Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak briefly to Motion No. 432. The bill, in its present form, would help to redress the problems we see every day in the delivery of broadcasting by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The corporation under the government opposite has no money. It has basically no vision of where it is going and the board of directors is full of Liberal Party hacks.
The member opposite in his speech would have us believe that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the CBC, ignoring the fact that currently 2,000 employees are walking the picket lines, some of them within a stone's throw of the House of Commons today. The member opposite said about the reduction in funding that “the deficit made us do it”. That is their standard refrain on just about everything these days.
I find interesting another refrain we hear all the time from government members. They talk about globalization, how Canada has to be competitive, and how we have to be aware of what is happening around the world.
At the same time, in the last 10 days or so, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has announced that three foreign CBC bureaus around the world would be cut and the broadcasters reassigned.
One of those bureaus is in Mexico City. As we go forward as a country on the free trade agreement of the Americas it would be extremely important in the future of North and South America. Joan Leishman, the CBC first-rate broadcaster working out of Mexico City, and her crew are one of the three groups that will be reassigned and the bureau closed. It is particularly painful and very difficult for the government to square that circle on globalization but cut foreign CBC bureaus at the same time.
Another point I would raise is the whole business of the CBC having been told by the Canadian government that it has to display Canada's logo. As a noted TV broadcast journalist has said, this is a role that is common in countries where TV and radio act as government mouthpieces. It is absolutely outrageous that the Canada logo should be included on our television sets. It is a very worrisome trend that the government seems to want to perpetuate.
In view of the absence of money and vision, the make-up of the board, the whole question of globalization on the one hand and on the other related to the broadcasters, as well as the logo, the motion would go a long way to correcting all the initiatives the government is taking.