Thank you.
I have a two-part question, and it concerns the fees that are paid out and how effective that is in terms of making production.
I've been looking at some numbers that suggest that over, say, the 10-year period leading up to the beginning of this decade, of the broadcast licence fees being paid out, CBC doubled theirs from $9.6 million to about $20.6 million in that period, but conventional broadcasters dropped their broadcast licensing fees by over 24%, and the difference was being picked up in foreign acquisitions.
So part one of the question would be the effect that has, again, on viability of productions and whether or not you see, actually on the ground, that those numbers do make sense, whether there has been a drop, because overall, the broadcast licence fees in Canada are much lower than anywhere else, as far as I've been able to see. So that's the first part of the question.
The second is this, and it's come up a number of times in this study. We have developed, based on a model that probably worked great in the 1970s, a number of funding silos: Telefilm, National Film Board, we have the Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund, we have now the CTF—there are others as well—and we have a national broadcaster. There seems to be a major disconnect between all the money that we're spending to develop programming and the fact that it's not necessarily tied to being seen on our nation's broadcaster; and also how you see the role between being an independent producer, where you want to actually be able to shop your product, and whether or not there is a need to start bringing some of these together to say, we're creating a phenomenal amount of amazing product, but it's just not being seen, because that link between CBC and those various funding agencies seems to be getting weaker rather than stronger.