Okay. I'll jump ahead.
We all know that local news is in trouble, but we've been erroneously handing money to vertically and horizontally integrated giants to solve the problem. At each hearing, they promised that with deeper pockets they would be able to support local production, but they don't. The local journalism initiative by the Department of Canadian Heritage has finally recognized that if you want to ensure communities have local news, you resource not-for-profit community media that are located in and committed to serving communities over the long haul.
CACTUS, the Fédération and the Community Radio Fund of Canada are generating news under LJI for a tenth the cost of public and private sectors, hour for hour, so we do not support further consolidation. It's bad for information diversity and it's also bad because the bigger the companies get, the more they capture our regulator. The CRTC staff openly refer to them, not the Canadian public, as their clients. The rot has gone so far up that we're being told not only by the CRTC, but by Canadian Heritage staff working on Bill C-11, that they cannot recognize not-for-profit broadcasting in a new broadcasting act, because other big entities think it's a zero-sum game. If they recognize that we exist, there's less money for them. The legal structure of our country is caught in their net.
We've elected you to defend the public interest when our bureaucrats and regulators are captured by industry. Should the merger go ahead, however, we urge you to support initiatives that ensure a diversity of information—