Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Transport and Communications
Issue 16 - Evidence - June 6, 2007
OTTAWA, Wednesday, June 6, 2007
The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications met this day at 6:15 p.m. to examine and report upon the Department of Industry User Fees Proposal for a spectrum licence fee for broadband public safety communications in bands 4940-4990 MHz.
Senator Lise Bacon (Chairman) in the chair.
[English]
The Chairman: I call the meeting to order. Tonight, we have on our agenda Department of Industry user fee proposals for a spectrum licence fee for broad band public safety communications in bands 4940-4990 megahertz.
From Industry Canada, we have Mr. Michael Binder, Assistant Deputy Minister, Spectrum Information Technologies and Telecommunications; Mr. Peter Hill, who is Director of Spectrum Management Operations; Mr. Glenn Sheskay, who is Counsel, Legal Services; and Ms. Nadia Lombardi, who is Manager, Operational Policy.
Welcome to our committee. I suppose you are accustomed to committees like yours. We will hear from you first and then we will ask our questions.
Michael Binder, Assistant Deputy Minister, Spectrum Information Technologies and Telecommunications, Industry Canada: Thank you. It is not every day that we get the opportunity to talk about our favourite topic, spectrum management. We discovered that a lot of people do not necessarily have a background on this subject. Therefore, with your permission, we have circulated a slide presentation, to give you a context as to where the fees come from, why this is an important activity, et cetera. With your permission, I should like to take you through this slide deck.
The Chairman: Please go ahead.
Mr. Binder: I will ask Mr. Hill to do so. Following the presentation, we will be happy to answer any questions you might have.
Peter Hill, Director, Spectrum Management Operations, Industry Canada: We will try to go through this quickly for you. Basically, we will give you a bit of a background on what spectrum management is, et cetera, and how this rolls into the wireless communication needs for public safety agencies and hence the fee.
I will jump right into slide three. The radio frequency spectrum is part of the light spectrum, in fact. It is at a lower frequency band; X-rays, et cetera, are all part of this. A certain portion of that permits radio communication — for example, items such as a BlackBerry and broadcasting operate in this small swath of total electromagnetic spectrum that we manage.
Wireless spectrum is divided into a whole number of frequency bands that are good for some things and not good for other things because of the physical characteristics of those frequencies. They are allocated internationally through the International Telecommunication Union. Canada, in compliance with those rules and regulations, sets up our own domestic allocations and licensing processes that get the frequency into the hands of people who actually use them.
Generally speaking, characteristics of radio waves make it such that taxis, couriers and things like that use radio frequencies in certain kinds of bands. Other things, such as radar, are in different kinds of bands because of their physical characteristics.
I will move now to slide five. There are many uses of the spectrum, such as broadcasting, AM and FM radio, television, microwave and satellite communication, cell phones, the BlackBerry and pagers. Equally, it is used in other domains, like heart monitors that allow patients to walk along the corridors and not be wired up to their bed. Radio astronomy is a major user of spectrum as well. Other users are couriers and trucking, among others in the transportation field, as well as safety services notably. There are many kinds of consumer devices. Your remote control for your television is likely a wireless device. Some are infrared. Your garage door opener and such things are wireless devices that in some sense we create standards for or manage their use in Canada.
I will now move to slide six. Wireless is important to the Canadian economy, certainly to broadcasters on the cultural side but also on the industrial side of things. For example, in cellular and PCS, there are 25,000 jobs and $11 billion of revenue in that one industry alone. Wireless more and more is absolutely critical to safety services in this country. Ever since 9/11, they have seen a need to improve their capacities in this realm.
On slide seven, as I mentioned, spectrum is a limited resource public resource in Canada, and we manage it on behalf of the Canadian public. It cannot be confined within national borders. If you have ever had the opportunity to listen to your favourite AM radio station, which I did when I was young, you will know how far it would go, and at night how it would go even farther. I could pick up stations from the mid-western U.S. some nights. You cannot control radio frequency waves to live within political boundaries. They have their own physical boundaries.
