Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Burnaby—Douglas.
I am not a Conservative and everyone back home is well aware of that. However, I had to rise earlier to tell the member for Vancouver Centre that it was hypocritical to say that the government is not investing in CBC/Radio-Canada, considering that in 1995 the Liberals reduced the corporation's budget by $400 million, a decision that resulted in the loss of 4,000 jobs. Now, the Liberals claim that they did not really make cuts to CBC/Radio-Canada's funding. Come on!
At the time, they did it because of a financial problem and not because an economic recession had hit our country. They reduced the CBC's funds by $400 million and they also made cuts to employment insurance. I do not want to engage in a debate on employment insurance when we are dealing with the CBC. However, workers lost $57 billion. The Liberals also made cuts to health care. Therefore, I have a problem with the hypocrisy that they are showing today.
But let us now get back to today's issue. Time has gone by and this is no longer 1995. The CBC's shortfall is the result of an economic crisis. Advertising revenues have gone down. As the minister said, even if we gave money to CBC/Radio-Canada this year, it would not save the jobs at stake. He is right, because we are not talking about this year alone. The corporation needs a multi-year budget, and money must be invested every year. Rather than injecting $1.1 billion annually, the government could have provided $1.25 billion or $1.3 billion.
It must be realized that CBC/Radio-Canada is important to us. It is our national broadcaster. Back home, we did not have the opportunity to watch TVA or TQS. I am sorry, but when it comes to French language television, TVA and TQS do not provide local news in French. They are not reporting on events that are occurring in Grand-Pré, Nova Scotia, in Manitoba, or in Vancouver. The cuts that CBC/Radio-Canada must now make mean that in Windsor, for example, only three of the nine employees will keep their jobs. The crown corporation will eliminate a half hour of local news every evening. The lunch hour phone-in program will also disappear, along with the local segment. That saddens me. This is our broadcaster. This is a public broadcaster, a crown corporation that belongs to our country. It belongs to us. And today we can see what is happening.
The Prime Minister gave a first interview to CBC/Radio-Canada last week. Does the government have a problem with the crown corporation or CBC/Radio-Canada? Is there something it does not like about it? What problem do the governments have? I do not want to blame only the Conservatives. The Liberals are also to blame. What is their problem with CBC/Radio-Canada? When there is an issue between the government and CBC/Radio-Canada, we get the impression that the corporation is expected to be different than it is and not say anything bad about the government of the day. If it reports the real news, it gets a rap on the knuckles and the daylight scared out of it. Unless it helps the government, the government will not help it, and if it says anything bad about it, the government will cut its funding further.
Someone once told me that it was as if Jean Chrétien stayed up at night looking for ways to dismantle CBC/Radio-Canada.
This was at the time when $400 million in cuts were made and 4,000 people lost their jobs. He just hated that corporation. Everyone knew it, and we in this House knew it. Now, the Conservatives are saying that they did not make any cuts. They are providing it with $1.1 billion in funding, but CBC/Radio-Canada is struggling.
With all due respect to our Montreal cousins, I am sure that the people of Caraquet, back home, do not want to hear nothing but news about Montreal. They want local programming. It is nice to be able to sit in the living room after dinner and tune in to Abbé Lanteigne's talk show and hear people from our area talk with him. That is really nice. No doubt that the people of Chicoutimi and that area want to be able to sit in their living rooms and listen to news about their area. They will lose that ability. They will get the news from Montreal: the cat that was killed crossing Saint-Catherine Street. That is what is going to happen to us.
To help the CBC, why does the federal government not change course and require that providers of satellite broadcasting services offer CBC programming? Even in Ottawa, the nation’s capital, satellite broadcasting service providers do not distribute the signals of the local CBC/Radio-Canada television stations. On the one hand, there are Montreal, Quebec City, the Atlantic provinces, Manitoba and Vancouver. On the other, there are Ottawa, Regina, Saskatchewan, all the places where the local CBC/Radio-Canada station's signals are not distributed by satellite. Why would the CBC produce programming in those regions if it is missing 30% of the Canadian audience? That is what it amounts to.
This is something the government could do: order the CBC, perhaps by way of the CRTC, to offer its services by satellite. For example, Quebec City does not even get service from Star Choice. It is a major francophone Canadian city, with a large population, and does not even get service from Star Choice. As well, the companies could be told that if they want to broadcast programming by satellite here in Canada, they will have to include our public broadcaster.
Where I live, in the Atlantic provinces—that is correct—there have been call-in shows at noon on the CBC. It was enjoyable to listen to. That is over, and now there will be national broadcasts. We are missing the boat, and that is unfortunate. Now we have to ask whether the government really cares about our public broadcaster. We are going through an economic crisis. Eight hundred direct jobs will be lost. For each job lost, three indirect jobs will be lost. Imagine how many people are going to lose their jobs. The only thing the government is saying is that it has already provided $1.1 billion. But that figure is money that was already there, in the ordinary course of things. And we are in an economic crisis.
I would like to kindly ask my francophone colleagues from Quebec, and I will not say my token colleagues, to get the Prime Minister’s ear and tell him that this is going to hurt people where they live, in the regions, not them as members of Parliament, but their regions and the people there. When we were young, where I live, what did we watch? We watched the CBC or Radio-Canada. That was the television we watched, the television we pay for with our taxes, and we are proud to have a public broadcaster.
I would really ask the government to rethink this, to try to meet with the managers of the CBC and come to some agreements with them to save our public broadcaster. We need it. It is ours, it belongs to us, and we should be proud of it.