Thank you.
CBC North, which has the award-winning show for the best morning news and information show in central Canada, has been living on a shoestring for years. I heard Mr. Stursberg's comments on the phone-in show, where he said it was too bad about CBC Sudbury, too bad about CBC Thunder Bay, but there are lots of smaller, modest markets out there that CBC would like to help. I was wondering if maybe he didn't quite have the picture, because when staff in CBC Sudbury or Thunder Bay are looking at their region, they're looking at having to service a region the size of Europe. Yet they're told in the newsroom that CBC is not interested in counting the BBM ratings outside the metropolitan area. So they're basically looking at 30% of the market.
So when you are looking at what you're going to cut, I can see that Mr. Stursberg might think that Sudbury's a fairly small, modest market, but if you're not counting the 70% of listeners who are dependent on it on the James Bay coast and in isolated communities, it says to me one of two things. Either the listeners in those outlying areas really don't count, period, or maybe you're not looking at the full obligations.
When you went into making these decisions, if you're not counting them outside the metropolitan areas, were you fully cognizant of the role they have to play in the listenerships that you're not counting?