Mr. Speaker, once again I have the honour and pleasure of taking part in the adjournment debate to revisit questions I have raised in this House and for which I have had no satisfactory answers from the Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages.
On March 25, I asked questions about the CBC, which is currently in a very critical situation. It has a deficit of $171 million and has had to lay off 800 people, people who worked directly for the CBC and are now out of work. We need to keep in mind that 800 direct CBC jobs represent 3,200 indirect jobs. This is a very serious situation in Quebec as it is everywhere in Canada. These people losing their jobs are information and television specialists. There is no other CBC or Radio-Canada in Quebec or in Canada.
I asked a question of the Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages and my leader asked the same thing that same afternoon. All the CBC was asking for in order to avoid this real catastrophe and tragedy was a simple cash advance. Nothing complicated about that. It would have made it possible to save 800 direct and 3,200 indirect jobs. These are people, men and women, professionals who are now out of work and lining up for employment insurance. We do not know what kind of summer they will have, and neither do they.
This is a terrible situation and must not be looked at merely in terms of figures or statistics. We have to think about these individuals who are experiencing a real tragedy and we must have compassion for them, something that the Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages showed no sign of. He told us that even if he had given $125 million to the CBC, there would still have been 800 people laid off. We know that is not true. What is more, he claims to have increased its budget, when in fact he has kept it the same. Sometimes he says it has been kept the same, sometimes he says that he has increased it. This is clear evidence of lack of clarity.
What is clear, though, is that an organization called Friends of Canadian Broadcasting has provided a table which shows that, in 2009 dollars, the parliamentary votes for the CBC have decreased drastically. I cannot show that table, but I could table it with unanimous consent, which would give me immense pleasure. This table shows that under the Mulroney government in 1990 and 1991, the CBC received $1,589,700,000, and now under the Conservative government of this present Prime Minister, it is getting $1, 052,600,000. That is a difference of $500 million. How can this government boast that it is maintaining the CBC budget, or indeed that it has raised it? The figures show the opposite.
If there is one thing in life that does not lie, it is numbers. A person can do all sorts of things to manipulate words, but not numbers. The budget went from $1,589,700,000 to $1,052,600,000. The truth is that the government has not maintained the CBC budget. On the contrary, it is constantly decreasing. The Conservatives will argue that the Liberals did worse than that in 1995 when they slashed $400 million from the CBC budget, and they will be absolutely right in saying so.
That said, I am again asking the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languagesto answer my question.