I think what it really comes down to is taking the view that when you spend money, you have a right to know what you're getting for it.
The Broadcasting Act, as we all know, provides the basic guidance. But the process of interpreting the CBC's mandate has been a pretty random affair over the years. It's been a matter of decisions arising from committees such as yours; decisions or recommendations arising from royal commissions; decisions and recommendations and conditions of licence arising from licence renewal processes undertaken by the CRTC; and so on and so forth. That's been the way the mandate has been interpreted, if you will.
We have before us an example of what we think is a better system—namely, the charter and agreement system that's used by the BBC. It has been for some years. It allows for the public, through its elected representatives, to say this is what we want our national public broadcasting system to do, in some detail. This is bearing in mind that the most critical thing that you guys have to deal with—I think—is the continuing question of the arm's-length relationship. We don't want a state broadcaster in Canada, we want a national public broadcaster. It's that arm's-length relationship that makes that critical difference.
So bearing that in mind, you still, we think, need to be in a position where you can reasonably say this is what we want this outfit that we're paying a big chunk of money every year to do, and we want to talk about it in some measure of detail, but we also want to reduce that incredible and persistent gap between the expectation of service and the payment for service.
I mean, that's been the problem with the CBC for a very long time. So the recommendation is a two-part one—that there be a process in place that says this is what we want from you, this is how we're going to measure whatever it may be, this is the amount of money we're willing to put forward to do that, and this is what we're going to commit to doing over a period of time.
You know, it truly is amazing that this has been recommended so many times, literally beginning with the Aird commission report, which started the whole affair in 1929. It's there, in big black and white letters.
That talks to the principle. It doesn't, I fear, address the specifics of your question—namely, how you go about doing it. That's process. I don't know exactly how you go about doing it, but we have the example of the BBC. It's all there in black and white.
Broadly speaking, we all, or many of us, have the business experience that guides us in what an MOU really means. You sit down, the two parties, and you say, okay, folks, where are we going? What are we going to try to achieve over the next period of time? We come to an agreement on that and we write it down--along with some of those process things we talked about before.
That's the principle of the thing that we're talking about.