Canadian Heritage committee  I've been very preoccupied by the situation with respect to local news. Local newscasts in the CBC have been in decline for 15 years, for whatever reason. At the same time, we know a couple of things about Canadian viewers: for them, local news is exceptionally important. When we did those pilots last year, we attempted to see whether we could figure it out.

Canadian Heritage committee  Actually, there hadn't been a lot of them bought already, so we sent them a note. Then we put a further freeze on all sales of the DVD. One of the important things to bear in mind is that this is not the CBC's property, but belongs to the independent producer who made it; recently we've said to the producer that we're perfectly happy to give back the distribution rights and any further showing rights, and you can do with it what you want.

Canadian Heritage committee  After the film was first aired we received representations from a lot of people, not just the Gardiner family, that the portrayal of James Gardiner in Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story was unfair. This was not really an issue of legal liability; it was really to your point that there was a question of fairness at root.

Canadian Heritage committee  It may be of interest to people to track back through what the controversy over The One was about, since I think sometimes it was a little bit misunderstood. The One is a show that in French Canada was known as Star Academy, with big success in French Canada, having that on our network.

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you, Jane. It's a pleasure to be here. At CBC television we're driven by a very simple focus: to make programming that better connects with Canadians, programming that matters to them and that they want to make a part of their daily lives. English Canada is the only place in the industrialized world whose citizens overwhelmingly watch the programming stories of another country.