 Thank you, Daniel. Hi, everyone. I'm Vivek Krishnamurti. I'm really delighted to be here introducing our guest today, Mr. Jean-Pierre Bleu, who is the chairman of the Canadian Radio, Television, and Telecommunications Commission. I'm outfolded, so I implore you to use CRTC instead. It's a distinct pleasure as I am both a Berkman client person at the Cyborg Clinic and also Canadian, so it's wonderful to have. This co-sponsored event between Berkman client and the Canadian Law Students Association here at the law school. Chairman Bleu has been the chairman of the CRTC since June 2012. It's a five-year term, and he came to that position after a long and distinguished and varied career in Canadian public service, starting in the CRTC's legal directorate where he became General Counsel before then becoming the Executive Director of Broadcasting in 1999 and overseeing the regulatory framework to allow for the development of digital pay TV and special TV channels. He then moved to the Department of Canadian Heritage where he was Assistant Deputy Minister of Cultural Affairs and created a task force on new technologies to study the impact of the internet and digital technologies on Canadian cultural policies. And somehow, during his time there, he found the bandwidth to be the Canadian government's representative on the ultimately successful committee that bid on the Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver in 2010. So, since Mr. Bleu took over the chairmanship, the CRTC, I would say, has been a real leader amongst its peer regulatory organizations in innovating in regulation. And before the main topic of today's presentation, in 2015 the CRTC garnered global headlines with this decision to require cable operators to unbundle specialty TV channels and offer a la carte pricing. So, if you want to watch ice road truckers on history, you don't have to pay for Justin Bieber videos on much music, which is Canada's equivalent of MTV. Today's presentation, however, focuses on the CRTC's very significant decision late last year to classify broadband internet service as a basic service along the lines of the venerable local telephone service. And so doing, we're looking very forward to hearing Chairman Bleu's thoughts on the future of internet connectivity in Canada around the world and the role that regulators can play in ensuring that the digital future is the one that we want to live in. Now, as Daniel emphasized, this event is being live-streamed and recorded for posterity. If you are online and would like to participate, you can ask questions, submit comments using the hashtag CRTC. And without further ado, I would like to welcome Chairman Bleu. Thank you very much. I think I mic'd up so that I can put this mic down. Real pleasure to be here today, and I was going to do a presentation and then leave plenty of time for questions and answers there. And I promise you I won't mention the hockey game last night, being from Ottawa. Two, for the hockey fans in the room. Today I wanted to talk about and give some context about what the CRTC is and does in its history, and then take the basic telecommunications service proceeding and decisions as a bit of a case study, and then we can have questions and answers dealing with that. But why don't we start out with a short video that in about minute 48 seconds will summarize what the CRTC does? We live in a rapidly evolving digital world. You're using technology to work, play, and connect with each other. You spend a lot of time watching, listening, and consuming media. Technology has become essential in every part of our lives, from health to education, from safety to security, and to the strength of the economy. You deserve communications networks and services that you can count on. The CRTC plays an important role to make that a reality. We ensure that you have access to a world-class communications system, one with reliable and secure networks, and choice of affordable and high-quality services, whether you're living in Kujuak, working in the prairies, or sitting in a café in Montreal. We protect you from unwanted, unwavering, and unwavering concerns. We ensure you can create and share your stories, whether on the radio, television, or over the Internet. You can shape the future. Learn more about your CRTC at crtc.gc.ca. So, how do you do that? So, it encapsulates, in a short video, what we do, but the mere fact that we have a corporate video was a big change for the commission, which we wanted to go out and talk to Canadians, because the commission, as an institution, was suffering from regulatory capture. Very close to the industry-regulated, and we wanted to disintermediate and speak directly to Canadians. So, we have done a lot, and this is just one example, of us trying to reach above and directly to Canadians. And you'll notice when we talk about your CRTC. So, the commission was created in 1968, at the time it was called the Canadian Radio-Television Commission, so only responsible for broadcasting, became a converged regulator in 1996. Previously to that, it was the Canadian Transportation Agency, sort of their own agency, of the railroad companies, because of the telegraph aspect that regulated the telecom world, and so it all came together in 1968. We're an administrative tribunal, which means, in Canadian law, that we have certain duties to act fairly, and we have a certain duty to act fairly, and we have a certain duty to act fairly, which means, in Canadian law, that we have certain duties to act fairly, respect certain procedural rules, but we tend not to be very legalistic. We don't swear in witnesses, except sometimes when we think we're not being told the full truth, but that's actually quite rare. And we are in the Canadian legal systems quite high in terms of our positioning as a quasi-judicial tribunal, when originally created in 1968, the Federal Court of Canada didn't exist yet, and appeals of our decisions went directly to the Supreme Court of Canada, and only on leave, and only on questions of law. And certainly some of our decisions are also reviewable by the Canadian cabinet, but mostly for policy reasons. And from a governance perspective, we are independent and