Madam Speaker, I appreciated the comments of my colleagues around the Chamber. In terms of the member across the floor, I had hoped Liberal governments would drop the rhetoric about stable funding for the CBC and actually in the cold light of day look at what they have wrought in the public broadcasting situation. However, that will not happen.
I would like to make some comments which I think are real wake-up calls for me. I was on the heritage committee tour across the country last week talking to people about what they want in a cultural policy. Over and over again we heard about the importance of a public broadcaster. More than that, we heard terrible concerns about the fact that we are living very much in an occupied country in that our culture is occupied.
Jack Stoddart, a respected publisher in the country, says that we are at war with another culture, the American culture. One of our main defences is institutions such as the public broadcaster, our magazine industry, our publishing industry and the Canada Council. They are the bulwarks for our defence against an unending swamp of American products.
The idea of having a strong public broadcaster is as critical at this point as ever before. We are also facing enormous media concentration. We are facing foreign ownerships in all these areas. The issue is keeping a strong public broadcaster, funding it sufficiently so that it is not constantly making deals with the devil or is not constantly trying to cut here and alter there and drop services in order to balance its ever shrinking budget.
One of the things my colleague from Yukon just told me was quite astounding but also played into the issue of globalization. We are saying we are out in the world. We are dealing and marketing ourselves all over the place. Yet for some reason we decide not to have journalists in some major centres of the world, one of them being Mexico with which we are inextricably connected by a trade agreement.
Paris and South Africa are places where we need Canadian eyes and voices and Canadian values looking at what is going on. We do not need just CNN feeds. We do not need to hear another country's particular take on issues. We need to know what we think.
Apparently there was a Catholic priest who was with the Chiapas human rights centre. He was kidnapped during the Chiapas uprising. If it had not been for the meticulous and aggressive work of the CBC reporters at that time he would have been killed. He was actually saved by their investigative reporting.
I think that these kinds of things are important. I think they are signals. I am not sure how anyone on the other side of the House can actually feel comfortable about removing our eyes and ears on the world from these important bureaus simply to cut further into the budget.
In conclusion, I would ask for unanimous consent to make this a votable motion.