New Canadian Heritage minister Hélène Chalifour Scherrer was put on the hot seat on March 9 by the committee bearing her department’s name. For close to two hours, the minister was grilled by members of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage about her support for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., the Canadian Television Fund, and especially on her position on lifting foreign ownership restrictions on telecommunications carriers and broadcast distributors. An all-party gang of committee members returned again and again to the question of foreign ownership, asking the minister to agree or not that the future of Canadian television content relied on a Canadian-owned distribution system. Scherrer was initially vague, answering tough questions only by saying that her department and Industry Canada are discussing the issue, and that "our response will meet the expectations of Canadians."

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