But we're talking about what happened in the lead-up to the crisis. For example, Hubert Lacroix, again:
To help us manage budget pressures, we had asked the Government to grant us a degree of financial flexibility similar to the flexibility that private broadcasters enjoy when managing their budgets. ...we simply wanted to be able to have access to lines of credit and to pay them down in the course of normal operations. We never asked for additional subsidies. We did not "beg for more", to quote recent headlines in the Toronto Sun and Ottawa Sun. As you already know, that request was refused. No lines of credit, no temporary funding and no advances on future parliamentary appropriations to allow us to better manage CBC/Radio-Canada’s operations...and to protect the investments that various governments have made since our creation nearly 75 years ago.
And yet one week before the end of the fiscal year, you were running up the flagpole that you had never had any conversation with CBC about a loan for future appropriations.
Mr. Minister, we've heard the questions from your colleagues at this committee. They've been absolutely hostile towards CBC on funding, every single one of them. As you know, your colleagues in the House continually heckle. I'm sure you've heard the heckling about CBC—you might even have heard some today—that your members do whenever they see that CBC is in trouble.
How can you, as a minister, when you're supposed to be responsible for this department, run something up the flagpole that's so blatantly untrue? I'm talking about the fact that you went public and said that you'd never had a discussion with the CBC about a request for future appropriations, an advancement, a loan, when everybody knows they had that conversation? What kind of truthiness are you trying to preach here?