Mr. Speaker, CBC/Radio-Canada operates 13 foreign news bureaus, including bureaus in Paris, London and Washington. The corporation does not have a bureau in Rome.
The bureaus are used as a base of operations for coverage of events in surrounding regions and countries as required and approved by the head of news and current affairs. Expenses incurred by these bureaus include travel to remote locations, hotels, accreditation and travel documentation. These expenses are part of the corporation’s journalistic programming activities and are not public. Expenses are not automatically separated into programming and non-programming categories; this would require a manual review of every expense. It is not possible to separate the programming from administrative expenses of these bureaus in the time provided for responding to this question. News budgets are approved by the vice-presidents of CBC and Radio-Canada.