The crisis at the Canadian Television Fund may be cooling down, but hearings into the lingering fracas continued in Ottawa on Thursday, as Robert Rabinovitch defended the track record of the much put-upon fund at CBC and its French sister, Radio-Canada.

Citing the success of CTF-backed programs including Little Mosque on the Prairie and Les Bougon, the CBC/SRC president and CEO told Parliament’s committee on heritage that the fund — together with ad revenue and government backing — is essential to the programming of both networks.

‘Remove one of those pillars and you fundamentally alter the ability of CBC/Radio-Canada to fulfill its mandate,’ he told lawmakers, flanked by CBC English TV boss Richard Stursberg and French service EVP Sylvain Lafrance.

The committee is partway through several days of hearings into the recent trouble at CTF, which recently lost the support of cable outfits Shaw Communications and Quebecor-owned Videotron amid complaints that it is ineffective and poorly managed.

Quebecor flip-flopped earlier this week and has resumed its payments to CTF, though its president Pierre Karl Péladeau is still calling for an overhaul of the public/private fund.

Rabinovitch also responded to complaints about the Ceeb’s share of CTF cash, noting that the 37% slice in question ‘is dedicated not to CBC or Radio-Canada but to independent producers who make programs’ commissioned by the networks.

What’s the difference? For one, says Rabinovitch, the network now does less in-house production and thus ‘an independent Canadian production sector is flourishing.’

Also present at the hearing were representatives of the Directors Guild of Canada and the Alliance for Children and Television. The hearings resume on Tuesday with appearances by Péladeau and Shaw Communications boss Jim Shaw.