Sure.
I would start by reminding members that the A-base, the core base of CBC, has not been increased since 1974. The last time that we had an A-base increase was in 1974. As well, in 1995 we took a $400 million cut as part of our contribution to the government of the day's desire to wrestle the deficit. Everybody took a cut, whether it was post-secondary education or medicine. We took a $400 million cut. Some of those cuts have been, if not rescinded...the moneys have gone back into the organizations over time. Ours has not. There has not been an increase.
I must add that we do get money for salary inflation, so we get whatever the government agrees to basically that is what they're willing to give us. In other words, what they agree with their unions, they'll give us. If we settle higher, that's our problem. I haven't seen the day when we've settled lower.
The result has been, on the capital side, for example, that our capital budget has been reduced by about 30% and has not been increased, so part of the answer that I didn't give before to Mr. Scott is we are going to be faced with terrible problems in terms of going digital, in terms of delivering digital HD programming to Canadians. We just don't have the money. We'll have to do it at an extremely slow rate as assets wear out. We don't have the money. The government gave us a special grant in 1979-80 called the accelerated coverage plan. Those towers are now 35-plus years old and are beginning to collapse. We really do not have the money to replace them. We have some very fundamental problems in terms of our capital budget.
In terms of what's most important to me, programming, what we don't have is the money to take risks. We don't have the money to fail. When you take a risk, sometimes it works and sometimes it fails. Little Mosque on the Prairie was a great risk. It could have been a bomb. And what would we have done at that point? We have had bombs and we've had to play them off because we didn't have anything else to put in their place. Les Bougon was an amazing success story. I'd like to see us doing many more of those, but to the extent that you do these you have to recognize, as a programmer, that some are going to fail. We can't afford to fail.
I'm sorry.