Order, please.
Mr. White, my name is Gary Schellenberger. I am the chair of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. Thank you very much for making yourself available today.
For just about a year now we have been studying the role of the public broadcaster in the 21st century, and we felt it very important that we talk to you folks at BBC because we know how you've tackled some of the problems and how great a public broadcaster you are.
Before we start, I'm just going to go around the table and introduce our people. I will start with my clerk, Jacques Lahaie, and then another clerk, Catherine Cuerrier, the honourable Mauril Bélanger from the Liberal Party, Luc Malo from the Bloc Québécois, Mr. Bill Siksay from the NDP, Gord Brown from the Conservative Party--I don't know if he's related to your prime minister or not--and then we have our parliamentary secretary to the minister, Mr. Jim Abbott, and from the Conservative Party, Ed Fast. We also have our analysts, Lara Trehearne and Marion Ménard.
Welcome this morning. I don't know, sir, whether you have a brief statement to make before we have this, but we could start with questions. We're not going to hold to a strict time limit on questions unless someone gets really long.
Again, thanks for making this work, and I welcome you here. It's morning here in Ottawa, but I think it's evening in Britain. Am I correct?