Thank you for the question.
In fact, this act was fundamental. If it hadn't been for the current Broadcasting Act and the CRTC regulations, there probably wouldn't be any local news on regional television stations.
When I first became involved with my union in the mid-2000s, local stations had Canadian programming obligations that were down to three hours and ten minutes a week. As you can imagine, that's very little Canadian content per day. Through efforts and interventions before the CRTC during licence renewals, we succeeded in having the minimum requirements of Canadian programming increased to five hours. It was still a struggle. I would not say that the act is perfect in this regard.
That is why we are asking that the provisions of the Canadian broadcasting policy be strengthened with respect to employment in Canada and the funding of local information and community television. Currently, the CRTC has no real regulatory power to create production funds. It does so on an individual basis or when it initiates large processes that concern, for example, all cable companies. I think that's when the first version of the Canada Media Fund was created, around 1993. The ideal would really be to have provisions in the Broadcasting Act, through the proposed new subsection 11.1(1), that would allow the CRTC to allocate funding to local news or community television.