Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you to the witnesses for appearing today.
Mr. Lacroix, with due respect on the answers that you gave my colleague with respect to ATIP requests, I would expect, and I think all members of this committee understand, that if you have a concern with respect to....
We're all public servants, as is the CBC. We're on the public payroll. I think we would all expect that if the CBC wanted to investigate our expenditures, wanted to look into how government was spending money, it would do that with a dogged determination to get the answers for Canadians, because they would see that as being responsible to Canadians. And Canadians deserve the answers.
I think all parliamentarians have worked hard to increase the amount of information that we're providing, in fact to the point where for some folks it's been frankly embarrassing. But as we've said internally, never expense anything that you're not prepared to stand behind. If you're not proud of how you're spending money, then you may have to answer to your constituents for it.
The CBC's constituency is all of Canada. I think it looks very bad on the CBC when it releases ATIP requests that are largely blanked out and that don't actually respond to the answers that the ATIP is looking for.
I think the CBC should be as open as a book. It should be completely transparent. You serve the public. You're owned by the public. When the public hears stories, stories that may be completely untrue, about lavish expenditures that other networks don't make, about folks who might be commuting back and forth to work from remote lakes on float planes that the taxpayer is paying for....
These are stories that have been out in the public. We should be able to push back against it instead of fighting it in court; I think all you do is fuel the fire.
Do you see that you're fuelling the attack against you by taking it to court rather than simply answering the question?