Thank you, Madam Chair.
I thank the witnesses for their remarks.
I think this is an exciting time. Congratulations for your fine work on the Olympics and The Tragically Hip's Secret Path show. It was very impressive. I'm proud to be a supporter of the $675 million, I believe, in new money that will be going to CBC/Radio-Canada in the next five years.
But I have one problem.
There is a problem involving French radio. Last summer, in the very year that your funding was increased by $75 million annually, we learned the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation would be eliminating all regional programming broadcast in the noon hour in Western Canada. For many years, in my riding, the Midi Plus program aired local content out of Saint-Boniface. Now, the broadcast is from Montreal.
Moreover, in Manitoba, a radio program called L'heure de pointe, which airs when people are on their way home, was cut short by an hour. As for television, we used to have 90 minutes of local programming, but that was reduced to 60.
How does the current situation for French-language programming in Manitoba constitute greater openness toward local news for our communities?