Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for taking the trouble today to speak on the motion I presented this morning. I appreciate it very much.
I would like to ask him a question. You may have heard the numbers I gave earlier, illustrating the funding imbalance between the CBC and Radio-Canada. I will repeat them for the benefit of new viewers and listeners: for an hour of news, the SRC gets $7,000, while the CBC gets $18,000; for an hour of variety programming, the SRC gets $30,000, the CBC, $141,000; for drama, the SRC gets $68,000, and the CBC, $99,000.
Given the success of French TV programs across the board-for the audience to "La Petite Vie" to reach four million, some English speaking viewers must be secretly looking at it, otherwise it would be extremely difficult to find four million francophones who would feel like looking at the same program at the same time-would it not amount to penalizing SRC for its success to arbitrarily apply the same cuts to the French and English networks?