Thank you, Chair.
I appreciate your being here today. Thank you for attending.
This is nice, because I've thought in the past that if I had a chance to ask some of the folks at the CBC a few questions about diversity, I'd like to do that. This follows on some of the questions we just heard.
You mentioned diversity, but you restricted it in terms of faces or issues. I'm going to focus on the news, where I think the CBC is failing Canadians in terms of diversity of opinion.
Ms. Wilson, you just mentioned offhand two million viewers a night for The National, when I think the numbers are more like half a million. CTV News is doubling your audience. Your numbers have been crashing over the last number of years, in part, I would argue, because your approach to news tends to be one-sided, and viewers are tuning out because they're looking for a good debate and they're not getting it from CBC's The National.
So in terms of the issue of diversity of opinion, which I think makes a strong news room.... I won't talk about your competitors in Canada, but if you look in the United States, you have people like Charles Krauthammer, with both NPR and National Review; George Will on ABC, a conservative; Bill Bennett on CNN, another conservative; and Ron Williams on Fox News, a liberal. I think CBC news in particular is failing its audience, and that is reflected not in your allocation from the Government of Canada but in terms of the number of viewers. I would submit to you that CBC is becoming a caricature of itself. There was a time I think it was better able to hold governments to account by providing both sides of the debate, but in the last number of years I think it has begun to fail to do that, and you're seeing that result in a rapidly declining television audience share.
If you expand your platform and no one's tuning in, I'm not sure taxpayers are getting value for money just by paying for more content when eyeballs are going elsewhere.