Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank all four of you for coming here. For some of us it's our first opportunity to have a face-to-face meeting with you.
Staff were kind enough to provide members of this committee with some background material, and included in that material is a table that shows the decline in CBC's viewing share, certainly by station group, between 1993 and 2004. It shows that share dropping from a little under 13% to about 6.5%. That's a dramatic decline. That's in all provinces except Quebec. Quebec has a better experience and I won't touch on that this time. But it does highlight some of the challenges that CBC faces.
I had an opportunity to review the Lincoln report, which is a report, I believe, of a previous iteration of this committee. It certainly highlighted some of the challenges you face, the rapidly changing face of technology, as well as, and perhaps more importantly, the audience fragmentation you face.
I believe it was Mr. Lafrance who referred to the fact that there are some people who want CBC to be all things to all people. I certainly don't subscribe to that view, and my guess is that most of us on this committee acknowledge the fact that it's just an impossibility. Given the fact that we have these huge challenges and that I believe that Canadians do see CBC as having a much more focused mandate than many of the other competitors, such as CTV, CBS, NBC, ABC, the pay and specialty channels, I'd be really curious to hear the president's and the chair's comments on his vision for the future of CBC.
We don't have a lot of time--you probably have maybe three minutes--but perhaps you could give us a glimpse of where you see CBC going to try to fulfill the mandate that you believe it has.