In Timmins, the broadcaster offers us four services. We have Première chaîne , CBON, which is from Sudbury. We have the SRC television which is broadcast over the public airwaves as well as by cable. We also have the Réseau de l'information, which is a cable channel, and we have Radio-Canada.ca, which is the Internet service.
The francophone services that we do not have access to are the SRC's Espace musique and ARTV. For the latter, one would have to have satellite service because it is not available to us by cable.
In our brief, we make a very important recommendation, in our opinion, concerning the lack of vision. Francophones outside Quebec are not represented in the national programming of Radio-Canada, whether we are talking about radio or television programs. Therefore, we recommend that there be a content requirement, for example the 10 o'clock news show the Téléjournal or Christine Charette's excellent program broadcast on Radio-Canada Première chaîne which deals with social issues. This is to say that for a certain number of minutes, they should deal with francophone communities outside Quebec, whether it is about culture, our achievements or our concerns. In our opinion, Radio-Canada would therefore become a much more national channel.
We have indicated in our brief that we appreciate the fact that the majority of francophones are in Quebec, but we also wish to remind you that there are a million francophones outside Quebec as well as almost six million francophiles. Radio-Canada therefore has a role to play in this regard.
We have a final message. We believe that francophone communities that are not in major centres, like Timmins, are often treated like second-class communities by the SRC, because little time is spent talking about us, our achievements and our feelings.
I thank you for having given the opportunity to an organization like the Alliance de la francophonie de Timmins to come and meet with you. We hope that we will have a fruitful exchange and that in the end, Radio-Canada will be much more faithful to its mandate and more representative of the Canadian population.
Thank you.