Finally, spectrum management is essential for the orderly development of use in Canada. Certain things are not compatible with others. They will cause interference, which will cause communication not to happen. There are supply and demand issues. Many people want certain kinds of spectrum and others want other kinds of spectrum. We have regulation to promote efficient use to meet all demands. However, we rely more and more on going forward as well in terms of the market to try to regulate the pull between supply and demand.
The Radiocommunication Act provides to the Minister of Industry sole discretion in terms of how to plan, allocate and use the spectrum in Canada. Within the Department of Industry, our program manages that. There are approximately 250,000 licences issued every year. We spend approximately $60 million a year managing that and we pull in around $315 million to the Consolidated Revenue Fund.
We have a lot of challenges. The technological speed of change is amazing these days. It is very difficult for us to keep up, but we are looking at administrative ways to make things simpler and equally more market-based approaches. The fee approach is one of those administrative ways of making life simpler for our clients and for us.
Public safety agencies are demanding access to more spectrum. We have opened up more spectrum exclusively for public safety undertakings. Indeed, they have a certain priority above others when it comes to getting access to radio- frequency spectrum. As technologies advance, as we all get a BlackBerry that has wonderful speed and we get wireless Internet server routers at home that we enjoy, the public safety agencies have similar needs, but their needs are not within a building, generally speaking. When they are on site at an incident, they need communications wherever in a particular place. Increasingly, they need the same kinds of services that we need in terms of business to undertake their responsibilities, including broadband-type systems in localized situations.
We do charge licence fees for the use of spectrum, as a fair return to the Canadian public for the use of the public resource. We do use auctions as well for commercial spectrum but not for public safety-type uses. We have done a number of auctions in this country, to give it to the highest bidder literally, for whatever use they see fit. Generally speaking, it is for more broadband BlackBerry-type services.
We set annual fees for other types of licences, non-auctioned. We try to get some semblance of the value of this spectrum in the marketplace and provide that fair return to the Canadian public.
I will make the comment that resources that are underpriced tend to be over-consumed and we have had that happen in the past. Hence, we have a fee that we think is fair to all parties, the public and equally the public safety organizations.
On slide 11, you will see that the fee is small, less than half a cent per 50 megahertz per pop. That means that, to use this band, if you want it to cover one person of the population, it would cost less than half a cent. That means that every city, town and village in this country that has a population of less than 60,000 people will pay our minimum fee of $250, which is not much money for any of those kinds of organizations.
The fee, however, is dependent on the geography defined by that area. If you are not covering one population but you are covering the City of Ottawa, there is more than one person who lives here. There are 750,000, approximately. Hence, the fee would be commensurate with that kind of coverage.
At the same time, if you are only covering Kanata, for example, your fee would only correspond to the people living there. They are scaleable in terms of where public safety agencies might operate and how they might want to use this spectrum.
The next slide provides examples. In the absolute highest case, if someone wanted to cover every square inch of this country, including right up to the border going through Lake Ontario and right past the Arctic Circle, they would have to pay $125,000 a year. That is not the reality of how this spectrum will be used. In every square inch of the province of Quebec, the fee would be $30,000 a year.
Most likely, this will be used in places such as Halifax. We have a system on trial in Regina, for example, where the fee will be very small in relation to the cost of the radio communication system in and of itself. Typically, these kinds of fees amount to well less than 1 per cent of the capital cost of a network and a very small proportion as well of the ongoing operating cost to run such a network.
We have consulted with the public safety community on this fee. This fee is not a hardship to those agencies, in our view. The comments we received included requests for free service, but there was no real objection to the fee that was proposed.
Our intent is to get the fee set so we can start to license these agencies. As I said, a number of cities around the country are already pushing us to get this spectrum out for their use quickly. Our intent is to try to set this fee quickly so that we can give them access to the spectrum to provide the safety services they say they need to provide.
