I have a feeling I'm going to get it right between the eyes.
Evidence of meeting #63 for Canadian Heritage in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was money.
Evidence of meeting #63 for Canadian Heritage in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was money.
8:25 p.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
I have a feeling I'm going to get it right between the eyes.
8:25 p.m.
President, Alliance for Children and Television
No, no, I quite agree. I think that it's really important not to mistake commercial imperative for ratings. They're not the same thing. The CBC definitely should be concerned about ratings. People should watch. It's a broadcaster. We should have Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday, and we should have great children's programming, and we should have great programming that's arts oriented and documentary oriented. There are a lot of communities in Canada that make use of the CBC at different times. Not everybody watches television all the time every night on one channel. But when you have an appetite for sports, you know where to go. When you have an appetite for the arts, you know where to go. When you have an appetite for documentaries, you know where to go. There's a real difference between that and saying commercial considerations dominate.
8:25 p.m.
President, Alliance for Children and Television
So the adverting council is not telling you the truth. It's not a question of whether they are prepared to spend money on the CBC to get a Coke commercial or a car commercial in front of some eyeballs. It's the CBC who needs to say it reaches many different communities and collectively it has large ratings. Think back to the nineties. In 1995 CBC announced its first 100% all-Canadian prime-time schedule, and the ratings went up, not down. The ratings went up when it was 100% Canadian prime-time schedule. Subsequently it's been eroded. It's not because of money; it's just been eroded.
8:25 p.m.
Conservative
8:25 p.m.
Member, English Language Arts Network
The question you're raising is obviously a fundamental question, which is how can Parliament justify spending a lot of money on the CBC if the CBC is only getting 7% of the audience, or whatever it might be. That is sort of like asking how we can justify a national Trans-Canada Highway if everyone in the country doesn't cross it. Knowing it's there is important, and some people do cross it. It's also a question of CBC radio, which doesn't get huge ratings but is incredibly important to public service. How many people use the Canadian military? I don't know, but you people spend $16 billion a year on it. So do we have it on the basis of it being something that everybody has to go and look at? No. It's because it's considered necessary to the country.
8:25 p.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
I agree with the logic of your thinking on this, but the reality is a lot of voters aren't necessarily watching the CBC. At some point, when it comes to budget considerations, we have to have the ammunition to say that people are turning to the CBC and that it is relevant and that it's not just an incubator for experimental ideas that has no sort of accountability to the viewer base. That's sort of the conundrum, really.
8:25 p.m.
Member, English Language Arts Network
The CBC is competitive, and from a viewing standpoint in the current environment of fragmentation, all of the U.S. channels together get a 12% share. Global gets an 8.6% share. The CBC gets a 7% share. CTV gets a 14.6% share. That's for 2006-2007. So it isn't like no one's watching it. Believe me, everybody wants as big an audience as possible; whether they're a filmmaker or an executive or whoever they are, of course they do. That's quite natural. It's just that we're talking about a public service like public education, like the national highway. We're talking about something that shouldn't be judged strictly on the basis of ratings.
8:25 p.m.
Conservative
8:25 p.m.
Director, Alliance for Children and Television
I have just a small point in terms of again not confusing ratings and other issues. I'd like to take the example of Télé-Québec, who, a number of years ago, saw their ratings slip. By focusing on kids' programming, they were successful in regaining that number one position. So it is possible if you focus on it and you have clear goals. It's possible.
8:25 p.m.
Bloc
Maka Kotto Bloc Saint-Lambert, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Welcome, and thank you for being here.
First of all, let me start with a semantic comment. I heard the words “multiculturalism” and “multiracial”. Looked at another way, multiculturalism is a political concept and I do not think that it is the role of a public broadcaster to become involved or to be mandated to do that kind of promotional work. As regards the term “multiracial”, humanity is made up of one race, human and undivided. It cannot be fragmented on the basis of pigmentation or of tendencies attributed to skin colour. It has to be accepted as such. I just wanted to make that point.
