I think the funding for the public broadcaster should be primarily from parliamentary appropriations. It's Parliament that created the CBC, and having created the CBC, it's Parliament's responsibility to ensure that it is properly funded. The rest is details. We've come up with a few ideas here as to how funding can be redirected. As Bill has indicated, if you don't like our ideas, fine, come up with some new ones. We don't care.
When Parliament passes laws saying they are going to create a public broadcaster, then concomitant with that decision there is a responsibility to fund it properly. There is not much point in our having a piece of legislation that says, do all these great things, and then we let the CBC try to sort it out for itself. That's where the responsibility lies.
If Parliament decides that somehow or other the private broadcasters should help do that, that's fine. We have no position on that. We're simply saying, the current model isn't working. It's broken. You need to fix it, because if you don't fix it, what's going to happen is that the CBC is going to become more and more of a commercial broadcaster.
If that's what Parliament wants, then all it has to do is declare that the CBC is going to be privatized, and I can tell you, to privatize the CBC would make money, lots of money. It would go into the market and start competing aggressively to buy U.S. shows like CTV and Global do. It would raise up the price, put more American shows on television, and CBC would make a tonne of money. If that's what Canada needs, then go for it and privatize the CBC.
I personally don't think Canada needs another private commercial broadcaster to put on more American shows that we can easily get by watching the American channels in the first place. And right now the private broadcasters are being subsidized, with the simulcasting rules, for hundreds of millions of dollars. Under provisions of the Income Tax Act, it's hundreds of millions of dollars. Through the CTF, hundreds of millions of dollars are coming out of taxpayers' money.
What I'm saying is, if we're going to put taxpayers' money into Canadian content, let's put it into the one organization that was designed specifically by Parliament over 70 years ago to do precisely that. That's the kind of choice that Parliament has to make.