Canadian Heritage committee  I think the group that's done the most accurate research is the one you mentioned on Monday, the Canadian Media Research Consortium. I don't know where those numbers came from on Monday. I've seen some of them before, but if roughly 10% of Canadians, on average, don't have cable or pay television service, that amounts to about three million Canadians.

Canadian Heritage committee  Oh, it is households. The 31,000 households, as I mentioned, may be the number that lose service right on August 31. They will be where we know analog transmitters are going to be decommissioned and not replaced. Our belief is that they're going to be decommissioned gradually over a period of years.

Canadian Heritage committee  I just wanted to reiterate that I think there's a lot of focus on the fact that the digital transition may bring in a loss of service for some Canadians, and that's true. I think it's such a pity that we're not focusing on how to make sure that Canada as a country gets the most out of the digital transition in terms of new services.

Canadian Heritage committee  Are you talking about captioning?

Canadian Heritage committee  Are BDUs carrying the load on letting the public know what's coming? No, BDUs aren't involved at all. It's being left up to the over-the-air broadcasters, but most of them are now owned by BDUs. If they really were independent broadcasters, you would think that they would be highly motivated to let you know where to find their channel after the transition and to make sure they're on air; that doesn't apply anymore, because the BDUs own them.

Canadian Heritage committee  I agree with your assessment of the situation. One thing comes back time and again: the Conservatives imagine that if we are well-positioned within the market and there are a lot of players, all the problems will resolve themselves. But the fact is that we don't really have a free and open market.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes.

Canadian Heritage committee  Is that addressed to me?

Canadian Heritage committee  One thing to understand is that we think analog transmitters are going to be slowly decommissioned over a period of years, so it's never too late. It doesn't have to be that large. Heritage Canada has started on a website. I notice they have a 1-866 number. I haven't tested what information they actually give on it yet, and this may be the beginning of a call centre.

Canadian Heritage committee  My name is Cathy Edwards. I'm the spokesperson for the Canadian Association of Community Television Users and Stations. CACTUS represents the views of Canadians who believe that participation in the broadcasting system by ordinary Canadians is fundamental to our democracy. CACTUS and approximately 20 other organizations wrote to the Prime Minister in September asking for a coordinated government education campaign in advance of the digital transition.

Canadian Heritage committee  Before I start my comments, I want to warn you that my comments, as prepared, run to about 12 minutes. We made a point of listening to your transcript from Monday and wanted to give you a slightly different take from the CRTC on some of those questions, in addition to our comments.

Canadian Heritage committee  No, they said they were going to do that--that's Global. CTV hasn't yet committed and neither has the CBC. The CBC, out of over 1,000 transmitters that it has--retransmission sites--has only committed to upgrade 27 of them. So that's an enormous loss in infrastructure. Our concern is that those towers are sitting there.

Canadian Heritage committee  We're in those talks at the moment.

Canadian Heritage committee  For example, with CTV, the VP of engineering told me last week that they have always leased space to small, local broadcasters and that they would entertain cost-sharing deals to upgrade to a digital transmitter in a market that they're not planning to upgrade right now. So those are ongoing.

Canadian Heritage committee  Not at all. As I said, right now companies in the private sector are controlling the community sector, and the community sector hasn't been given any access to any of the sources of funding available to the other sectors. At the spring hearing one of the things we said was instead of creating really complicated regulations to try to force big BDUs to do something they clearly don't want to do any more, we don't care about those channels they're running.