With your permission, I'll answer that question. The Fédération nationale des communications has conducted two studies which are consistent with the one my colleague mentioned. It isn't the same study, but I could send the committee copies of those studies, which have been conducted since 2000. In fact, the introduction of independent production has occurred gradually since 1986, with the advent of Télévision Quatre-Saisons, whose licence was related to the fact that production had to be done using independent producers.
However, I would like to draw your attention to one factor that I referred to in my presentation. It indeed costs less for broadcasters, but it costs more for the public, because these subsidies are granted out of public funds. One of the dangers lies in the ownership of those programs. This is a danger for Canadian heritage. If Radio-Canada no longer owns the rights to those programs, who will? It is the producers who will get them. As Mr. Bibeault said earlier, they will continue making money on derivative products and a lot of other things. They can even resell a program to another broadcaster.
For example, the program Catherine was broadcast on Radio-Canada about four years ago. But we have just learned, in the newspapers this morning, that it will be rebroadcast on TQS, whereas Radio-Canada invested large amounts of money in that production. But it doesn't hold the rights to it. The producer has a right to leave with the program. What happens to the amounts of money that are invested in those productions, if the producer disappears after a certain number of years?
Fortunately, before it was possible to use independent producers, Radio-Canada had extensive archives in place. As we're currently seeing, it has put a large part of its archives up for sale in the form of DVDs and derivative products, and the profits go to Radio-Canada. It can do that because it owns the rights to those programs, which it produced within its infrastructures. Let's take the example of the children's program La boîte à surprise or Les belles histoires des pays d'en haut and a whole series of programs; there are tens of them at Radio-Canada. It can do that in the case of programs that it itself has produced entirely.
We said that the structure for funding television productions had to be reviewed and that the broadcaster had to be allowed to have this access to that funding as an independent producer. We're not saying independant production should be stopped, but the television or radio broadcaster must be allowed the choice whether to produce in house or to opt for independent production.