Thank you very much.
Good morning, everyone.
Madam Chair, members of Parliament and committee members, my name is Cindy Simard and I am vice-president for news of four Télé Inter-Rives ltée local television stations owned by the Simard family. I am now 40 years old and was a journalist myself. I am currently the main local newsreader for CIMT-TVA, our station in Rivière-du-Loup.
With me here is Pierre Harvey, general manager of station CHAU-TV, affiliated with TVA, in Carleton-sur-Mer. Pierre has worked there for 40 years.
Let me also introduce Jean-Philippe Nadeau, who is news director at CIMT-TVA and CKRT-TV, which is affiliated with Radio-Canada.
Madam Chair, I would also have liked to say a few words in English, but my English isn't quite good enough and it would take too long. And that's even though my mother is an anglophone and I was actually born in Ontario, but my English isn't fluent.
Our family has been involved in broadcasting for more than half a century. My grandfather, Luc Simard, founded the first television station in Rivière-du-Loup, affiliated with Radio-Canada. The launch of that first television station took place in the early 1960s, when the Government of Canada, through Société Radio-Canada, needed small private entrepreneurs in the regions to provide Canadians with their first television service. In 1978 and 1986, my father Marc Simard answered the call from the CRTC and founded our station affiliated with TVA, followed by a station affiliated with TQS, known today as Vtélé.
Our television stations today serve all of eastern Quebec, including the Gaspé and the North Shore, as well as the province of New Brunswick, where there are about 235,000 francophones, most of them Acadians. The whole market served by our stations represents about 650,000 people.
As they did during the Let's Talk TV consultation, Canadians who participated in the online forum stated unequivocally that they considered local news to be very important and their principal source of news and information. In a survey, 81% of Canadians stated that local news on television is important to them.
In the Let's Talk TV discussion forums, many Canadians spoke about the importance of local news. Most of the participants said that they relied first and foremost on televised news to remain informed of issues of public interest, and that they used newspapers and the Internet only as a complement to televised news.
Our four local television stations spend nearly $3.5 million every year just on their local news service. It is the largest single expense of all our television stations. For nearly 60 years, since television came to Canada, local television stations in all regions of the country, except the main television networks, have had only one source of income, the sale of advertising.
Unlike the specialty channels, the major broadcasting distribution undertakings, the BDUs, the cable and satellite distributors, capture our local television signals and pay us nothing to distribute and resell them to their subscribers. While this goes on, besides the subscription revenues paid by consumers, the specialty channels benefit from additional revenues from advertising. And they do so without any obligation to produce local programming and local news in Canada's regions. That is one of the reasons that conventional television is in a precarious situation, in addition to the advent of the Internet.
The new media are now an essential supplement to our radio stations. We consider the new media to be an additional window for broadcasting our local news. However, our websites generate virtually no revenue. It is television advertising revenue that pays the costs of our websites.
In North America, the websites most consulted are those operated by the major broadcasters like CNN, ABC, NBC or, in Canada, CBC, TVA, CTV, etc. That is because of their capacity to deliver news produced by professionals. The same is true in our regions, where the local news sites of our stations are also those most consulted, because of the accuracy and reliability of their content and the trusted reputation of our stations.
In every case, whether in the major population centres or out in the regions, all the money necessary to provide content for and operate the websites comes from advertising revenues from television or specialized news channels. Needless to say, operating Internet websites is extremely expensive.