Canadian Heritage Committee on Sept. 27th, 2006

[Robert Rabinovitch]

It's really in the hands of the government, sir. I have no idea whatsoever.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

But have you spoken with them?

[Robert Rabinovitch]

I have spoken only with the deputy minister, who has told me that she believes they may move forward. They'll move forward with due haste, as they say. I honestly don't know when, and we will govern ourselves accordingly.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Do you speak very often with the minister at all, or do you deal with her assistants?

[Robert Rabinovitch]

I speak from time to time with the minister. It is not normal for the president of the CBC to speak regularly with the minister, as we are an arm's-length independent agency. I do speak to the deputy from time to time--and she talks to me as well--as to what is going on within the government.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you.

I don't want to second-guess decisions, because, as you say, you have to take risks in television, but when we met last October you were very emphatic; you said, “We do not do reality TV. Other people do, we do not.” It seemed to me that was a very clear part of your mandate for a framework of television. Then this summer we had The One. We bumped The National. It caused quite a national stir and then it bombed after two weeks. Whether it bombed or it didn't is neither here nor there to me, but what is important is that we had a very clear understanding at committee that the CBC had a very clear vision about what it did and did not do. I'm wondering, did something change dramatically in the six or seven months between deciding on that show and when we were told that we would not have reality TV?

[Robert Rabinovitch]

I must admit, sir, that the answer I gave is unambiguous to a very ambiguous situation, and that I was really talking about a type of reality program. There is no question I said what I said, but I was really talking about a particular type of reality program that I think is not appropriate for a public broadcaster. But as I was speaking, we were doing shows like The Greatest Canadian, which is a reality show. We did Kraft Hockeyville and we're doing a show right now called The Great War. These are reality shows. But what we will not do is shows like Fear Factor, Extreme Makeover, and Survivor, particular shows that stress plastic surgery, sex and humiliation, and eating of insects. I was too general in my answer at that time, because in fact we were doing some forms of reality shows. I simply think we have to do our shows much more carefully and with taste.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

On the decision with The One, because it didn't do very well out of the U.S. and it was an American program, do we do Canadian-type reality? Do we report American reality? Obviously we're not going to do bugs, but what are the criteria for deciding good reality TV that CBC partakes in, as opposed to bad?

[Robert Rabinovitch]

We will do reality TV, and I think it's important that we do some. I think it has to have redeeming graces and reasons. It's a perfect opportunity for me to throw the ball to Richard, to give you a more elaborate answer.

[Richard Stursberg]

It may be of interest to people to track back through what the controversy over The One was about, since I think sometimes it was a little bit misunderstood.

The One is a show that in French Canada was known as Star Academy, with big success in French Canada, having that on our network. And it has been a huge success for the BBC, for example. The show is essentially a celebration of young talent. You get a bunch of talented young people, you put them together, you train them, and then there's a competition to see who is the most talented. So the idea is to promote talent.

The format for Star Academy has been pursued in countries all over the world--public broadcasters, private broadcasters--very, very successfully. So we had entered into a conversation to do a form of the Canadian Star Academy in English. What happened was, during the course of our concluding this, ABC in the United States decided that they would like to do Star Academy too. We thought, “Well, that's nice; that's interesting.” They were going to do it in a slightly different way. They were going to do it in the summer, and our plan was to do it in the late fall.

So we bought the American show, because we thought buying the American show would do two or three good things for us, one of which is that it would allow us to sort of educate the English Canadian public as to how the format works; secondly, it would provide us an opportunity to learn what they did right and what they did wrong; and thirdly, it would allow us a tremendous opportunity to be able to promote the Canadian show that would be coming out in the fall.

When we bought the show, the only way you could do that as a practical matter was to simultaneously substitute the American show, which would have been sitting on ABC, and overlay our signal onto that. In doing that, we don't control what time the Americans want to put the show on. We don't have control over that. They put the show on, and then we're stuck with taking whatever time they put it on. So that's what happened. Then, unfortunately, ABC, to be perfectly honest with you, made something of a botch of the show, but they also put the show on at a time that forced us to move The National from its traditional time slot. That's more or less what happened.

