Madam Chairman, I welcome any question on accountability. Actually, I really enjoy talking about accountability and governance, because we realize the importance of receiving $1.1 billion from taxpayers and making sure they understand the value of the $34 each Canadian gives to CBC, allowing it to deliver the services it does—in two official languages across six time zones, in a country as large as ours.
Here's what we've done to be more accountable and to deal with this. We now, on a quarterly basis, publish financial statements and 102 pages of accompanying explanations, in the same very clear way that the public companies of this world are actually reporting to their shareholders. We have an annual general meeting that we put online. Everybody is invited; you can hear us explain what's going on at CBC/Radio-Canada.
The economic model of the other broadcasters is such that they can't do what we do. I told you about that, and you referred to that exactly: up north, there's only one broadcaster—us. So when we talk about a loss, it shows you that the model is broken, because it's actually an investment by the government to connect Canadians together and tell our stories. It's an investment for the person in St. John's, Newfoundland, to understand what's going on in Red Deer, Alberta, or to find out what happened in Victoria yesterday. That's what the broadcaster does, in an infrastructure that is significantly larger than any other infrastructure in the world. We also just spent some $60-some million trying to go into the digital world.
That's what we do, and that's why, when I hear our friends at Quebecor always saying that this is a loss, actually I think it's a spectacular investment by Canadians into the broadcaster: to allow us to be the glue in this country, connecting stories from Canadian to Canadian.