Thank you.
As you know, over the last two weeks there has been a great deal of uncertainty about the Canadian Television Fund. The position taken by Shaw and Videotron has been that they are pulling out of the Canadian Television Fund, which very much puts the future of the fund at risk.
The terms of their licences state that they're obliged to pay in, going back to the 1993 CRTC decision in which the cable firms were allowed a major increase in subscriber rates in order to prepare for penetration of market against satellite. They succeeded. They were given an option at that point. The CRTC gave them the option to lower their rates to their subscribers or to keep those rates high but put part of that money into a fund, which was initially the Cable Production Fund. When the government stepped in, that became the Canadian Television Fund.
As you know, the minister is meeting with them today, so in some ways this should alleviate some concern. However, what is on the table now—and this is where I think it ties in with what we're dealing with in regard to the CBC. They've made it very clear that they will not continue to pay into CTF if the CBC is able to access funds. Such a position would have profound implications for the CBC's ability to run drama in English and in French markets, because it's all independent production now.
I think this is probably the most serious threat we've seen. There hasn't been anything even close to this when you have giants like Shaw and Videotron both saying they're now going to dictate the terms. The issue of CBC being able to access CTF certainly will impact on our study.
So I completely agree about our need to stay focused on CBC, but I think this is now part of the puzzle. This wasn't a piece of the puzzle two weeks ago, and it wasn't a piece of the puzzle three weeks ago. It's definitely a piece of the puzzle that we're now having to look at. I would recommend that we can do it within the mandate review of the CBC. We can draw witnesses, but we need to have this on the agenda as something to be dealt with.