Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you. First of all, I think we have to draw an important distinction here. You're very sensitive to this, I'm convinced of it. There is an enormous difference between the behaviour of the francophone audience and that of the anglophone audience. Quebec has traditionally man

Canadian Heritage committee  To sum up, APFTQ is concerned about the future of our broadcasting system if the difficult economic situation becomes a pretext for relieving corporate broadcasters of their obligations. We continue to believe, very sincerely, that Canadian content must remain central to the broa

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you. Mr. Chairman, committee members, my name is Claire Samson and I am the President and CEO of the Association des producteurs de films et de télévision du Québec. With me today is Brigitte Doucet, the Association’s Executive Vice-President. We want to thank you for invi

Canadian Heritage committee  It's done, since it's always been done. To date, I believe Radio-Canada has largely managed to remain independent over the years. Perhaps there have been some attempts at influence, but, in the years when I worked there, we didn't feel any jolts internally, obviously. However, t

Canadian Heritage committee  It's an option; of course it is an option. In the ideal world, the broadcasters, producers, and rights holders would be successful in establishing among themselves what they feel is fair treatment. If we start with the fact that everybody is reasonable and of good faith, fine. Bu

Canadian Heritage committee  None at all. Vincent can confirm this; I can produce a show that will generate a million viewers, and—

Canadian Heritage committee  That's true. If we wanted to revisit the whole system, it would be a huge job. Who could arbitrate that for the next 10 years? I don't know. But it would be a huge challenge. Everybody is quite open to revisiting it, but right now we're faced with a way of doing business that

Canadian Heritage committee  I guess somewhere there is a solution. A year and a half ago, the APFTQ started working with a committee on new rights and new platforms. We've done our homework. We've had some research done and so on as to what the models in the world were and how they were working. We tried to

Canadian Heritage committee  Vincent and I are former Radio-Canada employees. I don't know whether that's the case of Lise and Jean-Pierre. There are 12 of us around this table. If each of us went off on our own and prepared our own optimum programming schedule, the result would be 12 or 18 different proposa

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you. We hope that these few simple but basic principles can help the Committee clarify the role of our national public broadcaster and convince the Canadian Parliament to provide it with adequate financial resources to carry out that role. We believe that the implementatio

Canadian Heritage committee  Good afternoon. I am Claire Samson, the president and CEO of the APFTQ, and I am accompanied by the chairman of the association’s board of directors, Mr. Vincent Leduc, who in daily life is vice-president of Zone 3, one of the largest independent television production companies i

Canadian Heritage committee  I agree with you. I don't think there is much to negotiate right now. If there is anything to negotiate and if it's going to be solved by negotiation, I'd like to know where to call to renegotiate my income tax payment, because I disagree with some regulations of the government.

Canadian Heritage committee  Of the cable companies, so far Cogeco and Bell have said publicly that they would be continuing to support the Canadian Television Fund. Rogers has not made any comment so far; at least we have not seen any. Nevertheless, it is clear that if Shaw and Videotron are left free to

Canadian Heritage committee  In my opinion, it would not be wrong to talk about a historic war between the private sector and the public sector. I've been working in this industry for 30 years. This competition existed back then. Relations between private and public broadcasters were extremely difficult, and

Canadian Heritage committee  We made these recommendations public on Tuesday. We have not yet had any reaction.