Mr. Speaker, I would be pleased to do that and I would be pleased to do so with specific reference to Bernard Ostry, whose funeral I attended in Toronto on Friday. It was an extraordinary manifestation of a great life.
Here was a person who had done many things in the Public Service of Canada. He covered many dossiers, but culture and broadcasting were really his forte. His far-seeing vision of the impact of new technologies on public broadcasting in our country goes back to the 1960s and 1970s. Things that he wrote in 1975 have a prophetic air to them.
It is precisely because we have great public servants like Bernard Ostry, who served both the Government of Canada and the Government of Ontario when he was head of TVO, and his wife Sylvia, who is the leading trade expert in the country and his children, particularly Adam Ostry, who works in the cultural field, that we have been able to have these deliberate policies. These policies have taken us forward. They have anticipated the changes which have come across in the multi-channel universe of over the air broadcasting in the early fifties. At that time, the United States had three channels and Canada had a couple.
We have gone through a total revolution. It is precisely because we have been well served by people like Bernard Ostry and the rest of his family that we have been able to anticipate change and introduce, in a thoughtful and intelligent way, the kinds of regulations which have allowed us to keep up and demonstrate the flexibility, which has been asked of us by the Conservative government. I ask the government to once again demonstrate flexibility and support this motion.