Thank you very much. I appreciate that we have a local television improvement fund, and I certainly support it, but I think in terms of conveniently forgetting....
I'm talking about regulatory obligations. The CRTC has to say to the broadcasters, “These are part of your commitments”, but year after year we see the bleed-off, the firing of local service. Now we're looking at a crisis where, in the last year, we're looking at almost $800 million in spending on foreign programming--Canadian spending, stagnant.
Local news spending has been going down, even when they were making money. Contrary to my colleague Mr. Bruinooge's view, local news spending doesn't seem to account for all that much on the bottom line, and they're making more in advertising.
I'm wondering where the CRTC's role is in saying, “You're making money off specialty services, you're making money in other areas, so where is your commitment to ensure local news and broadcast?”