Thank you.
This is a very interesting discussion. I'd prefer that it was without a microphone, around a bottle of wine, and I think I'd feel more comfortable being honest, but I have to assume my role as a cultural critic and be very careful.
It's this issue of regions and this issue of why we have such mediocre television, as a general rule. I'm hearing from your presentation and the presentation we heard before of two possible reasons it might actually converge. One is the issue that we're chasing after advertising dollars. We've become increasingly committed to safe television, and safe television is boring television. People don't watch boring television, so it's a dead-end run that we're on there.
The other issue, I guess, is the loss of nuance when you don't have a regional voice. I think there is a general belief--and I'm not knocking my artist friends in urban centres, because I worked in that milieu for many years--that we can do a show and that people in St. Boniface or people in Sudbury are just like us; they just don't have good coffee. So we'll just get a bunch of people and we'll put lumberjack jackets on them and then we'll set up a story and it will be nowhere, anywhere, because we don't want to have any particular landmarks or any particular references because that will limit our audience.
I've always felt that's a dead end to anything culturally. I think people are attracted to nuance. I think that the particularities of regions actually speak more to Canadians because they say it's real and not just a blank family set on a blank stage and now let's give them some funny lines and a laugh track.
Mr. Paquin had said before that it has to be non-negotiable, that in every genre there has to be a regional commitment. Is that what you would support, that for television--whether it's comedy, drama, or news--it's non-negotiable and we have to insist that CBC starts to take productions from the various regions?