The Broadcasting Act has a whole shopping list of objectives, but they basically boil down to two. It should be an overwhelmingly Canadian system offering Canadian content, and Canadians should have access to it both as viewers and as participants, i.e. as producers. Those are the overriding key objectives.
If you bring in a Canadian communications act and you combine the two acts, you want to make sure you maintain that as much as possible. Obviously, in the age of convergence, in the age of digitization where all content can be offered, this becomes more and more difficult.
In the past under the Broadcasting Act, we would control what you could run on a radio station or what you could broadcast, so we would control what the cable companies could offer you. Therefore, it was a defined universe. We could impose rules.
Now that you have an open universe, you have alternatives. Right now, you can watch most programs on the Internet or on your hand-held devices, so this becomes much more difficult. Therefore, rather than dealing with trying to use regulatory arbitrage, really, you're driven very much more to an age of subvention, of finding ways to support and aid in enabling Canadian programmers.
Why do we say 49%, etc.? Why does there need to be control? In a combined company, you want to make sure that the controlling minds, the controlling people, are Canadians, and they understand Canada, and they understand our bicultural, our bilingual situation.
Let's face it, if we don't do this, by and large it will be bought up, and you will have a “transplant” communications industry that will be the training ground for young executives from foreign countries. No matter what regulations you put together, you can't instill in them what Canada is all about so that they can reflect that in the programming. You can do that only if the Canadians are in charge.
That's really what the bottom line is here. If you do take away the ownership, I'm afraid.... If you try to do it by regulating, you may not succeed, and there's no way you can go back.