Senator Downe: Actually, I did forget that. I mentioned in my speech, it was the local TV news. Colleagues, the only locally produced TV news in the province of Prince Edward Island is CBC. CBC cancelled that news, so we were deprived of the TV news. Radio continued as well. Had they cancelled the news in Vancouver, would anybody have noticed? They’re probably fourth or fifth ranked. Had they cancelled the local CBC news in Toronto, would anybody have noticed? No, because there are all kinds of options — Global, CTV, it goes on. In P.E.I., the ratings are 90% plus because there’s no competition. It’s the only news service available.

The significance of it was at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, nobody knew what to do. You bought a green pepper at the grocery store; did you have to put it in your microwave or did you have to scrub it with a hose? How was the disease transmitted? People were desperate for news to protect themselves. CBC TV, at the beginning, when we needed them the most, they left. Why did they leave? Not because the local journalists were concerned about catching COVID. They were quite prepared to do what others did with hockey sticks and microphones. They were cancelled because CBC Toronto cancelled them. The only province in Canada with one newscast — the local TV newscast — was cancelled. Totally unacceptable — at the beginning of a crisis, they abandoned us totally.

What my amendment is trying to do, and what Senator Francis, obviously, understands as well, and what we heard from many Islanders, is that this cannot be repeated when there’s another crisis.

I had the CBC president sitting in my office recently. I mentioned the cancellation. She said, “Oh, it was a disruption. It came back after a few days.” It came back after a few days because the premier and everyone else were in an uproar about what the heck was going on.

That’s the problem. The $2 million a day is a bare minimum because what I found out when I checked into this is the CRTC gives a licence to the CBC. The CBC appears before the CRTC and says, “We will do the following things.” The CRTC may say, “We want you to do this,” and so on, and the licence is offered. None of that is valid because the CBC cannot have their licence cancelled unless they ask the CRTC to cancel it. So there’s no enforcement mechanism. The CRTC wrote back after three or four letters and basically said, “We give the licence, but we can’t do anything to enforce the rules.”

According to the Broadcasting Act, the CBC had to have public hearings and they guaranteed a minimum broadcasting time in P.E.I. They had no public hearings; they didn’t do the minimum broadcasting. They just, on a whim, cancelled the service, leaving the province — as I said in my speech, a high percentage of seniors, some of the worst internet connections — and you had to hope something was on the radio.