politics for about 15 years now. I chair something called a regional broadband committee, which is a regional approach. There are three or four regional districts. We represent about 160,000 people scattered throughout the mountains, so it's a very expensive area to serve.
Our present state, and why we have a problem, is that what happens in our area—and I'm sure in much of Canada—is that big telecoms come in and look at a business case. Their business case is predicated on where the density of population is, and they take that. That's fine. That's how business works, but the people on the fringes—they could be 50 metres out of the fringe, they could be 10 minutes out of that fringe—will not get service. As was mentioned by others, this is an essential service for all of us. That really leaves us with a tough problem.
Who came along to help us solve the problem? It was the small Internet service providers that were talked about by previous speakers. These businesses are small, localized, and are faced with a difficult problem. The cost of infrastructure in most of Canada is such that it generates low revenue, especially where you have mountains, where you have to build lots of very expensive towers.
This is not a formula for sustainability in business; hence, all orders of government, be it our local government, municipal governments, or the federal government, need to provide these small carriers with access to funds so they can provide the service to rural people. Much of rural Canada is not profitable. We understand that, and that's our role.
I think, from your point of view, how might you help? We, in local governments, provide essential services. That's what we do, providing things like water and sewer, and we fund them by a formula where the taxpayer, the person receiving the service, will pay for that. For the infrastructure, it's usually a funding formula among the local government, the provincial and the federal governments. Once the service is established, it's not that difficult to pay for the ongoing operations.
To our experience, again I must agree with the previous speakers. We lack, in this country, any sort of strategic plan for this. We have programs. This is the way this has been managed for many years: We have programs. One I was first involved with was called connecting Canadians. I recall it was a good program because it focused on rural programs. Then we had a program called connect to innovate. We applied for it. We weren't successful.
What that program did—and I won't criticize it—is that it gave people who a decent level of service a great level of service. Those who had no service—and you heard the statistics earlier—still had no service. That program didn't go very well. It took almost two years for us to rewrite our applications about four times, and ultimately we were told no. Programs that are very goal-oriented support one part of the country, but again, they're not based on a strategy, from our perspective. What we need to do is to make some programs that reduce the administrative burden on these small Internet service providers. We need to get away from these goal-oriented programs.
Can we create a new granting model that focuses on the strategic needs of the community and the region? This might include consideration of the very real business challenges faced by the local ISPs. Can the grant process be modified toward more localized measures of success? These small carriers are our private sector solutions for offering affordable high-speed Internet.
Another option—and you'll probably hear it, and maybe some of your communities do it—is where the municipality takes a role. That has not been our choice, but it's not something that we won't do.
Again, as the other witnesses have said, we very much lack high-speed Internet for all the reasons you're well aware of. COVID-19 is just making it that much more difficult for our residents, our students at home, for telehealth, to get the job done.
I have included in my report an appendix to a report issued April 23, 2020, by the B.C. Broadband Association. They talk about varied success—access to spectrum is a big one, and the lack of infrastructure.
Thank you very much. I appreciate your time.