Industry committee  I realize there are those who believe that any new creation of a government agency is per se a bad thing. What we recommended--and I regret that this has not been looked at more carefully to date, and I thank you for the question--was for the telecom consumer agency to be an industry-funded, industry-run, self-policing group under the supervision of the CRTC.

Industry committee  New Zealand is very interesting. They had a number of totally libertarian economists come to advise them around the time that....You may recall that in the early 1980s New Zealand technically went almost bankrupt. The International Monetary Fund came in and a number of steps were taken to privatize industry and to try to get the country back on track fiscally.

Industry committee  I'm not sure there is much I can add to what we've said about win-backs in the report. The one comment I would make is that there has been a lot of concern—and I've heard the comment hundreds of times that you've made, Mr. McTeague—that the person with the deepest pockets is going to be the only one left standing.

Industry committee  I've spent the last three months trying to buy a satellite company. That answers the question.

Industry committee  Without accepting any of the assumptions in your question, I would say yes, it would have been possible, I think, for the commission to move toward deregulation more quickly, because, as I pointed out, the law is so broad and vague that it essentially gives the regulator a very broad degree of discretion to apply policies.

Industry committee  In defence of our report, we did not recommend three new regulators. We recommended--

Industry committee  I think that's very true. There are always real concerns about deregulating in an area and what might happen if the market is allowed to run amok and cause problems. But the reality is, in the very regulated markets we've had in the telecommunications area over the last decade, we've had dozens and probably closer to hundreds of companies—CLEC and others—go out of business, notwithstanding a significant amount of regulatory oversight.

Industry committee  Yes. I think what we had hoped for was that in addition to the policy direction, the government would endorse some of the new regulatory framework recommendations made in our report.

Industry committee  That's a particular issue, the forbearance issue.

Industry committee  It's an important issue.

Industry committee  Right. Is there a huge risk in applying the market threshold test, the competitive presence test that the government has implemented? I don't think so. And sometimes it's worth trying these things out. We tend to be overly protective, sometimes. If it really does transpire that there are serious problems with competition evolving outside of the 20 top Canadian markets, then it wouldn't be too late, in our view, to....

Industry committee  I was going to say, I don't think we believe that having the competitive presence test applied for a few years is too great a risk for Canadian society or the economy.

Industry committee  That's very fair. I think in the end it should be the job of a regulator to look at the actual level of competition in a market, because it is hard to prescribe a bright-line test. Many have tried. The commission tried with its 25% rule, and government is now trying with its competitive presence test.

Industry committee  I really haven't thought that through.

Industry committee  Yes, he is. If the government follows through on the rest of our recommendations, which we're hoping will happen, that would be the case. Let me tell you a little bit about why we put the recommendation for the policy direction into the report. It was a bit of an afterthought. What we were concerned about is the great fear of anyone who devotes a little bit of their private time, as we did, to a public initiative such as this, to spend the time and hard work to write a report.