Thank you for that. It was nice and succinct.
I've been doing some research on this, because the issue of local and news has to be front and centre continually while we're doing it. When I'm looking at it, I see that in some ways the crisis might be new to some people at head office, but the crisis at the local level and in the regions has been going on for years. There's nothing new about it. I think back to October 2000, when we lost 150 jobs in northern Ontario alone when CTV amalgamated, and it went up for its licence renewal and nothing was said. In 2004 we lost the jobs in Calgary and Toronto local news with the Craig takeover by CHUM. In July 2006 we had 281 job losses to kick off CTV's takeover of CHUM. In 2007 we had 200 at Canwest, in broadcast 350, at print 400, 40 at TQS, 200 further jobs at CTV and Corus. We've lost jobs at TVA, and of course today we lost 800 jobs at CBC. Yet throughout this, these broadcasters come back for their renewal licences and they get their renewals stamped and life goes on as normal. Now we see again your suggestion that you would consider lower levels of local programming requirements.
My argument to you, Mr. Chair, is that the local patient is pretty much on life support. He's very anemic, and the CRTC solution, which is again “Let's bleed the patient”, strikes me as positively medieval.