I believe I made myself quite clear when I spoke about this proposal. We must leave it up to the different industry stakeholders to decide, through the negotiation process, the value of their respective services. We have made representation on several occasions to the CRTC. Eventually, we agreed to a transition period during which we would move from a highly regulated environment to one that is less regulated, where market forces and players will decide the fair values of these services.
In the past, as you are no doubt already aware—and this helped to stimulate the Canadian audiovisual landscape—royalty fees were paid to create specialty channels and to help them survive. Today, the reverse is happening. Specialty channels, the only ones to receive royalty fees, are reporting higher income from the operations than general interest networks. Their contribution to the Canadian broadcasting system, particularly in terms of investment in Canadian programming, is less significant. We want some balance to be restored to this equation. Just as royalty fees were important when it came to creating specialty channels, so it is that today general interest television networks are dealing with the harsh reality that they do not have the benefit of these royalty fees.