I have one small question before asking three questions that will help me get a better sense of the thinking in your presentations. Do you recall the decreased budgets for public broadcasters at the beginning of the 1990s? If so, do you know how much those cuts were at that time?
8:30 p.m.
Member, English Language Arts Network
There was a cutback in 1993 from Paul Martin's budget, not just for public broadcasting but for a whole range of things. I don't know what the exact number is, but 1993 is certainly the point at which things fell off dramatically.
8:30 p.m.
President, Alliance for Children and Television
That was $500 million out of the CBC English side in the early nineties. It went from $1.5 billion to under $1 billion.
8:30 p.m.
Bloc
Maka Kotto Bloc Saint-Lambert, QC
That is a realistic figure. In any case, the cuts were enormous. They really were significant: the budget was reduced by almost half a billion dollars. At that time, the envelope set aside by Parliament for the SRC was about $1.1 billion.
Do you feel that the CBC/SRC fulfilled its mandate better before those massive cuts?
8:30 p.m.
President, Alliance for Children and Television
There's no question in my mind that the resources were a direct relationship to the CBC's ability to fulfil its mandate. Undoubtedly the breadth of programming and concern was curtailed when the budget was cut. Some of that money was transferred to the Canadian Television Fund, so it went from CBC to the independent community. So the money was still in the system, but because it was not CBC's money specifically, decisions were bent by that.
8:30 p.m.
Conservative
8:30 p.m.
Member, English Language Arts Network
I'll try to be brief.
The issue is that the funding of the CBC is a political football, and has been for a long time, and that since the establishment of the Canadian Television Fund there's been an attempt to move public funding that would have gone into the CBC away from the CBC and put it into an independent fund. And now Shaw and Vidéotron and people are arguing about that. So the CBC requires its own budget to meet its mandate, on top of which there is question about funding independent production that is accessible to all the broadcasters. If the CBC had long-term funding the way they do in Britain, so that it becomes less of an annual political football and is set out that over a ten-year period you're getting x amount, increased by inflation or whatever, leave it at that.
8:30 p.m.
Bloc
Maka Kotto Bloc Saint-Lambert, QC
You mentioned the BBC funding in the United Kingdom. Essentially that is from licence fees. We do not have a system like that here. If the government, or Parliament, did not guarantee funding through tax revenue, do you believe that Canadians would accept licence fees?
8:30 p.m.
Member, English Language Arts Network
I don't understand what you mean by “royalties as an acceptable...”.
8:30 p.m.
Bloc
Maka Kotto Bloc Saint-Lambert, QC
We do not pay license fees here. They pay a tax on television sets when they buy one. They are then in the system and they are treated like that until...
8:35 p.m.
Member, English Language Arts Network
There was a fee on radio sets in the thirties in Canada, which would probably surprise most people in this room. The reason they got rid of it really quickly was because people were saying the Americans don't have it, so why do we need it. At least there's the Atlantic Ocean between the United States and Britain, which is why they're able to get it. So, no, I don't think we can have a fee per television set, like in Britain. I'm simply saying that the public money for the BBC is over a period of time, it's guaranteed, and in Canada it's every year. It's like let's find out if we're going to give the CBC a dollar or a billion dollars.
I was in a room with Bev Oda before she was elected, and she said “We have to give the CBC stable, multi-year funding, and that's the Conservative position.” I just thought I'd point that out.
8:35 p.m.
Vice-Chair, Documentary Organisation of Canada
I also just wanted to point out that it should be recognized that since 1993 there's been an explosion in the television landscape. There are so many more digital channels now than there were back then.
Regardless of money--and this relates to ratings again a little bit--if the CBC acts like every new broadcaster that has sprung up since then, then what's the benefit of it if it's the same as every other broadcaster out there? What's the reason for public dollars going into it? So it has to be recognized that for the CBC to be relevant today, it needs to make itself more different, not more the same, as the rest of the channels already out there.
