Canadian Heritage committee  Finally, CTF funding was intended to provide leverage to increase private sector spending on Canadian programming. In fact, private broadcasters are now spending more on non-Canadian programming and less on Canadian. For example, in 2005 alone, private broadcasters saw CTF fundin

Canadian Heritage committee  What happened was that in 1993 there was an arrangement through the structural decision of the CRTC to allow systems to decide voluntarily whether to contribute back to a fund or to return funds to subscribers. People have described that regime. It ended in 1996, 10 years ago.

Canadian Heritage committee  First, I'd like to make it clear that we have not broken any rules in doing what we did. What we have is a regulation in place that, as is clearly agreed by everyone, requires us to pay within the broadcast years. That gives us to the end of August to make the payments. If this i

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes.

Canadian Heritage committee  The first thing that would happen is, if you indicated that you're concerned with the programming, we would want to have one of our service reps have a discussion with you first. That would be the first step.

Canadian Heritage committee  Then we would want to make sure we understood what your concerns were. That would be a first.

Canadian Heritage committee  It's been a process that I would describe as, “Yes, we know about your concerns and we're going to take care of them”. That process has been going on for quite a period of time.

Canadian Heritage committee  I would say over the past five years.

Canadian Heritage committee  I think Mr. Barrett indicated at the hearing when he appeared that he knew the BDUs had been unhappy for 10 years. I would say that's been the nature of our concern. There have been various issues. We were concerned about audits, and then we were told the Auditor General was goi

Canadian Heritage committee  None.

Canadian Heritage committee  October.

Canadian Heritage committee  I'll make two points. One is that we did address those issues at the CRTC hearing, and then when the CTF appeared we did not feel those issues were addressed. But we had made points in our interventions beforehand that were on the record about our concerns about the CTF. As well

Canadian Heritage committee  In terms of the two markets, let me first deal with the English language market, because you do have that information in front of you from the CBC. The CBC showed a chart, which is quite interesting. It shows a number of shows they've produced through CTF funding, and they had on

Canadian Heritage committee  First of all, we do not believe in funds. We have the position that funds just become subsidies of uneconomic behaviour. We believe regulatory obligations are the best way to proceed. We don't look for funds. When we invested in satellite services, I think in the first year we lo

Canadian Heritage committee  In terms of local programming, we think local programming is important. We do have one local television station that we happen to own. It was part of the cable system we purchased in Kenora. We believe it's a successful operation and we continue to plan to make it a success. We t