The Chairman: The 4940-4990 megahertz frequency band is proposed for non-exclusive public safety use. The proposed licence fee and the minimum fee are intended to reflect the economic value of the radio-frequency spectrum. The economic value criterion is supposed to encourage the efficient use of a limited public resource and the radio spectrum.
Public safety entities are public service, non-commercial and non-profit organizations that sometimes operate under limited funding. In the United States, the criterion used for non-auction spectrum is cost recovery and not economic value. The model you propose is inspired by the Australian experience.
What are the reasons for your proposal not being in line with the U.S. or Australia? What are the motivations behind the choice of the economic-value criterion instead of the cost-recovery criterion vis-à-vis a public safety service when, in the end, the same tax dollar that will pay for the service?
I am repeating myself, but, as you know, public safety entities are working with limited public funds. Given that, do you think it would be more appropriate to use the cost-recovery approach? Is it the case, as it is the case in the U.S., instead of the market economic-value criterion as proposed by your department?
Mr. Binder: I will start and then ask my colleagues to jump in. Not everything the U.S. does is better than everybody else.
The Chairman: I am not suggesting that.
Mr. Binder: In this particular area, the U.S. is looking at us as a model. They would love to move into the market- based kind of charge we are using here. I cannot remember whether the fees on a cost-recovery basis would be more or less. I am not sure about that. We have had experience historically when there were no charges. There were no charges 20 years ago. I can tell you that the use of the spectrum was totally inefficient. All kinds of frequencies were not being used properly and so forth.
Economic rent allows the public safety organizations to decide between managing the network themselves and contracting out. In fact, it is the commercial ability to make those decisions based on market comparison, doing it in- house or on the outside, that allows them to make this decision and force them to be very economic. If there is one message our slide deck is trying to convey, it is that spectrum is a limited resource with a high demand for these frequencies. They would be happy to see this rolling out because there is such a huge demand for just the frequencies.
We did not get in our consultation an outcry about these fees being unrealistic.
Mr. Hill: Public safety agencies in Canada already pay fees, for any other band, similar to other users of the spectrum within that same band. Mr. Binder makes a very good point that, 20 years ago, when all levels of government in Canada started to pay fees, it was amazing how much spectrum came back to the department that we could use for others knocking at the door asking for spectrum that we did not have to give. By charging them a fair fee — I do not think it is exorbitant — it brings in a market mentality of how they will use the spectrum and whether they need this or not.
With respect to why we are going beyond cost recovery, this is not a fee for a service. This is a fee for a privilege of use. It is a little bit different in that sense. The costs we have for this band are 90 per cent already spent. We go to the International Telecommunication Union. We have bilaterals with the U.S. about how we will share this frequency at the border. We deal with technical specifications with industry and manufacturers. We have spent all that money already as well as a lot of time.
If you look at the fee forecasts currently within the proposal, you will see that we are not getting anywhere close to recovering our costs. It will be in the fullness of time. I do not know what that fullness of time is because it will depend on the uptake of this band by industry to recoup even costs. At some point, we might move beyond cost recovery, but that will be a long time, beyond the scope that any of us can predict. That is why we have gone this route.
In the U.S., they have cost-recovery fees for non-auction spectrum, whether you are Federal Express or a fire department. That is their legislation. Ours is slightly different. It comes down to a difference of approaches between the two countries.
I am not sure we modeled it on Australia because there are no real relevant international comparisons for this kind of fee. We guess and try to compare apples and oranges, but it is not a direct comparison. You cannot say it is that much over there and then do the monetary conversion to get what it should be in Canadian dollars.
We looked at similar bands for similar types of services in Canada operated by various folks, some of them commercial and some of them not. We looked at those fees and said that those are similar.
If we wanted to figure out a fee for this band, it was a good starting point. We used it as a starting point and we discounted it for a couple of reasons: First, it is non-commercial; second, it is shared use. When you look at how the fee is derived, it has already been discounted a bit because of the nature of the client.
