Industry committee  Madam Chair, I will again turn to my colleague Éric, who actually runs the programming, to speak a little bit about this issue. Obviously, affordability is a key objective of the government. There are a variety of programs and measures on affordability. In terms of the actual arrangements that we have to subsidize deployment of broadband, I'll turn to Éric on that.

Industry committee  Madam Chair, maybe you can turn to Éric on this, but there is.... For wireline Internet access, there are requirements. There are wholesale rates that are established by the CRTC.

Industry committee  We obviously want to have projects that will be viable in the long term, but no, the pricing is not built into the contract. That's not a feature of the discussion.

Industry committee  Thank you for your question. As I explained, these are fairly complicated infrastructure projects. Obviously, our goal is to move them along as quickly as possible. Is the interpretation coming through?

Industry committee  I see.

Industry committee  Is that working for everyone? Very good. I had briefly explained that these infrastructure projects can be rather complicated in some cases. I am going to turn the floor over to Éric Dagenais because he is more familiar with the circumstances and projects in Quebec. He can give you more details.

Industry committee  Madam Chair, I think Éric Dagenais should answer those questions.

Industry committee  One example would be the connect to innovate program, which was announced by the current administration in its first mandate. Then there was a top-up to the connect to innovate program. The total value of funding for the top-up and the original programming is $585 million, with the anticipation of about 390,000 households being connected.

Industry committee  Madam Chair, there has been an enormous amount of work, I can assure members, to get more sophisticated mapping and to build a pathfinder service so that when communities come to us we are actually able to work with them more closely, particularly communities that have a little less capacity to engage on these complicated projects.

Industry committee  Madam Chair, maybe I'll turn back to Éric Dagenais, but what I would say is that, obviously, we've just launched the program. There are clear application criteria. We want to sit down with potential applicants and work through their circumstances to understand how we can work together.

Industry committee  Again, as I noted, there have been a number of strings of activity that the government has launched, generally aimed at different purposes—for example, there is the low-earth orbit satellite investment the government has made; there is funding that has been provided to connect first nations communities; there is, obviously, the universal broadband fund.

Industry committee  Madam Chair, from the department's point of view—and I won't pass judgment on whether the quantum is sufficient—it's been a very large amount of money relative to the historical spend, in the zone of nine to 10 times more than the historical spend. The other point I'd like to make to the honourable members is to point out that in many cases these are infrastructure projects that even in the best of circumstances take time.

Industry committee  Madam Chair, I'm happy to start with that. It is true that there are a number of streams of funding available for broadband. The CRTC, obviously, has funding that it is allocating. We have the universal broadband fund, and we have a set-aside that's available to work with the Infrastructure Bank, which has set aside $2 billion, so there are a number of streams of funding.

Industry committee  Madam Chair, I could answer that. As the minister said, the government does have a coordinated national strategy, just to assure members. There is a coordinating table. ISED plays a chairing role in that regard. Without getting deep into the details, there are different kinds of broadband projects, and different projects have different demands.

Finance committee  I simply want to say that it will be our pleasure to provide further details to the committee about this. As the minister said, we have received...