Thank you, Madam Chair.
I want to thank all of our witnesses today. These meetings and discussions are very important to me and to all the committee members, not to mention to the people who work in media, especially news. It is very tempting to bring up a slew of issues that we really want to discuss, given the seriousness and scale of the crisis. It has been impacting everyone in the news sector in Quebec and Canada for years. My sense is that we are turning our attention to the situation 10 years too late.
Mr. Gonez, I want to start by telling you how much I appreciated your opening remarks. Your comments were sensible and reasonable, and you bring a healthy perspective to the discussion. I want to give you a bit of reassurance: I think your company and those like yours are an essential part of the discussion around the future of the media. That discussion cannot happen without the involvement of pioneers in the digital media space. I want you to know that.
Now I'm going to turn to you, Mr. Chamberland. We worked for the same company in the 1990s. You were at Radiomédia and I was at Astral Media. We never crossed paths, but your reporters did the news segments for my radio shows, so we do have that connection.
All that to say that we have a few decades of experience under our belts. We've seen the landscape change. You opted to focus on local radio with Arsenal Media. To some business people, that may sound like a crazy gamble, the state of radio being what it is. You, however, decided to put your faith in local radio and its future as a viable sector.
You recently purchased seven of Bell Media's stations. The committee will actually be meeting with Bell Media representatives in the coming weeks. We probably won't show them quite as much appreciation as we are inclined to show you, given that you just saved a number of local stations. I gather that the news was also reassuring for the people who work at those seven stations.
Would you say the stations are in good shape? Do you plan to grow them locally? What does the future of those newly purchased stations look like?