Canadian Heritage committee  I'll just say one thing. Obviously, what the president said is right. It's not our job to tell Canadians what values they should espouse. Our job is to reflect the full diversity of view within the country. We were talking about regional before. When we think about regional, I t

Canadian Heritage committee  The fact that 55% of revenue comes from the advertising sector shows that there is a problem. The budget of the CBC and Newsworld is $600 million. You can see without any difficulty that, without the 55% that comes from the advertising sector, we would have no service.

Canadian Heritage committee  Do you want a response to that?

Canadian Heritage committee  I think this is very fundamental. The question of what's been going on over the course of the last number of years, in terms of attracting English Canadians to English Canadian programs, I think reflects a very interesting structural problem within the industry. Over the last 1

Canadian Heritage committee  The answer is no, we haven't put the back catalogue on the website or on YouTube. We have to confront a couple of different issues with respect to the back catalogue, by which I take it you mean in large measure all the old drama shows, variety shows, and so on. First of all, t

Canadian Heritage committee  No, actually it pre-dates your decision by almost a year. For those of you not so familiar with the ins and outs of this, CBC television maintains, and it had for many years, a department that designs and builds sets within the organization. I must say we're the only English-la

Canadian Heritage committee  I would just say that I was the chairman of the fund for four years. I believe I was the longest-serving chairman of the board in the history of the fund, and survived. The way it stands now, there are four seats on the board for the cable companies and satellite companies. Ind

Canadian Heritage committee  Do you want the precise sum?

Canadian Heritage committee  The way it works right now is that all the broadcasters receive envelopes of different sizes of the total money that's available. In the case of the CBC, as everybody has pointed out, we receive 37% of the fund for English and French together. We then contract with independent pr

Canadian Heritage committee  Thanks. I think it's sometimes helpful to remember the history of how this fund was put in place in the first instance. What happened is that in the old days when the cable companies wanted to make an improvement to their capital infrastructure, whether they wanted to build more

Canadian Heritage committee  I have just one little comment. What you say is completely correct, and what Sylvain says is completely correct. We live in two different worlds, utterly different. Everything goes, frankly, very well in French: people watch Canadian television shows; they watch Canadian movies—i

Canadian Heritage committee  As I mentioned in my opening remarks, the thing that preoccupies me the most is that English Canada is the only country in the industrialized world that prefers other people's entertainment programming to their own, by an overwhelming margin. So all the things that English Canadi

Canadian Heritage committee  Well, just to be clear, separating out journalism, there is a standards handbook that all the journalists get that lays down the standards that are expected of CBC journalists. That's the first point, and they all get trained into it. The second point is that the job essentially

Canadian Heritage committee  Absolutely. We certainly can give you a copy.

Canadian Heritage committee  I've been very preoccupied by the situation with respect to local news. Local newscasts in the CBC have been in decline for 15 years, for whatever reason. At the same time, we know a couple of things about Canadian viewers: for them, local news is exceptionally important. When