Mr. Speaker, as a matter of fact, with regulation, we see an increase. There are ceiling prices and floor prices. However, given the minister's order, deregulation will be uncontrolled. If competition becomes too fierce, there will be no one to cap prices, and they will be tempted to do that.
We may be sure that in the beginning perhaps the consumer will get fair value but we know very well that once an industry is established, the people in the industry agree among themselves and prices go up and up. There is then no longer any way to control price increases.
Before closing, I want to make a personal appeal to the new Minister of Canadian Heritage, the Status of Women and Official Languages, who is from the Quebec City area. She has received a very clear message from everyone. There is a coalition of all the stakeholders in Quebec. I will not name them all, but there at least ten groups and they are upset. A spokesperson for this coalition emphasized that the regulatory drift of the CRTC has increased in recent years but it dates back as far as 1999, and they are calling for it to stop. Moreover, we are being told that the rapid growth of technologies has left our cultural policies out of date.
We know very well that the spectre of new technologies is a false argument, because technologies are only a vehicle for a cultural message. That is where any new initiative for regulation of the telecommunications industry should be focused.
Instead of abusing the democracy of this House, why do they not introduce a bill? We would then learn what all those stakeholders in Quebec and other people think. Indeed, if there is a Canadian culture to protect, we would also like to here that. In the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, we used exactly that approach on the subject of threatened cultures. If Canadian culture feels threatened, perhaps we should be asking questions about Quebec culture. Is it not legitimate to think that it is also threatened and doubly so because we want to keep that culture?