In a perfect world, the CBC wouldn't behave like a commercial broadcaster, right? In a perfect world, it wouldn't need to buy ads; it wouldn't need to sell ads. It would be able to program high-quality stuff for Canadians. It would be the way radio is, a fantastic alternative to all the noise. I'm a huge CBC Radio guy, because it's the one place on the busy dial where it's always great. It's always great. There's never anyone hawking diapers, things like that.
But I know it's not a perfect world. Unfortunately, CBC is torn between having to behave in some way like a private broadcaster and having to provide all the things that no one else is providing. And I think that's really important. The criticisms and the points I'm making are based on the belief that we can work hand in glove with the CBC. We love it. The CBC is important. I wouldn't be sitting here for a hearing on Global or a hearing on CTV, because they do nothing; for Canadian feature film certainly, there's absolutely nothing being done.
It's interesting to me—I'm speaking about the movies here, the cinema—that Showcase does so much for the Canadian feature film, that the CHUM brand has done so much for the Canadian feature film. CHUM is basically a commercial network, but they understand the benefit of working with people in the film community to get the word out. When you go to the Toronto film festival, who's throwing all the big parties and making all the big splash? It ties into their Entertainment Tonight-style broadcasting. They're very smart. Why is the CBC invisible—invisible—when it comes to cinema?
The CBC was the first place to put an Atom Egoyan film on the air, the first place. You can say the same for all of the great directors in Canada. It was in some ways the NFB of broadcasting. And yet what happened? Where did it go? In my lifetime, I won't even bother knocking on the door. There's just no point. When it comes to cinema, the CBC is a door that is closed. I think that's wrong.
We have a division between television drama and feature film drama, but let's be honest, drama is drama. And 99.9% of English Canadian feature films appear on television, so for most of us, that's how we know these films. We don't know them from their great performance theatrically.