Industry committee  Part of it is price, of course, as you say. The other thing is technological innovation, which will come. And it has come. Actually, I think that we are one of the only countries that has a coast-to-coast high-speed wireless access network right now. So we're not doing badly. Esp

Industry committee  I wouldn't make the recommendation if I wasn't satisfied of that. I think the international financiers who control finance, etc., appreciate that various countries have rules providing for national control. As long as the rules are clear and justly administered, etc., then it bec

Industry committee  Mr. Masse, you have my presentation before you. I suggest that you should deal with both of them when I say to liberalize, but do not open it up globally, to save 49% but make sure that Canadians can control it and it stays in Canadian hands. We are largely in agreement. Because

Industry committee  Could you be more specific? I want to make sure....

Industry committee  If you want to effect a progressive reform rather than a wholesale one, and you want to start with foreign ownership, then I'd say to do the same thing for both acts. Both acts now have essentially the same ownership restrictions. If you want to liberalize them, fine, liberalize

Industry committee  In every industry, competition brings a discipline into the market. You have to make sure that you have innovation and good service, and that the consumer benefits. If you have a lack of competition, those three things disappear over time.

Industry committee  Let's not make a comparison between gasoline and telecommunications. They're quite different industries. You're talking about telecommunications, particularly wireless. We now have three national coast-to-coast, very high-speed, state-of-the-art wireless carriers, notwithstandin

Industry committee  Of course they will merge. Of course they consolidate. Will they all consolidate together? Will we wind up with three or will we wind up with four or five? I'm sure there is not a place, in a market as small as Canada, with this huge geography that we have and its thinly distribu

Industry committee  Just a second; you're making a huge number of assumptions here. First, you're assuming that all of those mergers will pass the review by the Competition Bureau--

Industry committee  I'm talking about the Competition Bureau, I'm not talking about me. The Competition Bureau can't be overridden. That's number one. Two, notwithstanding our huge land mass and sparse population, our wireless network is equal to anyone's in the world, which is a phenomenal achieve

Industry committee  Well, the OECD always makes these wonderful studies. I've spent a lot of time at the OECD in Paris, etc. It's very hard to compare France and Canada or Korea and Canada. For one thing, they're not right next door to the largest communications and broadcasting market in the world.

Industry committee  The two that come to mind are Australia, where you have ACMA, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, and the States, where the Federal Communications Commission is largely in charge of all CMs and CIOs. Because, again, the States.... Every country has slightly differ

Industry committee  Absolutely. You're talking to a former Commissioner of Competition. I spent seven years in this country trying to foment competition.

Industry committee  Our broadcasting regulation system is based on a world with borders. We determine what can be transmitted or not. The content must be 60% Canadian and 40% foreign, for example. Then, with the advent of convergence, we could no longer control Internet or wireless technologies. Ho

Industry committee  Technically, it would be very easy to sidestep all the rules that we would like to impose. I don't see how we could do so. We could try to do so, as you suggest. Right now, the content is there. Cell phone owners can use applications as they wish. I don't believe that we will be