I purposely didn't want to go too deeply into that, because I feel that if this agency is set up, people are going to have to operate this agency, and they're not going to be me, and how they're going to make their determinations, I believe, will be based on precedents in other funds. Whether applications will be peer-reviewed as they are in academic councils, for instance, I'm not sure, but what concerned me most was the governance structure and that the governance structure be distant from government. I just commend, as I say, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation as a model the committee might want to look at in that regard.
You spoke also about the regional and local challenges. This is an incredible challenge, I think.
I don't want to invoke myself too much personally on the committee, but I'm actually not completely and totally and historically a metropolitan elite. I come from an immigrant family and I had my first news job in Lloydminster on the Saskatchewan-Alberta border. Then I went to the Regina Leader-Post, and I've worked in different sizes of media organizations. I understand in a city like Lloydminster—and there are a thousand Lloydminsters across this country—how imperative news is and how the transmission lines of the community occur through news and the community seeing itself and reflecting itself and knowing what's going on.
This would lead me in two directions to your answer. We cite in the report that Prince Albert, oddly enough, seems to have a very interesting portal type of operation that's built on the base of local radio. Some people may be familiar with it. That may be a replicable model, but it might need some money to try to scale it. Scaling is very difficult, and maybe the fund might help with scaling.
In the CP local initiative, we could start by putting something like 80 reporters out across the country to cover things that are not covered. Through this not-for-profit second service of Canadian Press, this material would be available to everyone: the local blogger, the local radio station, the local newspaper, start-up operations, whatever. It would be available to everyone and it would have high standards.
We believe that news is a public good, and if a community felt that they were losing this public good and they wanted to petition the CP local initiative to say their community needed news or a community group wanted to petition and said they'd like to contract for a reporter to cover their community, they'd have no control over it. They'd just pay a three-year subscription or something like that. These are things that would be measured.