The main role should be to develop a truly national news industry policy. Right now, the problem is that they're kind of hopscotching. There's broadcasting over here, there are independents over here and there are newspapers here. There's really no such thing anymore, in the news industry, as separate areas. Broadcasters produce text news. Newspapers produce video and audio.
Right now, every time the government tries to address one problem, it creates an imbalance elsewhere. If you give the CBC $150 million and it's a commercial competitor, you're actually tilting the playing field against non-CBC competitors. If you throw money at newspapers, you're tilting the field against broadcasters, so you counter that by doing broadcasters. This is a crazy way to do things. If you really want to get a good outcome, you have to understand, and look forward into the century, that this is a single industry—news—and then build public policies to support that.
One of my key recommendations—there are several in the paper—is to go ahead and subsidize the consumer, not the producer. There's no point in subsidizing the production of something that's not being consumed. I think it's the entirely wrong approach. Maybe it was okay on a temporary basis, but on a long-term basis, you really need to sit back, take a look at this and stop shifting from crisis to crisis, trying to solve the problem individually.