Thank you, sir.
My first point will be to go along the same lines as Mr. Simard when he talked about income averaging. Income averaging is a necessity in any equitable fiscal system, especially for people who are creators, who live in insecurity over the years. You've got one good year, three bad years, fat cows, lean cows, and it touches on people in professional sports, artists, actors, and anybody self-employed who can have a bad year.
The day that we come back to the system we formerly had in Canada and that was removed, we'll have made a significant step toward fiscal justice. I don't know how this committee can contribute to this, but let's talk about it at one time or another.
Mr. Simard, your second point concerned the quality of the Quebec cultural industry.
For English Canada, this has taken on mythical proportions. Quebec culture, and Quebec producers, have an advantage that the rest of the world only dreams of: a captive audience. The more we allow the teaching of English to erode, the more barriers we build around Quebec preventing people from learning what goes on elsewhere, and prevent people from travelling freely across provincial and national borders.
More and more Quebeckers are being forced to consume artistic products of declining quality, and put up with a cultural class that is becoming increasingly incestuous.
I must be said that within Quebec's film industry, auditions are virtually never held to seek out real talent, but the friends of those involved in subsidized productions are simply brought in. Auditions are never held within the Quebec film industry, or at least almost never. We see more and more subsidized artists driving around in Mercedes that the average person would never be able to afford.
An increasingly select group is being generously subsidized. You can't begin to imagine the number of extraordinarily stupid programs being served up to Quebeckers by private and state television in Quebec, because the captive audience can't look elsewhere.
Mr. Hardacre, the mandating of Canadian content has always been a given in Canadian cultural policy. Is that because you don't trust the Canadian public to support and listen to quality when they see it, or they are too dumb to recognize it when they see it, or is it because you don't trust yourself to produce things of quality that the public will recognize and support? How come you always need the big brother of government to force you on the Canadian public?