Canadian Heritage committee  I have a really short answer on this. We have a big R and D department. We're really prepared to continue the commitment to that. But in terms of public policy development, at the Canada 3.0 conference in Stratford a couple weeks ago, one of the things that came across in a roomf

Canadian Heritage committee  The short answer is yes. We understand the social contract that, as Canadian citizens and Canadian taxpayers, there are a bunch of things that we should and need to do. The difficulty, though, is that we take not only our own creative content but the creative content that's suppl

Canadian Heritage committee  Well, I'll have to take issue with that. First of all, on the spending, Astral has numbers, but I can tell you that just on the 3,300 episodes I talked about, our expenditure was $1.1 billion—billion—and those programs are seen around the world. We have the number two and number

Canadian Heritage committee  Well, actually, one of the areas that we have some concerns about is the need to access our programming on a quota system from independent producers. The independent production system is a relatively new process, but let me get back to.... I mean, we are all spending a lot of mon

Canadian Heritage committee  And that is part of the problem, but in terms of public policy, we see it as a mix. We're supporters of the public institutions that are creating programming, such as SRC/CBC and the National Film Board. We're supportive of agencies such as Telefilm and the Canada Media Fund. W

Canadian Heritage committee  We're doing a lot of that, but one of the mythologies of new media is that.... We all have these visions. And there's a kid in all our lives who's 14 years old, who's in the basement or in the garage, who's got a website, and it's terrific, and he's smart and he's going to do gre

Canadian Heritage committee  No, we're not saying that at all. We don't have the time today to get into the details of what we're looking for in terms of regulatory improvements and what we think should be set aside--

Canadian Heritage committee  In the new media sector, for example, we're facing a process right now under which we're being asked to report on our new media activities. Reporting is inherently inefficient, and it requires us to devote attention and resources to making reports, when, frankly, first of all, th

Canadian Heritage committee  Five, allow Canadians to experiment. Recognition of this principle is also key to new media. By their very nature, new media initiatives are risky, business plans are uncertain, and ultimate success is very much a matter of trial and error. In that type of dynamic, rapidly moving

Canadian Heritage committee  Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman Schellenberger and members of the committee. My name is Gary Maavara. I am executive vice-president and general counsel of Corus Entertainment. With me today is Sylvie Courtemanche, who is vice-president of government relations. Mr. Chairman, member

Canadian Heritage committee  We are the controlling shareholder of the documentary channel, so we know Ms. Hodder's colleagues quite well. It's a category one specialty service, and I think it's been around for seven years.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes, I am, very much so.

Canadian Heritage committee  There is a range of positions they put on the table. Fundamentally, our view is that this country—and you certainly don't need Corus to tell you this—ust isn't big enough. We sell programming in 120 countries around the world, so we know the world market pretty well. You simply c

Canadian Heritage committee  It depends a little bit on the channel that we operate. I guess fundamentally one of the things that we're going to have to look at as policy-makers and as regulators and as broadcasters is that the system is very rapidly moving from linear-scheduled programming to on-demand. A

Canadian Heritage committee  Our view, clearly, is the CBC should continue to follow the model that it's following now--in other words, be commercial in some parts of its day and not so commercial in other parts of its day.