TORONTO – Instead of waiting for the federal government to implement a national digital economy strategy for Canada, the private sector needs to take the lead on the initiative, said Tom Jenkins, executive chairman and chief strategy officer for Waterloo, Ont.-based enterprise content management software company OpenText.
He made his comments Wednesday morning during a special session called “Building a Digital Canada” at the Canadian Telecom Summit in Toronto. Other participants in the panel discussion included executives from Xplornet Communications, SaskTel, ORION and Cologix Canada. Jenkins argued that the private sector – being dynamic and understanding network convergence – is in a better position to construct a vision of what a “Digital Canada” would look like.
“We need to turn our psychology around,” he said. “We need to take the lead and then invite government, as opposed to going to Industry Canada and arguing about spectrum and what have you – which are good arguments to have, but those are point issues.”
Jenkins (whose company employs 4,400 worldwide) made his comments after some of his fellow panellists had expressed dissatisfaction with how slowly the federal government’s digital strategy has been taking shape since its first announcement in May 2010 by Industry Canada’s then-Minister Tony Clement. On Tuesday afternoon at the Telecom Summit, current Industry Minister Christian Paradis reaffirmed the federal government’s commitment to a national digital strategy, saying the industry could expect it to be released by the end of the year.
At the beginning of Wednesday’s panel discussion, moderator Darren Henderson, partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said there is “a sense of real urgency and some frustration” in the industry, regarding the as-yet-unreleased national digital strategy.
John Maduri, CEO of Xplornet, said Canada’s digital strategy must address the country’s “digital divide”, specifically the problems associated with deploying rural broadband. As a fixed wireless and satellite service provider, Xplornet is more than familiar with the challenges of delivering high-speed Internet services to rural customers. “In a country with among the lowest population density in the world – three people per square kilometre – I’m proud of what our company has done to eliminate the digital divide,” he said.
Maduri said access to new spectrum is an important issue for his company and other rural providers, but unfortunately Industry Canada has not included provisions for a separation of rural and urban licences in its announced rules for the upcoming 700MHz and 2.5GHz spectrum auctions. According to Maduri, under the current auction rules, acquiring spectrum for rural markets is not economically feasible for Xplornet. “If all Canadians are to participate in the country’s digital agenda, Xplornet and other rural providers will have to find commercial means to secure spectrum,” he said. “This would include partnership models, network sharing and joint venture structures.”
Ron Styles, president and CEO of SaskTel, said the cost of service is one of the key challenges facing the industry and he believes network consolidation may be on the horizon. “We’ve heard some discussion about whether or not we’re moving toward maybe one network across Canada, something that’s a lot more unified, and I tend to believe that is the direction that you’re going to see,” he said.
“Having duplication of networks, having duplication of fibre-optic networks especially, is likely not something that is either affordable or sustainable in the long run,” he added.
Styles said a digital society already exists in Canada today, but the real question is how pervasive and expansive it is going to be. “And the second part of this question is whether or not we’re going to have a true digital policy framework from the federal government to help drive it,” Styles said.
To illustrate the importance of a unified digital strategy for Canada, Darin Graham, president and CEO of ORION, offered up an anecdote from a health research workshop he attended recently. ORION (the Ontario Research and Innovation Optical Network) is a high-speed fibre-optic network that connects research and education institutions in Ontario.
Graham said the U.S. researchers who attended the workshop were amazed by the fact that various Canadian health research databases were not connected in a way that data could be easily shared, making collaboration very difficult. “At the end of the day, the Americans said Canada could solve cancer in a very short period of time. What’s in the way is that we don’t have the infrastructure to share and collaborate and pass this data around,” he said.
“So imagine Canada solving cancer. This is what the digital economy could do."
