Canadian Heritage committee  Well, hear, hear! I'd love to see the CBC doing it, but I'd also love to see MPs getting their constituents in Hamilton, London, Guelph, the mainland of British Columbia, and several other areas out there beating on the doors of the CBC and the government—there's no point beating

Canadian Heritage committee  I'd just like to add—I hate to keep going back to governance, but there's a governance issue here too—that the very fact that the board and the president and the chair are appointed by the government of the day does create a public perception of a broadcaster under the thumb of t

Canadian Heritage committee  Television is a money-eater. There have been a lot of cutbacks in radio, but they're not as noticeable. As long as you have a voice—into a microphone, as I'm doing here now—you don't see the fact that a lot of the people working behind the scenes have been cut and the quality is

Canadian Heritage committee  That's how the CBC has stayed on the air. I worked in Ottawa at the supper hour program for many years. I left in 2000, just at the point when they cut the supper hours back to half an hour and they cut the staff by 40%. One of the reasons I left was I thought this is not what I

Canadian Heritage committee  Strangely enough, this circles back to the issue of governance, because I think—and I don't want to turn this into a heavy attack—one of the largest failures of the current president has been in selling the CBC to the country. I think the president of the CBC should be on the hus

Canadian Heritage committee  I have to say, I don't want to dump on another witness, but I read the transcript of Ms. Landolt's testimony and I thought a lot of it bordered on the absurd. There was an idea put forward—I think it was on Friday—that the ombudsperson at the CBC should perhaps not be a CBC emp

Canadian Heritage committee  That's a difficult question, but as I'm sure you're aware, the CBC is already proposing 44 transmitters that would basically limit its over-the-air high-definition transmission to major cities, and everybody else would be experiencing what the people of Kamloops, British Columbia

Canadian Heritage committee  I think your concerns are well-founded, but I would throw back at you—this may sound like a trite cliché—that relevance costs money, and if you want the relevance, you have to pay the bill. In terms of regional programming—and you've heard many calls already for increased regio

Canadian Heritage committee  We don't think so. We don't think it's politically saleable for government to put $300 million or $400 million into the CBC to remove advertising, and we don't think there's a necessity for that. If the government were to say it was willing to do that, we would, first of all, say

Canadian Heritage committee  Absolutely.

Canadian Heritage committee  They're paying it now. They're paying for Newsworld, they're paying for RDI, as I said, and they're paying for The Sports Network. It's a hard, cruel world, and I'm sure this is going to come back to bite me, but the reality is that consumers don't get a lot of say in the matter.

Canadian Heritage committee  At the moment, there are satellite subscription fees. They are collected primarily by the specialty broadcasters: Newsworld, RDI, The Sports Network, and MuchMusic. All these specialty channels, essentially delivered by cable, now collect from the cable company a subscription fee

Canadian Heritage committee  In Britain they use something called the Nolan rules, and I won't claim to be an expert on it, but it is a process—as I understand it, and my colleague may have more to add on this—that involves a non-partisan appointments board that reviews nominations. The nominations are publi

Canadian Heritage committee  More or less. I just want to clarify, because we're looking at two different pockets of new funding. We think there should be new funding from Parliament. We think it should all be primarily devoted to new programming. We don't think the Canadian public have a toleration for en

Canadian Heritage committee  Absolutely not, and we don't see any problem with, for instance, advertising on Hockey Night in Canada or other professional sports programs. We just think it's a little overdone, and at this point it drives a lot of programming choices. The example that's been given over and ove