Evidence of meeting #37 for Canadian Heritage in the 39th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was broadcasters.
A recording is available from Parliament.
4:35 p.m.
Chair of the Board of Directors, Canadian Television Fund
The specific concern you are referring to is their desire to make money off their Canadian content?
4:35 p.m.
Conservative
Jim Abbott Conservative Kootenay—Columbia, BC
The major concern, if I understood Jim Shaw's presentations correctly, was that here is the money he and the BDUs and other entities are putting in there, and he just barely has one lone voice, and the private broadcasters are not given access or given opportunity to really influence the way in which the money is being distributed.
4:35 p.m.
Chair of the Board of Directors, Canadian Television Fund
Well, I would say that's not factually correct, having been the private broadcasters' representative on the board on five separate occasions over the last ten years. We certainly had a voice.
The CAB has four representatives on the board. They are the voice of the private broadcasters in Canada. There are two specialty channel representatives and two conventional television representatives, two from English Canada and two from French Canada. We signed off on the guidelines and the rule changes year after year.
You know, we picked specific battles when there was pressure from the producers, the independent producers, to raise licence fees. We would try to dig in our heels and come up with charts to show how much money we lost for every hour of Canadian...certainly in English Canada; the mathematics are quite different in Quebec.
At the end of the day, we almost always voted unanimously for the guidelines. It was never over our protests. Nothing was forced on us. Again, I speak to the compromise in the system between the different sectors.
So I would say that Mr. Shaw, with all due respect.... And here perhaps is where we failed to communicate clearly what was going on at the fund. One of the things I hope to do, if he wants to return my calls, is to actually get him to understand how the fund works. The fund was there to serve the interests of private broadcasters as well as the other people, and it did so with our cooperation and our sign-off on it.
I don't believe the CAB showed up at the CRTC and said “This is a terrible fund that doesn't address our needs”. Everybody would like to see some tweaking, but private broadcasters have been very involved in the evolution of this fund. I think many of the things they've wished for have come to bear. Certainly one of my missions was to get an English-language drama envelope when I was a CAB representative. It took two years, but we succeeded in doing that. It was voted unanimously by everybody on the board.
So I think that's a mischaracterization in terms of how private broadcasters have been served by the fund. I say that as an informed insider on this particular matter.
4:35 p.m.
President, Canadian Television Fund
I would just add that one of the concerns Mr. Shaw continued to raise in his campaign was that a lot of money is spent on programs at the CTF and there are simply no audiences for them. We demonstrated quite well, I think, in our presentation to the CRTC that in fact numerous programs made by the CTF reach very high audience numbers, well over a million, in both language markets. And again, it depends on the broadcaster; the specialty market has a very different reach from the conventionals.
In answer to your question, Mr. Abbott, we at the fund already have started to focus on ways in which we can put more emphasis on audience reach and audience growth and less on historic access--very close to what the CRTC has recommended, in fact, in terms of the factor weight criteria they've used for the private funds.
So I think one of the answers would certainly be...and Paul answered it on the board representation. There has always been the opportunity for the BDUs to be represented on the board. In fact, at our AGM in Banff, we added an additional seat so that direct-to-home representatives can actually contribute now on the board itself, as well as continuing to focus.... It's a mandate in the contribution agreement, in fact, that one of our major jobs is to increase audiences for the programming that's done through the CTF; we are looking at ways all the time. We have a working group over the summer that will be doing a lot of calculations to determine what the factor weight should be to ensure that this happens.
So that would be part of the answer back, for sure.
4:40 p.m.
Liberal
Andy Scott Liberal Fredericton, NB
Thank you very much.
I'll add my congratulations to those of others who have gone before.
I don't think it should necessarily be surprising that Mr. Shaw would argue that this should be more market-driven: it's the business he's in. I also think it's also critically important for us to push back on that instinct, because it's a very sparsely populated, big country with lots of diversity in regions and all kinds of considerations such that, left purely to market forces, I wouldn't see much of my part of the country in this realm.
This brings me to the objectives of the fund and whether or not the CRTC's recommendation that more emphasis be placed on audience.... Can that be batched with the objectives of the fund to your satisfaction? That's one question.
To go backwards a little, the first question I wanted to ask and simply forgot in my reaction to the interventions around Shaw is: do I understand your position to be that you do not believe it's necessary to have two streams, but that if somebody decided that were going to happen you would also recommend that there continue to be a single board?
4:40 p.m.
Liberal
Andy Scott Liberal Fredericton, NB
But that isn't to be confused with the idea that you support the idea that there be two streams?