The Chairman: In your consultation process with different stakeholders, many public safety agencies have said they would prefer that no fee be charged for the use of the spectrum. They are concerned that fees may impact the quality and the deployment of public safety applications. The RCMP indicated that they would have preferred that fees be kept to a minimum and be charged on the recovery basis of spectrum management costs rather than the economic rent set by the economic value of the spectrum.
The RCMP and other agencies have concerns about an increase of their overall licensing fees. What is your response to these concerns?
Mr. Binder: Everybody would like it free. Free is always better. We cannot compete with free. We have had experience with our stakeholders. We are very close to them and we know them. If you compare it to buying equipment for the RCMP or for the fire department and the engine that goes with it, it is a negligible expense.
I would like to remind everyone that this is viewed as a privilege. It is not like a marriage licence. It is the privilege of dealing with a limited resource. Our preference would have been to allocate this in a commercial way. In fact, we do it through an auction. Let the market decide what its value is.
Then we set aside, out of the commercial band, specific public service kind of use. Our historical experience has been that if you do not charge a reasonable rent for that public use, then the asset is being mismanaged, to be absolutely blunt.
As Mr. Hill said, the experience when we set up those fees is that we got back a lot of spectrum, which we gave back, either to the private sector or to the law enforcement agencies to use for other services.
The Chairman: How much leeway does the department have in setting fees for a spectrum used by public safety entities without violating the requirement that all users, including governments, are required to pay licence fees on the same basis as other users of the spectrum?
Mr. Binder: We never set those fees without consultation. The last time we increased fees, if memory serves me right, was in 1994.
The Department of Industry wants to be clear that we are not in a conflict of interest. We do not get the money in the department. The money goes to CRF. We are waiting for a thank you note from the Department of Finance. It goes into general revenue and not to us. We are interested in ensuring that there is equity in distribution. Hypothetically, if you said we will not charge the RCMP, then you go to the local police, ambulance service, air traffic control or the Red Cross — you can go down the chain — in our experience and international experience that is not the right thing to do.
The Chairman: Are there considerations that restrict the 4940/4990 megahertz spectrum band to public safety use?
Mr. Binder: No, not that I am aware of. It is a shared band. By the way, we are looking to other bands for law enforcement and public safety. In fact, this is one of the big challenges internationally. Can we have a common band that all the law enforcements agencies can share internationally to fight anti-terrorism, et cetera?
This is not the only band for them, but it is a useful one because of its physical and engineering characteristics that the agencies look forward to. There is no restriction on use, with one exception: You must not interfere with other services. The technology allows us to do that.
[Translation]
Senator Dawson: If I understood that correctly, you have a minimum fee of $250, which means that Charlottetown, with a population of 58,000 will pay $250. Will the municipality of Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague, for instance, which has a total population of 500, with volunteer firefighters and a communication system, have to pay the same fee?
Mr. Binder: That depends on the population.
[English]
Senator Dawson: However, the minimum is $250.
Mr. Binder: Right.
Senator Dawson: That means $250 for a city of 58,000. You have a little village on the coast of Newfoundland that has 450 people and volunteer firemen in the system. Do they have to pay $250, the same price?
Mr. Binder: Yes.
Senator Dawson: That surprises me. That is when you start multiplying the number of little villages compared to a big city. The costs can look heavy.
Mr. Hill: Those fire departments already pay licence fees that probably exceed $250 a year.
Senator Dawson: In their case, will they get it lowered?
Mr. Hill: No, because this is the fee for the use of this frequency band only. If there are other frequency bands, there will be a different licence and there are different fees.
In this case, it is very unlikely that a fishing hamlet will use this spectrum. It will primarily be used for something called incident response. When a fire department goes into an apartment building where there is a fire, this allows them to transmit like a wireless local area network. The floor plan can be transmitted to the firefighter while he is in the building, providing him with the knowledge of how to navigate through the building and the smoke to get out. It is unlikely that that kind of need exists in small towns.
Senator Dawson: I just wanted to be sure. I was imagining if you had a total population of 50,000 made up of 300 villages, they would not have to pay 300 times $250. I understand. I just want to be sure you are on the record saying the effect will be minimal on these small villages.
