In Quebec, to support the core mandate of community television, the Government of Quebec provides financial support to community television stations that produce four hours of news programming a week. The amount of that support is between $25,000 and $35,000. Community television stations that broadcast on the Internet receive between $8,000 and $10,000 a year in financial support.
Our proposal is to create community media centres that bring together all the platforms, including radio and television. In the Sherbrooke area, where there is currently only one community television station, in Waterloo, and MAtv that produces some news content, there could be as many as four community media centres in the Estrie region that could reach out to the entire world. At that point, local news could reach a larger number of people.