Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I'd like to thank our witnesses for coming today.
I'm probably going to stick more to the English side, Mr. Burman; that's one I'm much more familiar with. You've given your presentation, and I think it's an excellent advertisement for why we should watch the CBC and your news programming, but we're here to do a study on the role of the public broadcaster.
I'm going to quote from what you said:
We sometimes hear it said that there's no need for CBC News because the private broadcasters do exactly what we do, and they do it well. We can agree that private broadcasters do some things very well. And we can perhaps debate at some other time whether they do them better than CBC. But there is no debate about the role of CBC News....
Can you tell us why it's uniquely from the public side and why the taxpayers of Canada should support that? What are you giving Canadians that's unique in terms of news programming because it is a public broadcaster? I'd like to hear about that.