From our point of view, we obviously don't like moving The National. We don't like moving The National for anything, if we can possibly avoid it. So what we tried to do was make sure that The National was available on Newsworld--so it was available at 9 o'clock on Newsworld, 10 o'clock on Newsworld, and 11 o'clock on the main channel--and then we tried to point people, as effectively as we possibly could, to Newsworld to make sure that nobody would actually miss the show. We actually did, I think, a pretty commendable job, since, interestingly, the numbers for The National on the nights that The One was on were higher than their summer averages. So we think we learned something. That had gone reasonably well.

That said, obviously, when it comes to a show like The National, what you want to do is limit, to the maximum extent you possibly can, moving it around, because it's fundamental to English Canada.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you very much for that. That was a little over time, but....

Mr. Lukiwiski, please.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Rabinovitch, thank you for being here.

I'm going to narrow this down a bit and talk about an incident I feel certainly does not conform with your stated mandate. Let me start off by giving you a hypothetical.

Let's assume for a moment there was a movie made. The movie claimed to be in the year 2006 and was a movie about the CBC. In this movie there was a character who portrayed the role of the president of the CBC, and this character's stage name in the movie was Robert Rabinovitch. This character was portrayed in the movie to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and clearly, sir, you are not. This character also was portrayed in the movie to be an alcoholic, and I can only assume, sir, that you are not. Also, this character in the movie, let's assume hypothetically, was portrayed to be a corrupt individual and someone who was engaged in many illegal activities. I can only assume, Mr. Rabinovitch, that if this movie aired you would be very much offended by the characterization and the tarnishing of your reputation, particularly since many people in this hypothetical situation consider this movie to be factual.

Obviously, sir, I'm not going to get you to comment on a hypothetical, but as you well know, there was an instance that was very similar to this and it was not hypothetical, it was real. It was a movie that played on CBC called Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story. In that movie the character of the Honourable James Gardiner, a former Liberal Premier of Saskatchewan, a former Liberal cabinet minister, and in fact I think the longest-serving Minister of Agriculture in the history of Canada's Parliament, was portrayed in exactly the light that I have given in the hypothetical.

I never had the privilege of meeting Mr. Gardiner, but by all accounts he was a very highly principled man and very moral man, a man who stood up against the Ku Klux Klan in Saskatchewan in the 1930s, when it was not popular to do so. He was a man who was not an alcoholic; in fact he was a teetotaler. This was a man who was mischaracterized so severely in this movie that it's moved his family on many occasions to communicate, or at least try to, with your organization to get this situation rectified.

My question, Mr. Rabinovitch, is how does this movie, which clearly misrepresents the reputation of a great Canadian, enlighten Canadians, particularly school children? At this point in time there are over 10,000 copies of the DVD of Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story in the hands of Canadians through libraries and schools.

I know there have been some attempts by CBC to rectify the situation. To your credit, you decided to pull a rebroadcast of this movie in June, but there's been precious little done, in my view, beyond that. There has been no effective disclaimer put on. I do not know whether CBC ever plans to rebroadcast this. There certainly hasn't been a disclaimer that meets the approval of the Gardiner family.

I am concerned, sir, that as a national public broadcaster, receiving public money, you would air a movie like this that seriously besmirches the character of someone who was not on the same side as I politically, but was someone who represented our province and country very well. Frankly, sir, I think it was disgrace. I was appalled when I saw the movie. I should say my son appeared in that movie as an actor, so I had a great interest in the movie, but when I saw the characterization of Mr. Gardiner, I had no qualms about standing up to what I believe was an intolerable act from a national broadcaster.

I ask you, sir, again, how does the airing of that movie help enlighten Canadians, particularly school children?

[Richard Stursberg]

After the film was first aired we received representations from a lot of people, not just the Gardiner family, that the portrayal of James Gardiner in Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story was unfair. This was not really an issue of legal liability; it was really to your point that there was a question of fairness at root. If you identify a person by name then I think you have an obligation to be true to the nature of their character, particularly if they're dead and they can't defend themselves.