arm's length from the government. It's somewhat unlike the FCC, where when there's a change of the executive arm, there is a change at the FCC. We are very much more independent, even though the cabinet appoints the members of the Commission, the deciders. The fact remains that once you're appointed, you cannot be removed, except for a very serious reason. Because of our nature and following Dysian notions of rule of law, the Commission can only do what the statute enabling it allows it to do. And our statutes include the Telecommunications Act, which we'll talk a lot about today, but also the Broadcasting Act, which regulates broadcasting, a much broader definition than here in the United States. We give licenses to specialty networks. We are heavily involved in licensing distribution undertakings, whether they're a cable or satellite or IPTV. And it's contrary to here, there's very, very little role for municipal or provincial or territorial governments in this space. It's almost exclusively federal jurisdiction in this area. The other statutes other than the Broadcasting Act and Telecommunications Act we get involved in are the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation, or what we call CASL, because the actual title of the legislation, because it was a minority government, they couldn't agree on anything, are the name of the statute is actually too long to write a tweet about. It just goes on and on and on. It's one of these long titles that had political reasons behind them. So we just call it the Anti-Spam Legislation, or CASL. When I was first appointed at CRTC, I said, why do you call it CASL? Like all the, you know, it's always the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation. We don't call it the Canadian Copyright Act or the Canadian Broadcasting Act. And the staff who were briefing me said, just sound it out. And you don't want to be the first chair responsible for CASL. So we call it CASL. We also have new responsibility under recent amendments to the Elections Act of Canada for supervising registration of robo-callers during federal elections and by-elections. And so quite a range of issues and complicated governance. But as I said, we can only do what statute allows us to do. But the Broadcasting Act has a general principle that you cannot broadcast in Canada except under a license or under an exemption order by the same token under the Telecommunications Act. If you're a telecommunications common carrier, you're subject to certain responsibilities of getting tariffs approved unless, of course, they've been foreborn from. And on the telecom side, 90% of the revenues of Canadian telcos are deregulated. So what is left is rather a narrow area. When I became chair, I certainly changed. I mentioned the regulatory capture issue and we certainly said what we were going to be about was ensuring that Canadians receive a world-class communication system. You saw it mentioned as well in our video. And when we talk about Canadians, we talk about Canadians in three ways. I know some people often associate me with a consumer agenda. It's actually a little bit more complex and rich than that. And it's Canadians as citizens, Canadians as creators, and Canadians as consumers because there are certain issues that I refuse to consider as purely consumer issues. The rights of official language communities living in minority situations, that's a quasi-constitutional issue. The rights of accessibility for certain communities to me is not a consumer issue. It's a citizenship issue. And so I'd like to think of these three areas of citizen creators and consumers a bit like an overlapping Venn diagram. Sometimes you might be a Canadian French speaker in a minority situation. You obviously want Canadian French language choices. Let's say you're living in Manitoba, a predominantly English province, and you want it at an affordable price. There's both citizenship issues and consumer issues that overlap in that area. That's not to say that the consumer issues are not major. You mentioned earlier the question of pick and pay. In Canada, currently, communication costs are the fifth largest household expense. And around $280 a month on average for a family, the Canadian dollars. A considerable amount of money. And in certain respects, often outpacing, certainly was on the cable side, outpacing the consumer price index. So it was growing, a large basic package that was growing and growing. And that's one of the reasons why in the Let's Talk TV proceeding, we went down the road of changing how television services were offered to Canadians. What we do generally is very varied. Licensing, obviously new providers. That's mostly the broadcasting side. We as well have a law enforcement role, but we really rather promote compliance. So we do a lot of outreach for that. For instance, with respect to the do not call list, the anti-newsons call regime similar to the one that exists here in the United States. We also get involved in the anti-spam world. We also get involved with ownership transfers. Unlike here in the United States, that is entirely our responsibility, although the Competition Bureau can also look at it from concentration of an anti-competitive action. But most of it is ours, and we've dealt with some large mergers. In large part, Canada's had a policy that encourages a great deal of horizontal, vertical, and every other kind of concentration or consolidation of ownership. The idea was that Canadian companies needed girth and breadth to be able to compete internationally. Sometimes I wonder if that was a wise decision, because we do not see a lot of Canadian companies actually competing internationally. They seem to rather say in their domestic territory where there's a great deal of protection. On the telecom side, we also involve ourselves in improving tariffs to the extent that they have not been foreborn in the area, and as I mentioned earlier, we foreborn a lot. We also try to encourage competition, because regulation is a poor substitute for a properly working marketplace. We are very open to the Canadian public. We have nearly 16,000 contacts per year of any sort. Remember, we're only a tenth of your size. Every