Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Gaffield. And I want to thank you for providing some of your written material in advance. I read it--with great interest, I might add.
I want to drift away just a little bit from the idea of clusters and how we approach, from a human resource aspect, jobs and industry. I want to focus in on the cultural aspect.
We have a body by which we protected Canadian culture to the greatest extent we could. Primarily it was through the CRTC.
I would like to draw an analogy here. It might not be a good one, but bear with me.
Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin: everybody in Berlin knew what it was. They feared it. It was very famous for what it stood for, and that was the gatekeeper. When the Berlin Wall came down, it was useless.
That's my analogy with regard to the CRTC. With the advent of digital technology, our CRTC becomes that much more diminished. I'm very concerned about us as legislators protecting Canadian culture, first and foremost. I see it being lost, to an extent, through the advent of some of these technologies.
I always use as a litmus test my 15-year-old son. I watch him very closely, not just for the content of what he's watching but how he's watching, what he's using to do the watching. When we make rules by which he can see only Canadian content, or it's shown to him and other international content is left out, he goes to the computer and gets around it, no problem. He is a citizen of the world. He plays video games with his friends who exist in provinces that he doesn't live in.
My question then--it's a broad one, apparently--is how do we push ahead with policy that protects what we feel is Canadian?