Thank you very much.
We've heard many times, “We want the CBC to be like the BBC. The BBC has excellent programming and it's non-advertising.”
I'd say there are two problems with that model. Number one, my riding is the size of Great Britain. It has 85,000 people; 13% of them listen to Cree radio, 35% listen to francophone radio, and the rest, English radio. So our markets are substantially different. The other thing is that I haven't seen anybody, from any of our parties, put up their hand and offer the $500 million that we're going to lose in commercial advertising.
So we're in a bit of a conundrum with the CBC, because people say we want quality programming, but we want it to be relevant. So if we want quality programming, we shouldn't be chasing ratings. If we don't have ratings, they say nobody is watching it, so why should we be spending $1 billion or $1.5 billion on programs that nobody watches? So the snake ends up eating its own tail as it's trying to catch up.
I'm setting this up because it seems to me we've heard nothing about this documentary channel. I'm just throwing this out for your feedback. I'm wondering whether or not we have an opportunity, actually, to set up a separate service that is non-advertising, that is based on content, where we have the best of Canadian programming on a stream that is not trying to change what we're doing on the CBC on our commercial revenue with Hockey Night in Canada and competing with drama and reality shows, that we actually have a possibility with this other network to put out the best of everything that we're producing.
What's your perspective on this, particularly from the documentary world?