Mr. Speaker, I want to assure the member that affordable telecommunications services to Canadians in both rural and urban areas across Canada is a fundamental policy objective of the Telecommunications Act and it is key to the government's program called Connecting Canadians.
The CRTC has taken a number of initiatives to ensure that Canadians have access to a affordable, high quality telecommunication service, including an explicit subsidy from long distance carriers to support local telephone service which particularly benefits high cost rural and remote areas.
The CRTC has mandated that the level of basic telephone service generally available in urban areas must be provided in rural and remote areas. The CRTC has ordered the incumbent telephone companies to file service improvement plans to provide this level of service in those few areas where it is not available. This will mean significant investments by the telephone companies. However, in the end it will eliminate party lines and ensure that all Canadians can have access to the Internet without paying long distance charges.
Until 2002 the CRTC has capped annual price increases for residential service. Increases in residential rates are limited to inflation on average, with a maximum allowable increase of 10% on any particular local rate.
Under this price cap regulation, the telephone companies must file with the CRTC annual proposals for price changes.
Most of the telephone companies are proposing increases to be brought in over two years. In some cases, the companies are seeking approval for the maximum allowable increases in areas where the disparity between the cost of providing service and the price of service is the greatest. In Bell's territory, for example, most rural customers pay less for telephone service than urban customers even though the cost of providing them service is higher.
It is worth noting that, according to the OECD, Canadians continue to enjoy among the lowest telephone service rates in the world and the lowest—