Good morning. My name is Marc-Philippe Laurin, and I am President of the CBC branch of the Canadian Media Guild. I represent employees at the CBC outside the province of Quebec. In my daily work, I am a technician and associate producer for local CBC radio in Ottawa.
I would like to talk a little about what is happening to the infrastructure of our public broadcaster. The guild is very concerned about the fact that the CBC clearly does not have the financial resources to protect its cultural and technological assets, which enable it to provide programming on all its platforms to reach all Canadians, including minority language groups in every region.
CBC/Radio-Canada's infrastructure, we believe, is in decline. This is of some concern to us. Many of the decisions faced by the CBC today to change some major parts of its infrastructure are, we believe, in part because it cannot defend the expense when so much of its programming is now bought from independent producers. I want to be clear here. While we certainly support the role that independent producers play in providing Canadian content, we also believe that CBC and Radio-Canada must continue to be able to produce original programming that cannot be found anywhere else on the dial.
As you know, CBC/Radio-Canada is also proposing to greatly reduce its provision of free television over the air with the transition to digital. This is due to the fact that the CBC again does not have the resources to upgrade all its existing TV transmitters. We know you've heard about this already, and we share the concerns of smaller centres, such as Kamloops, B.C., which is losing free access to their public broadcaster over the airwaves. We think that is just wrong. This not only disenfranchises Canadians in small towns and in rural areas, but it would also fundamentally change the public broadcaster's role to one of a specialty service sandwiched within a 200-channel universe, as opposed to being one of a broadly accessible public service.
The public broadcaster's leaders have stated this is a public policy question, and we entirely agree with them. Even in Germany, where only about 5% of the population picks up TV signals over the air, the public broadcasters were required to fully replace analog transmission with digital without losing a single viewer. It was a matter of public policy for them, and we believe it should be one for Canada also. That's why we are urging Parliament to provide one-time financing to CBC/Radio-Canada to allow for the upgrade of its existing transmission infrastructure from analog to digital.
The public broadcaster must continue to provide broad access to CBC/Radio-Canada programs over the airwaves to all Canadians in all parts of Canada, to every single viewer.
I would like to pass along the microphone to my friend, Benoit.