Mr. Speaker, I wish to thank my colleague from Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine for his question.
I find it even more regrettable that the national news never talks about Canada’s other provinces. When we listen to the national news, we do not hear anyone talking about Gaspésie. We hear about Montreal, then the United States, and then about war in other countries.
I congratulate the Radio-Canada journalists working where I come from. I can assure you that they do very good work. But the only stories of theirs that are aired on the national news are the ones where some tires are placed in the middle of the road and where the roads are burned up. Then we get on the national news. Everything that is negative gets on the national news as long as it is big.
In Montreal, if a cat crosses St. Catherine Street and gets killed, it will be on the national news. But we do not see anything from the rest of the country.
I have been critical of this since my election, and even since I have been watching Radio-Canada and listening to SRC radio, which I love. It is our radio, it is our money, it is the taxpayers who fund it. The government has a duty not to impose cuts on the CBC and Radio-Canada. It should give them money so that they can cover the regions, without having the excuse of budget cuts. When the United States is in the news for a whole day because some incident has occurred there, and we cannot cover the news in our own country, we have a problem.
That is where the government should do some soul-searching about the way it treats public radio in Canada.