The emphasis on the private fund in the report tries to direct criteria that would predetermine what a hit would be, and that's a very difficult thing. It's almost impossible to predetermine the success of a program in this business. Corner Gas would be an example of that. I was in Saskatchewan at the time, and I don't think anyone at the beginning of that program really anticipated the level of audience and commercial success that show would receive.
It is true that once an ongoing series has had its first run, you can pretty well determine what the audience response was and have a little more sense of whether you might have a hit on your hands. It would be a fairly simple thing to look at a show like that and ensure that it received financial support to continue and to continue to build that audience, but frankly, it's pretty tough. If we all knew the answer to what a hit would be, we probably wouldn't be working in this business in Canada; we'd be working for somebody in the U.S.
I just wanted to make a point, Ms. Fry, in relation to your question about whether the $120 million is enough. We've never really had that conversation for a while, but I'll just point out to you that the issue of oversubscription in the industry largely has not gone away. With the broadcaster performance envelope, what we've been able to do at the fund is eliminate oversubscription from the fund itself because we know how much money we've got to work with and those resources are finite, but the oversubscription question has just moved to the door of the broadcaster. We still know there are about 50% more really worthwhile, good, potentially commercially successful projects and stories and ideas out there that will never see the light of day because the amount of resources has been completely finite for a number of years.
Would it help if the fund were extended? I think it certainly would. That conversation has been around for a long time. A number of lobbies by the industry itself have tried to have the fund renewed for more than a one-year period, but those decisions are outside the scope of our ability to answer that question. They really do remain with the federal government and with Canadian Heritage.