When these representations were made to us we asked an historian at a western university who was an expert in the period to look at the film and tell us whether he thought it was fair. This was somebody who was unconnected to the Douglas or Gardiner family. He came back to us and made many of the points that were similar to the points you've just made. He said he thought the characterization of Jimmy Gardiner was unfair in the sense that he had been pro-immigrant, he had actually struggled against racism and the Ku Klux Klan, and so on and so forth.

That being the case, we thought we had an obligation then to deal with the matter. We decided we would not broadcast it again, not just in June, but we will not broadcast it again period. We put a freeze on the distribution of the DVDs and we advised those people who had already bought the DVDs that we had some concerns with respect to how Jimmy Gardiner had been portrayed in the film.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

Thank you for your comments.

How did you advise the people who bought the DVDs that the portrayal of Jimmy Gardiner was inaccurate?

[Richard Stursberg]

Actually, there hadn't been a lot of them bought already, so we sent them a note. Then we put a further freeze on all sales of the DVD.

One of the important things to bear in mind is that this is not the CBC's property, but belongs to the independent producer who made it; recently we've said to the producer that we're perfectly happy to give back the distribution rights and any further showing rights, and you can do with it what you want. That's the position we've taken.

I only say that to show we don't disagree. It has raised some broader issues for us--very interesting issues that we're going to try to think very hard about over the next little while--as to how we draw the line appropriately between taking the necessary kind of artistic licence to make something dramatically compelling when you're doing an historical piece versus being fair to the people who are characterized within it. We take this very seriously, and I think we've tried to deal with a lot of the things you've said that way.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Your time is up. It's seven minutes.

Mr. Simms is next.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Mr. Rabinovitch, Mr. Stursberg, monsieur, madame, it's good to see you again. If you remember, I was part of the last session as well, so I'm going to pick up where I left off.

You mentioned that in your regional programming of news you were doing a pilot project--would it be fair to describe it as that?--in three different markets: St. John's, Montreal, and Edmonton. St. John's is extended to an hour.

For the sake of the other members, I'm talking about the supper-hour newscasts that several years ago were reduced from one hour to half an hour across the country. It was detrimental in many markets, because some markets were actually doing extremely well and suffered as a result. There you have it. Would you call the pilot project a success?

[Robert Rabinovitch]

I would say the one in Newfoundland is a success and is developing. The other two did not work out very well.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

But did you do any?

[Robert Rabinovitch]

No; we never got beyond the mock-up stage--in other words, trying to put together shows we thought would be different and distinct. We worked in both markets with the people, and we never were satisfied that we had made the progress necessary to have a distinctive, different type of show.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

How do you gauge success, then? Obviously, strictly, you could say that in private enterprise, it's the number of viewers.

[Robert Rabinovitch]

In our case--because I think we have to start with the understanding that the private sector does this very well--we had to ask ourselves what is distinct, what is different, what the holes are, and what type of programming we could do that would be different and would meet a public service mandate.

Our conclusion was that we did not have, quite frankly, the competence to do it in a way that would be distinctive and different and have a chance to draw a very good audience. I'm not going to say it's going to draw a good audience, but if I may finish, the consequence of that has been that we've gone back to the drawing board--and Mr. Stursberg can talk to you a bit about that--and we are re-evaluating all of what we do in terms of local and regional news.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

You're re-evaluating it over a period of time, I gather. How are you going about doing it? Is it in a way similar to this one? I ask because I'm struggling to find out how you would gauge the success of a program that never went to air.

[Robert Rabinovitch]

Well, you can, sir, gauge the success of a program, because you look at it. You do full mock-ups. You run the show and you look at it and you say that this show is not different enough, not unique enough, and we are not ready to put the money in to go the next step. You have to do things in stages, and you conclude in analysis, in looking at it, that you don't have a product that's going to work. That's why many shows don't even make it to air, let alone reach success--because in doing the shows in development, you begin to realize they're not coming together.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Yes, I understand that in the sense of drama, but I have somewhat of a news background myself, and I just find that difficult. The question remains: are you going to use that same paradigm for your upcoming...?