Madam Speaker, I am pleased to make a few remarks today with respect to Bill C-57, the amendment to the Bell Canada Act.
Right off the top it is clear that this legislation is a housekeeping amendment and Reform supports its speedy passage. Bill C-57 simply removes the restriction preventing Bell Canada from holding a broadcasting licence, thereby allowing it to get into the cable business at some point down the road.
Bill C-57 flows from the government's convergence policy announced in August. Convergence has become one of those words that is bandied about a lot. People sometimes use it to sound impressive, but convergence simply means the coming together of different technologies and industries into a new competitive environment. In this case we are talking about cable companies getting into the business of providing telephone services and telephone companies becoming cable providers, both in direct competition with each other.
As the process of convergence pertains to this bill, we are referring to Bell Canada being allowed to hold a broadcast licence. In the late 1960s the Bell Canada Act was amended to prevent Bell from getting into the cable business in order to protect the fledgling cable industry.
Today with the likes of Rogers and Shaw, companies which have grown enormously since their beginning in the protected marketplace they have had, now the playing field is a bit more level. So this is really an administrative prelude to the more difficult and challenging task of actually getting convergence and the prospective competitors up and running.
The CRTC, which Terence Corcoran of the Globe and Mail has called the Canadian roadblock to telecommunications competition, is currently holding hearings with stakeholders on how best to proceed with the nuts and bolts of the government's convergence policy. I certainly do not envy it that task. Much of it will be concerned with the arcane technical details that must be worked out in order to make sure that any new system functions smoothly for both the providers of the service and for consumers alike.
What is certain however is that convergence will benefit the consumer. It is for that reason that Reform urges the government to push ahead as swiftly as possible in its implementation. Witness long distance competition as an example of consumer benefit.
In 1992 the CRTC permitted resellers to enter the long distance phone market. Competition in other words. To begin with there were many players, some big, many small. Those consumers who switched early will recall dialling multiple access codes and passwords in order to be able to call long distance with their newly chosen provider.
Slamming, or the practice of moving a consumer from one long distance provider to another without their consent, was rife. Many small companies fell by the wayside under the strength of the larger firms.
Along came 1994 and the ease of access provisions. Then we could simply pick up the phone and our long distance call was billed to the chosen company.
During all of this, intense marketing was taking place. Door to door campaigns and multimillion dollar TV blitzes with Hollywood stars were launched in order to woo our patronage. People switched because they saw that prices actually had dropped right across the board. Even the Stentor companies that own the networks were forced to become competitive, all without the due interference of the prodding CRTC. Wonder of wonders: private sector competition in an area of former monopoly control and the consumer benefits.
Well, it will be the same with competition in local phone service as well as in cable. Pricing and service packages will become more attractive and competition will keep the choices interesting. New entrants into monopoly fields will shake up the old ways of thinking and marketing and operating. Stodginess and complacency will thankfully become things of the past.
The convergence of phone and cable, which we have come to be so familiar with, will open doors to new types of service simply due to the inherent properties of the technologies. But there are new technologies coming on line by the time convergence gets up and running that will further stimulate and spur competition. I refer to PCS, personal communications service, the next generation of cellular based telephones, and LMCS, local multipoint communications system, or wireless cable.
Instead of having an 18-inch dish outside your house for direct to home satellite service, assuming it ever gets up and running that is, how about an 8-inch dish on top of your television delivering high
quality digital TV and audio services and high speed Internet access as well? It is just a couple of years away.
Industry Canada is going through the process of granting the first batch of licences right now and PCS is already hitting the market. New technologies make it a more secure and a far more flexible form of wireless telephone service than current analogue or even digital cellular. The types of things it can do make it more akin to land line phone service than anything yet available.
I recently heard an interesting quote. It said that nowadays one should not invest in companies that still employ professional ditch diggers. The inference is that wireless is the way of the future. The once mighty cable and phone companies have more to worry about than just each other with these new technologies coming on the scene. The issue is not without politics either, as if anything in this place ever is without politics.
British Columbia's telephone company, B.C. Tel, was to have been barred from entry into the cable business based upon a historical reality. That reality is the fact that 75 years or so ago, there was not enough interested Canadian capital available to build B.C. Tel's initial infrastructure so it went south of the border for the money to build the system. This was before the cultural engineers in Ottawa decided that foreign capital was a bad thing in a business like a phone company.
As a result of being 51 per cent or so foreign owned by GTE Inc. of the U.S., B.C. Tel apparently violates all sorts of culturally sensitive rules made by the Ottawa bureaucrats. In its questionable wisdom, the CRTC recommended in its convergence report in 1995 that B.C. Tel be denied entry into the cable business due to this foreign content. Let me say that much consternation ensued in B.C. and the Liberals felt some of the heat that might come if B.C. Tel's future in the cable industry was denied.
In its wisdom and in an apparent victory for the industry minister over the heritage minister and her protectionist ways, the cabinet in approving the convergence policy has decided to let B.C. Tel into the cable business after all. Perhaps the thought of a hoard of angry British Columbians was not all that appealing.
We have a bright future for Canada's telecommunications sector. We lag behind in some technologies like direct to home satellites and PCS but we are ahead in others like cable Internet access and LMCS.
Large numbers of jobs will flow from convergence, high tech jobs, and that certainly is good news. In this first legislative round over convergence, I am glad the Liberals have finally come to their senses but I also wish to urge them to move toward turning policy into reality just as quickly as they can. The benefits are simply too great to permit much delay.