Canadian Heritage committee  I was sitting across the hall when you had a communication with Minister Moore just two weeks ago. In it, as I recall, you held up the main estimates, which showed a 5.6% cut to the budget of the CBC. Minister Moore consulted his deputy and acknowledged that this was in fact what

Canadian Heritage committee  Okay.

Canadian Heritage committee  If you take purchasing power into account, which is something that is done over time to factor in inflation to find out what a dollar will buy, you will find that CBC has been getting less federal purchasing power from its grant over the years consistently. We've done an analysis

Canadian Heritage committee  Obviously CBC is in a crisis right now. They've laid off 10% of their staff. It's not a very good time to ask them to amputate more. I am aware that the federal Treasury Board has this exercise, which a variety of government departments and agencies go through. I just felt, Mr. R

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you, Chair. I will stick to the 10 minutes you suggested. Friends of Canadian Broadcasting is an independent watchdog for Canadian programming in the English-language audiovisual system, supported by 100,000 Canadians. Thanks for granting us an opportunity to appear today.

Canadian Heritage committee  For example, to give some praise to the management of the CBC for a change, management on the English side of CBC Radio—I do not know the French-language examples in SRC's radio—have developed Radio 3, which is not broadcast over the air, it's broadcast on the Internet. It is tar

Canadian Heritage committee  First, I'll just go back. Mr. Rabinovitch was appointed at the end of 1999. Shortly thereafter, the CRTC came down with its licences for CBC for the next seven years. He held a huge press conference in Ottawa, which was very well attended. I think Le Devoir had a cartoon about th

Canadian Heritage committee  The problem you're dealing with comes from what I describe as an unregulated monopoly. Ted Rogers is a great Canadian, but somebody working for him made the decision that this would drive the penetration of digital. It costs your mother $14 a month, and it would cause other peopl

Canadian Heritage committee  There is the issue of leadership.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes. Obviously, with all the money in the world, there still needs to be some type of vision, which is why in the end portion of our presentation we called on Parliament to take the lead in saying this is what we want in this institution and we would like the board of directors t

Canadian Heritage committee  No, that was the Radio-Canada.ca site.

Canadian Heritage committee  On the first point, by the way, I find I can never trust hotel televisions to faithfully reflect what is available in the surrounding population. Sometimes they do little things, like catering to American tourists, and that type of thing. It may well be that if you were not in th

Canadian Heritage committee  The simple answer is yes. If I could magnify the answer and pick up a little bit from your interchange with my colleague, you used the words “fear of losing one's culture”, English-taught. The English-speaking people of Canada have been exposed to American audiovisual culture m

Canadian Heritage committee  On the distinctively Canadian question, obviously CBC is distinct; it's a question of degree. For us, the reason we're focusing our remarks on the English television part is that it seems to be the exception. Of course we are a group that can mention the anglophone perspective, b

Canadian Heritage committee  I will be summarizing the main recommendations contained in our brief of February 26. If you wish, we would be pleased to discuss them further. As an additional contribution to your important work, we have also commissioned, and we offer you today, a research report from CMRI,