I haven't fleshed it out yet, but the idea of a Canadian Communication Corporation has a nice ring to it. It's this idea of using the postal system as a general purpose delivery network.
That was the case with the United States post office from its inception in 1792 all the way through into the 20th century. Some people have done analyses and suggest that the level of subsidies in current dollars was in the billions of dollars per year. One telling sign was that 95% of the weight of the postal delivery system was occupied by newspapers, but they accounted for just 5% of the revenues. It was a huge subsidy given by the United States government under the guise of the free press because it wanted to cultivate a vibrant press. What it did was give these enormous subsidies to the press by way of a general delivery platform.
What I'm thinking is that somehow we try to update that through the century that has passed and see if there's anything we can think about with respect to that today. We have post offices throughout this country, so let's put wireless masts on top of all the post offices. The post office could be a kiosk for getting your cellphones. The post office has a culture of being a common carrier. The idea is that you would have structural separation between the CBC, with the content side of it, and the delivery side of it. It would be similar to what I described with the structural separation in the vertically integrated private companies. It could be something like that.
One thing I've heard a couple of times here is that Winseck is against subsidies. I don't want to say I'm against subsidies. I want to make it very clear that I'm squarely behind subsidies for the CBC and for the general purpose content fund. This is because news is a public good.
I tried to make that point clearly. This is not Dwayne Winseck believing in some fantasy land that news is a public good because I think people should eat their kale. From an economic point of view, news is a public good and has never been solved with a market solution, except for a small slice, as I said, of financial traders and merchants who want to trade on the advantages of time, secrecy, and exclusive access. For everybody else it has been subsidized.
You can pick your subsidiser. Do you want a rich patron to do it? What's the cost? Do you want government to do it? What's the cost? Do you want advertisers to do it? What's the cost? There's no free lunch.
You have to recognize that news is not a normal economic good. The whole institution of copyright is predicated on this. We created a whole body of law to deal with one specific kind of property—information and news—because it doesn't conform to the other kinds of property that we have. It's all about balancing. All of those balances are just social settlements that are subject to change over time. That's what we need to do today. We need to bite the bullet, realize that we need to have subsidies, and who's going to get them and who's not.
I'm trying to say that we should not give subsidies to those who have blown up the system. We should not channel subsidies through an opaque labyrinth, as we've done throughout the last half-century. We should not allow the existing commercial players to be both the suppliers of the subsidies, the administrators of the subsidies, and the beneficiaries of those subsidies. It's riven with conflict of interest that is self-evident to anybody who asks or who looks at the evidence honestly.