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Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.
My name is Peter Moss. I'm president of the Alliance for Children and Television. Before we begin our presentation this evening, I would like to introduce my colleague, Madeleine Lévesque, executive vice-president for content development at Nine Story Entertainment in Toronto, and a board member of the alliance.
The mandate of the Alliance for Children and Television is to positively affect Canadian children's lives by using advocacy, recognition, and training to enrich the screen-based media they experience. In our view, the content of children's programming should be both relevant and entertaining, stimulating the intellect and the imagination, and fostering openness towards others. It should also be an accurate reflection of the world in which children grow up, respecting their dignity and promoting learning.
The alliance represents a group of individuals and organizations from across the country that are highly committed to ensuring the development of television programming that will be of interest to our children and our youth, and that will contribute to our cultural development as a country. Set up over 30 years ago, in 1974, the alliance benefits from the expertise of Canada's best creators, artists, craftspeople, educators, producers, and broadcasters of children's programming, which is available on an increasing number of media platforms.
Personally, I've been involved in the broadcasting and entertainment business for well over 25 years. I've held the positions of creative director of children's programming at CBC Television, vice-president of programming and production for YTV and Treehouse TV--both children's channels in Canada--and more recently vice-president of programming and development for all the Corus television channels. I'm currently an independent producer of children's programs and other programs.
We're very pleased to be here today to take part in what we hope will be a new beginning for the CBC-SRC. We strongly believe in our national public broadcasting system, and particularly in our national public broadcaster. Ultimately, the main reason we are here today is to present to the committee the very important needs and views of Canada's children, a perspective that is often overlooked when we're talking about Canada's broadcasting system, its goals and its responsibilities.
As the committee is no doubt aware, the CBC-SRC will have to go before the CRTC some time this year to renew its licence, which is due to expire in August of 2007. We believe your committee has a unique opportunity in drafting your report to propose strong recommendations to both the government and the CRTC as to what should and could be the goals and objectives of the CBC-SRC for the coming decade.
At the outset, the alliance wishes to affirm its full support for a strong CBC-SRC as we move forward into the 21st century, especially as it concerns the needs of young Canadians looking for quality programming that is developed and broadcast with them in mind.
We believe the CBC and SRC have a mandate of public service that makes them distinct, in that their programming should be in the public interest and not in the commercial interest. CBC-SRC has a unique role to play in reflecting the increasing ethnocultural diversity of our country's citizenship and providing access to Canadian stories that will contribute to the building of a unique Canadian society. Many of Canada's children are a reflection of this new ethnocultural reality, and we believe that CBC-SRC has a responsibility to help them grasp on to innovative programming, showing our distinctiveness and our values, which includes the celebration of the rich diversity of our country.
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In the past, the CBC-SRC has been at the forefront in the creation and production of children's programs that have, among other things, won a number of national and international awards. CBC-SRC used to be a creative incubator for new Canadian talent in this area; however, in recent years CBC-SRC seems to have lost some of its enthusiasm for creating and developing children's and youth programming.
CRTC was quite clear in what it expected from the CBC-SRC when it said, in the last licence renewal, that
A wide variety of children's programs is available to English-speaking Canadians on commercial, educational, specialty and pay television services. Notwithstanding this availability, because the CBC reaches almost all Canadians, it has a unique responsibility to provide informative, educational and entertaining programming directed toward Canadian children and youth, and to foster the development of the artists who represent the future of the television industry.
We strongly believe that CBC-SRC has a responsibility to invest in developing programs for young Canadians, in addition to seeking out ways of reaching our children and youth through new technological innovations. With such investment, the CBC will not only train a new generation of Canadian talent, but it will also develop the loyalty of new audiences in the future.
The extensive study entitled “The Case for Children's Programming”, in which the alliance participated last year with the CFTPA, the National Film Board, and the Shaw Rocket Fund, which was released in February 2007, clearly demonstrates a downward curve of funding within the Canadian broadcasting system for the production of Canadian television programming for children, moving from a high of $380 million in 1999-2000 to $283 million in 2005-2006. This was a drop of more than 25% in a very short period of time.
During the same period, the share of total production budgets for children's programming, when compared to total Canadian television programming budgets, went from 22% of the total to 16% of the total. In addition to this, from 1998-1999 to 2005-2006, the average budget for a 30-minute program for young Canadians fell 11%, from $224,000 to $200,000 in constant dollars.
