Maureen might be able to answer it better than I can. It seemed as though there was a bit of a perfect storm in 1999 in our industry concerning drama that partly had to do with a change in the CRTC policy for the private broadcasters. That was one of the things in the storm.
The other thing was that European broadcasters decided to put quotas in their own system for their own programming. There was a fairly healthy pre-sale market of Canadian series into Europe, and those sales were substantial, so we could fund that final 10% or 15% of our budgets from a European pre-sale. Because they regulated themselves to have their own programming on television, those sales dried up, and the only stuff that was saleable...we were in competition with ER for one time slot and ER won. So that bit of the budget dried up.
The other thing that happened at that time was that Alliance and Atlantis merged, and that affected our production industry in not a very good way. Alliance had been almost the only thing we ever had here that was close to a studio that could produce drama. The merged corporation wasn't very interested in production, and within a year or two it basically said “We don't want to do this anymore”. It has essentially become a broadcaster, with the exception of CSI.
So those three elements combined.... I think the thing that affected CBC most was that element of European sales.