Thank you, Madam Chair, and my thanks to all of you for coming today.
It's been an interesting discussion about the role of Quebecor in the Quebec media landscape and across Canada. Quebecor, like all media empires, is not a natural construct. It's a decision by public regulators to allow massive amounts of media concentration. Each time one of these companies went before the CRTC to demand the right to gobble up competitors, they said they would give us diversity of voice.
I asked Mr. Péladeau what I thought was a fairly straightforward question about the lack of diversity of voice, in that every time a small-time newspaper is picked up, the local editorials seem to go out the window; the local point of view goes out the window. Now we see that marching orders have been given to attack the CBC. I pick it up in every small-town newspaper across the country now. So I asked Mr. Péladeau, not once but seven times, to explain whether this is a natural phenomenon—whether the journalists all across the country who work for him suddenly all hate the CBC or whether they get their orders from above. I had a difficult time getting a straight answer.
Mr. Bernier, you wrote an article entitled “Quebecor–A tarnished ethical and democratic track record”. You made statements in the article to the effect that journalists were ordered by Quebecor management to attack Radio-Canada/CBC. Is that correct?