Thank you for passing on Mr Rowland's protest (and Michael Bywater's codicil). I was indeed in Vancouver myself on Monday, August 29, getting ready to return to the UK after a break and very interested indeed, naturally, in hurricane TV coverage. I spent some of Monday morning watching it on various channels - and wishing the CBC could have been a bit more competitive - then walked round to the CBC offices a couple of blocks away and spent some time reading the notices on the tented noticeboard and listening to people chat. I described that in my piece. I don't live in Kent or Kensington, either.

Is it a strike or a lock-out? Canadians I talked to took both points of view. The Canadian press I read, The Sun and Globe and Mail, seemed to think that, after 15 months of contract negotiation failure, the net effect was pretty identical - and I anyway used both formulations in my piece. And the point of what I was saying (which Mr Rowland seems to have missed) remains the same.

I think it's very difficult indeed for journalists to go on strike or put themselves, over time, in a situation where they may be locked out. I think that there's almost always a higher duty to report the news for the readers or viewers you serve - which is, precisely, a public service.

I find it hard to envisage how either side in the CBC affair could have allowed things to drag on so damagingly for so long. I lament the damage that that is obviously doing to public service broadcasting in Canada, and I wish that there'd been an evident move back to business when I was there (though that seems to have eased a bit since). Oh yes! and I'm just about as warm a defender of the BBC as you could imagine, felt very anxious about this summer's industrial action getting out of control, and wanted to make sure that Canada's difficulties were at least a small part of the equation here. PP