Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.
My name is Peter Moss. I'm president of the Alliance for Children and Television. Before we begin our presentation this evening, I would like to introduce my colleague, Madeleine Lévesque, executive vice-president for content development at Nine Story Entertainment in Toronto, and a board member of the alliance.
The mandate of the Alliance for Children and Television is to positively affect Canadian children's lives by using advocacy, recognition, and training to enrich the screen-based media they experience. In our view, the content of children's programming should be both relevant and entertaining, stimulating the intellect and the imagination, and fostering openness towards others. It should also be an accurate reflection of the world in which children grow up, respecting their dignity and promoting learning.
The alliance represents a group of individuals and organizations from across the country that are highly committed to ensuring the development of television programming that will be of interest to our children and our youth, and that will contribute to our cultural development as a country. Set up over 30 years ago, in 1974, the alliance benefits from the expertise of Canada's best creators, artists, craftspeople, educators, producers, and broadcasters of children's programming, which is available on an increasing number of media platforms.
Personally, I've been involved in the broadcasting and entertainment business for well over 25 years. I've held the positions of creative director of children's programming at CBC Television, vice-president of programming and production for YTV and Treehouse TV--both children's channels in Canada--and more recently vice-president of programming and development for all the Corus television channels. I'm currently an independent producer of children's programs and other programs.
We're very pleased to be here today to take part in what we hope will be a new beginning for the CBC-SRC. We strongly believe in our national public broadcasting system, and particularly in our national public broadcaster. Ultimately, the main reason we are here today is to present to the committee the very important needs and views of Canada's children, a perspective that is often overlooked when we're talking about Canada's broadcasting system, its goals and its responsibilities.
As the committee is no doubt aware, the CBC-SRC will have to go before the CRTC some time this year to renew its licence, which is due to expire in August of 2007. We believe your committee has a unique opportunity in drafting your report to propose strong recommendations to both the government and the CRTC as to what should and could be the goals and objectives of the CBC-SRC for the coming decade.
At the outset, the alliance wishes to affirm its full support for a strong CBC-SRC as we move forward into the 21st century, especially as it concerns the needs of young Canadians looking for quality programming that is developed and broadcast with them in mind.
We believe the CBC and SRC have a mandate of public service that makes them distinct, in that their programming should be in the public interest and not in the commercial interest. CBC-SRC has a unique role to play in reflecting the increasing ethnocultural diversity of our country's citizenship and providing access to Canadian stories that will contribute to the building of a unique Canadian society. Many of Canada's children are a reflection of this new ethnocultural reality, and we believe that CBC-SRC has a responsibility to help them grasp on to innovative programming, showing our distinctiveness and our values, which includes the celebration of the rich diversity of our country.