Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, before I begin, I want to take a moment to thank a couple of people who have been part of my office this session and who will be moving on shortly. First I want to recognize Oliver Batchilder, who has been with my office as an intern through the parliamentary internship program. Oliver is sharp, diligent and very hard-working. In fact, I have told him he works harder than most full-time paid staff I have known around this place. We are going to miss having him around, and Parliament is lucky to have young people such as Oliver coming through its doors, but I know he is going to do great things and his future is very bright. I also want to recognize Brenda Birch, my constituency assistant in Neepawa, who will be retiring in the coming weeks. Brenda actually lived in Ottawa for a number of years, but she likes to joke that she had to move back home to find a job in politics. Since then, she has been the friendly face and the steady hand for so many people back home in my constituency who needed help to navigate the federal government. She has done that work with an incredible amount of care and patience, and I know how much constituents noticed and appreciated her work. On behalf of my constituents, I wish Brenda all the best in her retirement, and I thank her for her years of service. With that, let me turn to the legislation before us today. On the night of April 14, 1912, a wireless operator aboard the Titanic tapped out a distress call into the dark Atlantic. Some ships caught it. One that might have reached the Titanic in time did not, because nobody was at the radio and because airwaves in those days were more like the Wild West. At the time, wireless communication was still new. The rules were incomplete, and channels were crowded. More than 1,500 people lost their life that night, and the inquiry that followed revealed that wireless communication was a matter of life and death. That is why, in the years after the disaster, countries agreed that the airwaves needed to be better managed in the public interest. I start there purposely, because more than a century later, we are still arguing about the same basic resource. Today we call it “spectrum”, and the importance of it has, if anything, only grown. Today we manage spectrum mostly through auctions, where the government sells telecommunications companies the right to use these public airwaves. That is a reasonable way to assign spectrum, but selling a spectrum licence is not the same as solving a problem of coverage. We cannot see spectrum and cannot touch it, but it is behind almost everything we do. It is the call that connects, or does not. It is the alert that reaches our phone, the card reader at a small-town shop and the radio a volunteer firefighter uses on a gravel road. In the city, Canadians barely notice any of this, but in rural Canada, it is the line between being part of the country’s economy and being shut out of it. Right now, rural Canada is too often on the losing end of that line. Let us look at a recent example. In the government’s recent 3,800‑megahertz spectrum auction, the licensing decision set a deployment requirement of just 5% population coverage within seven years for the Gander and Grand Falls-Windsor service area in Newfoundland, a region covering more than 144,000 people. Compare that 5% to the deployment requirement in a major city, where a provider has to reach 30% within five years and 70% over the long run. That information is public. It is outlined in ISED’s own licensing decision, for anyone who wants to check it out. That means a telecom provider can buy up the rights to serve rural Canada, let that spectrum sit there doing nothing for years, and clear a bar that is low, and the government calls that a mission accomplished. That is not good enough. Rural Canadians know it is not, because they are the ones living in the dead zone. If the legislation makes it to committee, I strongly recommend that the committee review the large discrepancies between rural and urban tiers for spectrum deployment requirements. Long timelines for deployment of spectrum in rural areas result in the lack of priority given to deploying connectivity in rural regions. Telecommunications providers purchase this spectrum and slowly deploy it after they prioritize urban regions, where there is more revenue to be generated. I have often asked myself why the deployment requirements are not equal between rural and urban regions, if we really want to close the digital divide. Any policy on this front must consider the spectrum that has already been licensed under weaker deployment requirements, because those terms and conditions were already agreed to and were reflected in the purchase price. Obviously, the telecommunications companies will oppose any accelerated deployment requirements. However, I will note that Telus, in recent government consultations, supported increased deployment requirements, so there is hope. There is a revenue side to the story too, and it is worth being honest about it. Spectrum auctions have turned into a cash cow for the finance department, and all funds raised through an auction go into general revenues. A recent spectrum auction brought nearly $9 billion into the federal coffers, with three large carriers accounting for the overwhelming majority of these funds. I have no objection to the government’s raising money, but raising money and actually connecting people are two different things, and we keep treating them as if they were the same. There is a real policy contradiction in this. If the government’s main objective is to raise as much revenue as possible for spectrum auctions, that can come at the expense of connecting more Canadians. When the government sells a telecom company a spectrum license and allows the company to never deploy it, or to deploy it very slowly, the public loses. This is a principle I have raised in the House before. During the 44th Parliament, I introduced Bill C-288, which was passed. It was aimed at making broadband service information more accurate. This was because Canadians were being sold one story about the Internet but were buying and living an entirely different one. That same idea belongs in this debate on spectrum policy. The coverage maps tell one story, but the people who live on those roads tell another. The map will colour an entire municipality green and call it served, while the people in that municipality can tell us, down to the bend in the road, exactly where the call drops every time. There is also the matter of spectrum that goes unused. We have had stretches in this country’s history where a frequency has sat idle in rural and remote regions for years, serving no one, and the demand for connectivity has kept growing. Therefore, it is worth Parliament’s asking whether our current rules put any real pressure on licence-holders to actually deploy, or whether smaller licensing areas, tougher deployment conditions and more enforcement might finally get that spectrum working for the people it is supposed to serve. Underneath all this debate sits the question of safety. A dropped call in downtown Ottawa is an inconvenience, but a dropped call on a rural highway in a Manitoba blizzard, with a vehicle off the road and the temperature dropping to -40°C, can be the difference between life and death. That is the same lesson the Titanic taught us over a century ago. We should not need to relearn this in 2026. This brings me to the legislation that is in front of us. Bill C-268 asks two fairly reasonable things: that mobile coverage data actually be verified for accuracy, and that this framework be reviewed on a regular schedule rather than being left to gather dust for another 20 years. I will not pretend that the bill would solve the whole problem, because it would not, but it would open the door and give the House a chance to ask questions that have been long overdue. In the end, the question is a simple one: When we hand a company a piece of the public’s airwaves, does it actually serve the public? It belongs to Canadians, and Canadians are entitled to know whether it is going to work for them. These are questions Parliament should take seriously, because Canadians, rural Canadians in particular, deserve action.
