I'm glad you asked me that question. It gives me an opportunity to clarify this, as I already did in our April hearing, but I'll gladly do it again.
At the hearing for fee-for-carriage, I asked CTV:
Would it make a lot of sense for us to -- assume we could grant you a fee-for-carriage of 50 cents per signal as you suggest and we earmark it in some way, we either insist that it is incremental over what you spend right now on local content and drama, let's say those two things, or we say it all has to go into local news, or in some way that in effect both you and we as a Commission could demonstrate we are doing this only for one purpose and that is to maintain that part of the system which we feel is under threat because of the fragmentation of the advertising dollars and a fragmentation of the whole broadcasting system.
That was my question.
Mr. David Goldstein of CTV, who was in the room, said:
As outlined in our joint submission, we submit that the fee would be tied to local reflection as to be defined by the Commission.
I said:
Put some bones on the flesh for me. What does that mean?
Mr. David Goldstein responded:
One of our issues, of course, is that of sustainability. As the economic research has borne out, the obligations on these stations are particularly onerous. What we are not coming back, or at least not what we are presenting today, is ask for a reduction in those obligations. But what we would -- what we would hope is to come back at group licence renewal for each of these individual stations and give you an extremely specific proposal of what that means to the sustainability of local service in each of those markets.
Mrs. Bell from CanWest then piped in and said:
And Chairman, we have tied the -- we have tied this to local original programming and part of the reason why it would be difficult for us to put a number on that at this point is we -- as you can appreciate this is a pretty massive review of television policy....