Mr. Binder: Just to clarify, in many of those networks, the network is shared. There is province-wide sharing.
Senator Dawson: I should have used the example of Cape Breton, which has more small villages.
Mr. Hill: The equipment costs are easily tens and tens of thousands of dollars.
Senator Dawson: I just wanted to be sure there would not be a collective negative effect on small rural communities because we were being too nice to you.
I appreciate the system, and I think that the cost is reasonable, but sometimes there is a perverse effect from a bill. We have been known to have them pass through here; we want to ensure it will not happen again.
I know there will be other auctions and other spectrums for the commercial side of the industry that will be coming out. There is nothing in this bill that creates a precedent that will affect — raising, lowering or widening — the competition. It does not have any perverse effect that would affect a bidding war in the commercial industry in Canada?
Mr. Binder: No.
Senator Eyton: I am learning quite a lot tonight. When I look at your spectrum range, I can see that we are dealing with a tiny part of the spectrum. In fact, with respect to the numbers in what you refer to as SHF, the super high frequencies, we are dealing with only 50 megahertz out of a total in that category of 27,000.
Given the needs and given expanding demand and greater sophistication, is that enough? Is there latitude on either side? How can you manage growth and demand? I expect, like everything else, there will be growth and demand for this spectrum.
Mr. Binder: That is exactly our challenge. There are two things. First, there is equipment and, second, there is technology.
Over the years, industry has developed equipment that allows you to do some wonderful things. For example, a law enforcement officer who stops someone for a check can go to a hand-held device and obtain a picture and fingerprints. You could not do that several years back. However, to be able to do this, you need more bandwidth. There is international demand for opening those bandwidths and we will be trying to open more. You will hear in the press when we migrate to digital television that we will open more public safety spectrum exactly to do the new services and activities coming up.
That is a long-winded answer. The short answer is this: There is not a megahertz that people would not like to have. They would like to have more. More is good.
Senator Eyton: The other part of that is that there is room there. There is this big spectrum and there is room for us.
Mr. Binder: Right.
Senator Eyton: I assume the spectrum is governed by the way in which you deal with it in Canada and how you allocate geography with the spectrum. It is also, importantly, governed by agreements you have internationally, including with the U.S. When you think that most Canadians live within 25 miles of the border, there will be a great deal of overlap, unless it is carefully regulated. I am sure our American brethren are eager to grab spectrum when they can. Are we holding up in that debate? Are we getting our fair share?
Mr. Binder: Absolutely. This is one of our unknown success stories. Our engineers are in almost daily discussion with the Americans to ensure that we share the frequencies, not only in law enforcement and public safety but also in broadcasting. You can be in Windsor and listen to a Canadian station as well as pick up a Detroit station and they will not interfere with each other. That is because a lot of work has gone on to ensure that there is no interference. This is continuing on an ongoing basis.
There is great interest in public safety on both sides of the border to ensure that, in the case of an emergency, they can interact and share information. That is the kind of coordination, the day-to-day grunt work in which we are engaged.
Mr. Hill: This band is exactly the same band in the United States. It will be the same pieces of equipment. Indeed, the whole idea of interoperability across the border was one of the considerations in terms of the selection of this band.
Senator Eyton: You refer to this term ``public safety agencies,'' and there is a definition here talking about police, fire and health emergencies. I assume you have to identify them; when somebody comes along, either you are part of an auction or you get this discount price for your bit of the spectrum.
What is to prevent, let us say, Rogers, in one of its many manifestations — and they would be all over the spectrum here — saying it would like to operate, say, a stand-alone public safety agency that in fact have a social or community purpose that would ordinarily fit within your general approach to what constitutes a public safety agency? Is that possible?
Mr. Binder: No.
Senator Eyton: How do you define it and exclude those who say it is a free ride?
Mr. Binder: They have to apply. It is first come, first served. We have to know who you are, who owns you, et cetera.
