No, I do not.
I believe that if one expects CBC English language to be the only broadcaster of Canadian stories and Canadian programming, sure there would be a lot of production. There would perhaps be a couple of new hours of programming.
We don't believe the CBC should be the lone voice in this country. We have a number of private broadcasters whose signals are the property of the people of Canada. They operate on a licence fee, and we believe these private broadcasters are also obligated to create Canadian drama. They're doing a despicably poor job of it at present. We've been alarmed about that for the last eight years. In prime time hours there is just an abysmal lack of Canadian drama. You can't point to one program in the English language called Corner Gas and say there's the success of our culture in the English language. That is only one-half hour in a week. It's inadequate, but I've diverged here.
Mr. Angus, I really believe that throwing money at the CBC and saying, “You do all the English language programming for drama” would ghettoize all Canadian production into the CBC. That's probably a good word to use: it would “ghettoize” it. And if there were a government in the future, or presently, that made an unfortunate choice of saying, well, CBC should have no more government allocations, then Canadian work would be dead—completely dead.
So, no, I don't believe.... And I'd actually firmly argue that all the work we hope to see—which is not just work for actors and our members—is for the cultural richness of the country. So we do not believe it should all be dedicated to CBC production only.