Thank you.
Thank you to the panellists for taking the time to prepare those presentations and for their clarity.
I'm a visitor to this committee. I've had the privilege of being here at the last meeting and at this one. As I did at the last meeting, I will disclose my bias as a former Vancouver junior youth orchestra member, as someone who went the Courtney youth music camp three times, and as someone who played in the cape arts board orchestra for a short time.
My summary includes the three issues people are talking about: the funding for the CBC, saving the CBC Radio Orchestra, and the programming on Radio 2. That's probably very simplistic.
I understand this committee has already reached a unanimous recommendation around increasing funding and including funding for infrastructure, so I'm not going to ask about that.
Saving the CBC Radio Orchestra, which I'm fully in favour of and I think is a very important issue, has been debated here in terms of whether this committee even has the ability to recommend specific programming. Certainly the Radio 2 programming decision is one that some members of the committee believe is outside the terms of the committee's work.
However, the principle of publicly supported radio--like CBC--or publicly supported broadcasting is I think clear. It has a mandate to do those things that commercial broadcasting won't do. I mean, that's the point of public dollars being spent on anything, whether it's policing or defence or heritage. It's to provide the things the market won't provide. That seems to me a clear principle.
I would like to ask the panellists this question. If you were to present to this committee one or two very clear principles that they could take forward to the minister and government and say, “These are clear principles that express the mandate of CBC”, principles from which would flow logical decisions around the CBC Radio Orchestra and the foundation of classical programming that most of you are looking for, what might those be?