First of all, I want to agree with Peter Moss about the devil being in the details and that the CBC mandate right now is immensely broad. Clearly, it doesn't have the resources to fulfill that.
The thing is that I think you have to be careful about the idea of saying the CBC can make more money with commercial deals. You have listened to a lot of people come here and say, “Boy, can I make the CBC tons of money! I have a commercial deal for them.” Well, all of these commercial deals have a price.
If you just look at advertising as the fundamental commercial deal, it has caused the CBC untold problems for a very long time--TV, of course. If you look at CBC radio as the alter ego of the CBC, you can say okay, there is a public service in a different medium that has zero advertising on it, and what is it doing? Is it able to reach people? If it doesn't have a huge audience, is that good or bad? Look at CBC radio and ask yourselves the questions you're now asking: is the public service able to fulfill these functions? And I think CBC radio proves it is. The problem with television is that you've built a system that requires $400 million in advertising revenue, and to wean it off that will be very difficult. That is quite a challenge, obviously.
It is important to give that the effort. At the very minimum, I think you people need to accept the fact that advertising is definitely warping the programming strategy of the CBC, and that this is not a good thing.