Thank you, Mr. Chair.
We're here because Canadians are telling us different stats from some of the ones we're hearing today. They're telling us that they're still paying some of the highest cellphone prices in the world. After eight years under this Liberal government, we've had the cost of almost everything go up, which has been mentioned already by our witnesses. When we looked at grocery prices, we looked at the Toronto Daily Bread Food Bank, and there are 300,000 people visiting that food bank. Cellphones are not a luxury anymore. Cellphones are essential.
When we look at some of the facts, we see that cars are being stolen, and that's up 300% in Toronto alone. People use cellphones now to put Apple AirTags in their cars to track where their cars are going. They have doorbell cams because they're looking to prevent home invasions. People are using cellphones to find coupons to go to the grocery store.
Cellphones aren't a luxury. They're essential, and what happens when Canadians use more and more cellphones? They're using more data. When we look at the facts, by 2026 Canadians are going to need an average of about 50 gigabytes a month just to use the essentials on their cellphones, and we're not even talking about social media and other uses.
We look at other countries, and we compare prices with other countries. We have found that there's more competition in the U.S. There's more competition in Australia. What happens is that prices have gone down. We heard from Mr. Staffieri and Mr. Hartling that the prices at Rogers were lower than those in the U.S. and Australia.
Do you stand by that statement at this point?