Thank you.
We sometimes think of the issue of urbanization as a third world issue. On average, there are about a million people a week who move from the countryside to the city in places like India and elsewhere, but the same thing is happening in North America. We're finding that rural communities are getting smaller and that the percentage of GDP coming from those communities continues to decline. Nobody is thinking of a way to put more labour into a farm; they're thinking about ways to take labour out of a farm.
When we look at that, we look at the infrastructure that we need in cities and the jobs that we're going to find in the cities. Between artificial intelligence and robotics, we're heading towards what they call “singularity”, where there's a whole different way of looking at things. Throughout that, one thing is going to remain true: we need very efficient ways to move massive amounts of data around because everything we're looking at, moving forward, is data.
If you think about how we built our initial infrastructure, if I had a home and I wanted water, I dug a well. Then my neighbour dug a well, and his neighbour dug a well. Finally, we said that it made more sense to do that as a utility and have it managed by the government, so we did that. Then we did that with roads, with rail, and with electricity. Nobody thinks about building their own electricity, and nobody digs their own well anymore, but everybody is still putting in their own bandwidth.
We have Rogers digging trenches and laying fibre. We have Bell digging trenches and laying fibre. I was at a meeting recently with the head of OC Transpo and the head of Hydro Ottawa. I asked them if they were each laying fibre, and they said yes. I asked them if they knew the other was also, and they said no. I told them that they had each dug up the same street three times, putting glass in the ground.
Fibre optics is the key to building smart infrastructure. It is the basis. You can't do anything if you don't have that. We don't have enough of it, and we don't have a strategy for it. There should be a simple policy that calls for one provider of that glass, and that stipulates that it does not need to be a for-profit product. It can be government-managed, just like water. What you do with the water when it comes out the other end is something that industries can manage on their own. We have to start thinking of bandwidth as a utility and, therefore, as one that should be managed by government.
If we can get past that hurdle, the efficiencies are phenomenal.
Thank you.