Over the last three years we have made several attempts to raise awareness about OMNI's financial challenges and have suggested tangible policy and regulatory changes for how the system can support and govern OTA ethnic television in Canada.
In 2013 we met with representatives from each of your political parties and walked through OMNl's financial challenges and made recommendations on how the government could support ethnic programming. Specifically, we recommended giving the CMF a mandate to support language, news, and information programming. Last year we asked for several changes to OMNl's licence at our renewal hearing. We believe many of these changes would have helped OMNI drive the revenue needed to support its in-house production.
All but one of these requests were rejected. Even as recently as last fall we were asked to appear before the Senate committee reviewing the mandate of the CBC to talk about our challenges with OMNI and about how we are making the station work given its financial situation. We made it very clear that major changes were needed to make the station financially viable.
In addition to these efforts, we have discussed OMNl's financial situation with our regional advisory councils, which comprise independent representatives from communities and organizations involved in the local diversity community.
While we wish we were here under different circumstances, we do welcome the opportunity to draw attention yet again to OMNl's financial situation, and hope it will encourage and expedite a discussion of a new policy and regulatory framework for free ethnic television.