We believe that CBC-SRC should be doing more and spending more on children two to eleven years, and on youth eleven to seventeen years, on original programming that recognizes the important role television can play in forming the attitudes of young Canadians who are increasingly coming from different parts of the world to contribute to Canadian society.
We strongly recommend that the committee send a clear message to CBC-SRC about the leadership role it should be taking in developing and broadcasting high-quality programming that will not only be of interest to our youth but also challenge their intelligence and inform them on subject matters that will contribute to their development as proud Canadians.
Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, the Alliance for Children and Television has the expertise, the ability, and the will to contribute effectively to the Canadian broadcasting system, and particularly in this case to work with our national public broadcaster, the CBC-SRC, to develop new initiatives that will ultimately benefit our children across the country.
Let there be no doubt in our position: The CBC should be called upon to be doing more for children's programming and providing our children with interesting and challenging content that will contribute to their intellectual, social, and cultural development.
This completes our oral presentation. We look forward to responding to any questions you may have.
Thank you.
I'd like to start by thanking the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage for this opportunity to present on behalf of our members and the diverse communities we represent.
The Independent Media Arts Alliance is a national network of 84 non-profit independent film, video, and new media production, distribution, and presentation organizations representing over 12,000 artists and cultural workers across Canada. The IMAA is now 25 years old, and since the beginning has worked to improve the means and access for independent media artists at every stage, from funding to production, distribution, and exhibition.
First and foremost, I would like to underline the important role the CBC has as the primary cultural broadcasting institution for Canadian arts and culture. The CBC is an important place for the production and presentation of independent media artworks, in addition to being a primary source for the diffusion and promotion of our events and reporting on our activities. The CBC is key to audience and market development for the independent media arts sector.
I'm going to jump ahead here and talk a little bit about the Canada Council for the Arts, because a lot of our members rely on Canada Council funding to survive.
The Canada Council for the Arts receives approximately $150 million annually from the federal government that is then invested into artists and organizations that create and disseminate cutting-edge artworks that endeavour to reach a broad Canadian audience. It stands to reason that the federal government should invest in the promotion and diffusion of these works through our national public broadcaster.
Television programs such as Zed, and Socket, which aired last summer on CBC radio, featured young Canadian artmakers, and plugged listeners in to current cultural and aesthetic issues. Not only were these programs instrumental in building new audiences for our sector, they were interesting and, I found, really fun shows. Unfortunately these programs are no longer running.
The trend of cutting arts programming when the CBC faces funding challenges is short-sighted. We urge the federal government to acknowledge the long-term benefits of supporting programs that feature independent media arts by providing increased stable funding to the CBC.
We also feel that the CBC is not able to fulfill its cultural mandate with consistency within each region and within each artistic discipline. It is felt that the majority of arts programs focus on larger commercial productions. In some regions, the programming does reflect the media arts sector while in other regions it's next to impossible to get any reporting on our events. It is felt that the CBC would be far more successful at reaching its mandate if it were not so dependent on commercial revenue.
In certain regions, the CBC has been very proactive in getting involved with indigenous and diverse communities through training and development, sponsorships, joint programs, and the CBC website. For example, in Manitoba, CBC participates quite extensively in the first nations community. We would love to see that sort of initiative happening across Canada.
The CBC can go a long way towards promoting emerging artists, artists from diverse cultural backgrounds, and indigenous artists. The mandate of the CBC states that it sets out to “actively contribute to the flow and exchange of cultural expression” and to “reflect the multicultural and multiracial nature of Canada”. Increased funding would enable the CBC to address the specific needs of the indigenous communities across Canada. We feel strongly that the indigenous community should be consulted in that process.
In response to the inquiry about new media and its impact on public broadcasting, we feel there's tremendous potential in this area. The growth in media arts is rapid. More and more artists are working with new media. This is due to the popularity of media art as a form of audiovisual expression in today's culture.
Canada’s youth are exposed to and become familiar with the Internet, video, television, and other technologies long before most other forms of visual communication or artistic production. As a result, many young artists are moving to the media arts as their form of creative expression.
