I'm subbing in for a colleague.
We live in a country where oligopolies exist, especially in the protected markets in which the telecom companies operate.
If I can use the analogy.... Look at the grocery sector. For a long time, a lot of the grocery participants said these leases for where you could set up shop didn't exist. All of a sudden, we brought in legislation—I think it was Bill C-56—and now you have entities saying, “Jeez, these leases may have existed to prevent competitors from entering the grocery market.” Now we have a voluntary code of conduct in the grocery sector, which I hope becomes a legal code of conduct, because there is too much corporate concentration.
Please forgive me if I don't.... The other analogy is that you folks are like the Energizer bunny because you're like the gift that keeps on giving, in a very negative sense, to your customers. Regrettably, we have to say this. Canadians are frustrated when they see their bills increasing. I understand it in some sectors. We have seen reductions in certain services, like wireless and so forth. Have the reductions happened quickly enough? I would say no. Do we have a protected market? I would say yes. I can probably glean over all your financial statements, your P and L and your cash flow statements and see the billions of dollars in share repurchases, dividend stock buybacks and so forth.
Frankly, I love competition and I love wealth creation, but I hate crony capitalism and I hate crony concentration in markets. This is independent of political allegiance or alignment. We really need to look at this in this country and where we're going. Canadians work hard for the money they make and they want to see the value for it. We're here to represent our residents and Canadians. We're not here to represent anyone else's interests. We're here to promote competition and get rid of the crony...especially competition within competitive markets.
Today, I found out that one of your entities is selling your assets to one of the PE shops out of New York City. I'm going to look at that when I finish up here and read more about it. It creates some worries.
On the wireless side, how competitive or uncompetitive is our market versus other jurisdictions? When you travel abroad, it seems much cheaper there than it is here at home.
I'll go to Bell first, and then to Rogers.