year, from Canadians asking us various questions, complaints about what they've heard on television or heard on radio, complaints about the quality of their service and so forth are just providing information. We have a lot of outreach on that side. We also develop policies, and by here I mean contrary to the broad policy statements that are found in the Broadcasting Act and Telecommunications Act, which go on for several paragraphs, but basically are equivalent to the public interest tests that we find in the US legislation. We adopt second level policies, and the Supreme Court of Canada has given us the permission to do that. They're non-binding. It's just the commission speaking out loud. In fact, it would be a jurisdictional error on our part to apply those policies as if they were regulation, but we like to think out loud so people know and expect and it creates a business climate that says to somebody if they're coming in to, for instance, get an approval that generally this is what we would be looking for or not if you came for an approval. So we do a lot of policy statements, a small P policy. Our structure, like the FCC, I'm both chair and CEO, so all the staff, all the back office, the enabler functions, IMIT, HR of the 450 or so staff, they all report to me to model that the Australians have adopted the FCC, as I mentioned, and provides a great deal of responsibility on the chairman because not only do you head the College of Commissioners, and there could be 13 at any given time, up to 13. Right now we're seven. You also have the responsibility of the other part of my day, which is running the organization. We have regional offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Regina, Toronto, Montreal, and Dartmouth, just across the way from Halifax. The lead staff person is Danielle May-Cugonado. She's the Secretary of General and she's actually responsible for all the processes she and her staff from receiving applications or considering tariff notices or so forth, all the way to decision making. But in terms of policy responsibility, there are policy centers from each of them, including a new position I created when I became chair in 2012 of a Chief Consumer Officer that has the specific task of actually looking at all the applications and applying a lens that is consumer focused. It's not the only aspect. It's one of many, but it's something that needed a little bit more attention. Unlike the FCC, commissioners at the CRTC have no staff. They don't operate as independent offices. We are a collective group of decision makers and we come to the table together to make decisions. A single commissioner has, there's one minor exception, but generally does not have any authority on their own. They always have to act with the other commissioners or group of commissioners. As chair, however, I have the power to appoint panels to consider matters. So if there's a competitive application for radio frequencies, let's say in Quebec City, I might appoint a panel of three commissioners to go and hear that matter and make decisions. And again, unlike the FCC, which has, I understand, a minister of law judges that hear matters, CRTC commissioners actually hear evidence directly to make decisions. Commissioners have, as I said, regional, right now we have seven. We have, most of them are regional commissioners accepted to vice chairs. Historically, one called broadcasting, one called telecom, the statute doesn't provide that. In fact, one could wonder why we still have that dichotomy in a converged world, but there is those two aspects of responsibly. Our reporting to the public, the way we frame our three-year plan, everything we do is under three pillars, which we redefined in 2012 when I started, under the create, connect, and protect. Create is to ensure that there's a wealth of diverse content available to Canadians to enlighten, entertain, and inform them. And this can be both Canadian main and foreign. We're a very open marketplace where foreign content, a lot of it being American obviously, is welcome and appreciated. The connect pillar deals with making sure that we have high quality, affordable connectivity. So this obviously includes telecommunications activities, but includes as well cable, satellite, IPTV, and internet activities. And the protect pillar deals with matters of 9-1-1, emergency alerts, loudness of ads on TV, protecting children from certain offensive content all the way to spam and do not call. We try to be forward-looking in what we do, and what we're trying to ensure is that there's a strong Canadian presence, a Canadian main presence in the space so that Canadians have among all the other choices some Canadian choices. And we try as well to ensure on the competitive side that they have choices and innovation of service providers. I think one interesting aspect and I think probably the hallmark of the CRTC is consultations are us. We, to render about 450 or so decisions per year, run about 12 oral public hearings a year that last sometimes two or three days all the way to three weeks, depending on the subject matter. But we are actually sitting as commissioners and hearing evidence, not sworn as I mentioned, but people come in, whether it's an individual Canadian who decides to have their say or organized groups come to a proceeding. Most of our decisions, the other decisions are based on a paper record. So we hear, in a sense, the evidence on paper, but the most important files tend to have an oral component to them. And we also have less formal outreach in the form of using our convening power to bring people to round table type discussions, to discuss issues, for instance, of official language or accessibility issues and where we try to bring people to collaboratively come to solutions. Our tools to get Canadian involvement have certainly been diverse, and I think we are seeing in the Canadian government as a center of expertise for how to consult, how to... And unfortunately, once you're seen as an innovator in the space, what you did two years ago doesn't seem that new anymore because everybody has taken it up. But we use digital advertising, we use Facebook, Twitter, we even use Vine videos before they