Thank you very much.
In response to the question, I think one of the key things we've seen most recently is that COVID has shown the need for a really good broadband system. Currently, we have many of our children on and off going to school. They're required to be able to learn online. What we're finding is that we have a disparity between the ability of children in the urban centres versus rural centres to even learn at this time.
What we're also finding [Technical difficulty—Editor] many people would be able to work from home, but they're not able to do so because of the lack of the broadband services. Today, I drove 80 kilometres to my office. Typically, I would have liked to be able to do this testimony from home, but I do not have a good enough service at home that's anywhere near reliable enough to do this.
To the second part of your question—what have we done?—what we've done is realized that there is just not enough profit involved for any telecommunications company to come in and service our vast area with our sparse population. What we realized was that, if we could in fact put that backbone, that fibre and some towers, into the community, we could have companies come in and want to service our area.
I basically look at it as the same as building the first roads in our communities. It's the same as the first power line that was built by my great-grandfather in our area for the rural electric [Technical difficulty—Editor] where there was no power, or the gas co-op that just came in. I think that we need to, as levels of government, provide that service. I think that if we can do that together....
We've taken a huge bite out of this on the Red Deer County side, but I think that if we were able to get a little bit more help from other levels of government, we could set that backbone up so that we could have an access where we don't give this to one company or another. We, in fact, could share that road that we all drive on, because we don't need to build a bunch of roads. If we had one good road and everyone had shared access, we could have a system that would rival none.
I hope that answers your question.