OTTAWA – While milling about on the floor of the Institute of International Communications 2011 Canadian chapter conference here at the beautiful new Ottawa Convention Centre on Monday morning, everyone had a guess (and some claimed inside information) on what Industry Minister Christian Paradis is going to say in his speech to the conference on Tuesday afternoon.
Is it to be a statement on foreign investment changes for the telecom sector? Setting out the rules on the auction of 700 MHz wireless spectrum? Some sort of direction in the long-overdue digital economy strategy?
It looks like now, it will be the latter.
While former Industry Minister Tony Clement was set to announce the federal government’s digital strategy back in May at the Canada 3.0 conference in Stratford, the federal election was instead called days before that and the announcement was kiboshed when the politicians hit the campaign trail. Post-election of course, Clement was shuffled to the Treasury Board, and since Paradis was new to the portfolio, everything was put on hold, indefinitely.
So, there has been no official digital strategy for the nation so far (even though there have been allusions to one), still no 700 MHz auction rules and no decision on opening up Canada to more foreign investment in the telecom sector (something that has been pushed for a long time and a number of reports, as Mark Goldberg mentions here). That said, many believe the federal government, when it does decide on those auction rules, will first say that telecom firms with less than 10% market share will be able to access foreign capital more freely, first.
How much more freely – and if it will start with just the small companies like Wind, Mobilicity, Public Mobile, SaskTel, Ontera, MTS and many others – remains to be seen. According to this story in the Globe and Mail, the minister will say tomorrow that the auction and foreign ownership decisions will be delayed until 2012 (although one wonders how any decision, even if released today, could be described as “quick”). The delay will likely push any auction well into 2013 and deployment of that spectrum by winning bidders to 2014.
All this speculation will make the IIC’s 9:45 plenary debate on foreign ownership and spectrum that much more meaty and topical.
Minister Paradis takes the stage at IIC 2011 at 4 p.m. (after the markets close, so maybe it will be something that could affect the publicly traded companies after all…) and we will be tweeting what we hear as it happens, if you care to follow on Twitter (@gregobr). For that matter, we’ll be in the crowd to hear CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein speak at 11 a.m., too, and prior to that, Heritage Minister James Moore at 8:15. However we couldn’t find anyone who would speculate on what Moore will say beside congratulating his home town B.C. Lions for their Grey Cup win on Sunday (he was the guy to the right of Prime Minister Harper on TV).
– Greg O’Brien
