Thank you, Robert.
Almost one year ago, all of the French services were reorganized under a single vice-president. I would like to say that one of our fundamental roles at Radio-Canada, and one of our corporate objectives, is to improve democratic and cultural life, with all that that entails in the 21st century.
Improving democratic life by providing quality information in the 21st century means much more than it did in the 20th century. The same thing is true for culture. Today's definition of culture is very different from what it was, because of globalization, immigration, new means of communication and for many other reasons as well. In order to do this, democracy and culture must be defined.
Our action plan is based on three main components that will guide us for the next three or five years. The first element is of course distinctive and high quality programming in terms of content and technical quality. We want to ensure that we are always in the forefront as far as the means of distributing content are concerned, and to help bring Canada to the state-of-the-art level for all forms of content distribution that may exist, so that Canadians continue to have access to quality content that speaks to them.
The second element is the integration of our services, that is to say that we have integrated all of our radio, television and web services under a single management group. We are also integrating all of our management activities, because we believe that the best way to confront the technological changes and all of the new platforms is to create a very strong brand, which is that of the public broadcaster, that showcases the very strong values and that we will now be able to broadcast over all of the new distribution technologies. Therefore, the integration of services component is an extremely important one for us.
The third component deals with human resources management, as much our own employees as the thousands of people who work with Radio-Canada—musicians, artists and authors—to create the content that we broadcast. We want to improve all of our labour relations, both with our own staff and with all of the stakeholders who work on public services every day. This is the third main theme of our action plan for the next few years. All of this with a goal to simply improve overall content and the overall choice we offer to Canadians.
We often hear that people hope that Radio-Canada will be everything to everyone, and I often respond that yes, we can cover almost everything for everyone, but not on all platforms at the same time. We have radio, television, and the web. There are a huge number of different platforms, and the more time goes by, the more fragmentation there is, and the more we will choose the best platforms at the right time and with the right content. I believe that we are currently building the structures and giving ourselves the means to do so.
Thank you. I now give the floor to Jane Chalmers.