Canadian Heritage committee  Friends of CBC. Of course, we've followed the work of Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, but, again, they are a political advocacy group, and as you know, part of what I just said to you was that we do not get involved in political positions because we absolutely have to stand fre

Canadian Heritage committee  It's something I, of course, ask myself and my colleagues here today. We are very cognizant that history can repeat itself. Hopefully, it won't in this instance. There are a couple of things. Most recently, in our strategic plan that we launched, we talked about the need for th

Canadian Heritage committee  One of the reasons I believe the government invited a review of the act is to address the issues of digital media and to modernize the act. Our submission is pretty clear about that. We're not just a television and radio broadcaster anymore. We are obviously trying to reach and s

Canadian Heritage committee  If you're talking about competing for advertising dollars or audience share, those are different things. What we do is provide services across the country to Canadians who would otherwise, in many cases, receive no information and no programming, because the privates have simply

Canadian Heritage committee  I would say that as long as we are given the flexibility and maintain the independence and flexibility to serve Canadians the best way we possibly can, yes, we can continue, but we're going to have to be creative and smart about how we fund those activities.

Canadian Heritage committee  One thing we say in our buildings across the country is that the best antidote to fake news is real news—truth. I believe, and I wouldn't be here and I don't think my colleagues would be here either, if we didn't believe as an organization that as long as we're focused on truth-t

Canadian Heritage committee  Well done.

Canadian Heritage committee  Those are a lot of questions. I wasn't there when that particular quote was given.

Canadian Heritage committee  But I like that glass-half-full approach of whoever that person was. I think it's important for everybody to understand, and if you're new to this committee, that CBC/Radio-Canada ranks 16 among 18 public broadcasters in the OECD family. The $1.2 billion that we receive means p

Canadian Heritage committee  I can't give you a percentage off the top of my head, and I don't want to mislead you. Going forward, we have made local and regional representation and representing contemporary Canada, meaning all of the diversity of Canadian voices, the top priority in our strategic plan. We w

Canadian Heritage committee  It's thousands. I'll just give you the top line number of employees at 7,500, and of those probably about 900 people are associated with technical services and all of the back office work. It's hard to say how many people work in news because there's all the infrastructure and th

Canadian Heritage committee  We could. I can't do it off the top of my head now. I could do it.

Canadian Heritage committee  Sure thing.

Canadian Heritage committee  I believe it's on the public record. It was in the range of a thousand people.

Canadian Heritage committee  Again, to the quote that your colleague across the way mentioned, I think what we did was to try to privilege local service at the time. Again, I wasn't there so I'm just trying to be generalist here. I think we tried to privilege the boots-on-the-ground journalists whom we have.