You know, I really don't think it's fair, because I am looking at the list of all the people who are getting the funds; some of them are huge multinational corporations that I personally think don't need the help of the federal government, and here we have newspapers that are basically struggling. I am talking about official language minority papers: English in Quebec and French outside of Quebec. I'm not talking only about Quebec here; I'm talking about my French counterparts outside Quebec. They're in basically the same position that we are. I don't think it's fair.
Pushing us so that we are going to have to go out and sell 2,500 papers or 5,000 papers--I'm not sure what the number is--in order to qualify for this program is, I find.... Yes, you're going to have some people who are going to go out there and get very creative and do this in order to get the program, but I don't think that's the way it should be done.
You were talking about 35 papers in Quebec and another 35 papers outside Quebec, and how some of these papers are already receiving this funding because they are smaller papers outside metropolitan areas. If you're publishing a paper in a small town and your distribution covers a 30-square-kilometre area where you cannot do door-to-door distribution, then you have to use Canada Post or some other method. You have no choice but to have a subscription-based newspaper. However, in our communities in Montreal and surrounding Montreal, the market doesn't work like that. We are competing with many other papers. As an English paper, I am competing with three or four other French papers in the area, so we can't go to subscription only; our numbers would drop down to such a number that it would be impossible to compete.