Senator Housakos: Government leader, your answer does not correlate with the facts. Over the last decade, we’ve seen the CBC reducing regional service to an enormous degree, simultaneously spending millions of dollars toward the digital platforms, and that is a fact. The only thing we can’t really determine is how much of taxpayers’ money they are actually spending to convert to digital.

Let’s try another question. Senator Gold, the minister responsible for your government’s online censorship bill, Bill C-11, has written a letter to the chair of the CRTC, whom the minister himself had just appointed, expressing concerns that his bill could be used to infringe on freedom of expression. Shocking. The bill is still before Parliament, so I’m not so sure why the minister would write a letter instead of just writing something in the actual bill to protect against the very thing we have been raising concerns about all along, which is the trampling of the freedom of expression.

Senator Gold, are the members of your government, the Trudeau government, unaware that they are in government and that it’s not being done to them, but it’s being done to Canadians by them? Why is the minister sending a letter to his appointee?