died. Our most recent was in the context of the broadband proceeding and using Reddit. Oh, no, so it was not in broadband. It was on the differential pricing proceeding. And we saw that there were discussion threads about zero-based rating and said, well, maybe there's an opportunity to reach out to a community that doesn't normally participate in our proceedings. So we announced that we would be doing a Reddit consultation. Oddly enough, the Reddit community then had a discussion about the fact we were having the use of Reddit and disciplining each other about how they had to be pretty polite and nice so that the commission would do it again. And then they participated in the proceeding and we took the record of that discussion and put it on the public records. So because we are evidence-based and we do public interest decision-making based on the factual records we gather in paper and at the oral proceeding. I talked earlier about the fact that we are seeking the public interest and it's defined in our statute. And I often use the image of our hearing starting off as a darkened stage and everybody shows up at the hearing with a beam of light, whether it's a large, organized, well-funded beam of light or individual coming with a smaller beam and in the end, hopefully, at the end of the process, with all the contribution, we will have discovered together what the public interest is. So it's very important for the commission to get the public to participate in our proceeding. And we've done it with some success using new platforms, whether it's Twitter or Reddit or our website or online discussions. We even used a choice book because we realized in one case when we were reviewing the TV policy that everybody was saying, well, it was a me conversation. This is what I want and people weren't thinking about what their neighbor or the person down the street might want. For instance, you might want to have children's programming in a broadcasting system even though you don't have children because it's good for the society. So we use this choice book which forced people to have a conversation, a we conversation as opposed to merely a me conversation. And that was successful. Our proceedings are both English and French. We have interpretation going on all the time. All our official documents are in both official languages of Canada, English and French. And on occasion, depending on the issues, we also use American Sign Language or the non-Gas de Signe du Québec which makes for quite an interesting hearing when things are double translated as we go through the proceeding but a very open and accessible form and probably one of the most accessible forms in the federal system. The type of issues we're dealing with these days are obviously telecommunication, making sure we have sustainable competition. We do not get involved on the telecom side that much if at all on the retail side. There's one small exception where we actually regulate retail internet services in the north, in the territory. But for the most part, our action are on the wholesale side. By way of example, we have mandated access to fiber facilities so that competitors can use the fiber being laid by others at a rate that will be set by the commission. We also regulate the wholesale access rates for wireless carriers so that competitors can access the infrastructure of the three large companies in Canada that together and operating together control about 90% of the internet, the wireless space in Canada. On the television side, just like here, I suspect although on average Canadians listen to about 27 hours of television per week, the fact is that people under 35 aren't, so you can imagine that the older demographics are watching a great deal and people are moving to an on-demand. And so the Let's Talk TV proceeding was very much about redefining that shift away from traditional schedule programming to on-demand programming where schedules didn't matter and in fact you would be listening to what might be seen as traditional television in a very untraditional way, in an on-demand way, which means that some of the tools we've used in the past, like Quotas, which were very successful at a certain time, don't work going forward to ensure Canadian choices are there. Therefore, we're moving towards other means of promoting rather than protecting Canadian content. We hosted a discoverability summit to look at ways through algorithms and other means of Canadian content makers to be able to have Canadians and others around the world because we're also thinking that we have to work internationally to discover Canadian content. On the digital side, since the 1990s, the definition of broadcasting is quite large under the Broadcasting Act. We have decided not to require licensing of broadcasts, technically Netflix activities would in Canada be a broadcasting activity that would require license, which would be difficult to obtain because the government has told us that broadcastings in Canada have to be Canadian owned and controlled. But since the 1990s, the Commission has found that it need not regulate in that space by requiring licensing and so we did regulate by exempting them from holding a license. So I always make sure that people realize that we do regulate, but we regulate by exemption and not requiring them to hold that. But the fact that we can exempt undertakings that are streaming services in Canada clearly points out the fact we believe we have jurisdiction over those undertakings even though their servers may be found elsewhere because the activity is occurring in part in our jurisdiction. On the linguistic duality side, that's a very important Canada, I work on that to make sure that Canadians of both official language group see themselves and hear themselves and can create in their language, but as well acknowledging that Canada is a modern immigration-based society, also ensuring that we reflect the diversity, both employment-wise and through its programming of the ethno-cultural diversity of Canada, not to exclude, of course, Indigenous Canadians who are also important in terms of ensuring that they abide their ownership or their presence in the Canadian broadcasting system find