Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm going to paint a little picture of my constituency first. If I eat up some of my own time doing that, it's okay because I'll be back up again.
I live in Miramichi. That's a beautiful salmon-fishing, more central-northern part of New Brunswick. It's a very beautiful riding.
Twenty years ago, I moved to South Korea. I spent two years working there. It always dawns on me that the Internet and mobility capability that the South Koreans had in 2003, 2004 and 2005 was actually better than what my constituents have today, 20 years later. That really pains me.
I was a provincial MLA for 11 years. A fibre optic cable runs from Newcastle to Fredericton along Route 8 in New Brunswick. That's about a two-hour drive. There are lots of people who live along Route 8. The company that owns that cable said it's not up to them to hook up the people who live there. They would often send those constituents back to me. As a provincial MLA, I always felt that we were like the last person to get invited to the dinner.
The infrastructure is private and the regulation is federal. I always felt like I was a complete disservice. It didn't seem like I could ever help my constituents. I wore it a lot. I took it home with me because I have four small children and my wife is a teacher. I'm a public figure. Internet service is so important to everyone where I live.
The interesting thing about that is that, some years later, we found out who was connected to that fibre optic cable. It was large industry. There were only a couple of them in my area—two or three at a maximum. It was the pharmacies and the Atlantic Institution.
You can imagine: An inmate in a maximum security prison in my constituency maybe only has access to Internet once a day and maybe it's not for very long, but he was getting connected to fibre optic while my constituents were having to choose between two monopolies. In the municipal regions, which are still very rural, you had the option of broadband, which was terrible compared to what the fibre optic would have been. In the rural and more remote areas of New Brunswick, you had the option of satellite Internet, which was terrible and the price just kept going up.
You can picture my neighbour, who is an 80-plus-year-old woman. She's looking out of her kitchen window directly at a fibre optic cable. It's 15 feet away from her. The company won't hook her up because they already have her business on the lower end of what they are offering. She doesn't have anything else until recently. Now there's Starlink. Thank God it exists. It actually outperformed everything we had in rural New Brunswick.
I have a couple of questions here and I don't know who should answer them. For me, the Prime Minister and the government are always accountable for everything, but lately the Prime Minister doesn't think anything is his job. Today, I'm curious about whose job it is. I want one of you to answer me and I have no favourite. Whoever thinks it's their job to answer can do so.
Whose job is it to ensure that rural Canadians have proper Internet mobility service?