I think you would lose the certainty of a debate. People in our surveys show that they want a debate and that they expect leaders to be at the debates. They think it's important for democracy. This is in the upper 80% to 90% of public opinion. I think you would lose the stability and the predictability of having a debate.
Before, the issue about the debates was whether there would be debates or not. You had to negotiate with the parties, and you had to negotiate with the networks. It was always uncertain, and those are not the best conditions in which to produce a debate.
I think, as I said, that it's growing the democratic footprint by offering the debates for people in languages other than French and English, but also offering the signal, because, you know, the signal of the debates, the feed, is free to anyone who wants to stream it. It doesn't belong to the commission. It doesn't belong to the networks, and this would be different.
This is important in the sense that, in the last election, we had 60 smaller digital media who streamed the debates on their YouTube channels or their other platforms and did programming around that on their platforms. I think it also takes it away from big network production and interpretation of the debate to communities who don't necessarily feel impacted or concerned by the debates.
I'll give you an example. There's a small alternative media outlet in Montreal that does reporting for communities who don't see themselves on the big networks, poorer people and people from different neighbourhoods. They streamed the debates. They had 5,000 people log on to their debates, and they also took questions and did analysis from those people's perspectives.
These are things that would be lost if the commission was not there and that we are hoping to grow even more for the next debate.