Industry committee  I'll just say one thing on that. I think it's more about what we could call “regulatory hesitance”. I'm not so sure about the independence part. I don't have enough knowledge and experience with that. A Harvard study back in 2009 pointed to something that it called “regulatory hesitance” among Canadian regulators.

Industry committee  I myself can't speak enough on that.

Industry committee  I'm going to hand this off to Ben as well. I think there are four things I'd say in response to your earlier question. I would say that the Competition Bureau seems to be handcuffed by a lack of a mandate and resources to look at what's happened after a deal has already been approved, so we need to have a retrospective assessment.

Industry committee  I think I'm just good to go here—

Industry committee  There seem to be a couple of questions there. Regarding the idea of the tax question, I think that's pretty low-hanging fruit, and we can standardize the HST and GST across the like services. I think we're waiting on a developments agreement at the OECD on a digital services tax that would harmonize that across the OECD countries.

Industry committee  I'll turn that to Ben.

Industry committee  I will make a short answer to that. I'm not quite sure how onerous the administrative burdens on telecommunications companies are as opposed to, say, members of the public who want to participate in regulatory proceedings. The Competition Bureau itself has very non-existent public proceedings; it does not even meet the standards of the CRTC.

Industry committee  Thank you very much. I will lead the discussion and hand it over at the end to my colleague Ben Klass. Good morning and thank you for inviting us to appear before your committee. Our research at the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project examines the evolution of everything from mobile wireless Internet access and cable TV services to the quickly evolving digital media delivered over the Internet such as online video services like Netflix and Crave, Internet advertising, social media and newspapers.