Fundamentally, telecom is an industry that needs density. The economics of telecom are very simple: The more people you have in an area, the less costly and the easier it is to serve them, period, full stop. That plays out in a country of our size, with such low density. It makes serving, particularly the substantially rural Canadians, very difficult.
There have been some good steps taken to create programs to work together, but there are many overlapping programs with different requirements. It would be very helpful to have them be more co-ordinated, connected and using similar criteria so that we get the biggest bang for the buck, the biggest leverage.
As well, as a presenter said earlier, there are a lot of costs we carry that we feel are unnecessary: the long delays getting permits, the difficulty getting access to poles, to ducts, to infrastructure and deploying services. That, frankly, is a waste of money and time. If we were able to find a way to do the latter more efficiently, I think we could do the former better as well and reach deeper into rural Canada than we have so far. That includes connecting programs across rural municipalities. Regions, provinces and the federal government all have overlapping, and sometimes not consistent, expectations.