First, to your opening analogy with the reference to the knife, thanks for calling me big and beautiful.
But look, nice try with the leg-breaking analogy. Not quite so true. As I explained to your colleague with regard to the audio-visual industry, not only are we still spending over a billion dollars every year to the CBC, but there is $375 million in money that didn't exist prior to, frankly, our government. Not to be immodest, but the first initiative that I took on as Minister of Heritage was to re-establish that public-private partnership and to build the Canada Media Fund.
I appreciate you waving the flag here for a 10% reduction over three years to the CBC, which is $115 million, but feel free to go ahead and acknowledge the $375 million that is also being invested on the other side into the audio-visual sector, looking forward to that analogy.
With regard to the CBC, our economic action plan is a plan and the reductions that we have are over three years. Everything we have put in place is to arrive at a balanced budget by 2015. That's over three years. Everything that we've put forward in the budget is our plan over three years. The certainty that we've given the CBC, and every single other government organization, is that these reductions will be phased in over three years. This is a three-year plan, and the CBC is planning accordingly, specifically to their mandate and their plan for 2015.
Our whole approach to this, on policy and on funding, has been to support and recognize the 2015 plan and to make sure that it is realized in the full scale they hope it will achieve, and the funding is there in order to do that.