Yes. That's perhaps a dramatic characterization, but it's taken from the lips of some of the broadcasters who would be on the public side. They feel they would be ghettoized if they were in a fund that did not grow. Quite frankly, if there were acceptance of an index, so that the public side would grow in lockstep with the private side--again, I don't want to put words into their mouths--I think a lot of their concerns would be alleviated.
The cost of production is going up at the same rate for everything that's being produced, for public broadcasters as for private broadcasters, so being caught in a fund that might not grow or might be subject even to cutbacks, depending on the political situation and what the priorities of the government are, is anxiety provoking, because these people are as proportionately dependent on the fund as the private broadcasters are. That's what I meant by ghettoization.
One would think that some of them would have responded with delight that they'd be absolved of the need to compete for audience with conventional broadcasters, which by their very nature are different and have different lead-ins and different reach with the audience and different mandates that lend themselves to rewards for having the biggest audience possible, both in terms of advertising revenue and pleasing their shareholders. Yet across the board the response from those people, including the CBC, who would be on the public side, has been that they don't really want to be there.
Even this morning I had a brief chat with Richard Stursberg of the CBC, who said, “We'd love to compete. We want to be able to grow. We think our line-up of shows has shown a lot of promise.” So it was in that sense that I used the word “ghettoization”. I was trying to characterize the negative response of the public and not-for-profit broadcasters.