Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Nickel Belt certainly understands what it is like to be in northern Ontario. He has communities, like I do, that really have CBC as their only source of information. We do not have the luxury that parts of southern Ontario or large metropolitan areas have where they have a multitude of stations to choose from. To cut service to somewhere like Sudbury so that northern Ontario gets a smaller service, it really hurts every Canadian and every northern Ontarian.
The thing is that there are only 16 people covering a massive area. Northern Ontario is a large piece of geography. It is not like a concentrated city where there are hundreds of people, if not thousands of people, covering events within a couple of hundred square kilometres. We have tens of hundreds of thousands of space and we are cutting the staff in half. We are cutting 16 people down to 8, which is just not enough to run a proper radio station.
Cutting this out of northern Ontario and out of Sudbury is a black eye to the people of northern Ontario.