Thank you for that.
I believe that it's an important factor to try to develop programs in different regions. We do try to pursue that, particularly with our news and current affairs programming in English and in French. At the same time, one must recognize that like all countries there tends to be in our case two significant centres of production. I think it was Sylvain who told our board the other day that 95% of the members of Union des artistes live in Montreal.
We try to develop programs in Moncton and other places, but you sometimes have to transport the skill sets from Montreal to Moncton, so we do, for example, a co-production. The problem as well is that as people develop their skills, we can't give them all the work that they have. They have to be available to work with other independent producers, so they therefore tend to migrate to Montreal and Toronto. It's an inevitable pull. We don't say it's good or bad. Our position is that we do want to produce in different centres.
That's why we're rebuilding Vancouver at the present time. It's the second-largest English city in terms of CBC, well, in terms of the country. We are rebuilding our facilities there. We're putting a lot of money in to be able to produce.
What I was saying in the text is that it doesn't serve a purpose, at least as far as we're concerned, to say x percentage must be done in this area, y percentage must be done in that area, this kind of program must be done here, that kind of program must be done there. That is precisely what happened back in 1999 with the decision of the CRTC, which also proved not to be workable.
There is also a concern that we have—we live with it and have to work with it—that you're not eligible for certain grants unless the program is produced 150 kilometres outside of Moncton, outside of Toronto. That doesn't accept the reality of where the program producers live, where they want to work. Our job is to encourage them to move to different places to do it.
In a case like Little Mosque on the Prairie, a lot of the shooting was done in Saskatchewan, as I understand, but you're absolutely right, the core of the program was shot in Toronto or in Hamilton, because in fact that's where these people live and that's where they want to work. So we're always looking at a balance of doing it.
We do a much better job, I must say, and can do a much better job, in local radio. Remember that we see ourselves as a combination of services, a programmer that tries to do different things. The strength of CBC/Radio-Canada radio is its local programming. Everything is driven off local programming. That's why we feel there are eight million Canadians who are deprived of a service. In a city like Hamilton—I'm sorry, I'm going on—their local CBC radio show comes from Toronto. In Toronto, Andy Barrie is number one; in Hamilton, he's number seven. That's logical; he's basically Toronto-centric, but that's his job. We'd love to have a station in Hamilton.