Canadian Heritage committee  Going back to your original comment, you used the word “sovereignty”. It's a wonderful word. And we think in our organization that Canadian cultural sovereignty is a very important value. I quoted for you at the very beginning of my remarks that 88% of Canadians believe that as C

Canadian Heritage committee  --fraudulent or not.

Canadian Heritage committee  Well, that's just professional data. Pollara found that. It doesn't matter whether I agree; that's what Canadians—

Canadian Heritage committee  That's predicting the result, but yes.

Canadian Heritage committee  First, we often praise the CRTC when they do good things, but I would say that CRTC has dropped the ball on CBC issues. The CRTC last licensed the CBC's various networks in January 2000, and in their cycle they're supposed to do a review of licences every seven years. We're now i

Canadian Heritage committee  Are you studying the appointment of Mr. Pentefountas? Yes? I assume that Mr. Pentefountas is a highly intelligent criminal lawyer. Based on any understanding I have of his background and experience, I think he is not qualified to be a commissioner of the CRTC and far from qualif

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes, I do.

Canadian Heritage committee  I'm just going to read something from my letter. It takes about 40 seconds, Mr. Chair. FRIENDS of Canadian Broadcasting is an independent, Canada-wide, non-partisan watchdog group...[and it] is not affiliated with any broadcaster or political party. I think that's the answer

Canadian Heritage committee  Mr. Del Mastro's information is wrong, but if I have a few more seconds, I'd like to read something to you. I thought I had been misquoted from this letter, and I've now had the chance to find it. There's a tick mark on the response device. Mr. Chair, have you ever received a fu

Canadian Heritage committee  I'd say about a third. I have to back up and say something else, and that is that what we do, Ms. Crombie, is watch the entire Canadian audiovisual system. As I said at the outset of my remarks, we're a watchdog for Canadian programming. We watch public broadcasting. That inclu

Canadian Heritage committee  Could I borrow the letter for a minute?

Canadian Heritage committee  I asked him to give me a copy of my letter, but he gave me the CBC letter.

Canadian Heritage committee  I need the letter to answer the question.

Canadian Heritage committee  The problem is two messages. We have a lot of supporters. We encouraged them recently to write to their members of Parliament--I guess you would be included in that--with their concerns about Mr. Del Mastro's comment. What we found was that when those people lived in Conservative

Canadian Heritage committee  The key point was that there was this sophistry in this letter that was suggested, where “We're supporting public broadcasting more than any other government in Canadian history.” And that would be true only if there were no such thing as inflation. So the people who received the