Canadian Heritage committee  I'll just say one thing. Obviously, what the president said is right. It's not our job to tell Canadians what values they should espouse. Our job is to reflect the full diversity of view within the country. We were talking about regional before. When we think about regional, I try to think about it in a different way.

Canadian Heritage committee  The fact that 55% of revenue comes from the advertising sector shows that there is a problem. The budget of the CBC and Newsworld is $600 million. You can see without any difficulty that, without the 55% that comes from the advertising sector, we would have no service.

Canadian Heritage committee  Do you want a response to that?

Canadian Heritage committee  I think this is very fundamental. The question of what's been going on over the course of the last number of years, in terms of attracting English Canadians to English Canadian programs, I think reflects a very interesting structural problem within the industry. Over the last 15 years, literally hundreds of new specialty services have been licensed in Canada and are authorized for distribution in Canada.

Canadian Heritage committee  No, actually it pre-dates your decision by almost a year. For those of you not so familiar with the ins and outs of this, CBC television maintains, and it had for many years, a department that designs and builds sets within the organization. I must say we're the only English-language broadcaster in North America that maintains this kind of capacity, and we had a look at it to see whether there was some way of doing it more efficiently.

Canadian Heritage committee  The answer is no, we haven't put the back catalogue on the website or on YouTube. We have to confront a couple of different issues with respect to the back catalogue, by which I take it you mean in large measure all the old drama shows, variety shows, and so on. First of all, to put it up, you'd have to digitize the whole lot.

Canadian Heritage committee  I would just say that I was the chairman of the fund for four years. I believe I was the longest-serving chairman of the board in the history of the fund, and survived. The way it stands now, there are four seats on the board for the cable companies and satellite companies. Indeed, when I was the chair of the fund, I was the president of the Canadian Cable Television Association.

Canadian Heritage committee  Do you want the precise sum?

Canadian Heritage committee  The way it works right now is that all the broadcasters receive envelopes of different sizes of the total money that's available. In the case of the CBC, as everybody has pointed out, we receive 37% of the fund for English and French together. We then contract with independent producers to make the programs we want to show on the air.

Canadian Heritage committee  Thanks. I think it's sometimes helpful to remember the history of how this fund was put in place in the first instance. What happened is that in the old days when the cable companies wanted to make an improvement to their capital infrastructure, whether they wanted to build more transmission capacity or put in better equipment or what not, they would go down to the CRTC and they would say, “We would like to do this.

Canadian Heritage committee  I have just one little comment. What you say is completely correct, and what Sylvain says is completely correct. We live in two different worlds, utterly different. Everything goes, frankly, very well in French: people watch Canadian television shows; they watch Canadian movies—it goes very well.

Canadian Heritage committee  As I mentioned in my opening remarks, the thing that preoccupies me the most is that English Canada is the only country in the industrialized world that prefers other people's entertainment programming to their own, by an overwhelming margin. So all the things that English Canadians consume by way of drama, comedy, series, whatever, is American.

Canadian Heritage committee  Well, just to be clear, separating out journalism, there is a standards handbook that all the journalists get that lays down the standards that are expected of CBC journalists. That's the first point, and they all get trained into it. The second point is that the job essentially of the editor in chief is to ensure that what's put on the CBC by way of news reflects the standards laid our in the journalistic handbook.

Canadian Heritage committee  Absolutely. We certainly can give you a copy.

Canadian Heritage committee  Today is actually my second anniversary working at the CBC. Some of these decisions go back a little before my time. To be honest with you, I agree with you. I think the only way to look intelligently at local offers is to look at them in terms of their local markets and local communities.