Canadian Heritage committee  Those are very important questions. That is what worries us as well, and that is why we are discussing it. That is why we went before the CRTC to talk about the public service media fund that our president mentioned earlier. For us, that fund would be financed by 1% of the profits of cable and satellite companies.

Canadian Heritage committee  If I may just add, concentration of media most of the time happened where I think there was always an idea that there would be public interest served, and what we've seen is that we're just losing. They're cutting, losing jobs, losing programming, and losing obviously all kinds of outlets.

Canadian Heritage committee  There is no one. A teacher from Saskatchewan wrote that. He even started a petition because of this situation. Nearly 690 people signed the petition at the time. In fact, CBC/Radio-Canada still had someone there, but that position was just recently cut. We realized that no one from the private sector had ever been assigned to this work and that the only person who covered the news was a CBC/Radio-Canada reporter, whose position had been eliminated.

Canadian Heritage committee  To be accurate, that is 15,000 workers in Canada. Specifically, that means 7,000 media workers and 15,000 workers if we include all connected industries and other jobs.

Canadian Heritage committee  The situation is even more dire when we look to the future. Indeed, according to a recent study that the Canadian Media Guild participated in, 15,000 Canadian jobs will be lost and $1.4 billion may be removed from the economy by 2020 as a result of the changes made by the CRTC as part of its “Let's Talk TV” study.