Canadian Heritage committee  First of all, obviously it's very hard to get clarity on the impact of that agreement on the cultural sector. What it appears to do is preserve the existing measures, the ones that we have. The risk is that it precludes future measures. For example, there's a school of thought that says exactly what Mr.

Canadian Heritage committee  It's possible that they would be impossible, but I don't know; I'm not a trade lawyer. I'm not going to suggest equivocally one way or the other. If you've looked at this yourselves, you'll know that there's a well-known Ottawa academic, Michael Geist, who has written that it looks as if it preserves cultural protection; there's a well-known cultural nationalist lawyer named Peter Grant who said that he thinks it's okay.

Canadian Heritage committee  Let me say that when we look at Canadian content we look at it in different ways. For those of you who have observed it, there has been a real switch to look at the economic benefits of production. We talk a lot about that, and we haven't talked as much about the cultural benefits.

Canadian Heritage committee  I'd be happy to. Can I go back to your previous question, just to be clear?

Canadian Heritage committee  I'll be very fast. The stations in that bundle, the Global and the Bell, don't get any of that $25.

Canadian Heritage committee  In terms of whether there's money in the system, what we looked at are projections for the profitability of local TV. We looked at what we call the “revenue gap”, or in other words, what kind of gap we have in the system for conventional television. We compared that to the money the CRTC was looking at reallocating to local TV.

Canadian Heritage committee  The only other thing I can add is that the regulatory system up till now has regulated local news by having an hour of commitment. So in small markets, the small English-language markets, the hour of commitment is a minimum of seven hours a week. In francophone markets, it's a minimum of five hours a week and goes up to 14 and 10 hours respectively in larger tier markets.

Canadian Heritage committee  This is the issue that's very much before the CRTC right now. You heard a little bit from Scott Hutton from the commission when he appeared. The premise is that right now, distributors—and you will hear from one later this morning—tell us that they contribute 5% of their total broadcast revenues to Canadian programming.

Canadian Heritage committee  I had an opportunity to read the transcript of the testimony by Canadian Heritage officials. I think part of the problem is that they were dealing with dated data. Very often the data you receive is just until 2014, and some of the declines, we haven't seen since then. The declines right now, to be honest, are fairly small because, despite declines in conventional television advertising, the major vertically integrated conglomerates have continued to fund local programming and used the synergies with their specialty services and other assets to maintain revenue.