Mr. Chair, I would like to follow up on that. The minister said that these programs should be rated based on their quality. Who decides whether or not these are good quality programs? Is it the minister? Is it the department? Then we have a closed system where we do not have anybody ensuring that this truly is good stuff. The best way to determine whether there is quality is by judging how well accepted it is by the public. Of course that means using ratings.
The other point I want to make is that without ratings, the CBC cannot generate advertising revenue to the point where it can continue to fund these other programs. It is fine to say that we should rate these things based on quality, but that is completely subjective. Clearly, I think the Auditor General sees it differently and I think many Canadians see it differently too, who pay a lot of tax dollars every year to support the CBC.
Should the programming on CBC not be relevant to Canadians to the point where we start to see the viewership grow, not continue to sink as we have seen it do for a number of years? Is it not of concern to the minister that we have soft ratings for CBC and we really do not see, as far as I know, any prospect of that turning around?