4:40 p.m.
Liberal
Andy Scott Liberal Fredericton, NB
Okay. Good.
Can the objectives of the board that are being outlined here be reconciled with an increasing emphasis on audience share? Is there not a tension there, and need I be concerned, coming from a small market region of the country, that somehow the fact that one of the criteria that will be reduced in order to increase the importance of market share has to do with regional production, as I understand you to have said earlier? That worries me a bit.
Finally, on the question of this notion that somehow they can walk away, they can't. The crisis wasn't that they were going to withdraw; the crisis, as I recall, was timing: that they were withholding, but not withdrawing. This is a licence fee; this is not generosity.
It occurs to me that clearly their interest would be to be able to put more money in types of productions with greater audience share, because that means they get to show programs that they make more money from, because the greater the audience share, the greater their advertising revenues that flow from it.
4:40 p.m.
Chair of the Board of Directors, Canadian Television Fund
If I understood the Shaw and the Vidéotron positions, they did want to withdraw their money.
In its case, Vidéotron had a completely different approach and different structure for a fund that they would administer, and there was at least one dissenting opinion from a CRTC commissioner endorsing that world view within the Quebec context. In Shaw's case, it just wanted to withdraw the money and I believe redistribute it back to subscribers.
As to your question whether you can reconcile the pursuit of audience with some of the cultural criteria, my feeling is yes, that they're not inherently in contradiction. As Valerie has said, even if you're producing niche-target art programming, for example, you want to maximize the potential audience with the net niche.
No one spends a year or two of their life sweating and worrying—nobody is getting rich making this stuff, at the end of the day, really—and nobody is doing this in order to not have an audience. The same discussion occurs when we talk about feature films in this country and the abysmal box office. There are all kinds of impediments—budget sizes, marketing, access to screens—and there's a variety of factors that go in there.
God love the creative people in this country who continue, especially in English Canada, to do their damnedest to try to reach out to that audience. As Valerie pointed out, honestly, since the arrival of the CTF, there are some extremely notable successes.
I used to run the Ontario Film Development Corporation, and I'd tell the analysts that if you say no 100% of the time, you'd be right 90% of the time, but it still doesn't make you smart. What I wanted was people who would champion specific projects, who would, against all odds, come up with a Little Mosque on the Prairie or a Corner Gas that somehow, despite all the structural impediments to finding a significant audience for Canadian drama, managed to do it.
That's the challenge and the business we're in. So I don't see a contradiction; I see it as a constant struggle and striving. I guess that unlike Shaw I think this is a noble battle that we should not give up and should keep striving towards winning. The fact that it's hard doesn't make it not worth doing.
4:45 p.m.
Vice-President, Strategic Policy Planning and Stakeholder Relations, Canadian Television Fund
Could I add a couple of points where there were some disconnects?
We have to bear in mind that this fund is about supporting under-represented genres: drama, children's programs, variety programs, and documentaries. Some suggestions were made at the hearing that, for example, if we were to go down the road of strict mass audience appeal, that could be reviewed and we would find ourselves financing game shows and reality television and so on and so forth, whereas in essence our view is that we'd be replacing private financing that is currently in place. That's one area of disconnect.
I'll go back a bit to Mr. Abbott's question, where there was another disconnect. The CRTC actually, in this latest report, didn't keep that recommendation. On the private side it was originally contemplated in the task force report that another measure should be return on investment. We had a bit of an issue with that, because for the majority of Canadian programs, all Canadian financing goes into the financing structure of the project from the beginning to make sure that the project is made. If we were to create a factor that would be based on return on investment, in most cases that return comes from the sale of the program on international markets, so what would be the primary policy objective? Would it be to make programs to attain the largest possible Canadian audiences, or would it be to try to make programs that will make as much money as possible on international markets? As I said, that recommendation was not brought forth in the second CRTC report.
4:45 p.m.
President, Canadian Television Fund
I'll just assure you, Mr. Scott, that the aspect of regional activity remains one of the requirements of the contribution agreement. One of the ways we try to encourage that to happen is it is a factor weighed in the BPE system.
If you look at the success of Canadian television in the past few years, a lot of the really strong programming has certainly come from many regions of Canada. Our philosophy is that nobody has the monopoly on a good idea, so until somebody tells us differently, the aspect of continuing to support regional will always be there.
