I don't think there's any solution to a trustworthy flow of civic news in the country that CBC would not be part of. I also don't think it would be good to have too much CBC and too little anything else, because part of a democratic solution is diversity of voices and perspectives in assigning the news.
We say three things about the CBC. We say about its mandate, which is to inform, enlighten, and entertain, that the “inform” part, given what's happened in news, should be heavied up, if you will.
Second, we say that it should get out of the digital advertising area, because this is distorting to newsrooms across the whole system, since every day they get feedback on how many eyeballs saw a story, not on the quality of the journalism or the impact it might have had journalistically. It's pushing them in the wrong direction from where the CBC should be going.
Third, we say we should start thinking about, considering, and perhaps experimenting in a small way with what's called a creative commons licence, meaning that CBC's news material would be available to this much wider media ecosystem that Mr. Van Loan described earlier. We recognize that might sideswipe certain news organizations that are also doing an important job. We want to be careful not to create a moral hazard situation here, so we propose starting with the not-for-profit sector, which is a new sector of news, if you will, that's emerged over the last three to six years, and go down that road.
We think it's a good idea in some ways. Theoretically we believe it's a very good idea for what used to be a public broadcaster to be a public provider of high-quality information to the entire system, which is also having trouble discerning between high quality and low quality. However, we want to proceed cautiously on that because of the perhaps unintended consequences that could occur.