Good afternoon. Thank you, Chair and members of the committee.

I would like to begin by recognizing that I am joining you from the traditional territories of many first nations and indigenous peoples.

At Bell, our goal is to advance how Canadians connect with each other and the world. We set this goal in recognition of the critical role that Bell's leading-edge wireless and fibre optic infrastructure plays in the lives of Canadians and the future of the Canadian economy.

Canada's facilities-based competition framework is delivering access and affordability for Canadians at a time when prices for other essential goods and services continue to rise. While Canadians are paying more at the grocery store, in rent and in interest on everything from mortgages to small business loans, wireless and Internet prices are consistently declining.

Between January 2020 and January 2024, wireless service prices have declined over 41%. During the same period, inflation for all consumer items increased by over 15%.

Consumers today have a wide range of affordable choices. Let me highlight a few examples.

Through Lucky Mobile, we offer wireless plans starting at $15 a month.

At Virgin Plus, we have a 30-gigabyte plan for $39 a month. Five years ago, a comparable plan with less data cost $180 a month. That means a customer could reduce their monthly bill by $141 while using 50% more data.

In 2019, Bell's Black Friday special offered 10 gigs of wireless data for $75, a price of $7.50 per gig.

Today, you can get 100 gigs of wireless data for $60 when you bundle Bell wireless and Internet services, a price of 60¢ per gig. On a stand-alone wireless plan, you can get 75 gigs of data for $65, or 87¢ per gig.

Meanwhile, payments to government for spectrum in Canada are among the highest in the world. Most recently, Canadian telcos paid the federal government $8.9 billion for 3.5 gigahertz of spectrum. In Australia, telcos paid one-tenth that amount for comparable spectrum. Simply fixing the spectrum licensing process to mirror that of our international peers could reduce cellphone bills in Canada by five dollars a month for every subscriber.

Consumers are also benefiting from lower prices for Internet services. The average retail price of a 600 megabits per second Internet package is down from $71 four years ago to $54 today. This reflects a 25% reduction in the monthly Internet bill of a Canadian household over the past four years.

We are proud of our progress in expanding our networks while lowering prices for our customers. At its core, Bell is an infrastructure builder. Since 2020, we have invested over $19 billion to expand our networks.

That is the value proposition we offer to our customers and to the ordinary Canadians and their pension funds, which trust us to be the stewards of their hard-earned money through the purchase of our stock. However, building a new network is a risky, capital-intensive proposition. The payback period is long and uncertain. The business case for those investments cannot absorb negative regulatory decisions without consequence.

As a direct result of the CRTC's November 2023 decision on wholesale Internet access, which allows third parties to resell our newly built fibre network at below-cost rates, we reduced capital expenditures by over $1.1 billion. That means five million homes and businesses in Bell's footprint that are still without fibre will continue to be without fibre for the foreseeable future. If the regulator does not allow a reasonable return on investment, Bell cannot justify investing billions of dollars in brand new infrastructure just to subsidize its competitors.

Earlier this month, the Minister of Finance made a plea to Canadian companies to support the country's productivity through investment. Bell stands ready to answer that call. We want to invest. We share the minister's view of the importance of business investment and the need for Parliament's and the regulator's support.

Let's work together to build on the success of Canada's long-standing policy of facilities-based competition, rather than piling on additional costs and barriers to investment through heavy-handed regulation.

Thank you.