I'll just add that a lot of it turns on a decision about what sort of economy and society we want to have. Do we want to have large powerful champions that we hand a tremendous amount of power to and then put a lot of trust in, or would we prefer to see a more decentralized competitive environment that is operating according to the sorts of pressures exerted by a marketplace?
This is something that's relevant, I think, in the context of this discussion about the efficiencies defence, because Rogers is presenting this as “we're going to spend x billion dollars”. Mr. Natale confirmed in front of this committee that it would be new investment, but they're presenting the counterfactual, the status quo of each company going on its own, as if it's the only alternative.
We heard from Dr. Winseck that when AT&T was not allowed to take over T-Mobile, T-Mobile shifted its strategy and became more innovative. In Canada, we have an example in the network-sharing agreement of Bell and Rogers, which demonstrates that a company doesn't need to merge to provide world-class telecommunications service.
Bell and Telus collectively share a network. They've had this agreement in place since 2001. It's explicitly designed so that neither company has to put out the capital outlay that would be required to cover the entire country with mobile networks, but so both of them are able to offer service. It's a way of achieving efficiencies and scale without the attendant problems of creating a corporate hyper giant that would be, from coast to coast, in control of everything, right?
You see that there are alternatives. If you say no to Rogers, even if they don't invest, Rogers and Shaw, for instance, could enter into such an agreement and come to the same outcome without the problems.