In addition, to access programming, more and more Canadians are turning to new platforms and new formats, such as the Internet, cellphones, and PDAs. This impacts how CBC is able to carry out its mandate. This new communications environment has different boundaries than those regulating the radio and television sector and enforced by the CRTC.
As a free marketplace environment, satellite, Internet, and mobile broadcasting have enabled private broadcasters to infiltrate these new platforms for which the increase in demand and range of options dominates over quality in programming. Given this, there's the risk that CBC's ability to fulfil its mandate is challenged by a move into a less-regulated new-media paradigm.
It will be the vital role of the federal government to fund these new media initiatives to ensure Canadian cultural content has a strong presence within these new formats.
A more diversified and broad-reaching set of technologies will also benefit Canadians. New communication networks should be viewed as tools that could help to bridge communities--for example, the indigenous communities in the north and the more southern populated regions of Canada.
New formats are presenting the potential for CBC to advance and further its mandate. The CBC will be able to target audiences on a regional, cultural, ethnic, or linguistic basis while building a national consciousness and identity that reflects our diverse society.
Some CBC programs maintain podcasts that must continue to be developed and available online. These initiatives not only reach new audiences within Canada, they bring Canadian content to the world.
Canada is one of the most technologically sophisticated countries, and we are in a position to be at the forefront of the digital media revolution, which would benefit Canadians. It also benefits artists, making possible many new economic models for production and marketing.
This being said, we would like to point out that there should be a mechanism in place to ensure that Canadian artists are being paid for the work that they show, no matter what format it's presented in.
In addition, it will be important to ensure that no matter which platforms are used, the content is available across Canada and most importantly to Canadians of all socio-economic backgrounds.
One of the strengths of CBC radio and television has been its ability to reach Canadians in all regions via the airwaves. The federal government should investigate ways to ensure means of and access to new media for all Canadians.
To conclude, federal funding permits the public broadcaster to present programming that is an alternative to that of the homogenized corporate broadcasters. A soundly funded public broadcaster provides our democratic system with a balance of perspective that must be reflected in the information that is publicly disseminated.
Thank you. I would be happy to answer any questions.
I want to thank this committee for coming to Montreal. I know it's a big operation to leave Ottawa. It certainly makes it a lot easier, I think, for all of us here to be able to meet with you, so it's appreciated.
I'd like to introduce our delegation from ELAN. Ian Ferrier is a writer representative on the board of directors. I'm a film and television representative. Guy Rodgers is our executive director, and Anna Fuerstenberg is a theatre representative.
ELAN is the English Language Arts Network of Quebec, and it has reached a milestone this month. We now have a thousand members.
You may say, “A thousand members of English-language artists in Quebec? Impossible.” You may wonder who these artists are. You've seen or heard of our work, if not recognized our names.
We are musicians such as Oscar Peterson, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Oliver Jones, Arcade Fire, Rufus Wainwright, and Susie Arioli--the current chair of ELAN--and her band.
We are writers of plays, crime novels, and poetry such as David Fennario, Louise Penny, MacArthur prize-winner Anne Carson, Leonard Cohen, and Mavis Gallant.
We are dancers such as Margie Gillis, Vincent Warren, and Lin Snelling, a former chair of ELAN.
We are painters and video artists such as Betty Goodwin, Ghitta Caiserman-Roth, Nelson Henricks, and Ingrid Bachmann.
We are actors such as Clare Coulter, Christopher Plummer, Walter Massey, and Jack Langedijk.
Of course, we also work in film and television. We are producers such as Arnie Gelbart and Kevin Tierney, whose film Bon Cop, Bad Cop broke box office records in Canada.
We are directors such as Brian McKenna, Colin Low, and John N. Smith, who is best known for coming back to Montreal after directing the hit Hollywood movie Dangerous Minds, with Michelle Pfeiffer.
Of course, some people, from Norma Shearer to William Shatner to Donald Sutherland, never came back. Producer Jake Eberts keeps a cottage in the Eastern Townships and donates to McGill, so he is here in spirit.
I took the time to list all these names so that you know who we are--a vibrant official-language minority that has an impact across Canada and around the world. We only wish that many of us didn't have to leave Quebec to make a living doing what we love to do and can do so well when given the opportunity. As I read in The Globe and Mail this morning, “Most people work to make a living, but artists make a living in order to work.” I thought that was an appropriate comment.