a place and a voice. Some differences with the United States, I think I mentioned a few in terms of our activities is that almost exclusively federal jurisdiction, very little state, your state or municipal government involvement, very large, horizontal, vertically and diagonally integrated companies, which brings its own challenges and, of course, much more presence in specialty networks and satellite radio unlike here. Wanting to put Canadians at the centre. So the second part will illustrate how we did put Canadians at the centre through our basic telecom services review, which we called in part, let's talk, broadband. The question we're asking is what telecommunications services Canadians require to fully participate in the digital economy? And we were asking that question in a very wide sense. Our proceeding, based on a lot of the expertise we've had in other proceedings, trying to get Canadians involved, managed to get, in one way or another, about 30,000 Canadians participating in our proceeding directly. That took the form of 25,000 individual Canadians actually sending us submissions. We also had over 800 formal submissions from businesses, municipal groups, chambers of commerce, consumer groups. We did a public opinion survey, which was rolled into the public record that reached about 30,000 Canadians, and we did three weeks of public hearing, in which we heard evidence from ADD interveners. It was probably one of the most comprehensive reviews that the Commission's done in recent times. Over a year and a half, it started in April 2015, and the decision came out in December, just before Christmas. Multi-stage, and we really saw it as a national conversation as to what ought to be the future of basic telecommunications, how it should be defined, what the future of broadband would be. And we were primarily targeting Canadians in unserved or underserved areas. Can you imagine the three northern territories of Canada have a geography larger than eastern and western-year combined, but a population of 135,000 people. But even just a few miles outside of Ottawa, the nation's capital, you have people that don't have access to broadband. So there's a very big digital divide in terms of that. So that was one of our big issues. And yet, we knew that it had become an essential means by which you get e-health, e-learning, e-government. I, myself, when I was at the Treasury Board as an assistant secretary, the government, to save money, away from offices and any other channels of communication with government online, yet there are large swaths of Canada that do not have access and an affordable way to get that content. So these are the sorts of issues we were dealing with going into that. And we got Canadians involved, the 50,000 of them through social media, online forums, actually focus groups, various news releases, very much wanting to have a broad conversation about the future of content, of basic telecommunications in the future, in Canada. In telecom, I think it would be fair to say that in the past, we've mostly focused on voice as to what ought to be basic service, but now we shifted our thinking considerably and considered voice to be an application like any other. And what is essential to have is the broadband connectivity, which opens the doors to all the other applications of any form or sort. So now in Canada, since December, broadband internet access is now considered a basic telecommunication service. Of course, the press life to say, oh, Canada, it's now a human right. Well, we don't have the jurisdiction to make declarations about what's a human right or not. Our act defines, you know, you can define what is a basic telecommunication service, and that's what we did in our proceeding. We created new universal service objectives, and we created a fund, and I'll unpack those one after the next. So in terms of broadband, we said it was essential. It was important to Canada's future economic development, its global competitiveness. It's also important for social development to have access to various services and as well as a place for democratic discourse. As more and more Canadians, particularly younger ones, are leaving behind radio and television and printed newspapers, we now see that the conversation about society, about what's happening in your own backyard around the world is occurring in this space. So it's very important from a democratic perspective. It's also the place where we're finding innovation and underpins the vibrant, creative, and interactive, and creativity that we're seeing there. So even though it was a proceeding dealing with telecom, it was essentially also considering where Canadians, the creators, would be able to make their space of creativity and share that content with their neighbors and the world. And you'll see that with our target, to us, upload speeds were very important from that perspective. And it's important to connect Canadians fast distance, second largest landmass in the world. And although many of us live within 100 kilometers in the United States, it's still six and a half time zones that you have to connect as well. And it empowers for the quality of life in various forms, but I need to convince you in people in this room. The decision also in a second pillar decided that all Canadians in urban areas, which was largely occurring through market forces, but also in rural and remote areas, would have access to voice services, which was the old objective, but also access to broadband internet access, both fixed and mobile. So the outcome would be that telcos continue to invest. Obviously, we don't want that to be slowed down. Government had to continue to support. There were government programs, and I'll speak a little bit more of that in a second, to finance the robust, scalable infrastructure that's capable of delivering this high quality service. And as well, we wanted to enhance social and economic development. The targets we chose increased by tenfold before it was five and one. We decided to move to 50 up, 50 down, and 10 down. Now it's the other way around. The arrows are wrong, aren't they? On the screen. So it's a download 50 and upload of 10. We already believe we're at 82% of