I don't at all want to be put in a position of trying to defend private broadcasters, because my heart is with the public broadcaster, but I don't think that's an accurate portrayal of how the system basically works in Los Angeles.
One of the key problems is the 1999 decision of the CRTC, which took away the mandatory spends of private broadcasters. Going even further back, when Keith Spicer was at the CRTC, when the cable industry had the huge upswing in the eighties and early nineties, there was an opportunity to say if you broadcast in this country, you have to pay your share of the Canadian content cost. All cable channels have to pay anywhere from 30% to 47% of their previous year's revenue on Canadian content. Private broadcasters, until 1999, also had to do that. There was a time when you could have said that if you're NBC and you broadcast on a cable carrier in Canada, you too must spend a percentage of your revenue and put that money into the system. That opportunity was lost, and from that time on the system has been underfunded.
I don't think it's a question of Los Angeles. I've been to those auctions. I can't believe that we spend that much money, because I see what the British spend, and I see what the Latin Americans spend, and I have lost rights to.... It's not so much a question of the Los Angeles aspect of it as it is of the choice of how the money gets spent inside Canada. I don't think it's a question of pulling back and saying there should be less advertising.
One suggestion is to follow the Australians to a certain extent and to set up dedicated funds, so that things like the CTF are not there to cover drama and to cover documentaries and to cover entertainment and arts programming. The Australian Children's Television Foundation has money from a parliamentary allocation to provide children's programing to the system. We could have similar things here in Canada for children's programming, for documentary programming, and for arts programming. So it isn't broadcaster-controlled, it's government-controlled, producer-activated, and fed into the system to feed all the channels that can demonstrate it and broadcast it to their public.