Thank you, Madam Chair.
Did our motion originally misspell your name? We'll have to get to the bottom of that. I apologize. I don't know how it happened, but we're going to get to the bottom of it. As someone whose name is regularly mispronounced, I have no tolerance whatsoever for names being misspelled.
Thank you, everyone, for coming together on short notice.
Of course, we were all met with the titanic news that two of Canada's major telecom providers were entering into a merger. It is actually an acquisition merger. As you all know, Rogers and Shaw have proposed a transaction to combine forces. It would reduce the number of players in both the cable and the wireless space, and have enormous implications for the structure of our digital economy and for the services available to our customers.
This deal has to be approved by the industry department, by the Competition Bureau and by the CRTC, all three of which report to this committee.
This is obviously an industry file, and I believe that while we do have regulatory bodies that are tasked with looking into these matters, it is the duty of parliamentarians to represent their constituents as well. We are the only ones who are directly accountable to the people who will be affected by this deal.
I am not proposing to interrupt any existing plans that the committee has. We already have an aerospace study [Technical difficulty—Editor] and those can go ahead, but what I am proposing is that the forthcoming double break week period be used to have 12 hours of hearings. I originally thought 20 hours would be appropriate, but following discussions with colleagues who like to take advantage of break weeks for constituency work, I thought we could reduce that and tighten up the hearings so that they could be done in 12 hours instead.
Obviously we're willing to compromise and amend this motion to make it agreeable to members of the committee and to suit their desire, as parliamentarians, to have a productive session on this subject. This is just an opening proposition, and we look forward to hearing what other members have to say.
Thank you.