that. And we, with the third element I'll talk in a moment, are aiming to get 90% of Canadians at that level by 2021. It's the highest, the last few kilometers are the hardest and most expensive to connect, and hopefully 100% by 2031. We also provided that there'd be access to the latest mobile wireless, not only in homes, but along Canada's major roads. And you see that the slide compares the new standard adopted in early 2015 in the U.S., which is obviously the Canadian standard is a very ambitious objective, but a critical one for all the reasons I pointed out earlier, particularly in rural and non-urban settings. And this will be of a major challenge. And we're trying to continue. So the 18% gap between the current 82% and 100% is mostly found, as you can see from this slide, in the rural and remote areas of Canada. And that's why we created a new funding mechanism that builds on the funding mechanisms available by other levels of government. It will be, and it's for the first five years, up to $750 million, these are Canadian dollars, to help promote the build-out of the network to ensure that those that are unconnected are properly connected. It will focus on ensuring that the funding mechanism will be based on objective criteria, would be transparent, would be fairly administered, efficiently administered as well. There are various programs in the government of Canada, and we always are concerned about the delivery costs of those programs. And also, we were very concerned about that there would be no political interference in those decisions, being remote areas. There's also a risk that if politics get involved, it is the place where there are fewer votes. Everybody's a Canadian and entitled to the basic services. So managing of the program at an arm's length was a clear decision point for the commission. The program will be designed to ensure access to and transport infrastructure for fixed and mobile. We're trying to be neutral in terms of technology. We clearly stated that we continue to be a shared responsibility of industry, governments of all level, and the regulator. And it will be a competitive bidding process for the best application to get access to that money. In the decision, we also made other statements that I think are not so much about the build out, but are important in terms of consumer empowerment and accessibility. We will now require that wireless service providers offer and publicize mobile service packages that meet the needs of the disability community, whether they have a disability of speaking or hearing or other types of disabilities that require adaptability, adapt that's you. Okay, I'm not finding the English word, but adapted to their needs. The synapses sometimes don't trigger off like they normally should. And as well, we've included some obligations to give better information to consumers more generally. I'll give you the example of my father. Okay, I got my mother on a streaming services, so there was more demand on the network. But month after month, my father was realizing he was getting over charges for his fixed broadband. And I saw, and he finally asked me about it, which is odd because you think your father would figure his son works at the CRTC would see that there might be a useful resource there. But anyways, I saw that. And the overage is because he had a bad package. And so we phoned the service providers in a non competitive area. But just by asking, I ended up getting for him without even negotiating more capacity, higher fees for less money. So you said to yourself, why are they not actually proactively offering their customers this? And it would seem that shareholders are more important than subscribers. And there's often discussion about disloyal customers. I think there's a place for a reflection on disloyal companies as well. I'll move on. So there are some of the issues. We've made a lot of decisions in our broadband discussion about expectations. But we also made some what we call preliminary decisions or express preliminary views, which then says that a third party will run a process and people can comment on whether that preliminary view, that way we are leaning is the correct one. And they can make comments on that. We've recently launched that proceeding. And it really focuses some on the details of the administration, the third party that will be responsible for receiving, for instance, those applications for the share of that 750 million amount of money. And so that is going on now. There are a couple of other issues in the proceeding that got a lot of airtime. And that was dealing with other gaps in the system. Dealing with affordability for low-income consumer groups. And they wanted us to find a funding program and digital literacy, which was not really at the center or the core part of the CRTC's mandate. Concurrently with our proceeding, the Minister of Innovation had launched in 2016 a proceeding to examine the future of an innovation agenda for Canada. And had asked us to submit what we were hearing in the proceeding, dealing with things that he might find of use in his proceeding. And so we did. And affordability and digital literacy were two matters that we did a report and sent to the Minister. In budget 2017, the Trudeau government did make some statements about the future of innovation and connectivity. Interestingly enough, the government committed, committed to working with the CRTC to coordinate broadband targets and establish ways to meet them. Notice that the government's committed to working with the CRTC and not the other way around, which is a rather interesting way of formulating things since we're within the larger government. They did state in that budget speech that it was a shared responsibility for the regulator, obviously, but also for municipal provincial and territorial governments. First nation governments and telecommunication companies would be part of that the players need to do them. They announced a $500 million program. There's sunsets after five years, as I understand it, and it will focus on building the backbone. Traffic between communities and like ours will be based on a competitive application process which is open until the end