Industry committee  I'll go quick and I'll try to leave John some time. When you look at the underserved areas that we have now in rural, remote and indigenous Canada, it is because explicitly the companies have said that they do not find those areas profitable. There is nothing about this deal that suddenly makes those areas profitable to serve, which is why we have the universal broadband fund.

Industry committee  The clearest case to be seen is looking at cellphone services and wireless services in Canada. When you used to look at the provincial prices and you looked across, you immediately saw there was something that stood out in certain provinces, and it was that where there is a regional carrier or a fourth provider, those prices are lower.

Industry committee  It depends on the type of new competitor. When you look at cellphone services in particular, it's the fourth carrier strategy that's really based on that idea of facilities-based competition. If you want to be a competitor on cellphone networks in Canada right now, until the CRTC rules otherwise in the MVNO decision, you need to come into the country with billions of dollars, you need to find a way to bid on spectrum to be able to purchase the air waves themselves to be able to build the network and then you need to start building cellphone towers across the country from one end to the other so that you have a service to sell to customers.

Industry committee  Yes, that is correct. When we look at the ways that companies are, you can carve them up and try to shave them into something that is not quite too big, by whatever standards, but if they're already too big to start with and you're still letting them combine their capacity in one way or another, it still leads to a problem.

Industry committee  I'm not sure how much time we have, but I would agree that it's both. I think the deal itself is a problem, and I think the outcomes of the deal are a problem. The fact that this deal is even being proposed goes to show just how big our companies are and how much bigger they think they need to get in order to be able to keep growing.

Industry committee  I would have to get really creative in the number of conditions I could possibly put forward to find something that would offset this enough to make it worthwhile. I think we are so far from where we need to be under the current circumstances that trying to take so many creative measures to prevent our going backwards is a bit much.

Industry committee  I would agree. I think we've heard promises that new jobs will be created. I'd be curious as to whether those are permanent, full-time jobs that people can bank on as careers, or if they're temporary contract transition jobs that are to transition some of the hardware that they actually have to make their network compatible.

Industry committee  You can go first, John.

Industry committee  I think you raised two important issues. One is price, and one is service. When you look at remote and indigenous communities, these often go hand in hand, but very often it's so expensive because they are so underserved. The actual service is not available. I think that's where we look at the need to have the government support building the infrastructure.

Industry committee  No, I would agree with you. I think it is well past time to look at the Competition Act, at the powers of the competition commissioner and at what the bureau is able to do, to look at what competition actually means in this country. When you look at a number of industries, telecom being an excellent example, there is a long history of oligopolies or government-sanctioned monopolies that do not provide the competition that I think we would like to believe the bureau is there to support.

Industry committee  I hope they look at this really closely, and I hope they understand just how big a decision this is and what an impact it will have. Looking back at how the Bell MTS deal was handled, it's not encouraging, because even though all of the flags were raised about what damage it would do, it was allowed to proceed anyway.

Industry committee  Thank you. I think there is a world where 5G can lead to a lot of innovation for indigenous, remote and rural communities. There's a lot of talk of what it can do for farming communities, for example, and how it can actually help with our agricultural industries. I think the concern I have, and that a number of people have, with 5G is that the promises of what it can do for rural Canada are very far from where we are in actually implementing it in rural Canada.

Industry committee  It's hard to predict specific prices, although everyone wants to be able to do that. What Rogers promised for Freedom cellphones, as an example—and this is not just about cellphones, but it will impact home Internet as well—is that for the next three years Freedom cellphone prices will stay the exact same.

Industry committee  I would respectfully disagree. When we look at Canada's wireless market in particular, there was a report released just this week that again shows we pay the highest prices in the world, and the direct correlation is the number of providers that we have. Implying that having three national providers and the fourth carrier struggling to keep up is too many players is implying that they are comfortable with monopoly.

Industry committee  At the time, the Competition Bureau said that this deal was going to have a negative impact, but it still permitted the deal to go through. With regard to some of the questions you were discussing with your previous panel about what amendments can be made to the deal to try to make it palatable, I think that Bell MTS is a really good example of how that doesn't work.