Exactly 75 years ago, public broadcasting began in a room like this, before another parliamentary committee. A young Graham Spry spoke five words that clarified the issues and galvanized those parliamentarians. He said that Canada faced a simple choice in broadcasting, “the state or the States”.
Today let me say, as loudly and clearly as possible, that we support public broadcasting. We support it unequivocally and passionately, as creators and as viewers and listeners. As Canadians, we need public broadcasting because it connects us to every corner of our country and to ourselves. It provides a diversity of viewpoints and programs that we cannot get on commercial TV or radio. We hope that someday, CBC television will become a public broadcaster just as CBC radio is.
Right now, chronically underfunded for decades by short-sighted Liberal and Conservative governments, the CBC has been driven to maximize commercial revenue. The more commercial revenue the CBC must make, the more it compromises its public service mandate and the goals of the Broadcasting Act.
The CBC simply does not have the funding to fulfill its mandate under the act. I think Parliament--the government of the day--has to look in the mirror when it wonders what can be done.
Yet it is not possible to look at the CBC in the 21st century in isolation. We must look at it as part of the broadcasting system. The English Canadian broadcasting system is a mess.
Three years ago I did a study called Through the Looking Glass: A Comparison of broadcast licence fees in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. I discovered that Canadian broadcasters receive the lowest per capita TV advertising revenue among the countries studied. Why? Probably because of spillover advertising from the United States. In turn, among those countries studied, English Canadian broadcasters pay the lowest licence fees as a percentage of budget. Why? Because the public subsidies designed to support independent Canadian production have ended up indirectly subsidizing the broadcasters. They can afford to reduce the licence fees they pay for Canadian content and still meet their CRTC obligations. I suggest the CRTC as well should be looking in the mirror.
What do they do with the money saved by paying low--world-record low--licence fees? Here the private broadcasters differ from the CBC. The private broadcasters use the money saved in underpaying for domestic programming by overpaying for American programming at auction in Los Angeles. That's driving up the cost of these programs to a record $688 million last year, which was 12% higher than the year before.
In the end, English Canadian commercial broadcasters pay more for foreign programming than they pay for domestic programming, unlike any other broadcasters in the developed world. We are a record-setter in that regard.
When private broadcasters spend two-thirds of a billion dollars—and I did say billion—in program money in Los Angeles instead of Canada, the independent Canadian producer and the creative community here must absorb the cost. The situation has been getting worse over the years for Canadian producers. The average independent English Canadian program budget has fallen by 41% in constant dollars from 1984 to 2001.
As we can see, there is money in the commercial TV system to improve the quality and quantity of Canadian programming, but it needs to stay in Canada. We need private broadcasters to spend more on Canadian programs than they spend on foreign programs.
Generally speaking, the CBC does not compete with private broadcasters as long as it follows a domestic programming strategy while they follow a foreign programming strategy. Our private broadcasters in fact have even given up the freedom to program their own prime time schedules to benefit from simulcasting American network programs.
We need a public broadcaster that is not driven by commercial objectives of the private broadcasters but is publicly funded. That means significant and dependable increases in parliamentary appropriations, not more advertising.
Here in Quebec, CBC radio is especially needed by the arts community to hear news about what is happening in our disciplines. We need radio production in Montreal that uses our talent and that speaks to anglophones throughout the province.
With the abdication of cultural programming on CBC television, CBC radio is our lifeline. It does more than any other broadcaster, but erosion of funding has cut its quality. CBC radio needs more public funding, not advertising, as the Association of Canadian Advertisers has requested before this committee.
We need more TV program expenditures by the CBC and more decision-making here. We need better communication with the CBC. We need to see the CBC's executives on a regular basis so that relationships can be developed. Unlike you, they leave Toronto not very frequently.
We would like an advisory committee between the CBC and the production community that can grow up and manage a national terms of trade agreement with independent producers.
We would also like the Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund budget increased. That is the one production fund that is not controlled by broadcasters and therefore spends money in the regions on the smaller producers. Dollar for dollar, it is the most important source of production funding in English Quebec.
Should increasing the CBC budget be a parliamentary priority? Yes--at least more so than increasing the military budget--because in the 21st century, we need to redefine our idea of national sovereignty. The 49th parallel is a media border, a cultural border, not just a geographical line. We can only defend our country and the minds of our people with TV and radio programming that helps us see ourselves and our country, not someone else's. We want to work, and we want to see our work on our screens, big and small, without having to go to Hollywood to be paid with our own dollars to create someone else's vision.