of April 2017. Now, for the two issues we had made recommendations on affordability and digital literacy, the government made some announcements for some additional funding there, as you can see on the screen, for $29.5 million for digital literacy and $13.2 million beginning in 2017-18 for affordable access. As a result of that budget, which I think some of the groups that were advocating before us about digital literacy and mostly affordability seeing the budget and I guess being disappointed by it made an application to us pursuant to Section 62 of the Telecommunication Act asking us to review and vary our decision and coming back at us suggesting that we should intervene more directly and deal with the affordability issue. So that matters depending before us and before I will have no future more comments at this time on that but that proceeding is underway. Sorry, that should have moved that slide so that's the budget announcement. If you want more, this is obviously our website you would probably want if those are interested in net neutrality issues want to keep close attention once the market closes at four o'clock on Thursday when we will make our decision public on differential pricing practices and zero rating I think it's much anticipated especially with developments here in the US as to where goes net neutrality in Canada we have been involved in this space since 2008-2009 and we will continue to be concerned about net neutrality going forward because the last thing we want is our telecommunication companies becoming gatekeepers like our cable and satellite companies it's a space for open discussion, democracy and any inappropriate and that's the question when does it become inappropriate attempt to shape the traffic or to shape what services are available for instance at lower or zero rating would be allowed to be distributed and to whom raises some rather interesting public policy issues and you'll know more about that on Thursday at four o'clock when we render all that public as to the way forward anyway you can also stay connected with various websites and social media for us and there we go so thank you very much for your attention happy to have conversations and questions answering for us okay so open it up to questions and ask that you keep your questions to tweet length phrase them as questions with a question mark at the end so we can have as many people speak as possible and just please introduce yourself very briefly hi I'm Ron Newman from my personal experience the US do not call this simply does not work there are too many exceptions and it just doesn't seem to work have you managed to do it better and how so no I don't think we do any better and it's the do not call mostly list we've made exceptions as a result of a lot of lobbying for charities for and not us it's in the in the actual legislation exactly it's the same process I would say in Canada at least we've justified it ostensibly by some constitutional principles of freedom of expression so we've said if you're trying to sell a subscription to a newspaper your exempt and there are a lot of exceptions but our big problem right now is not so much that it's spoofing spoofing is actually our biggest problem and the fact that Canadians still in large part think that the anti the do not call this is a bit like a municipal bylaw you file a complaint and some officer is going to complaint that individual phone call you got at 11 o'clock on the 16th of April while you're having dinner and that's not how we do it we do it through mega data analysis and go after offshore mostly offshore providers of these unwelcome services I you covered a couple of my questions but I was wondering is the CPC an arm of the government and do you regulate it like any other telecommunications entity and also do you do anything with regards to regulation of objectionable content or political speech of any kind on the web or in the internet or anywhere else in the tele sphere okay the CBC in Canada is created and constituted under the broadcasting act it's a crown corporation it is funded to level about a billion dollars a year by parliamentary appropriations so it operates as an arm length from the rest of the government but we do regulate it they have a license from us we hold a proceeding every well it could be seven year but about every five years to renew their all their licenses radio television English and French and so we look at their plan and so forth but they are crown corporation they they have a CEO who's appointed by the government they have a board who's also appointed by the government but they are accountable to us as broadcasters yeah we regulate them from that a variation of what occurs in Australia with their public broadcaster and in the UK as well sectional content on the radio and television traditional space we have co-regulation or self-regulation but on the internet side because we've largely exempted it from holding a license that area is not subject to direct CRTC involvement there are of course laws of general application that continue to be applicable there but not CRTC involved well the Broadcasting Act actually says the commission shall exempt if we find that licensing those activities do not contribute to the the objectives of the Broadcasting Act and now on two or if not three occasions the commission has come to the conclusion that that space is not contributing one way or the other to the Broadcasting Act objective so we have not filled that space that's not to say that the others have not the Human Rights Commission and when it's or even the criminal code has gotten involved in certain respects Adolf Hi I'm Sol Tanenbaum I have a question of called it National Linguistic nuance one of your slides you said all Canadians in urban areas as well as rural and remote areas have access to voice and broadband internet services here in America access is often a key a keyword used by conservatives to mean something other than actually having access to a service that you have something that you can theoretically but not really what does it actually mean in your context what what barriers are you actually seeking to overcome and does it act you know does it mean