Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The issue I want to talk to today is the issue about access to public pay phones. Years ago there were pay phones almost everywhere you looked, whether they were on the street corners, at the arenas, our theatres, or even our grocery stores and shopping malls. These days there are less and less and you’d be lucky to find any. In my riding of Yellowknife Centre alone I’ve only been able to track down one and that’s at the Explorer Hotel. We’ve reached a point where it’s hard to believe that pay phones are even less common than public washrooms.

For some of you who may not know, pay phones got their start back in 1878 as pay stations. People paid the station attendant after making a call. Coin operated pay phones were only introduced 11

years later in 1889. These phones were extremely important, of course, because it wasn’t until World War II when house phones, private phone lines, became publicly available. Nowadays it seems even the term “pay phone” belongs in a different time and perhaps maybe even a different generation. I wonder even today if I’ll have to take my son to the museum to see what a pay phone might have looked like. Or I certainly hope that our education Minister will start rolling it into history classes right in line with stories about the passenger pigeon and, yes, the dodo bird, and soon it will be the pay phone.

Even considering some of us come from a different time, as well, there will be a few here who will remember that Superman had to run into a pay phone to change into his costume to do public good. Many people out there wouldn’t even know that and wonder what the pay phone was.

Some of the people here in Yellowknife need a pay phone for their access as a lifeline. People on low income don’t necessarily have a phone. People from the communities don’t necessarily carry a cell phone, so when they visit Yellowknife they’re in a difficult position. The assumption out there is that everyone has a cell phone and certainly that’s not the situation that exists.

The CRTC is now getting away from its public responsibility about providing public access to pay phones. They may complain about the maintenance costs, the vandalism, the lack of user fees, and about other trouble. I hate to say it, but that’s not my problem. Public access to communication is a right. The reality is here that we need pay phones.

I’m going to close by saying that I’ll be raising questions with the Minister of Public Works later today to talk about what he is doing as our intervener in this public communications issue. I’ll have questions then.