I can't see when Paul or Stéphane are going to speak, so I didn't want to jump in on top of them.
As we look at this, if we step back and look at a bigger-picture policy question, the question for us at the CTF is always what it is we're trying to achieve. As we mentioned in our presentation, we believe that the system the CTF has meets the objectives of both the Broadcasting Act and a market-driven system.
If you look at the kinds of projects we fund—and I know that since the CRTC report came out, we're all very focused on which broadcasters go into which potential of the two streams—we need to remember that the CTF's legal obligation is with the actual producer.
Now, the producer has to have a broadcast licence, so it might be determined that if a project is more commercial in nature it would go to the private side. But the odd thing is that I don't think any broadcaster in the country, whether public or private, sets out to make a production that isn't going to reach an audience and be commercially successful. In fact, if we look at the CBC, many of their recent productions have very high audience numbers, certainly high enough that they could compete on the private side.
So although with the 37% that was directed to the fund by the contribution agreement.... And I think Mr. Coderre asked about historic access. That number was given to the CTF in the contribution agreement. If we look back at the history of CTF financing prior to the administrative change, when we provided the programming administration to Telefilm, CBC often drew as much as 50% of the funding allocation from CTF, for various projects that we finance through the producer itself, which happen to have a CBC licence. We ourselves aren't sure what the rationale for the actual 37% was, because if you look at the history of the CBC's draw, it has often been higher than that.
But we can make anything work. It just seems to us that from a logical, administrative-efficiency perspective, we have a system now that, as Paul has said, can look at the whole industry and provide the oversight and the overview, and we try to meet the current requirements of the contribution agreement on the language split, aboriginal financing, regional, etc. We'll certainly look at the two streams.
Obviously, like everyone, we have just received the report. We're starting to do a number of modelling exercises based on what the report has recommended, to see whether we can determine and predict any unintended consequences, so that when we respond to Heritage Canada, we can give them some concrete statistical information on the impact of APTN being split in the way they've suggested, the impact of the tax credit recommendation, etc. From a technical perspective we'll be doing all that work.
But philosophically, for us it's about doing the best program in the country of Canada and getting it to the widest audience, regardless of who the broadcaster is.