Well, I would say that's not factually correct, having been the private broadcasters' representative on the board on five separate occasions over the last ten years. We certainly had a voice.
The CAB has four representatives on the board. They are the voice of the private broadcasters in Canada. There are two specialty channel representatives and two conventional television representatives, two from English Canada and two from French Canada. We signed off on the guidelines and the rule changes year after year.
You know, we picked specific battles when there was pressure from the producers, the independent producers, to raise licence fees. We would try to dig in our heels and come up with charts to show how much money we lost for every hour of Canadian...certainly in English Canada; the mathematics are quite different in Quebec.
At the end of the day, we almost always voted unanimously for the guidelines. It was never over our protests. Nothing was forced on us. Again, I speak to the compromise in the system between the different sectors.
So I would say that Mr. Shaw, with all due respect.... And here perhaps is where we failed to communicate clearly what was going on at the fund. One of the things I hope to do, if he wants to return my calls, is to actually get him to understand how the fund works. The fund was there to serve the interests of private broadcasters as well as the other people, and it did so with our cooperation and our sign-off on it.
I don't believe the CAB showed up at the CRTC and said “This is a terrible fund that doesn't address our needs”. Everybody would like to see some tweaking, but private broadcasters have been very involved in the evolution of this fund. I think many of the things they've wished for have come to bear. Certainly one of my missions was to get an English-language drama envelope when I was a CAB representative. It took two years, but we succeeded in doing that. It was voted unanimously by everybody on the board.
So I think that's a mischaracterization in terms of how private broadcasters have been served by the fund. I say that as an informed insider on this particular matter.