Thank you, Ms. Hepfner.
This is a great opportunity to talk about that history. When we decided to make the acquisition of CHCH in the early part of 2009, the CRTC had, at that time, already determined that local news was under siege and in crisis. It feels repetitious to talk about local news still being in crisis 13 years later.
The CRTC, under then chair Konrad von Finckenstein, devised something called the “local programming improvement fund”. Knowing that money was going to be there, we were able to, first, make the decision to acquire CHCH, and reorient it toward local news. We were able to, as you said, expand news coverage to all day, all the time, because part of the quid pro quo in accepting that money was us having to hit certain benchmarks of local news. We expanded the news offering. We had market success in the expanded news offering.
Unfortunately, when the then chair moved on, there was an interim chair for a short period of time. That commission made a decision to discontinue the local programming improvement fund completely, so we went from having a subsidy for local news to having no subsidy whatsoever. It happened very quickly. In a matter of two fiscal years, the money went from substantial to nothing. To your point, what we had to do for the second time—and I don't know about “knight in shining armour”—was step in and make tough decisions to ensure that CHCH would survive.
Fortunately, a couple of years later, the commission realized this was a bit of an overstep—I think I would call it an “error”. By the end of 2017, if I have my date right, the ILNF, the independent local news fund, was established. That, again, gave us the ability to staff up, increase the number of hours of local programming, and serve our audience and community in a way that was missing in the previous two years.