I want to thank you, Chair, and all the members for having me today. Some of you will know me, and to some of you I might be a new face. I've been on the Hill for the last 10 years, first as the Ottawa bureau chief for Standard Radio, which was bought out by Astral, and those stations now, of course, have been bought up by Bell.
I've been working in media—print, radio, television, and Internet—for the last 16 years. I've been in the business long enough to have started in radio when we still cut tape with razor blades, but young enough to have been early on the Internet side. I have worked for most of the major broadcasters and I still, in addition to working for the Rebel, do work for one of the major broadcasters, hosting a talk radio show on News Talk 580 CFRA, but my comments here today are directly from me and from the Rebel and do not represent CFRA or their owners, Bell Media.
Rebel.media came out of the fall of Sun News. Perhaps that experience is why my message to you will not be that we need help, or that the media industry needs help, but that the best thing you can do is create a level playing field, and mainly you can do that by getting out of the way. Sun News was a victim of an awful lot of bureaucracy and an awful lot of government mandates that were not met by the support that you would expect when the government requires certain things. I would be happy to answer questions on that.
From the fall of Sun News came the Rebel. We started in our living rooms, I and Ezra Levant, recording videos the day Sun News went down. People laughed at us, these two guys who had been on big TV shows, creating lots of controversy, starting in their living rooms. Well, almost exactly one year and nine months later, we have a staff of 25, which is small potatoes compared to some, but we've been hiring, which is rare in this industry.
We have 425,000 YouTube subscribers. When I started preparing my notes yesterday, it was 422,000. It's 425,000, and growing, today. This is more than any legacy media outlet on YouTube in Canada. It's not as much as my neighbour next door here at VICE, but it's probably the biggest of a Canadian-based media outlet, with 105 million video views to date, 100% viewer supported, and zero tax supported. We've been able to grow by providing content that the audience wants.
We've just had crews come back from a UN conference in India with the WHO. We have a crew over in Marrakesh, Morocco, for the COP conference, and we plan to do more reporting like that in addition to opinion-based commentary.
I agree with what has been said, by Mr. Crawley and by others, that you can't have a level playing field when the public broadcaster, the state broadcaster, call them what you will, has decided they want to be all things to all people. CBC has a mandate from Parliament. You and your colleagues in the House of Commons supply that mandate through the Broadcasting Act, and I will tell you emphatically that CBC has been violating the Broadcasting Act and their mandate for a long time. There is no reason on God's green earth that CBC should be running a service of digitally streaming music that competes with Apple, Google, Spotify, and every single private music radio station in this country. There is no reason they should be expanding into digital-only platforms of opinion. When people complain about that, we're told, well, they have to have a digital presence. Nobody's going to argue against that, but this isn't promoting their radio or television programs; this is creating new areas.
I reported several years ago on Radio-Canada deciding that what the Internet actually needed was more free pornography. They bought a series from France and posted it online for free. It was a little bit shocking. I think everyone knows that this is actually something that the Internet has an awful lot of, and we didn't need taxpayers' money going to it.