The Debut: Setting Up the Telecommunication Study Mission

Depending mainly on archival documents, correspondences, personal diaries, government reports (all deposited in the Library and Archives Canada), as well as my personal one-on-one interviews with key informants in the history of Canadian communication public policy (such as Alan Gotlieb, Pierre Juneau, Spencer Moore, Betty Zimmerman, and Charles Dalfen), the chapter maps out the setting of the department of communications’ Telecommission Studies, their plan, projects, and main outcomes. Mainly it overviews the three main topics it was set as its mission: (1) Telecommunications Environment Pilot Project; (2) telecommunications and individuals; and (3) telecommunications and institutions. I argue that this phase of brain-storming ideas, proposals, discussions, and unavoidably, debates, represented a healthy debut for a novel research inquiry such as the Telecommission and its particular outcome on the right to communicate practice in Canadian communication policy.