Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for being here today.
I've been here too long as a member of Parliament, clearly, because when I first was elected one of the first things I remember doing was raising money for a public school student to go away to school to study music. That was Measha Brueggergosman, who now I'm having thrown back at me as a national icon. She was a public school student, and the community of Fredericton was doing that around her activity.
An analogy here could be that we have these wonderful new drugs or interventions or tests in medicine that are not covered by medicare because we're strapped financially. Imagine somebody coming here and saying that what we should do is introduce this other new drug, and the way to do that, of course, would be to throw out the other ones that are currently being covered. The debate that would probably cause us to be involved in, forcing us to make choices between things that, frankly, we'd rather not make choices about, seems a wrong-headed way to celebrate new, wonderful things.
I think it's about timing. There's been a lot of reference to the fact that if there were more funding available, or perhaps we should recommend.... We have. I would commend to everybody that as a committee we table a report, which in some ways, if it were acted upon quickly, could make the debate redundant, because at the end of the day it could make resources available for another stream.
If there's any magic in what's happening at the BBC.... Look at the numbers, look at the resources that are going into the BBC on a per capita investment basis compared to what's happening here. I think we should see the opportunities, and not at the expense of the committed audience that has sustained the CBC to this point.
I think we should call the CBC, as part of this exercise, and ask them to explain to us some of the things they explained before, when we were less informed and had not yet had the benefit of your testimony.
What would you as a panel want us to recommend to them? I'd like you to think about all of the things that you would like the CBC to accomplish, thinking about the other members of the panel, rather than maybe the more narrow position that you felt compelled to put when you made your earlier interventions. What would you want us to recommend to the CBC when they come?