The Financial Post reports in its Saturday edition BCE chief executive officer George Cope said Friday his company will walk away from its proposal to buy Astral Media if the CRTC forces the sale of more assets as a condition of approval for the deal. The Post's Christine Dobby writes that on the final day of a week of Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission hearings into BCE's $3.4-billion bid for Astral, Mr. Cope told the commission chair the sale of further French television services or the pay service the Movie Network would defeat the two strategic rationales his company had for buying Astral. He said the deal in its current form can still achieve BCE's goals of increasing its position and providing competition in the Quebec market and using the valuable and edgy programming on TMN to compete with over-the-top competitors such as Netflix. Executives from BCE and Astral returned to the hearings Friday to reply to arguments made by intervenors throughout the week. CRTC chair Jean-Pierre Blais said he wanted to get their response to various possible outcomes but emphasized that he was not suggesting one way or another that the commission would embrace those options.