If you look at public broadcasters around the world, out of 18 public broadcasters, CBC is 16th in terms of the amount of support it receives from the public.
For many years, the CBC was able to paper over that hole by delivering hockey on the English network. Now that is no longer there as a revenue source. Having stripped away the fig leaf, if you like, that Hockey Night in Canada represented for the CBC in terms of the private sector providing support for public broadcasting, it then becomes a question for the government to say, “What is our commitment to public broadcasting?”
There has been, if you like, a natural disaster in terms of.... When there is a serious impact—if there's a flood in Calgary—the federal government by and large doesn't say, well, Calgary is still getting the same amount of money it always has for water control from the federal government; they say that there is actually a specific crisis here: what do we think the citizens of Calgary deserve in terms of a response to a particular crisis? And this is a crisis for public broadcasting.