Thanks very much. It's a great question.

I really appreciate your sensitivity to the needs we face and the role that municipalities play. In fact, we built EORN's $175-million first project because, when we started, of the 750,000 rural residents in eastern Ontario, 300,000 were on dial-up, so they couldn't get any type of connectivity. In the absence of provincial or federal strategies to deal with this, it fell to the counties across eastern Ontario to try to find a way to connect our citizens and our businesses. That's how that first project got its genesis.

We see it every day. We get businesses that call us every day, saying they need better connectivity in order to operate their business. We have residents who call us and say they need to be able to connect so that their kids can do some online studying.

It's a real problem in eastern Ontario, and it's a problem across the country. There needs to be a national strategy, for sure, and a lot more investment. We've taken an area that's the same size as the province of Nova Scotia—that's eastern Ontario—and are trying to do our best to fix the connectivity issues.

Our next project is around mobile broadband and cellular, so it has driven it.

Telecom companies won't go where there's market failure. That's why governments have to be involved. That's the only time we're involved as local governments, when there isn't a business case for the private sector to do it on their own.

We've worked with them over the last 10 years, and that is still true. There are areas where they just will not go because they can't get a return for their shareholders. That's why government needs to be involved.

We liken it to the situation where people needed electricity or telephone service. Government got involved because every Canadian should have that same ability to connect or to turn the lights on. It's the same thing with connectivity.

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