Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to the member's speech. He talked about what the fabric of a community is and the role that arts and culture plays in a community.
My riding in northwest British Columbia relies heavily on the CBC for its information from outside. The concentration of media outlets in British Columbia in particular has been staggering over the last decade or decade and a half. Single owners have been able to acquire the two major dailies, most of the major radio media and a significant portion of the television market. Media concentration has been raised time and again in debates in this House, particularly in this corner, as citizens need the ability to have wide and diverse views about the news of the day and what is happening in and outside their communities.
Yet while in government, the member's party refused to make any serious commitments to actually having a diverse and transparent ownership regime in Canada. Now we get the sentiment from the new government that foreign ownership requirements may be dropped, if they have not been dropped in negotiations already, allowing outside ownership of our major marketing and our major media outlets, further distancing Canadians from their ability to have open and transparent reporting on the issues that are important to them.
My question for the member is with respect to the CBC. During his government's reign, the CBC was making drastic cuts in its ability to actually do local reporting. For rural communities in Canada this was significant, because getting news centralized from the city is completely unsatisfactory, yet the government allowed this cutting, and the Radwanskis and others, to go unhindered in the ability to concentrate, to not spread out and report more effectively.