First, I'll just go back. Mr. Rabinovitch was appointed at the end of 1999. Shortly thereafter, the CRTC came down with its licences for CBC for the next seven years. He held a huge press conference in Ottawa, which was very well attended. I think Le Devoir had a cartoon about this, where he attacked the CRTC, and they called him “Rambo-binovitch” and had him with a machine gun, walking into the office of Françoise Bertrand. You may remember this, as I read your newspapers.
What happened after Mr. Rabinovitch got in was this. He was upset, in my understanding, at being instructed by the CRTC to do more regionally relevant programming. He was quoted in The Globe and Mail as saying, “I have a mandate from the Prime Minister”—meaning that Prime Minister Chrétien, who appointed him, had told him that he didn't have to do what the CRTC told him. So he decided he was going to take CBC English television out of the supper-hour news, which means that from 6 o'clock to 7 o'clock in Vancouver, you used to get--in fact, we've given you a year 2000.... The programming starts at 7 o'clock, so it won't do the job.
He announced that, and a lot of people were upset. We were upset, but more importantly, your committee was upset. I distinctly recall a crowded Commons committee room where Rabinovitch and his then vice-president, Harold Redekopp, were brought in, and they were perspiring at the end of three hours. I had to stand; there were no seats available. Mr. Lincoln was in charge, and with Andy Scott, who's one of your colleagues on this committee today, he went after Rabinovitch very hard.
So finally he went back to the board and then came back and said they would do 30 minutes of local programming and 30 minutes of national programming out of Vancouver, called Canada Now. It's that compromise that they have now cancelled, and they're going back to what existed when Rabinovitch arrived.
It's the failure of leadership, but it's a win for local programming.