Rogers gets a lot of spectrum licences from us. We have a good knowledge about their business. They would never try to come in, not in this band anyhow. They may come and look for some interesting advantages on other bands, but not here because this spectrum is basically for public service. We know the people. It is ambulances, and they are registered.
Senator Eyton: Yes, but Rogers can render a public service as well. They can do a weather station, for example, which is kind of a public service.
Mr. Binder: They can provide service to an ambulance service, but they will not be the licence holders.
Mr. Hill: The way licensing works around the country is that people apply and we look at their application. Typically, we would expect an application from the town of something ambulance department for this kind of situation.
Its absolute first priority is police, fire, ambulance. We permit other uses, but they must be subordinate to those first three. We would not necessarily entertain an application for something other than public safety if those other three needs were not already there.
Senator Eyton: You would not permit advertising?
Mr. Hill: I doubt it.
Senator Merchant: I am from Regina. You said you had a pilot program running in Regina. Is that what you said, Mr. Binder, or was it you, Mr. Hill?
Mr. Binder: I did not say that.
Mr. Hill: I did; we have what is called a developmental system. The City of Regina wanted to trial the technology, which they are currently doing to see how it works, what they like and do not like. They have equipment from the manufacturer to check it out; they are kind of pre-commercial testing it out.
I do not personally have the feedback from the city at this point in time. We do not get into the workings of whether it is working for the city on a hands-on basis; but typically they feed back to us whether they thought it was good or bad. Personally, I do not have those results now. This is a very new band.
There is interest in it, but it is not that it is taking off out the door quickly right away. The equipment is rather expensive. It is substantial equipment. It has to withstand some difficult environments — smoke, fire and water kinds of environments, not cold and hot. For that reason, they are testing it out before they leap in. They want to be comfortable that it will meet their needs.
Senator Merchant: Are they paying something for it now? Is it on a trial basis? How long has it been there?
Mr. Hill: I do not know how long it has been there, off the top of my head, but it is a short while — I think less than a year. We have a licence that is called a developmental licence, and they are operating under that at the moment. The fee is nominal, in the order of $50 or $60 a year.
Senator Merchant: This really is a tax, is it not? It is just another tax that municipalities are paying. It is not a fee to have access to the spectrum.
Mr. Hill: It is absolutely not a tax. If it were a tax, it would have to be approved by Parliament. This is a fee for right of use of the public resource that we manage on behalf of Canadians. It is not a tax.
Senator Merchant: That is coming out of money from municipalities, is it not?
Mr. Binder: It is no different than if the mayor wanted to get a BlackBerry. It is a service, if you like. This is a public resource; it is deemed to be a privilege. It is like, if I had to give an example, if you get a licence to log a Crown forest or drill for oil. It is a privilege. You pay for this. It is not like a tax. If it were a tax, trust me, the industry would be running in there right away and trying to get some rebates. These are not taxes. We have some court decisions that it is a privilege; therefore, the fees are properly administered.
Senator Merchant: When we talk about it being only one cent or something, if everyone were to pay one cent for some service, that amounts to quite a bit of money.
The Chairman: It is half a cent.
Senator Merchant: Even half a cent. We know knocking 1 per cent off the GST generates quite a bit of revenue. Half a cent is worth something; it adds up to quite a bit of money. That money, you said, goes into the general revenue.
Mr. Binder: Yes. The only answer I can give is our observation that when there was no charge no one cared how much spectrum you used. The problem with that approach is that the spectrum is valuable and a lot of new uses are being developed, new equipment. The question is: How do you maximize the use? Without us going in and trying to measure use, the market discipline here is that if it costs you a little bit you will probably look to see how you will save money.
Saving money is sharing — municipalities getting together and developing broader networks. There are all kinds of technology fixes because it is costing you money. That is the discipline of the marketplace, which we believe is the right way to approach this. It is a scarce commodity.
