From Lisa Fitzgibbons, Executive Director of DOC:
DOC appeared before the CRTC on Wednesday [April 13th] and was given the luxury of an
entire hour to make its presentation and answer questions. I want to thank
Jacques Ménard, Les productions des collines, and Cameron McMaster for their
participation and contribution inestimable (have no idea how to translate
that…. euh, priceless contribution, there!).
Although it’s hard to know exactly how things went, overall I think we did
very well. We placed the emphasis on the need for strands and reminded the
Commission that the cultural objectives of the Broadcasting Act must be
enacted.
The fact that we had an hour before the Commission speaks to the importance
they give to the genre. Indeed, the Chair mentioned that they are
preoccupied with documentary which is why, he said, they included it in the
PNI regime.
We had many thoughtful/probing questions aimed at clarifying our position
and we had a few aggressive questions regarding DOC’s position vis à vis
regulation. We tried to navigate those as deftly as possible. We were
thanked for backing up our submission with substantive (and substantial
data), so to thank THEM, we gave them copies of Getting Real.
Jacques made a few choice remarks, and I invite you to consult the
transcript to look up the reference to the “organics aisle at Loblaws”
section. Just one thing: the transcript is being corrected as they
attributed comments made by Cameron to Jacques and vice versa.
Here’s the link for the transcript:
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/transcripts/2011/tb1304.html
Our presentation starts at paragraph 6863 and ends at paragraph 7094.
We will be posting our intervention today or early next week on
and expect to file our final comments on April 29.
EDIT: DOC’s submission http://docorg.ca/sites/docorg.ca/files/DOC_CRTC_2010-952_final.pdf