Thank you very much. It's a real pleasure to be here. If you would like to follow along, we have tweeted out our presentation under the INDU hashtag. We cover some data, and you can see some of the visuals that we made to go along with it there.
The proposed megamerger between Canada’s second- and fourth-largest communications and media conglomerates, Rogers and Shaw, would—if approved—significantly lessen competition. The merger would catapult Rogers even further ahead in the mobile wireless market, and it would become the biggest cable TV and Internet access provider in Canada.
It triggers all the criteria used by competition and communication regulators to assess these kinds of deals. It would also overturn a decade and a half of policies by successive Conservative and Liberal governments alike to foster a fourth maverick mobile operator in all regions of the country.
That policy has made solid progress: Vidéotron has carved out close to 20% market share in Quebec and the NCR, while Eastlink has roughly 10% of the mobile wireless market in the Maritime provinces and Shaw has gained just over 8% market share in B.C., Alberta and Ontario.
This transaction would eliminate Shaw-owned Freedom Mobile as a significant competitor in those three provinces, which include two of our biggest cities—Toronto and Vancouver—and the nation's capital, with knock-on effects across the country.
The deal would also significantly raise concentration levels nationally in the mobile wireless market. 5G will require substantial [Technical difficulty—Editor] handled similar challenges in the past though, and there’s no reason to doubt their capabilities now.
Shaw actually plows proportionately more of its revenue back into upgrading its fibre and mobile wireless networks than Rogers.