Canadian Heritage committee  What is their problem with us?

Canadian Heritage committee  The funding board has never discussed legitimacy, nor even the legitimacy of providing support to francophones outside Quebec, or support for production in aboriginal languages.

Canadian Heritage committee  Could you repeat the question? It was established in 1996—

Canadian Heritage committee  Since the start, there has always been a budget for CBC/SRC, yes.

Canadian Heritage committee  I do not understand the question.

Canadian Heritage committee  Our obligation to support productions being licensed by CBC/SRC comes from the Department of Canadian Heritage. People at Canadian Heritage are making these decisions. It is not up to us to say whether direct subsidies would be a solution to this problem. The only thing I want to say is that when CBC/SRC does business with us, the regulations applying to the entire industry, to the CBC/SRC and all commercial broadcasters, licence fees and the requirement to ensure production across Canada are the same.

Canadian Heritage committee  The reasons why they don't want to support the CBC/SRC?

Canadian Heritage committee  I have heard no criticism. They have their reasons.

Canadian Heritage committee  In their letters, they only said that support for the CBC/SRC was inadequate and that they were not satisfied with the governance of the fund. Their specific reasons are not clear to us. They simply said that support for the CBC/SRC was not adequate in their opinion. When a fund grants 37% of its budget to a single organization, it is not surprising that another organization would want to have more money.

Canadian Heritage committee  When the fund began there was no satellite distribution, so no contributions were made to the fund by satellite distributors and the only representation on the board came from cable operators. With the dawn of the satellite era and the commencement of contributions from the satellite side, we introduced one seat.

Canadian Heritage committee  I was going to start off by saying I'm not a lawyer, but of course I am. As I understand it, the full panoply of the commission's enforcement powers is available to enforce breaches of the regulations. The status of a circular as a policy document has not, as I understand it, been tested.

Canadian Heritage committee  Every stakeholder group—producers, broadcasters, BDUs, and so on—has an agenda for what it would like the fund to do, and those agendas conflict in some cases. Our actual job is to bring intelligence to the table to figure those things out in the interests of the industry as a whole.

Canadian Heritage committee  Sure. Thank you very much for that opportunity. We understand there's an ambiguity within the CRTC regulatory environment that makes the annual payment provisions of the BDU regulations enforceable while the monthly payment requirements of the CRTC circular are apparently somewhat less enforceable.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes. I think the short answer is that prior to 2004-05 we had a situation where the general policy guidelines of the fund had to be agreed upon by both our board and the Telefilm Canada board, and this two-board structure created a great deal of confusion. The direction at the time was to transfer to the fund all responsibility for policy-making at the program level in television, so there's now only one board.

Canadian Heritage committee  At the outset of our presentation I suggested that the real issue before the committee is not the state or performance of the CTF. We understand Shaw and Vidéotron have concerns about the fund. Some of these concerns are principled, and some relate to commercial interests. They're not alone in having issues with our decisions.