Canadian Heritage committee  I want to thank the committee for having us here. My name is François Olivier. I am the CEO of Transcontinental Inc., which is a Canadian public company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. We're active in two businesses at Transcontinental. Just before we start, we're not e

Canadian Heritage committee  We will get right into what we want to share with you this morning. We want to share the challenges that our industry has faced since 2009-10. I want to explain how our business works. Basically, a company like ours, or an independent like Benoit's, in the weekly business we so

Canadian Heritage committee  Just one minute. Okay. I guess I will finish my presentation in the question period. Basically we moved from a single-product organization producing one product on paper to a multiple-product organization selling very complex products on the Internet. This is a very tough transi

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes, we do sell that in the local community because we're a large corporation. We own some of these companies that are like a market of digital advertising. You could buy this in real time and—

Canadian Heritage committee  Most of our papers have one, two, three journalists, or four. Basically, if you go back to my presentation, on page 7 I express our problem in a very simple way. There is nothing more that our journalists would like to do than investigation, and we give them time and space, and

Canadian Heritage committee  —we do that at Transcontinental. We have developed a product for local communities, which has nothing to do with our content. Basically what we do is take the call to action that the advertiser wants to put on the paper on our websites, and we make this appear. We are able to buy

Canadian Heritage committee  Obviously we're not the New York Times.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes.

Canadian Heritage committee  If you look at page 7 of my document, I will explain all our business work. My business works that when you produce a paper you need to have half of the pages that are ad dollars and half of the pages content. That's how it works because you solely live on ad dollars. If you sen

Canadian Heritage committee  It doesn't affect the quality but it does affect the quantity.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes, we are a large corporation. I can tell you that we have a number of newspapers that are operating at a loss. I am not talking about tens or hundreds of dollars, but millions. The corporation has a social role to play as a civic partner, but it also has to answer to sharehol

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes.

Canadian Heritage committee  The government could support us in two ways. It could create programs that would give us tax credits or grants that would help us deal with the challenges we are facing. During this transition period, our challenge is to maintain the quantity and quality of information. To achi

Canadian Heritage committee  The flyers, in a sense, support the distribution of all these local papers that incur a lot less cost because they are distributed with the flyers. Actually, since 2009 a lot of people have been predicting, like you, the disappearance of printed flyers. We just ran a study lately