I'm not going to make any normative claims about what kinds of music are good or not. I'll leave that for other people to debate.
I do think what we have here is less than an ideal situation, because we're playing one musical community off the other. My view has been that the best way forward would have been for CBC to have established a third FM station, both in English and in French, to highlight other genres. If the space doesn't exist, these airwaves are publicly owned. Broadcasters receive a licence to borrow the airwaves to broadcast, and my view is that if we're going to be a community of 33 million people, then we surely can get a third radio station on the air that's a public broadcaster.
That being said, the other problem we face is that we don't have ubiquitous coverage of the existing radio stations across the country. In many parts of the country you can't get CBC Radio 2. You can't get Première Chaîne or Espace Musique across many parts of the country outside of Quebec. That is the other part of the problem. We are not even providing full coverage for the radio stations we do have.
I keep bringing this up at every committee when we talk about radio, because it puts us to shame. There are countries and states like the United Kingdom where they have five stations and they have over 50% market share. This is what we should look to in terms of where the future of CBC radio should go.
My question for you is whether or not the changes that have been put in place at Radio 2 will in fact increase the market share of this station. Presently it is around 3% or 4% market share. I'm wondering whether or not you feel those changes will increase the market share. If you feel they won't increase the market share, what do you propose CBC management do in order to increase that market share?