MONTREAL – Canada’s telecommunications regulations aren’t keeping up with innovation and are harming the country’s competitiveness, says Michael Sabia, president and CEO of Bell Canada Enterprises.
“In telecom, the regulatory environment is trailing the times. Stifling innovation. Limiting consumer choice,” Sabia told the Canadian Club in Montreal today. “A few months ago, [Industry] Minister [Maxime] Bernier issued a clear directive to let market forces determine outcomes in telecommunications. It’s time to bring regulatory practice into line with government policy.”
Speaking about the broader information and communications technology sector, Sabia said Canadian companies are investing only about two-thirds of what their U.S. counterparts are. “In the critical area of ICT, we simply have to do better.”
The lack of investment in technology is hurting Canada’s economy as a whole, Sabia said. “It’s time for a national policy on ICT. At a minimum, that means policies that will drive education in computer literacy and engineering. And that make technology diffusion a priority, especially among small and medium-size businesses.”
Canada needs to do better to move knowledge from universities to industry, “transforming ideas in our heads into products in the market,” he said.
Sabia said BCE is playing its role by, in part, rolling out DSL to reach more than 85% of households in Bell Canada territory. He also held up the example of the partnership with Microsoft to deliver hosted email and messaging services for businesses.
To help BCE’s competitiveness, the company is “reinventing” itself by “building new streams of incomes” with new products and services such as video, networking, VoIP, television, wireless, and high speed Internet. This year, Bell made more money from new services than it did its traditional businesses, Sabia said.
The company is also staying competitive by offering customer service “that sets us apart” and by “recruiting the best talent in the business.”
Using more high-tech devices at the border crossings to speed up the flow of goods and people between Canada and the United States would also increase our competitiveness, Sabia said.
Sabia’s speech can be found here.
