I have reviewed the five-year plan. As I said, Hubert Lacroix has had an open door policy in terms of discussing these issues. He and I have had free and very healthy, good debates and conversations in the past about how things ought to be, obviously respecting the boundary that needs to exist between the minister responsible and the independence of the CBC.
Funding questions are sometimes seen as a little bit more black and white. I've gotten the question here from Madame Lavallée about a five- or ten-year funding commitment to CBC and the question about the $60 million programming fund. But it gets a little oversimplified, doesn't it? Some people say, “How much money are you going to give to the CBC? Is it going to be $1.1 billion, $1.2 billion? For how many years? Locked in? What about the $60 million? Permanent or not?”
The challenges that the CBC and, frankly, all broadcasters have faced in the last three years are far more complicated than that. Don't forget, a third of the CBC's revenues come from advertising revenue, from outside sources--DVD sales, T-shirt sales, everything they do to raise funds from the outside. That's a third of their funding. All broadcasters saw a massive cratering of advertising revenue, so the challenges the CBC faced were a lot more than just how much money the government is going to give us and over how many years.
There were also some structural questions, for example, the sale of some assets that the CBC wanted to monetize in order to make some of the changes they've made structurally within the CBC that in the long term are going to serve the CBC. For example, there is the sale of their satellite radio holdings' storefront--in a parking lot in downtown Toronto, if my memory serves me--monetizing these assets, and doing it quickly, having it done through Treasury Board quickly so that CBC can have access to those funds quickly, so they can address some of the issues they're having in terms of cashflow because of a drop in advertising revenue.
We work with the CBC in a more intimate way than people understand on the financing side. Rather than just saying, when is the budget coming, how much are you going to give them, and for how many years, it's on an ongoing basis, and in a time of an economic crisis like we just had, it's having an open door, a healthy working relationship with the CBC, so we can tackle some of these funding issues head on and in a mature way. That's what we've had.
I've given Hubert Lacroix some praise here, but I think he genuinely deserves it for coming up with really creative and effective ways of making sure that the taxpayers' money they're getting has as much velocity as possible, so that Canadians see the end product, which is more Canadian content on their television screens, on their computer screens, on their portables, and on their radios.