Industry committee  I'd just like to add one thing to what Ben said, if I may. It's not just about the kind of downward pressure on adoption rates. It's even that once you do have adoption, it's the pressure and the constraints placed on usage that have kept Canadian rates at half the OECD level or a third of the U.S. levels.

Industry committee  I'd like to add a couple of points. I think Robin is dead right. The experience of Mayor Wood there is spot on. The interesting thing is that Mayor Wood's experience is replicated across the country. It has been for over a century. I think there are a couple of really important things right now.

Industry committee  Sure. I'll take an initial stab at it and then turn it over to Ben. I think these are not things that we have to trade off against one another. I think what we've seen is that companies like Eastlink, Vidéotron and Shaw have significant scale to make the capital investments in the new fibre and new generations [Technical difficulty—Editor] technology that we need.

Industry committee  I think I'd really insist on holding the line at “this deal should not go through”. The reasons for that are twofold. First, trying to create an imaginary, new fourth competitor to replace one that's already existing is a fool's errand. We've already seen that with the Bell MTS deal.

Industry committee  Yes, I believe we should. We have some of the most restrictive foreign ownership rules in the world. The last time I checked on this, South Korea was the only country in the OECD that had more restrictive rules than Canada. The thing is, you know, we've been here before. We've seen this plot line before, and this plot line does not necessarily translate into reality.

Industry committee  Yes, they've maintained extremely lucrative profit margins, in the 30% to 40% range, which is three to four times the average of Canadian industry as a whole. This idea that we have the eighth-largest market—I was stunned when I gathered this data up over the week—speaks directly to Robin Shaban's point.

Industry committee  Twenty-five years ago, Rogers and Shaw carved up cable and Internet access markets into “cable monopoly east” and “cable monopoly west”. This lead some to believe that a tie-up today will have minimal to no effect on either of these markets. While it is true that they did not compete with each other head to head thereafter, Shaw's earlier embrace of new cable network and set-top box technology revealed it to be the more innovative of the two firms, while also forcing Telus to roll out IPTV and fibre to the home five years earlier than Bell in Ontario and Quebec.

Industry committee  Thank you very much. It's a real pleasure to be here. If you would like to follow along, we have tweeted out our presentation under the INDU hashtag. We cover some data, and you can see some of the visuals that we made to go along with it there. The proposed megamerger between Canada’s second- and fourth-largest communications and media conglomerates, Rogers and Shaw, would—if approved—significantly lessen competition.

Industry committee  I'm very sorry, Mr. Lemire, and I apologize to the translators. The merger, we need to recognize, is not the only option. Rogers and Shaw could build on existing network-sharing agreements like Rogers does with Quebecor in Ontario and Quebec, and as Bell and Telus do nation-wide, or they could strike deals to share fibre and radio access networks.