Good afternoon. I am Claire Samson, the president and CEO of the APFTQ, and I am accompanied by the chairman of the association’s board of directors, Mr. Vincent Leduc, who in daily life is vice-president of Zone 3, one of the largest independent television production companies in Quebec.
As you surely know, the APFTQ represents the great majority of independent film and television production companies in Quebec. Our members regularly do business with all of the Quebec broadcasters, public and private, conventional and specialized. In the written brief that we submitted to your committee last February, we formulated four major general principles which in our view should guide the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage in its investigation of the role for the national public broadcaster in the 21st century. I shall first review these few principles and then ask Vincent to briefly explain the reasons why we are proposing them.
The first principle is that it is important and must continue to be important to have a strong national public broadcaster in the environment that exists at the beginning of the 21st century. The second principle is the need to ensure that this national public broadcaster receives a sufficiently large annual appropriation to properly carry out its mandate under the Broadcasting Act. The third principle is the need to preserve the generalist nature of the programming of the CBC’s core television networks, while assigning priority to certain programming categories. And last but not least, the fourth principle is the national public broadcaster’s obligation to play an exemplary and leading role in the use of independent production.