Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, I don't have that number totally off the top of my head.... It would be 300,000 households in terms of removing the remaining 2%.

Public Accounts committee  Yes.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, I'm not minimizing them. I'm just making the point that we will need different kinds of technology. We haven't talked about it today. It wasn't the focus of the report. We are also working on developing low-earth orbit satellite technology to bring high-speed Internet satellite coverage to the north.

Public Accounts committee  No, 300,000 Canadians is the remaining number we have to make decisions on regarding how best to connect them, given that it will be difficult to connect them with some of the technologies we're using.

Public Accounts committee  I might turn to my colleague. One thing I will note is that we have a fairly aggressive agenda to work with the telecom companies and the CRTC in order to improve the reliability of telecom services and particularly to deal with emergencies. We can spend a bit of time on that, but perhaps there's a specific question.

Public Accounts committee  I should clarify that this is an agreement to purchase capacity on Telesat's constellation when it is launched. Telesat's constellation is not operating yet. It is a commitment to support that Canadian company when its satellite technology launches in order to provide those services to Canadians.

Public Accounts committee  This is a financial pledge. There hasn't been a dollar spent yet.

Public Accounts committee  No, this is a—

Public Accounts committee  There has been no disbursement of money through that pledge of $600 million, because that is an agreement to purchase time on a satellite constellation once it has been launched. The satellite constellation hasn't been launched; ergo, the money has not yet been spent.

Public Accounts committee  Other than the current people connected in the earlier—

Public Accounts committee  No, because the satellite constellation has not unlocked yet.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for the chance to comment. Maybe I could briefly provide a slightly broader response to the question. We want to underline that we agree completely that there are significant coverage gaps in rural Canada and in indigenous communities. It is absolutely the case that historically, indigenous communities have much less connectivity than other communities in Canada.

Public Accounts committee  I'd just like to clarify that we completely agree that cellular coverage on the roads is very important. The Auditor General mentioned that we needed to address this serious issue, and we agree. So far, the goal of this policy has been to connect people to the Internet, but clearly we need to examine that other issue.

Public Accounts committee  We can absolutely provide the Committee with a response.

Public Accounts committee  It's not as if economies of scale were possible if we did both at the same time.