Madam Chair, I'm happy to provide thoughts, generally, about this issue of balancing, as the minister discussed. I won't add any colour commentary to the Governor in Council statement because I think the statement, obviously, stands on its own. The CRTC is undertaking its own reconsideration, if you like, of the matter.
In terms of balancing, certainly as a department we are obviously seized with the issue of affordability. We have a variety of programs to support affordability. We want to make sure that Canadians, no matter where they live, get access to high-speed Internet. We certainly understand that this is a very, very important service to be made available.
With regard to wholesale Internet rates, I'll generalize. The issue is that while you want to have rates that are affordable and rates so that people will be able to get access to the service, there continues to be a question of areas in the country where there is no service built out yet, so you need a facilities-based provider to actually go in there and lay fibre to build out service and make the actual capital investment to actually build the network. Then there are areas—and one of the honourable members mentioned it earlier—with regard to reliability. You have areas where you have a network, but you need to make investments to maintain the network and upgrade it.
There is, I guess I would say, generally a concern that we make sure that the wholesale rates are such that they achieve the affordability objective but also don't inadvertently discourage the continued maintenance of the existing network so that it falls further and further behind because the business case to maintain it is perhaps not there, and we also don't want to discourage the build-out in the areas where there is no service. This is not an abstract issue. If I were to be absurd, if you set the rates at zero, there would be zero incentive to build out the network. Balancing—