Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you.

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. It is pleasure to be here today to talk about my appointment as Chairman of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. When we appeared before you last week, we jumped right

Canadian Heritage committee  I saw that too, and I think it's wrong. This is clearly not a tax. This is a user fee that is directly linked to the industry. It goes to the fund. It goes to production, to produce content that they need, that they are required by law to do, etc. A tax is something that goes int

Canadian Heritage committee  As you know, we mandate payments into the CTF. As I mentioned before, since the payments weren't done on a monthly basis, we felt we had to step in because the convention was being broken, and this caused disarray in the industry. But over and above that, the criticisms levied at

Canadian Heritage committee  This is not the first time I have been a regulator. And in regulation you really cannot do it on a confrontational basis; you need the active cooperation of the people you are regulating. You are not going to have a regulation where you constantly enforce; that is ineffective. Re

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you very much. I am delighted to hear you report the attitude of Shaw and Vidéotron. That will of course be very helpful to Michel in his work.

Canadian Heritage committee  First of all, I agree with you, it's not a pleasant situation, and one that I hope will not be repeated. Secondly, I think I can say frankly that we learned a lesson. To the extent there are payment obligations, they should be clear-cut and mandatory: there should be no ifs, an

Canadian Heritage committee  You're talking about two different things. When the CRTC holds public hearings, it deals with commercial information, you're quite right. And that's data. We're really talking about data of companies and their procedures. Here what we are really trying to establish is how does t

Canadian Heritage committee  I don't agree with that at all, number one. Two, this is not something that the minister is mandated to meet. This is my responsibility, as regulator, to enforce. I do—

Canadian Heritage committee  Exactly. She's echoing the law. She's pointing out that the enforcement of the regulation is the responsibility of the CRTC, and I will do that. We're independent, and we do it in accordance with what we do.... We do not take instructions from anybody on the enforcement.

Canadian Heritage committee  Mr. Angus, you are mixing up two different things. One is, clearly, the CRTC, under statute, takes direction from the minister. The minister can give directions. They have to be public. They're going to be very well debated, etc. Those are directions, policy lines. For instance,

Canadian Heritage committee  You raise two issues that, for me, are very discrete. One is the future of television in this country, on which we have just finished a review. Later this year, we're going start a review on BDUs and specialty services, and that's where we address this globally. On top of this

Canadian Heritage committee  No, it was something was mandated to us by the minister. The minister, under the Broadcasting Act, has the authority to ask the commission to study any area and to render a report. That's what we did; we studied it, had public hearings, and basically presented something that is a

Canadian Heritage committee  Correct.

Canadian Heritage committee  Absolutely. And other Canadians will see it, as it will be on our website.