Industry committee  I'm saying that future-proofing should always be a part of figuring out any sort of minimum service standard for any reason. I don't know if that's a legislative application or a regulatory thing. Absolutely, it can't just be one and done forever.

Industry committee  I don't think I'm the best to speak on that. If you want me to speak on how our community responds to this type of thing, I would say that, yes, we've had a wider conversation with our community for more than a decade about this type of issue, through several iterations of Parliament, about the unfair power that big telecom has over people in Canada.

Industry committee  I don't think I can tell you what the adequate minimum should be. When I think about service quality standards in Canada, I'm always looking to the future. The speed standard we're shooting for in Canada is 50/10. At OpenMedia, we always talk about future-proofing, so we're looking into, say, 50 years from now.

Industry committee  I can say that I wish my ISP would tell me that information, personally. Yes, that falls under a lot of what we talked about today. A lot of great ideas are coming out as to how we can help empower consumers to actually get what they pay for and have good-quality service in ways that are currently not protected.

Industry committee  That's a really good question. As a consumer advocate, what I would say is that people are going to be in favour of whatever we can do legislatively to allow them to get more affordable services, to get money back in their pockets. What I will say is that I don't know if this bill is the place to do it.

Industry committee  Absolutely not. We are a grassroots community-led organization, explicitly non-partisan and explicitly not linked to any industry player.

Industry committee  We are a civil society organization that's led primarily by our community members. If you're asking as to our relationships with our funders, etc., I'm happy to follow up with you directly, but it's not really my area of expertise.

Industry committee  That's a good question. I think I'll answer a little bit of that and maybe throw that to one of the other panellists who might have a little bit more background on it. I can mention the FCC's broadband labelling approach. As I mentioned, when you subscribe to an Internet plan in the U.S., you would be provided with things like typical download speed, typical upload speed, typical latency—things that are not presently on advertising materials in Canada if you were to subscribe to an Internet plan here.

Industry committee  I feel like I have a great idea of who wrote that to you. Let me say that I am not in the business of taking big telecom's talking points at face value. Let me be clear about that. I can say that it's obvious why these monopolized companies don't want a bill that would reveal to customers that average speeds might not live up to the package that they were sold.

Industry committee  Absolutely not: Without question, current legislation is not sufficient. It's not working. I would say that big telecom has some flagrant disobedience and some exploitation of loopholes. That's been carefully documented by the CRTC, the federal government and civil society. It's obvious that we need clear, precise and enforceable requirements to hold these companies accountable, and presently it's not happening.

Industry committee  For me, nothing is off the table when it comes to giving recourse to consumers, or giving empowerment, in that sense, to consumers. I don't think that I am in a position to tell the CRTC what they should be doing with this case that comes in front of them, but I really think it's important for this legislation to put this item in front of the CRTC so they can do their job.

Industry committee  Absolutely. Transparency could have a really positive effect on pricing when it comes to the lack of affordability that we see, both in.... We're talking about broadband. If we're talking about telecom in general, people in Canada are still paying to this day some of the highest prices in the world on both cellphone and Internet services, so yes, the more transparent information can be made available to consumers....

Industry committee  I see it like this: If you talk to a telecom company, I'm sure they will tell you they believe they are giving you the service quality you're paying for. Many of them will say that to you if you talk to them. However, in my opinion, if there's nothing wrong with their average network performance according to the telecom company, they have nothing to fear from a bill that makes that network performance data transparent and publicly available.

Industry committee  I'll let Reza take this one.

Industry committee  Yes. When it comes to misleading practices, I think we're already seeing that today, and I really can only see it improving with this legislation. I don't see this legislation's doing anything that would make anything worse. I think when you're talking about penalties and such, looking to the other examples in other countries, there are probably good and bad.