Sure. As you know, the Canada Media Fund is now in its third year since we created it. I would be remiss if I didn't take the opportunity to remind this House as well that part of these estimates in the budget we're passing take in the Canada Media Fund.
Scott and I were just talking a minute ago about sunsetters. The Canada Media Fund used to be a sunsetter. It's not anymore. It is an A-base investment of the government. It's a permanent investment. With regard to that, the good news for everybody, including documentary filmmakers, is that we can have an ongoing debate about how best to make that investment work for all Canadians, including documentary filmmakers.
The Canada Media Fund has multiple strains of funding, including an experimental stream. The experimental stream goes to things like video games, kids' programming, and stuff that's purely digital. It's up to the Canada Media Fund to make sure they have funds available to documentary filmmakers.
The Canada Media Fund operates independently and at arm's length from the government; we have two members of the board. It's a five-person board. It's their responsibility to make sure they have funds available. If people are feeling pressure in one year versus another, then they should change the criteria to make sure that funds are available. As you say, documentaries are a unique aspect of Canada's film universe, because they're not often films that have a massive opening weekend and a great first month or month and a half in which they make all their money and then it tapers off from there. Documentaries float around for decades and decades. Their economic benefit shouldn't have to be realized in the first three months following release in order to demonstrate their worth.
Documentaries are incredible teaching tools. I graduated from high school in 1994. I remember watching documentaries from the 1960s that had the same value in 1994 that they had in the 1960s. The importance of documentaries for our cultural institutions, for learning, and for telling Canadian stories to one another is critical. If Telefilm isn't helping to support, if the NFB isn't there--and the NFB, by the way, does deserve a great deal of credit for the way in which it has promoted and pushed documentaries digitally--and if the CMF needs to have some changes to the criteria we've imposed on them, the transfer of $100 million per year, then that's certainly something we can consider as a government.