That's the end of what I have to say. I'd like now to pass the microphone to Ian Ferrier, a writer representative from ELAN. He'll talk about radio.
Thanks to the committee.
My name is Ian Ferrier, and until last year I was president of the Quebec Writers' Federation, which represents English-language writers in Quebec. I also serve on the executive for the English Language Arts Network.
I'd like to interject just for a minute on behalf of CBC radio. It is the medium that has had the most effect on the careers of the poets and the writers and performers I know, in paying them for work to be presented on the air, in promoting the work of the English-language literary community to our minority here in Quebec, and in presenting Quebec English literature to the rest of Canada.
When I go to the Eastern Townships south of here, or into the Gaspésie, CBC radio is the voice and core of the English-language community in Quebec. In places where the numbers of English speakers are low and the culture is threatened, everyone listens, and CBC is how they define what the English community is.
In Montreal, CBC radio is the voice of Quebec English literature, because, with very few exceptions, the commercial stations just don't carry literature. If my writing colleagues and I have any celebrity in this province, it is because of CBC radio. They invite us on the air, talk about our books, present our work to the English audience in Quebec and to the larger Canadian audience, who avidly listen to shows like WireTap and who find out from Canada Reads that Montreal's Heather O'Neill has written one of the hottest books of the season.
It is the station that shows that it pays to be literate, and by doing so it promotes literacy as no other broadcaster does. CBC sponsors contests for writers and presents prizes to writers. They were at the Blue Metropolis literary festival and the Festival Voix d'Amériques and Spoken Word Festival. I can say without exaggerating that without CBC radio, much of Quebec English-language culture would be unavailable, even to the community in which it is created.
In Quebec, the core mandate of CBC radio has been to present the best of English-language culture to the minority English-language community, and to show that community all of the smaller communities of which it is composed. From this core, the mandate extends into giving English speakers more insight into the French majority who surround us and who are among us, and, as more and more regional programming goes national, into showing the range and excitement of Quebec English culture to the rest of the country.
The fact that funding has not increased for CBC radio is an effective cut for each year that this policy remains in place. It means that each year there are fewer producers, fewer shows, more reruns, and less work being heard by Canadians for Canadians. For radio in particular, this is critical, as it is right on the verge of becoming instead of an ephemeral medium an archival medium. Each week the CBC receives calls asking “How do I find copies of WireTap or Ideas” or “ How can I hear that music special that was on Roots Montreal last week?”
The CBC's mandate--and the key to CBC's future--is to be in a position to present content to its listeners when they want it, how they want it, and where they want it. In the future, the key portal for CBC to fulfil this mandate will probably shift to the Internet. This means that the show a producer worked on for months won't disappear after a broadcast or two. In an ideal world, it will be available to any CBC listener who wants to hear it. In the process, an authoritative archive of our culture will be created, which people can download and listen to any time they like.
All of this costs money. I think the best thing you could do would be to fund the CBC such that it is not effectively cut each year, so that it can take on this challenge and extend its range into this new world where the excellent work it does will have continuing relevance to anyone in the world who has access to the Internet.
Thank you.
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I'm the vice-chair of DOC Quebec, and actually the chair of the lobby committee for the national board of DOC as well.
The types of documentaries we're talking about here today are point-of-view documentaries. That is the majority of the types of films our members make. These films present a strong point of view of the filmmaker or someone appearing in the film. They're not journalism. They're not always balanced films, but they're always creative. They're driven by passions. They're often entertaining, and they're usually provocative. They play in festivals around the world, on television screens, and when we're lucky they get into theatres, which is somewhere they need to be more often.
Canadian POV documentaries present a vision of Canada, not only to Canadians but to the whole world. They give voice to a unique Canadian perspective, to important urgent social issues, such as war, politics, the environment, human rights, and more. There is a tremendous hunger that is growing for these types of films. As an example, Hot Docs has just had a 33% increase in its audience this past April.
Some examples of these types of documentaries areThe Corporation, Roger Toupin, Shake Hands with the Devil, Manufactured Landscapes, and the recent Quebec hit and Jutra winner, À force de rêves . I can go on and on. The list is long.
