Can I give you a little background to this dilemma? It's one the CBC has faced for a long time. When the cuts began to get serious in the early 1990s, one of the great dilemmas that was debated internally was this. How do we reconcile the need to be a national public broadcaster with roots out there in all the communities of Canada and a network service as well?
The hard reality is that—I'll pick a weird number—I can make a program for, say, $100, and I could put it on the network and it covers everybody. If I make the same program, or some variation on a theme, in each of 15 or 20 regions, it costs me 15 or 20 times $100. When money is tight, you begin to say to yourself, economically speaking, it makes more sense to try to make the program at the network level for $100 rather than at the regional level for $2,000, to pick those numbers. Now, what I can also do is maybe reach out a bit into the communities and put a little content into that $100 program and maybe spend $200 on it, but I'm still much further ahead. The problem is, I get to a point where I can't maintain any reasonable semblance of regional production facilities because money is getting too tight. If I'm going to protect the organization itself, I have to protect the core, which is the network service. So, by way of background, the struggle went on at that level.
I would argue, however, that compared to every other television service and radio service in the country, CBC provides a great deal more regional content than anybody else. CBC radio, certainly, is rooted right out there.