actual service or some promise of service Actual service realizing that it needs to be built over time there are some very remote parts of the country that will take time to build and build out to but it's actual service access to a library is not the sort of access we're thinking about it's actually residential and along the major roads as I mentioned on the cell side Hi my name is Flippo I'm a second year here from Sudbury, Ontario in the last budget I've seen this forward on the internet that the federal government is currently looking at many aspects of the innovation agenda which of telecommunication regulations may include net neutrality I was just wondering how that review may be distinct from what the CRTC has done and how we as interested people can get involved I saw that, I mean we're not involved in budget making but there was because we're independent I saw the comment about net neutrality the commission has already the policies on that neutrality back in 2009 about traffic shaping and we've made another decision that got support in the federal court of appeal the mobile TV proceeding where the court gave us reason when a cell provider making arrangements to provide television services in what we thought was undue and unfairly inappropriate so we've dealt with that and I daresay that by 4 o'clock on Thursday we may have a complete code of net neutrality in Canada because we'll have pronounced on what the policy ought to be for your rating I'm not sure what's left frankly on net neutrality other than the government has also said that they want to review the broadcasting and telecom act at some point so that's very unclear to me right now what that means or why my experience has been that both acts work quite well because they have that very open textured drafting style that allows you to navigate ambiguities and change the technology it's up to them to make those parliamentary decisions but that's a three or four year process I'm going to use my prerogative task question which is that your definition of basic service is both fixed and wireless to the home everywhere which seems extraordinarily ambitious in a country as big as Canada and sparsely populated so it's really a mandate of last kilometer access you know everywhere why I mean why not just allow wireless to do it instead of saying you know especially your definition of 50 up 50 down 10 up you would think that by 2021 we might have wireless that would do it what are the effects you're probably reading the decision differently than I am certainly mobile along roads for sure as a public safety issue but we were neutral as to the technology it could be used to provide broadband access so it's more of an or than an and between fixed and mobile the reality is that in some places mobile may be the only way to do it because of wireless or whatever but definitely an or there but it was the outcome that's important my apologies for misreading this sort of clues into a debate that's happening here in the United States but whether mobile access is well it is an interesting distinction because often time people talk about mobile the reality is a mobile network requires as much line side connectivity you need the backhaul you need the trunk lines you need everything it's only the last little bit that's wireless but in some places actually quite effective to serve a remote northern village we've certainly done fixed wireless quite effectively thank you for that clarification Pat McCormick because I'd misread it too one of the reasons mobile versus fixed can be an issue certainly here and in Australia is whether net neutrality as much as those principles enforced are enforced on both mobile and fixed I know you're waiting on the decision Thursday but are you looking at it being comprehensive and coverage across those different technologies look what's important is connectivity and you don't want to trip over which technologies it's actually really effective and our hearing on differential pricing certainly pointed out and that's why unlimited packages are so available for wireline broadband and less so on wireless well that's a question of time some interveners in that proceeding however pointed out that well if wireless connectivity is such a limited bandwidth that you can have more traffic shaping or more control why then are companies offering zero rating or differential pricing in that space and we're saying well therefore you commission to encourage more unlimited services in the wireless space should not be allowing differential pricing in the wireless space but you'll have to see what happens thank you my name is Caroline Tronem at the Fletcher School at Tufts University I wanted to ask you about data and I realize it might be a little bit outside of the CRTC's purview but given that you're seeking to help perpetuate the digital innovation economy that a lot of Canadians use American services and a lot of Canadians data is stored in the United States would you prefer that not to be the case or do you pursue a specific relationship with American regulators or American companies to manage that we've had people approach us because they have been concerned that our connectivity passes through the U.S. Patriot Act concerns and others and we have not gotten involved in that space we the CRTC interestingly though when the government of Canada got involved in some of the data and connectivity issues and its own email systems as an enterprise we invoke the national security exemption and required our networks to be entirely Canadian based so the government of Canada at least is hinting in a direction of concern with respect to where data is but of course the U.S. is strong and close ally of Canada so it's not an issue that has come forward to us any other questions I realize that we're a bit past the top of the hour when people have other commitments but well if not then it only remains me to thank Chairman Bler for his incredible presentation of the CRTC and of the decision and correcting my misapprehension about what it is but nevertheless I think an incredibly ambitious policy and one that would serve well as a model for lots of other countries in this space so thank you very much