Senator Merchant: I have a question about the kind of service that you would define as a safety issue. In a small community, let us say in Saskatchewan, where you have a lot of older people, if someone wanted to start an escort service to help people who are walking from the grocery store to their homes or something, would that qualify as a safety measure? I am trying to see where you draw the line between something that is public safety.
Mr. Hill: We have gradations.
Senator Merchant: Senator Eyton asked the questions about categories.
Mr. Hill: It is not that there is a firm line. There are hierarchies. Police, fire and ambulance are very much safety of life and those are near the top of the list. There are other safety things. We want the sewer system to not back up, so you want to monitor the sewer system to make sure it operates well. There are a lot of variables in terms of what is a safety service.
Could that kind of service operate under a safety service licence? I would suggest to you there are a lot better frequency bands for that kind of use, ones that have equipment costs that are minuscule in comparison to this one. This, again, is more high-tech public safety things.
One of the potential uses is that sewer-monitoring kind of use, because it is a good spectrum for that kind of use. It is a very good spectrum for transmitting floor plans to firemen who are in a burning building. It is very good for that kind of broadband use. It is not good for other things, notably the one example you gave.
Senator Johnson: That is where you say it is a limited public resource in terms of service.
Mr. Hill: The limited public resource is the whole radio-frequency spectrum. While it looks like there is a lot there, some of the spectrum is only good for certain things. Some of it is only good for radar. You could not use it for much else other than radar systems. Some of it is only good for transatlantic communications. That is more the HF bands and ham radio kind of things.
Some of it is really good for mobile communications, like cellphones and BlackBerry devices. Some of it is really good for broadband, localized use in monitoring within a city, and that is this band.
Believe me, the commercial entities probably would like it if we auctioned this off, because they could find some neat commercial uses. However, they will not get that opportunity, to your earlier question, because we will not license them to do it. It is clearly a public safety band. There is lots of spectrum for them to use into the future. They should, in my lifetime for sure, never run out of spectrum in this band for what they will do — not because the spectrum will grow, but because technological advances continue where you can put more into a finite space. Believe me, 50 megahertz is a lot of spectrum. You can do a national cellular network and have tons left over with that amount of spectrum.
Mr. Binder: For clarification, this is a brand new band. They use a lot of equipment. This is not a public kind of device. In fact, the industry is now starting to develop this equipment. It will probably be bought by people with high data needs on the road as they go. It is not meant to keep in touch with your family and friends. It will not be used for that kind of thing.
As a government, we do not like to stand in the way. We like to release the band once we know equipment is starting to be developed. How do we know? We know because the Americans have started. We always like to harmonize. We would like to see this being used for our own public safety organization.
It will be used by the police and maybe by fire and ambulance services, not by the average person because they have cheaper and more user-friendly alternatives.
[Translation]
Senator Dawson: In his letter to the clerk of the committee, Mr. Bernier said he would be tabling the document. I agree. Your presentation is justified. What would happen if we did not agree?
The Chairman: We would say so.
Senator Dawson: What would the effect be on the act?
The Chairman: We can either accept or reject the user fees. This is what we are here for. It is the same as when we amend legislation.
Senator Dawson: But we are not rubber stamps. You are not making this presentation for the sake of it. We are entitled to object or to amend it if we so wish.
Mr. Binder: I guess so. This is the case in the House of Commons. We tabled it in both Houses.
Senator Dawson: I just wanted to know whether, technically, we are entitled to make a decision or are we simply here to rubber-stamp it?
The Chairman: The final decision rests with the House of Commons, not with us. Thank you very much for the information you presented to us this evening and for coming to the committee. For people from Industry, this is different.
[English]
The Chairman: Senators, do you wish to reflect on the user fees we have in front of us? Is the question clear to you? Shall we approve that tonight or next week?
[Translation]
Senator Dawson: Since we are meeting next week, if someone is listening and wishes to comment on this, I have no objection. But it would be wise to take a week. We are meeting next Tuesday anyhow. We can deal with this on Tuesday.
[English]
The Chairman: We are adjourned until next Tuesday morning.
The committee adjourned.