Mr. Speaker, that is a very important question. The member knows the hacking and slashing of the CBC did not start with the Conservatives. That was well under way a number of years before that under the Liberals.
There has been a battle within the country for a large number of years where the private sector feels it is coming of age and wants to be given all the cream and gravy associated with the advertising revenues available in this country. By the same token, it does not want to have to provide any service to areas where there is not a large listening audience. It expects the taxpayers of the country, through the CBC, to provide programming to sparsely populated areas where there is really not a lot of advertising revenue. Yet it would like to have almost exclusive rights to the heavily populated markets that have huge amounts of advertising revenue. That is basically the way businesses operate. They want to take the cream but they do not want the responsibilities for the poorly serviced areas in the case of the television business.