Canadian Heritage committee  That would help us. That would make us more competitive, but that would not stop them advertising on those other platforms, and honestly, sometimes I think they should. I don't think it's a bad thing. What we're talking about is more direct help in a transition period, as opposed to what you are talking about, which is building a competitive advantage.

Canadian Heritage committee  It depends on what is important. You could speak with your wallet as an advertiser. It's cool to advertise on all these digital products., but we have to look at whether they are really doing the job for you as an advertiser. If you don't support the industry, then the industry might go.

Canadian Heritage committee  If I understand correctly what you're talking about, you would offer a deduction to our customers if they advertise with us, making their advertising cheaper for them to buy from us. Is what you're talking about?

Canadian Heritage committee  That could be, but if you were a local advertiser 20 years ago, your job was pretty simple. Many communities had no TV stations, so you were splitting your budget between three things: you put an ad in the Yellow Pages once a year, you were advertising in a weekly paper, and, if you were rich, you were doing a little bit of local radio.

Canadian Heritage committee  I would like to make a last point, which relates more to the provincial level. Provinces have different formulas requiring newspaper publishers to pay recycling fees. We are absolutely ready to do that. Some provinces adopted those formulas in 2010 and 2011. Newspaper circulation in those provinces has dropped by 40%, but we are still paying according to the same formula, as though all those newspapers were in the recycling bins.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes.

Canadian Heritage committee  The flyers, in a sense, support the distribution of all these local papers that incur a lot less cost because they are distributed with the flyers. Actually, since 2009 a lot of people have been predicting, like you, the disappearance of printed flyers. We just ran a study lately that shows they are still very popular.

Canadian Heritage committee  The government could support us in two ways. It could create programs that would give us tax credits or grants that would help us deal with the challenges we are facing. During this transition period, our challenge is to maintain the quantity and quality of information. To achieve this, we would need temporary assistance from Canadian Heritage to support content.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes, we are a large corporation. I can tell you that we have a number of newspapers that are operating at a loss. I am not talking about tens or hundreds of dollars, but millions. The corporation has a social role to play as a civic partner, but it also has to answer to shareholders.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes.

Canadian Heritage committee  If you look at page 7 of my document, I will explain all our business work. My business works that when you produce a paper you need to have half of the pages that are ad dollars and half of the pages content. That's how it works because you solely live on ad dollars. If you send your people selling into the community and the community says we will support you with 16 pages of ads, then you produce 16 pages of content and you produce a 32-page paper.

Canadian Heritage committee  It doesn't affect the quality but it does affect the quantity.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes, we do sell that in the local community because we're a large corporation. We own some of these companies that are like a market of digital advertising. You could buy this in real time and—