Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to the committee members for coming here today.
I have to agree with the Auditor General here. This report is pretty startling, especially if you're living in rural Canada. It's nothing that we didn't know before. Over a million households in rural Canada and over half of first nations still don't have access to high-speed Internet. I think it's quite startling.
I have been hearing that. We have all been hearing this from rural Canada, and now the proof is in the pudding. I can't get over how the government keeps saying that they have Canadians' backs and they are looking after rural Canada, but the facts aren't lying here. This is quite detrimental to keeping Canada together.
I thank you so much for bringing out these important points.
Another kind of startling thing is why. Why is this all happening? In your report, you say that the universal broadband fund was supposed to be rolled out and awarded within 10 months. Actually, in your findings, it took up to 22 months to have the broadband fund award these projects. What was supposed to take only 10 months took 22 months. That's twice as long. The rapid response stream—we added up the numbers here—was supposed to be really fast and get to those shovel-ready projects. It was supposed to be five to 13 weeks, but it got extended out to 41 weeks.
Things are a mess. They are not reporting and there seems to be no accountability to this. This is quite troubling, for sure. Again, I thank you for shining some light onto these problems.
You raised concern about inaccurate connectivity data in your report: “We were told that network coverage information on the National Broadband Internet Service Availability Map was not only out-of-date but also sometimes inaccurate. One potential consequence of these inaccuracies was that households or communities without coverage could be shown to have coverage.”
Does this mean that the government's connectivity data is inflated?