At The 2012 Canadian Telecom Summit, Industry Minister Christian Paradis promised that we would see the release of the long awaited, long overdue national digital strategy.
We are still developing a Canadian digital economy strategy. And I am committed to delivering it by the end of the year.
So I was somewhat hopeful that the release of Canada’s digital economy strategy would have been the centrepiece of the Minister’s address to the IIC earlier today in Ottawa. It is the end of October. We’re starting to run out of time for delivery by the end of the year.
There were a few words mentioning the government position on the digital economy.
Our government begins from a single premise: A strong digital economy is fundamental to the future prosperity of Canadians. It’s that simple and it’s that important.
No doubt that all of us agree. A strong digital economy is fundamental to the future prosperity of Canadians. But the key question remains unanswered: what is the strategy to guide us toward this strong digital economy?
I wrote more than a year ago that “We seem to be witnessing a stream of tactics without a clear statement of the overall objective.” The Minister mentioned some of these in his speech: the new anti-spam law, modernized copyright law, beefed up privacy laws. But our anti-spam law demonstrates the problem with creating legislation in the absence of an overall strategy. The regulations being set up to enforce the still un-proclaimed law are almost certain to inhibit the adoption of digital technologies. The law and the regulations are at odds with red-tape reduction and serve to discourage small business from leveraging cost advantages associated with digital communications.
In the meantime, we continue to look forward to the release of our overall national digital economy strategy.
Assuming Godot ever arrives, the quality of the strategy will surely have suffered greatly by the time it is released. There have been no public consultations on this topic in a long time, and any strategy drafted 1-2 years ago will surely look somewhat out of date if it were to come out now. This is clearly not a priority for this government. At the end of the year, if pressed on this MIA strategy, the government will doubtlessly point to various initiatives they have undertaken on this file (C11, telecom foreign ownership, spectrum auction, C30) and call that their “digital strategy”.
Since the AWS Auction predates the DE consultation by 2 years, it would be hard to use that as an example of the government’s strategy.
It’s now been more than 700 days since the launch of the first consultation on 700 Mhz. That’s 1.65x the time it took to assign the first cellular licences and 3.6x longer than it took to assign PCS (both using comparative reviews).