TORONTO – It was easy to see Wednesday that Tony Lacavera was really stung by the critics who decried the level of Canadian-ness of his company.
No less than seven times in his speech to the Canadian Telecom Summit did the Globalive/Wind CEO feel the need to insist upon the new wireless carrier’s Canuck bona fides.
“I won’t shy away from saying that Globalive is a Canadian company… truly a brainchild of Canadians… created by and for Canadians,” he said during his speech.
Lacavera rehashed the 2009 regulatory battles, lashing out at the incumbent operators which used every tactic in their arsenal to keep Wind out of the market for as long as possible. He noted that foreign investment was used by many of the incumbents throughout their histories in order to grow.
However, the level of foreign investment from Egypt-based wireless company Orascom (118 million subs) in Globalive (two thirds of the equity and almost all of the debt) is what caused the CRTC to say the company is not controlled by Canadians, as the Telecom Act requires. Industry Minister Tony Clement overturned that decision in December of 2009, however, ruling the company is run by and for Canadians, despite where the backing was coming from.
The CEO also said he is glad to see high-level discussions on the relaxation of foreign ownership restrictions of Canadian telecom companies are under way. “We welcome that change and would urge policy makers to look to the experts for direction forward,” he said.
(Ed note: And to be fair to the incumbents, their quarrel with Globalive’s investment structure was not so much to cover themselves in the glory of the Maple Leaf – although it may have seemed that way – it was to argue that they, too, want to be able to access non-Canadian capital in the same way Wind Canada’s parent did.)
“The thing that upset me was that the incumbents were permitted to make a mockery of the process,” added Lacavera.
However, despite all that, Globalive’s leader has a lot in common with the incumbents now on the topic of foreign ownership.
“We believe that we’ll need to carve out three integral chapters in this story,” he said. “1. We must liberalize current foreign ownership rules. 2. We must facilitate access to foreign capital for telecommunications; 3. We must move forward with a policy review on the separation of broadcasting content policy from telecommunications carriage.”
Much of which are the same attitudes espoused by the likes of Rogers, Bell and Telus.
“We provide the pipes, not the content,” added Lacavera. “Content and pipelines have different roles and as such, they ought to have different regulatory frameworks.”
Which places him at odds with the CRTC once again…
– Greg O’Brien