These films shape our national identity and they export our unique Canadian perspective to the world. They are films that can't be made by in-house production by Canadian broadcasters, whether they're public or private. These types of films can only be made by the independent production community.
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These documentaries cannot continue to be made without a strong and stable national public broadcaster. A public broadcaster has neither the same mandate nor the same objectives as a private company, since it must work in the public interest. It cannot be subject to the dictates of ratings, nor must it seek to please advertisers. A strong public broadcaster takes risks and invests in projects that are first and foremost in the public interest.
Documentary filmmakers want their films to be seen, and they do get seen. The examples John mentioned earlier have all been successes in theatres, at festivals and on television, in Canada and elsewhere. By chasing ratings to attract advertisers rather than working in the public interest for Canadian viewers, the CBC/SRC distorts its mandate and its programming. The frantic race for the biggest audience cheapens programming and forces our national broadcaster towards content that caters to the lowest common denominator, as in the private sector: reality shows, singing contests, game shows and the like. Programs like that are low-risk and cheap to make.
Auteur documentaries and POV documentaries are hard to make and can be risky, both financially and politically. But when they are supported and broadcast properly, the odds of their success increase tremendously.We feel that these kinds of documentaries are the most successful in helping to fulfil the CBC/SRC mandate, which we understand to be as follows: the CBC/SRC should be distinctly Canadian, should provide a means of cultural expression, should contribute to our national consciousness and should reflect the multicultural and multiracial nature of Canada in both official languages.
Yet in the past few years, our organization, DOC, has seen an alarming decline in documentary programming on public television, particularly in English on the CBC. Documentary programming has declined from 263 hours in 2002-2003 to 122 hours in 2005-2006. One by one, documentary series have been cut from the main network, for example The Passionate Eye, Life and Times and Witness, while others have been reduced. CBC cut Opening Night, the only documentary series for the arts. And while the documentary An Inconvenient Truth was breaking box office records in 2006, the highly popular show The Nature of Things was downgraded to a limited summer series, with no official word about its return.
Its independent producers have been waiting for 18 months to hear how many new programs will be commissioned for the current season. How is this possible when the environment is at the top of everyone's agenda, and David Suzuki has been identified as the most popular man in Canada?
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You got the part II licence fees, which the private guys just repatriated, which is about $60 million or $70 million more that they now have to spend in Los Angeles.
If they were doing something with all of this money that they were collecting from all the sources you just pointed out, and doing something in the public interest, as they're supposed to.... Radio frequencies are public property; they're not private property. And because they're public property, the private broadcasters are supposed to do something in the public benefit and the CRTC is supposed to regulate it. I don't think the CRTC is doing its job. I think it has been captured, frankly, by the broadcasting lobby.
The private broadcasters are demonstrating an incredible amount of greed in the way they're spending their money, and they're not doing it where they need to do it. Last year $688 million was spent in Los Angeles. Somebody has to say, “Wait a second, radio frequencies are public property. You guys aren't doing your job. We think there have to be certain standards set.” If the CRTC is supposed to set them and doesn't set them, then somebody has to take the CRTC to task, frankly, for not doing its job.
I also think that the broadcasters are a bit disingenuous, in that they make their money because it's a regulated environment. They are protected from competition. Frankly, if they were in a real open environment of free market competitiveness, NBC would come up here and set up a channel in Toronto and get CFTO by the throat. CFTO would scream and say, “Wait a second, we're in a different country. That's unfair. NBC can't come up here and do that to us.” But at the same time, they say, “Wait a second. The CBC is unfair. They're competing with us.”
Basically, they try to get it every which way they can. That's understandable. They're businessmen. That's the way they want to make their money. Great, but I don't think the rest of us have to be so gullible. I don't think you parliamentarians should be so gullible as to believe that they need 25,000 different ways of making money and they don't need any responsibilities in exchange.
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My line of questioning has changed, probably with every answer, so this is going to be very hard to pull together. But I do think you start at the core.
Whatever inspired Canada to invent a public broadcaster and then to deal with television, and reinvent the public broadcaster, whatever the conditions were that made that imperative then, is there any less an imperative now? I'd have to think not--perhaps more, as the world shrinks and all of those things.
