It was a metaphor. The purpose of the metaphor was to try to capture what we're trying to do.
The CBC English service faces a very particular set of cultural challenges. I think the biggest cultural challenge facing English Canada is our failure as a country to produce television entertainment programming and feature films that actually connect with Canadian audiences. We don't have a problem with newspapers. English Canadians read English Canadian newspapers. English Canadians prefer English Canadian sports teams. English Canadians read English Canadian books. They listen to English Canadian music, and so on and so forth. But the one great area where we have not succeeded is in entertainment programming on television and feature films. We are the only country in the industrialized world that overwhelmingly prefers programs from a foreign country.
If the CBC is to address what we take to be the number one cultural problem, then we want to address it squarely. How can I put this gently? We don't want to make art-house programming. We don't want to make programming that is marginal in any way. We don't want to make programming for elites. We want to make entertainment programming for the public that pays for the CBC. We think that is the right response to the fundamental cultural challenge, because it is a problem about popular entertainment programming that is distinctively Canadian, that reflects who we are, our sense of humour, and our preoccupations.
To try to capture that a bit--and I think I got somewhat carried away, because one wants some simple way of making the point--we'd like to be a bit more Tim Hortons and a little less Starbucks. We want to capture the notion that Tim Hortons is a quintessentially kind of Canadian icon. It is broader in terms of its public stance than Starbucks, and in a certain kind of way, I think it reflects a broader public appeal than what is captured by the image of Starbucks.
That's why we wanted to put it that way. That's what we think is the right thing culturally, and it is the right thing given that we are financed by the broad public.