Madam Speaker, my hon. colleague and I worked together on the heritage committee and it was a lot of fun crossing swords with him many times. I hope we will be able to cross swords many times in the future.
I think my colleague is partially correct and partially muddying the waters. In terms of the hits to CBC, as I said in my speech, the reason we are here today is the years of chronic underfunding that go back to the massive cuts that were made by Chrétien and Martin in the 1990s. As my colleague said, the cuts damaged the CBC to the point that the president of the CBC at the time actually resigned.
We have been digging out of a massive hole ever since. The problem with his statement is that we have been hearing repeatedly from the Conservatives about their commitments to record funding, record funding, record funding. It is very much like getting kissed by the crocodile in terms of telling us how much they love public broadcasting. If one looks at the increases to the CBC, it is actually flat. What my hon. colleague identifies as increases are just the standard Treasury Board increases for inflation across the board. That is not any commitment to CBC. It just means they have not cut anything.
Other costs have gone up. CBC is stagnant and it remains stagnant. The heritage minister says that they have given record support. However, the issue today is bridge financing and loan funding that would not have cost the government money and would have allowed the broadcaster to do what any private broadcaster would do, which is when there was a shortfall, they could have gone to get financing to get through it. The government pulled the rug out from under them. Now, on top of the previous shortfalls, we are seeing a major hit to their bottom line.