So it's underfunded, and we're having a bit of an artificial debate around what it is that CBC is; that is, why would we publicly fund it if it's providing stuff that isn't distinct enough to warrant it? But we're also saying at the same time that the reason they're doing that is because they're chasing a commercial model and they're being underfunded and they're having to get ad revenues. I think we're saying the two things.
If we all agree that it's underfunded, there may be different models of getting revenues to a public broadcaster that are in addition to or complementary to a parliamentary appropriation. If we agree on a more stable, predictable, long-term, and more generous parliamentary appropriation, will we have to clarify the mandate? Because most people who say that have in their mind what that money would go for, and they'll be surprised in two years when they find out that it didn't, and then we're stuck to some extent. So we may have to bring some clarity.
I know on the regional side you don't have the same sense of the purpose of the CBC in St. John's this morning as you have in Montreal today. Coming from Fredericton, it is a different thing. We feel the need not only to be sovereign as a country, but we feel very vulnerable in the context of our own identity within the country.
But I think it can all come together. We all agree on the need. We agree that it's under-resourced. We even have a sense of what its purpose should be, and it's more important now than it has ever been, probably. That seems to be a pretty good place to start.
The opportunity that is presented by the description of our job--and that is the role of the public broadcaster in the 21st century--strikes me as an opportunity to perhaps think about it without getting caught up in....
Oh, and by the way, it was the 1995 budget. It seems strikingly ironic that I would be the one to have to point it out, but it was the 1995 budget that was so brutal. The 1993 budget wasn't ours. But what can I say....
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Yes, we're agreed on that point. And I don't know why it would be up to me to tell you.
In any case, if we see the opportunity to reinvigorate the public broadcaster because of new technologies, new media, new opportunities to get the stories out there in different ways, perhaps this becomes one of those historic moments when you do that. If we get caught up in the narrow debate around whether we should do this because it isn't distinctive enough and all of those kinds of things, I think it will be a distraction, frankly.
Now, the other part of this--and I'm all over the place today, as I warned you--has to do with the place of the CBC being one of a series of partners with a general objective. I think in the past the public broadcaster was seen as it, as against one of many, the leader among many institutions that perform this function. I think that may be a part of the mandate we have to rethink.
If people have come from Telefilm Canada, the National Film Board, and other places, even other channels on the range of channels that are available now, with an interest that might be complementary, if we could organize ourselves, if CBC assumes a leadership role on that front, I think we may have an opportunity. But it would have to be in the mandate of the CBC to say that, because right now institutionally they're not structured that way. Most of the other people have complained about that fact, that the CBC's view has been if it's going to be done, we have to do it--and I don't mean just in terms of in-house production, but just generally to be the entity in the country that protects our sovereignty and so on.
There hasn't been a consensus here on whether the mandate needs to be changed. Some have said it does and some have said it doesn't. Very specifically on that question, is it adequate as it stands if it's resourced?
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Content is the key; all the rest is housekeeping. Robert Fowler said that in 1957, and I think it is still true.
I have a vision. I don't have a dream, but I do have a vision, which is that somewhere in Treasury Board the CBC and the Canadian Forces are going to get their budgets mixed up and the CBC will have a budget of $16 billion and the Canadian Forces will get a budget of $1 billion. The Canadian Forces, with that money, can only do one thing: withdraw their forces from all around the world and trade in their tanks and what have you for some airplanes, and they will guard the east, west, and north coasts. If Greenland invades Canada, they speed-dial the Pentagon and tell the guys at the Pentagon, “We're being invaded. Do something.” And of course the Americans will do something.
But the 49th parallel is where we need to spend $16 billion in National Defence dollars, and then with that $16 billion we would find out that, gee whiz, we have so much money that we have to make so much programming, and we'll have to do really good-quality programming; and furthermore, we don't have enough people to do it right away, so we're going to have to get all the Canadian people in Los Angeles to come back. The next thing you know, the Americans down there are going to say, “Wait a second, how come those guys are making more money than I am? I want to move to Canada now.” We're going to have a reverse brain drain, and the next thing you know, Canada is going to be the centre of the world.
That could in fact happen in television programming just with a shift like that, which is within the actual total budget of the Canadian government--just by getting the address reversed of those two segments.
Anyway, it's a vision, and maybe you guys can suggest that.