This afternoon’s cabinet shuffle means that there is work to be done by Ottawa’s GR firms in forging new relationships with the new portfolio holders. Senior staffers at Industry Canada will need to dust off and update the briefing packages for their new Ministers in order to get them prepared for the next session.
For those of us in the telecommunications industry, here are some initial thoughts.
The new Industry Minister, Jim Prentice, will need to get up to speed right away on spectrum auction issues. This was a file that many thought would be Minister Bernier’s to clear. There are a lot of difficult issues to examine and with a new Minister, it is likely that the Department’s timetable will now be delayed.
One of the other telecom issues that Minister Bernier had been looking at was foreign ownership restrictions. Foreign ownership, Foreign Affairs? See the link?
You do the math…
Michael Geist has further comment on the changes at Industry and Heritage. He asks “What does this mean for copyright, telecommunications, and other digital issues?“.
These changes help keep things interesting.