Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased today to speak to this bill. At the outset, I want to note that the Liberals and the Conservatives seem to be onside, once again opposing this legislation. We saw them yesterday join together as one to try to support Bill C-2, the Canada-Colombia free trade agreement. Today we see them join together to try to stop Bill C-444.
At second reading we are dealing with the principle of the bill. I would think the Conservatives and particularly the Liberals should be open-minded enough to at least want to send the bill to committee so they could debate it, discuss it and try to amend it, If they do not agree with it at that point, after the amendment process is concluded, by all means, they can come back to the House and vote against it. However, to simply preclude the possibility of the bill going to committee is a very bad choice on their part.
The member who spoke for the Conservatives pointed out that we did not need a new regulatory body, that we did not need duplication of existing regulations. However, he is not prepared to give us the chance to even debate the issue further, to explore the issue in committee, perhaps call witnesses to the committee, look at the issue from all different angles and perhaps come up with a solution that would make everyone happy in the House, particularly the member who introduced Bill C-444. He is prepared to shut the door tight right at the beginning, defeat the bill and move on.
I do not think that is a good approach, particularly since the government finds itself in a minority situation. By the looks of it, it will always be in a minority situation. I see there are signs that it is beginning to accept that fact. There are some signs that it is tentatively making approaches to the opposition. I see it selectively dealing with the Liberals on the Canada-Colombia free trade issue and certainly dealing with other parties on other issues. I applaud it for that because it means it will survive longer as a minority government and it will, at a certain point, learn how to govern properly in a minority situation.
Up until now, it has been more or less a disaster for the government in the minority situation. Clearly from the very beginning, it could never accept the idea it was a minority and so it gave up on the idea, very early on, of trying to make a minority government work. It is going to take it a while to learn. There are some signs it is learning, but this is not one of them. The government should at least be open-minded enough to send the bill to committee.
My colleague from Vancouver Kingsway also spoke on this issue earlier today. He had indicated that the bill opened up a potential debate for members of the House to deal with public broadcasting and cultural policy in the country. My party and I are very strong believers in public broadcasting. I am a very strong supporter of the CBC. Many members here are of the same age or older than I am and will know that when we were growing up we only got one channel. It was the CBC and it was in black and white, so we had a very positive view of CBC programming in those days.
Things have developed and things have changed over the years. We now have multiple stations competing for the viewers and we have introduced the private sector.
The government, that is basically very dedicated to whatever the private sector wants, the private sector gets, is tied to deregulation. If we could redraw the map from a Conservative point of view, we would sell off or dismantle the CBC, turnover the whole market to the private sector, and while we did all of that, we would dismantle all the regulations. We would allow free enterprise to run its course.
We would have a situation develop where we would have the big guys gobbling up the little guys to the point where we would have just one or two broadcasters, media giants, in Canada and that is in fact what has happened.
Then we get to deal with the whole issue of the too big to fail syndrome. We have a situation right now with CanWest essentially going into bankruptcy because the original owners and founders of the company managed to load the company with $5 billion of debt. Then when the market downturn happened and the economy dove a couple of years ago, the bond holders were forced to take over the company. Now we see them basically selling off the assets to other corporate takers and that process is ongoing at this point.
Coupled with that we find ourselves in the middle of an extreme recession and the government announced last year that it was planning to sell off crown assets to, I believe, realize $2 billion.
I am not aware that it was able to do any of that last year, but I know the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance is listening very attentively and taking notes, I might add, and I am certain that this coming year the government will find a way to realize that $2 billion and maybe more by selling off public assets.
We on this side of the House have suggested that one of those public assets that it may be interested in selling off might be the CBC.