Thank you.
Mr. Lacroix, I want to begin by following up a bit on my colleague Mr. Del Mastro, who's very concerned about the highly paid CBC journalists. I'm going to go out and look for some. I worked as a stringer for CBC and got paid, on a good day, $60 a day and $35 for another news item, and if they didn't take it, I was SOL. Certainly the people I know seemed to feel they were doing it out of some kind of charitable commitment to making the world a better place, because the bottom line was pretty lousy. Now, I understand, we can't afford to run stringers in the regions anymore, period. I just want that on the record.
I want to follow up with what you said about regional losses. As you know, it's a very serious issue in our region, and this is not being parochial. Our communities are absolutely dependent on CBC. If they don't have CBC North service, they don't have a voice, period. I hear the number 28%, and I'm doing the calculations across northern Canada, where we took a 50% hit in Sudbury, a 50% hit in Thunder Bay, 100% in northern Manitoba, 100% in Saskatchewan. We don't really get a feeling that those losses were balanced out, because when you take two jobs out of a market like that, you're eliminating the afternoon show. When you eliminate the afternoon show, you're eliminating the entire ability of a vast region the size of western Europe to have arts programming, to introduce northern writers, to bring voices to the region.
So when you're calculating the decision—and I know it's not easy to throw people out of the lifeboat—are you looking at it as a bottom line decision as to where you can make money and where you see yourself as having to bear some kind of service to a region?