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 pla

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

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 t

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; recen

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

Canadian Heritage committee  Today is actually my second anniversary working at the CBC. Some of these decisions go back a little before my time. To be honest with you, I agree with you. I think the only way to look intelligently at local offers is to look at them in terms of their local markets and local c

Canadian Heritage committee  Well, just to be clear, separating out journalism, there is a standards handbook that all the journalists get that lays down the standards that are expected of CBC journalists. That's the first point, and they all get trained into it. The second point is that the job essentially

Canadian Heritage committee  Absolutely. We certainly can give you a copy.

Canadian Heritage committee  As I mentioned in my opening remarks, the thing that preoccupies me the most is that English Canada is the only country in the industrialized world that prefers other people's entertainment programming to their own, by an overwhelming margin. So all the things that English Canadi

Canadian Heritage committee  I have just one little comment. What you say is completely correct, and what Sylvain says is completely correct. We live in two different worlds, utterly different. Everything goes, frankly, very well in French: people watch Canadian television shows; they watch Canadian movies—i

Canadian Heritage committee  Thanks. I think it's sometimes helpful to remember the history of how this fund was put in place in the first instance. What happened is that in the old days when the cable companies wanted to make an improvement to their capital infrastructure, whether they wanted to build more

Canadian Heritage committee  Do you want the precise sum?

Canadian Heritage committee  The way it works right now is that all the broadcasters receive envelopes of different sizes of the total money that's available. In the case of the CBC, as everybody has pointed out, we receive 37% of the fund for English and French together. We then contract with independent pr

Canadian Heritage committee  I would just say that I was the chairman of the fund for four years. I believe I was the longest-serving chairman of the board in the history of the fund, and survived. The way it stands now, there are four seats on the board for the cable companies and satellite companies. Ind

Canadian Heritage committee  The answer is no, we haven't put the back catalogue on the website or on YouTube. We have to confront a couple of different issues with respect to the back catalogue, by which I take it you mean in large measure all the old drama shows, variety shows, and so on. First of all, t