All right.
You may notice, just from the weight of our brief, that it will run long. We've been furiously editing it down to meet your shortened time requirements. If certain passages aren't read out as we go by, we'd like you to read them later.
Thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to appear before you this morning. This is an important moment in the controversy that has arisen in the past couple of weeks. As you know, there has been much press coverage in recent weeks focusing on allegations that the fund is a broken institution, calling for a complete restructure of what we are and what we do. From our perspective, we don't think the fund is the real issue before the committee at this time. But I'll come back to that in my closing remarks.
For the record, while we certainly believe the CTF can and should improve, we believe it's a healthy and strong organization, definitely not broken, as some have suggested. The CTF has evolved and will continue to evolve, transform, and improve itself on an ongoing basis.
As a practical matter, the CTF is a well-governed and well-managed institution. It is both program-effective in service delivery and cost-effective on the administrative side. It manages a considerable amount of public and private funding to the highest degree of fiduciary standards. It operates under broad policy guidelines contractually imposed, and under program objectives set by the Department of Canadian Heritage. Its results are subject to close scrutiny, and it is repeatedly found to be performing well in periodic examinations and reviews.
All of these statements are supported by the facts. We are pleased to be able to review these facts with you today.
The CRTC, as you know, first proposed the establishment of the cable production fund, the fund's predecessor, in 1994. It was established as a privately incorporated non-profit corporation. Once the policy supervision of the fund was transferred in 1996 to the Department of Canadian Heritage from the CRTC, the fund has operated under a series of contribution agreements with the department.
The contribution agreements contain approximately ten overriding policy directions that govern our operations. We have a list of them in the document we have provided to you. These policy directions look simple and straightforward to administer, but they are not. They are quite complex, and require a tremendous amount of expertise to figure out how to implement. That's why the CTF's governance structure was intended from the outset to bring the very best industry expertise to the table in the original CRTC public notice.
A 20-member board of directors governs the CTF, with nominees representing numerous stakeholder groups. The largest group of seats on the board is held by the department itself, with five. Until recently, the board included senior officers from both Shaw and Vidéotron, who have participated in our board meetings for a number of years.
Good governance practices require conflict of interest management. Currently there are six directors on the board who are independent of any commercial connection with the television business. Together, the independent directors form a permanent independent committee that supervises and monitors an extensive conflict of interest policy.
In addition, and perhaps most importantly, all of the substantive policy and financial decisions of the board must be passed by a double majority of the independent board members and of the remaining stakeholder board members.
Mr. Chairman, I have been a corporate lawyer for over 30 years and a partner in a major Bay Street law firm for over 20 years, so I think it's safe to say that I know a little about corporate governance. I can assure you that the governance practices of the CTF match or exceed the best governance practices found in Canada's biggest public companies.