Public Accounts committee  Yes.

Public Accounts committee  My suggestion would be to come back with a detailed response in writing, just because I am a bit worried about eating up too much of the time. What I will say very briefly is that we have had progressively stricter spectrum deployment conditions in each auction. There are many different spectrum licences that have been auctioned at different times and in different places.

Public Accounts committee  I'm not sure. I apologize.

Public Accounts committee  I would be very happy to come back. As I say, I think we have a very aggressive “use it or lose it” policy.

Public Accounts committee  At the risk of repeating myself for the third or fourth time, we agree that the connectivity in rural Canada and in Indigenous communities is an issue and that we need to be focused on it—

Public Accounts committee  We are very focused on it—

Public Accounts committee  No, Mr. Chair, I think it's that the honourable member doesn't want to listen to the facts. I have been very clear multiple times—

Public Accounts committee  The biggest challenge to get to the 2026 figures that we've been talking about, the 98% plus, is, frankly, a matter of time. Many of these are large infrastructure projects. They take two or three years to build, and a lot of them are in train now. We've seen significant progress from 2018 to the present, but we need to run the line out another couple of years to 2026 before some of these very large projects that have been announced in concert with the provinces actually....

Public Accounts committee  There are different kinds of partnerships. For example, for the investments that are made in indigenous communities, we have a pathfinder service. We have a explicit group in the ministry that works a bit like a concierge service to assist indigenous project proponents with their investments.

Public Accounts committee  I will turn to my colleague Mr. Dagenais, because he manages the relationship with a lot of these proponents and actually has been doing a lot of the work with the provinces. I think he might want to speak to that.

Public Accounts committee  As I noted in my last response, my view is that the Department of Industry is responsible for closing the gap. That's an explicit assignment that we were given. We've been given the resources and we're working on that. My comments earlier were simply to note that, absent a government program such as this, there's no particular requirement for....

Public Accounts committee  I would just note, and I'd be happy to provide the very specific figures to the committee, that we agree that there's more work to be done to connect up indigenous communities. That is unquestioned. We agree that there's more work to be done for rural communities. I will, however, return to my earlier testimony.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, maybe I'd just make, again, two comments. One, and I'd be happy to table this, it is absolutely true that we have more work to do on rural and remote and indigenous coverage. In terms of comparisons to another country, I'd be happy to share the data. Canada in aggregate actually compares quite favourably with many other advanced jurisdictions.

Public Accounts committee  —but if you look at Europe or the United States, actually our coverage is generally good. Our networks are generally of higher quality. In the coverage of rural areas, even though we have more work to do in Canada, for sure, we actually compare favourably internationally. We have a price issue, which the government is focused on, but on coverage, Canada actually stacks up reasonably well.

Public Accounts committee  With the investments being made, even in coverage in rural and remote areas, Canada, in general, is higher in the league table than many other countries.