I'd like to add some figures—there are some very stark ones—for the purposes of this presentation.
In 1996, the audience share of CBC TV/CBNT was over 43%. It was among the market leaders in North America. As I said, every Newfoundlander can tell you that story. Everybody tuned in to see Rex Murphy, Ray Guy, and even me--I say with some modesty. For years, CBC supper hour Here & Now dominated. So you have to ask, what was the rationalization for cutting or breaking a successful operation in the first place? There has never really been a clear, coherent, rational answer to that question.
We tend to fall upon a kind of Toronto-centric view of the universe, because it just doesn't make sense, or perhaps following from that, the view that other supper hour news shows across the country, particularly in the urban areas, weren't drawing as much, so we took the fall for it. Of course, it was so shortsighted because the audience fell radically. As our table shows--this is based on very hard-core research by a Canadian media research company—in 2006 the audience share went down to 13.8%. So who's watching? I'm watching, probably everybody at this table is watching, and maybe everybody in this room. But people have gone to the other broadcaster, and it's very difficult to get them back.
There seems to be a strong correlation between the resources and the decline in ratings. We can at least say that. But to speak to the issue of management, it was a senior management decision and nobody here had any input into that. At the risk of using the language we're used to, everybody here was a victim of a decision made off-stage somewhere. Over the years from 1996, it went from 43%, to 37%, climbed a little to 40%, and then went back down--27%, 18%, 15%, and now it's 13.8%. That's a pretty staggering decline in a very short time.
There's a kind of tragedy here. Not to overstate it, but a lot of the goodwill was undermined by those cuts and by a quite recognizably different supper hour show, or supper 30-minute show, if you will.