Canadian Heritage committee  Télé-Québec promised to modify all their transmission towers so that they can support digital broadcasting. It is ironic that CBC does not intend to do so. It's a problem of financial resources. CBC hopes that the government will provide the funds.

Canadian Heritage committee  Can I add something important?

Canadian Heritage committee  Mrs. Lavallée, if Télé-Québec, for example, modifies its digital transmitter, it would be possible to transmit the signals of different broadcasters. If Télé-Québec wanted to cooperate with CBC, it could offer its services in all these communities. It is our community option.

Canadian Heritage committee  That particular number you were just quoting was taken from my talk. It was the fact that since the seventies and eighties, before satellite was available and when there wasn't cable in rural areas, a lot of rural communities had the gumption to stick up their own transmission to

Canadian Heritage committee  This is what's going on now: Industry Canada is asking how that auction should proceed, and there's a whole series of public users that at the moment are having to buy back spectrum from the private sector. I'll give you one example from Mr. Angus' riding in Timmins. A lot of rem

Canadian Heritage committee  That's right.

Canadian Heritage committee  A short, two-page document has already been prepared to provide Canadians with the basic information. We have also spoken with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, the CRTC and other agencies about it. We are encouraging the idea of producing a brochure saying what the muni

Canadian Heritage committee  I'm not sure I agree that just because the CRTC expected it from Shaw this time around, they will next time. In our experience as community broadcasters over the years, there used to be very high expectations of cable companies on the delivery of community television service, and

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes, and we did copy all of you on this letter, by the way, so I hope you've heard of it. We did get a letter just saying that it was going to be led by industry.

Canadian Heritage committee  As for my own decision not to have cable or satellite, it's partly income-driven. I'm actually here today as a volunteer. As we all do, we have money for certain things and we figure out our priorities. In my case, there's a whole range of structural problems with the Canadian br

Canadian Heritage committee  I definitely think that with the amount of money the government stands to make in the auction, they could be doing a better national education campaign that could offer free equipment. That would be a logical part of it. I agree that it's a huge amount of money.

Canadian Heritage committee  Go for it.

Canadian Heritage committee  That's the main reason that we think information needs to be prepared at the municipal and riding level. It needs to be specific and tell municipalities and counties and so on what their other options are. They don't have to just sit back and suffer loss of service.

Canadian Heritage committee  As I mentioned, the squatting is happening on two levels. It's happening on the TV channels that we have left, channels 2 to 51, which will still be used for TV service. I mentioned that all the existing broadcasters still get to sit on a whole one of those channels for HD, and t

Canadian Heritage committee  Sorry; can I add one other thing? It's just that you wouldn't know how many people don't intervene in these kinds of processes or in CRTC or Industry Canada hearings because they're afraid to alienate big broadcasters, and they're afraid because they have no choices out there. Y