I'd be delighted to.
Corus, for example, is one of the largest producers of children's programming, not only in Canada, but in the world. When one looks at all the various policies, whether they reside at the Canadian Television Fund or in terms of CRTC conditions of licence—For example, we're a big producer of programming. We're also one of the largest markets for children's programming. But the latest condition of licence we received from the CRTC said that in fact we could only schedule up to 25% of our service with our own programming.
We think that's really a silly idea. The reason is that as we move to an increasingly fragmented series of platforms for programming, where if we create a show such as Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends, which is targeted to children who are around six years old, we're going to use that on broadcasts on our own channels. We may use it on a website. We may use it on a mobile telephone and all those sorts of things. When the CTF policy or the CRTC says that we can't use it here or we can't use it there, all that's really happening is that it's infringing on our ability to make that program a success, and it forces us to enter into all kinds of complicated arrangements.
The flip side to that—The independent production sector would say that they need preferential access to the broadcast market. The analogy we look at in that context is the U.S. They faced this discussion about ten years ago with the so-called syndicated exclusivity rules. The fear was that if the broadcast networks could, in a sense, make their own programming, the studios would be shut out.
The first fundamental for every television broadcaster is that when you put a show on the schedule, it has to be a great show. For example, way back when, the ABC network tried to make all its own shows, and it realized that the creative process wasn't as predictable as that. It's not like making shoes. People come in with great ideas; sometimes they're inside the house, sometimes they're outside the house.
The second thing that happened was that in fact the broadcasters didn't become the studio plants; the studios bought the broadcasters. Universal bought NBC and Disney bought ABC, because they wanted to have the transmission system for their production content.
At the same time, Hollywood, sort of the mega-Mecca of production, if you want to call it that, still has independent producers who are enormously powerful, such as Jerry Bruckheimer, for example. The reason they're powerful is because they're creative. They're the ones who come up with the terrific ideas.
In the context of this discussion, our view is that in fact if the CBC does have a terrific idea in-house and they're capable of producing it, there shouldn't be anything in the policy that precludes that. If we have the ability to produce all our own programs for our own services, then the various policy tools should not preclude that.