Yes, sir. Thank you.
Well, I began down this path in September 2019, a year ago, so 14 or so months ago. The usual or traditional means of reaching out, engaging with basically the community, tasked me with doing whatever I could to change their situation. I would consider it to be desperate: The playing field was not level, is not level, for these communities, and they were in lockdown and isolation.
When I started down this path, it was prior to COVID, and COVID only accelerated that.
After eight months of engaging with the local telecommunications company, they came back to me and offered me 10% of the one gigabit that was in the cable plan. At that point, having done this a number of times, my frustration, my inability to go back to the community and feel like I had done my part to solve this issue, had reached new heights.
My feedback typically over the years has been met with indifference. We've often been told there's no money in servicing these communities. I think it was Albert Einstein who said that “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” To me, I have no sympathy for telecommunications companies in Canada based on what I've faced and had to deal with, and what I see these communities fighting for. They have had the opportunity to be competitive. They have had a head start on everyone else. They have had funding and support from taxpayers, provincial governments, federal governments, and have failed to deliver solutions and alternatives to indigenous communities.
They're not asking for 4K Netflix; they're asking for the ability to hold court proceedings in a community. Pikangikum hasn't had a court in nine months because of the lockdown. We did a proof of concept the same day we went into that community, and we did a three-way video conference with the Kenora courthouse, the Pikangikum bail bed program, and a representative from the indigenous justice group in Toronto. The person with the poorest connection was the individual in Toronto.
We basically got tired of banging our heads against the wall to solve a problem, approaching it in the same way that it's always been approached, using terrestrial telecommunication companies to do it with. We went to SpaceX and it was like a barn-raising. I was working with friends and colleagues, and they took this project on with as much passion and desire as I had, as much need as the community had. That's not what it's like to work with telecommunications companies. I've taken years off my life, and I'm only 26 years old—