Thank you.
I certainly don't want to impugn the motives of my esteemed colleagues across the floor. Perhaps I was just being sensitive, having sat on the heritage committee and never ever once having heard any of the Conservatives ask a positive question of CBC. There seemed to be a continual attack against our public broadcaster. Despite some extraordinary reviews and the updates on CBC planning that we heard, there always seemed to be an underlying sense of suspicion. Perhaps I'm just being overly sensitive to the Conservative government having an agenda to continually attack our public broadcaster and to undermine it.
That being said, I would like to take my colleagues at their word. Their desire for openness is certainly important. Access to information is about openness, so I'd like to just amend it. We have political staffers interfering time and time again with access to information requests. We have the access to information commissioner raising serious red flags about people's ability to get information. Perhaps to defuse this we could simply say that we will look at the issue of access to information as our first study, and Mr. Del Mastro can bring all the witnesses he wants against CBC, but we can get into a much broader general discussion without this being seen as just a pulpit from which to bash the public broadcaster.