Thank you very much.
Certainly, I too grew up on CBC. I'm from Alberta. While driving the truck when I was hauling grain, I'd be listening to programs all night.
Coming from the Red Deer area, I will say that we were very disappointed when CBC decided to pull out. That was decades ago, but we did listen to some of our local people, such as Ron MacLean. These are folks who have had and continue to have a great passion for CBC, but a lot of us have felt that perhaps the focus has changed. In shows like As It Happens and so on, the things we grew up on, and with the people we had, we could see the difference between reporters and editorialists. I think that's one of the issues. That's one of the things we see right now.
With the 24-hour news cycle, there's not a lot of opportunity to deal with the specifics. It would seem counterintuitive that you couldn't do that, but that isn't the way it looks on news shows. It used to be that there would be half an hour of news and then something local that was presented. When you lose that.... As was mentioned, you are in 60 communities, but you've had to pull out of a lot of them.
In terms of some of the issues, some of the things I've seen, this is why sometimes you're going to take a bit of a rap on this. I've been up to places like Fort McMurray when there were big stories there. CBC would roll in with a couple of trucks and six or seven people. All of the other newsgroups would have their one truck and their one person or maybe two. People look at that and say, “Well, I guess that's our tax dollars at work.” It's a perception that you have to realize is out there.
On the other thing that was brought up by the honourable member, I don't think the quote was exactly what he said, but he did talk about CBC's sometimes being too carried away with American stories and not focusing on Canada, or at least the way in which Canada is affected. We've seen that. We don't hear the stories about how Australia, for example, had a carbon tax and decided to get rid of that because it had lost all of its competitiveness. We don't hear the stories about how Germany has had to make major changes because of the issues it has had with its renewable resources and how that has fit in.
We don't hear the stories about the disastrous trade decisions that have taken place. We know what happens. I'm a farmer, and I'm also on the ag committee, so when you talk about the durum wheat in Italy and how that non-tariff trade barrier has affected us, or Saudi Arabia, where an errant tweet by a government has caused major disasters as far as a whole commodity is concerned.... South America has similar types of concerns and, of course, there was the disastrous trip to India, and the pulses and the opportunities to have done something. People are starting to see this in terms of, “Where's the reporting on that?”
We hear about Donald Trump. We hear about the associated issues there and how the Democrats and the Republicans are back and forth with each other, but who cares? What we need to be talking about is how Canada ties into the world. Yes, the United States is an important part because they're a major partner, but they're not the only partner, and we have to make sure that story is being told.
I'm wondering if, when you look at this, there is a way forward, where the corporation could be looking at more of the Canadian component of these national stories instead of simply saying, “This is what was said in the U.S.”