Mr. Speaker, one of the reasons that I am proud to serve as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport is the essential nature of transportation in a country with a geography such as ours.
If we consider the facts of our country, the longest distance north to south on land is 4.6 thousand kilometres from Cape Columbia on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut to Middle Island in Lake Erie, Ontario. The longest distance east to west is 5.5 thousand kilometres from Cape Spear in Newfoundland and Labrador to the Yukon territory at the Alaska boundary. Despite this fact, we have the 39th biggest population in the world, meaning we have one of the less populated lands, despite our enormous geographic breadth.
In short, Canada has one of the lowest population densities in the world. That means that we have enormous challenges moving people and things to their destinations. One of the things that matters most is books and other reading materials that come in the form of magazine publications, journals and specialized articles that are very hard for some people to get other than at their local libraries. This bill seeks to address that challenge.
Before I discuss how it does that, I would like to talk a bit about the changing nature of the marketplace of cultural products. I have been reading a book called The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson. He talks about how, not so long ago, sales of music products, for example, were overwhelmingly concentrated in the top 20 or top 100 artists or albums. That was because of something called shelf space. Music stores had only so much shelf space that they could offer to musicians. As a result, they had to dedicate that shelf space to those products that sold at the highest volumes. That meant that promising artists who had a dispersed following with a moderate but no less significant demand would not even get into music stores. They could not get shelf space. As a result, it was always the top 20 and top 100 that had most of the sales.
Something interesting happened with the growth of the digital world, which was infinite shelf space. No longer was physical space required to store the books, cassettes, CDs or records, as used to be required in the pre-digital era. Now there is literally infinite shelf space at our fingertips as we sit in front of our personal computers, laptops, iPads or any other devices that connect to the Internet. This means two things: one, it eliminates the barriers of transportation that afflicted a vast country such as ours; two, specialized artists, which is to say people who write or produce music in areas for which there is a small niche demand, can now have an easier time reaching their market because they do not need to secure shelf space at major retailers. This is true for music and books, and it is an exciting development in the democratization of literature and reading.
People who have unique interests and live in remote communities will not have to travel long distances or wait long periods of time for books to be delivered to them. In fact, they can order them online as long as they have some sort of Internet connection, which increasingly they do.
In 2007, 65% of rural Canadians used the Internet, compared with 76% of urban Canadians; by the end of 2009, 84% of rural households had access to broadband, compared with 100% of urban households. Less than 80% of rural households in the territories, Newfoundland, Quebec and British Columbia had access to broadband. Nearly 100% of rural households in P.E.I., New Brunswick and Nova Scotia had access to broadband.
To summarize all of these statistics, what is most interesting is that in a two-year period, from 2007 to 2009, we saw Canada's rural communities go from two-thirds with broadband access to three-quarters. That trajectory is very promising. It means not only the democratization of the Internet but also increased digital access to literature and other cultural products.
This is very positive. What we need to do as a government is more or less stay out of the way and allow, in a low-tax, free-trade, limited regulatory environment, the marketplace to provide this great explosion of digital opportunities to the Canadian people.
There remains a gap, however. That is the gap that my hon. colleague and chairman of the transport committee is seeking to address in moving this private member's bill. We all congratulate him for doing that.
His bill would allow Canada Post to continue to take advantage of its enormous economies of scale in delivering things from one place to another. One very important thing, as I said earlier, is literature: publications, books and other materials. There are certain people who are either disabled, do not have the financial means or are, for whatever reasons, suffering from an inability to access written materials; this bill would help them to do just that.
By taking advantage of the economies of scale of this vast crown corporation, which already delivers vast amounts of mail across the country, we can provide a low-cost opportunity for these Canadians who would otherwise be excluded from publications that interest them to have access to those publications. It is in that spirit that we support this bill.
At the same time, we celebrate the fact that the free enterprise economy is delivering to Canadians of all incomes, of all walks of life, in all geographies, access to knowledge that was not even contemplated only a couple of decades ago. To call the transformation in communications technology that we witnessed in the last quarter century “revolutionary” would be an understatement. It is a tribute to the enormous power of free enterprise economics that this commerce has brought us these new tools that make it possible for people of limited means to have extraordinary access to knowledge and to thereby have incredible upward mobility in our economy.
Every day that I wake up, I celebrate the fact that I was born in a free country with a largely free economy, a country that is now the sixth-freest economy in the world, four spots ahead of the United States of America. This government made its decision to reduce the cost of the state by $5 billion over the next three years, to expand free trade, eliminate excessive regulation and keep taxes low. We are building upon that Canadian tradition of free enterprise. That is the source, the fundamental source, of our prosperity; we celebrate it and we build upon it.