As Paul said, nobody gets up in the morning, whether they're a broadcaster or a producer, and decides they're going to make a really bad TV program today that nobody will watch. Everybody works as hard as they can to reach the maximum audience, and that applies right across the board. If we look at the history of where the great success stories for TV have come from, whether it is Trailer Park Boys, Corner Gas, or Da Vinci's Inquest, those are in the regions of Canada. As long as it remains a requirement for us, we'll continue to speak to that and address it in the actual calculations of how to create those envelopes.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
Dean Del Mastro Conservative Peterborough, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Gratton, I want to try to represent the average Canadian. If I'm the average Canadian and I look at this Canadian Television Fund, I understand that this is a fund that supports the production of regional Canadian broadcasting and so forth. Why would I care that this is being changed? Why would this impact me? Why would it matter to me whether the money is going to CBC or Global or CTVglobemedia or any of the other private broadcasters? Why would it matter to me, as long as I'm seeing good Canadian productions that I might be interested in watching?
4:50 p.m.
Chair of the Board of Directors, Canadian Television Fund
Well, I'm not sure who or what an average Canadian is.
If you're saying that for significant chunks of the Canadian population there is not interest in Canadian drama, for example, and perhaps sports is where you get your Canadian culture, then I would say perhaps there's not much interest for that person, but by the same token, does this person have children? Are they watching children's programming anywhere on the dial? At least half of them are funded by the CTF.
Perhaps this person, even if they're not interested in watching a dramatic TV series on a public broadcaster, is concerned about what is being fed into the minds of his little girl and little boy and doesn't just want American models of superhero violent cartoons. Canadian children's programming sells around the world because it actually propagates a different value system of tolerance and diversity; sometimes it's quite subtle and sometimes less so, but it's different from American children's programming.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
Dean Del Mastro Conservative Peterborough, ON
Are you suggesting those things would be lost if it were changed?
4:50 p.m.
Chair of the Board of Directors, Canadian Television Fund
I'm saying that if the Canadian Television Fund didn't exist, the size and the quality.... Why should an average Canadian care about this? Would an average Canadian care about the rules on how the money is disseminated? Probably not. But I would suggest to you that the average Canadian probably does care about the results on the television set.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
Dean Del Mastro Conservative Peterborough, ON
I'm not questioning that. I'm only saying that the changes they've suggested have been to allow for alternative revenue streams, for the stream to be divided somewhat differently. And that's what I'm asking you.
There has been some suggestion that this would be a ghettoization of public television. If I'm the average person at home.... For instance, Mr. Cardin brought up that the funding could be used for reality TV or game shows. So if I'm the average Canadian at home.... We recognize things like Survivor, for example; probably half the population watching TV on the night that it's on is watching it. Why wouldn't I want to see something in the Canadian Arctic that would be similar? Wouldn't that offer value and wouldn't it drive people to want to watch? And in so doing, wouldn't you learn something about the Canadian Arctic? I'm simply thinking about these things.
4:50 p.m.
Chair of the Board of Directors, Canadian Television Fund
Oh, yes, absolutely. It's probably not a bad idea. Maybe you have a future as a television programmer.
The key issue is whether or not that kind of show requires public money in order to complete its financing. And as Mr. Cardin pointed out, most of this stuff can be funded by the industry itself through pre-sales, etc.
The crisis, where there was always a gap in financing and where it was very hard to complete, was almost everything produced in Quebec, because the world market for Quebec programming is fairly limited outside of children and animation, and almost across the board in English Canada unless you were doing commercial co-productions that were not recognizably Canadian.
I was running Space for a number of years and there was a lot of science fiction that was technically Canadian--six, seven, eight points out of ten--and I would argue it never got CTF funding and didn't require it. And there are many average Canadians who really enjoyed those shows and there were a lot of Canadian actors and technicians who benefited from the production in Canada. My view is that lots of Canadian, right across the board, is good.
But when you talk about this fund and this particular very special recognition from both government, which is funding it, and the cable and distributors who have agreed to put money into it in order to keep their capital expenditure, the 50%, it was actually one of the more ingenious creations of the CRTC and of government to put together this fund to encourage the production of the most difficult-to-fund Canadian content in all these genres, which is ten out ten points Canadian content.
The average Canadian kind of benefits from having it out there as an option, even if he or she may not choose to personally spend their time watching the stuff due to personal preference.
4:55 p.m.
Vice-President, Strategic Policy Planning and Stakeholder Relations, Canadian Television Fund
A rubber hits the road type of answer to your question, which Paul brought up before, is that essentially, given that we don't know what the criteria of a public stream would be, there is always the possibility that certain programs--which would have to apply to both funds--might, given different eligibility criteria, not get made. So you'd have a potential for less programming than we presently have with the current systems.
