Hon. Andrew Cardozo: Thank you for that. Indeed, I think that does serve a good model. I certainly encourage the continuation of the funds that come from your department, but perhaps they can also be at arm’s length.

The other matter is local programming, which you talked about with my colleagues. Can that be much more fundamental to what the CBC does, so not an add-on because they have got some Google money or an add-on because they have got $150 million, but could we really change the corporation’s focus so that local programming is much more central to what the CBC does, as opposed to programming coming from the headquarters?

Hon. Steven Guilbeault, P.C., M.P., Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture and Minister responsible for Official Languages: Yes, it is a good question. In fact, in our campaign commitment, we said that we wanted to increase — and I spoke about the increase of funding to the CBC this year, as per our campaign commitment and over a certain number of years. We have stated that we wanted the public broadcaster to invest more in local news. In fact — I don’t have it in front of me — my predecessor, Pascale St-Onge, published a green paper, and I think the objective in the green paper was to have 30 new local stations. I am not saying that this will necessarily happen, but that green paper still guides the work that my department, myself and we do as a government. We do believe that local news is essential. News generally is essential to the health of our democracy, of any democracy, but especially local news.

Perhaps another example that I could give of more independent funding is that one of the changes we want to bring forward is that the budget of CBC/Radio-Canada would no longer be voted on by the government but by Parliament, to make it even more independent going forward.