Canadian Heritage committee  Content is the key; all the rest is housekeeping. Robert Fowler said that in 1957, and I think it is still true. I have a vision. I don't have a dream, but I do have a vision, which is that somewhere in Treasury Board the CBC and the Canadian Forces are going to get their budge

Canadian Heritage committee  That's the difference between a state broadcaster and a public broadcaster with an arm's-length relationship. France used to have a state broadcaster, where the government and the broadcaster were working hand-in-hand. And Russia has it now. That's not what we're talking about

Canadian Heritage committee  There obviously should be a board of directors, as there is, and the board of directors should appoint the president. I don't think the Prime Minister should do that. It would be one way of lengthening the arm. If Parliament as a whole were to take responsibility, that would be

Canadian Heritage committee  Are you saying that without advertising there would be a possibility of political interference with news programming or something? Is that what you're saying?

Canadian Heritage committee  Maybe there should be a formula that says that for every minute of advertising that the CBC does not broadcast, Parliament will give them x number of dollars instead, or they'll have access to cable revenue or something of the sort. Rather than saying that it should be zero--wh

Canadian Heritage committee  First of all, I want to agree with Peter Moss about the devil being in the details and that the CBC mandate right now is immensely broad. Clearly, it doesn't have the resources to fulfill that. The thing is that I think you have to be careful about the idea of saying the CBC can

Canadian Heritage committee  It's an absolute. To the degree that advertising on CBC could be reduced, you would get more and more of a public broadcaster. There was a study done by a company called McKinsey about 20 years ago, and it looked at all the public broadcasters around the world. It looked at the

Canadian Heritage committee  It was a Paul Martin budget, we're all agreed.

Canadian Heritage committee  You got the part II licence fees, which the private guys just repatriated, which is about $60 million or $70 million more that they now have to spend in Los Angeles. If they were doing something with all of this money that they were collecting from all the sources you just poin

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes, it was 41% in English over about a 17-year period, and it was 33% in French, I think.

Canadian Heritage committee  That's the drop in production budgets. In licence fees, I didn't look at it over an historical period, I don't think, but it was extremely low.

Canadian Heritage committee  You're talking about the production money in constant dollars?

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes. But what I think is happening is the commercial broadcasters are of course using every means they can to reduce their program expenses for Canadian programming. They do that partly by reducing the licence fees. They do it partly because they have access to certain kinds of p

Canadian Heritage committee  There was a fee on radio sets in the thirties in Canada, which would probably surprise most people in this room. The reason they got rid of it really quickly was because people were saying the Americans don't have it, so why do we need it. At least there's the Atlantic Ocean betw

Canadian Heritage committee  The CRTC just passed an order saying that the off-air broadcasters would not be allowed to get a fee out of cable. I think that's fine. But maybe for the public broadcasters, it might be worth considering a fee, like a national education fee or something, from cable. So when you