Official Languages Committee on May 1st, 2014

[The Chair, Conservative, Michael Chong]

Welcome to the Standing Committee on Official Languages. Today is Thursday, May 1, 2014, and this is our 21st meeting.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108 and to the motion adopted by our committee on Wednesday, December 4, 2013, we are here to study CBC/Radio Canada's programming following recent budget cuts.

With us today are Mr. Lacroix, Ms. Pleszczynska and Ms. Kinch, from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Welcome to all three of you.

Yes, Monsieur Godin.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

A point of order, Mr. Chair.

I have two quick motions to introduce.

[The Chair, Conservative, Michael Chong]

They are notices of motion, are they not?

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

Yes, that's right.

I give notice of a motion inviting the Minister of National Defenceto discuss respect for official languages in the Canadian Forces.

I give notice of a second motion. This one invites the Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages to appear before the committee to explain the delay in the payment of grants allocated to official languages groups.

[The Chair, Conservative, Michael Chong]

Thank you for those notices of motion, Mr. Godin.

Mr. Lacroix, the floor is now yours.

[Hubert T. Lacroix, President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation]

Good morning, Mr. Chair, members of the committee. Thank you for your interest in CBC/Radio-Canada.

As the chair mentioned, with me this morning is Patricia Pleszczynska, who is responsible for our regional services at Radio-Canada, and in particular, our services to francophone minority language communities, and Shelagh Kinch, who is responsible for CBC English services in Quebec.

I would like to begin today by talking about three things. First, the measures we announced on April 10 to balance our budget for this year, and what effect that will have on our services. Second, our new conditions of license, which reflect our commitment to minority language communities. Third, the choices we must face in developing our new strategic plan.

By now you have heard about the cuts we have had to make this year, of a total of $130 million, mostly due to market-related pressures and fixed cost increases. This will mean the elimination of 657 full-time equivalent positions. We will also have to incur an additional one-time payment of $33.5 million to cover severance for these job losses.

All of that is on top of the $390 million in financial pressures we have had to manage since 2009, first because of the 2008-2009 recession, then the deficit reduction action plan, the elimination of the local program improvement fund (LPIF) by the CRTC, salary funding freezes by the federal government in five of the last six years, including this year, and reductions in Canada media fund funding.

You will find a detailed breakdown of the current job cuts by service and by region in your folders.

As you've heard, we will no longer compete for the broadcast rights to professional sports. Our amateur sports coverage will be reduced, and future coverage will only be done on a break-even basis. These are two examples of the kinds of choices we've needed to make in order to balance our budget for 2014-15 while trying to protect our three strategy 2015 priorities: Canadian programming in prime time, service to the regions, and investment in digital. However, this time around we couldn't protect them completely. The numbers were simply too big and our margin for manoeuvring too thin from the cuts we've had to make since 2009.

Let me give you an idea of what that means for our regional services. We've had to cancel the rest of our regional expansion plans, including a radio station that we had planned for London, Ontario. CBC's ten-minute late-night newscast in the north has been eliminated. CBC weekend TV news in Calgary and Edmonton will be consolidated into one regional newscast. CBC Radio's local afternoon show from Thunder Bay and Sudbury will now be a single regional program. On Espace musique, our daily regional morning program that currently broadcasts from 11 communities will be replaced by one single network program. Quelle histoire!, Radio-Canada's daily network TV program from Ottawa-Gatineau, has been reduced from 90 to 36 episodes.

In your folders is a more detailed list of all the programs that were affected.

These are all difficult cuts to make. Not only are we losing incredibly valuable talent, we are reducing the programming we provide to Canadians. However, despite what you have just heard, our focus on the regions remains. We made the decision to protect our existing footprint. This means that we are not closing any stations or bureaus as we strongly believe that we should be delivering programming that originates and reflects the whole of our country.

Let me explain the background for that choice. Funding from the local program improvement fund was essential to helping us enhance our television services, particularly for francophone minority language communities. When the CRTC eliminated the LPIF, the logical decision would have been to cancel all regional programs supported by the fund. Instead, we took resources from elsewhere within our corporation in order to protect regional news, seven days a week, from all of our stations.

However, to keep our commitment to news, we canceled all non-news programming in the regions, programs like Caméra boréale, (out of Regina), which was produced by five young video journalists who told their travel stories throughout northern Canada to francophones across the country. We also had to reduce the number of regional productions for the network show Tout le monde en parlait. LPIF funding from 2010 to 2013 supported the production of 20 shows from francophone communities outside of Quebec, such as La cloche de Batoche, (Winnipeg), La Sagouine, (Moncton), and L'école de la résistance de Penetanguishene, (Toronto). Unfortunately, with the new season, which starts on May 6, only one regional documentary, Le monstre de Pont-Rouge, (Quebec), will be aired onTout le monde en parlait this year.

Our commitment to the regions is also reflected in our new CRTC conditions of license, conditions that we continue to meet. Radio-Canada's seven regional stations serving francophone minority communities will offer at least five hours of local programming a week, on average over a year. In Montreal, CBC will offer anglophones 14 hours of local television per week, including one hour of non-news programming.

Our conditions of license require us to hold consultations with francophone minority communities in each of these regions: Atlantic Canada, Ontario, western Canada and northern Canada. In fact, Patricia has just returned from our western consultation, held Tuesday in Edmonton. I invite you to ask her questions.

But let us be clear.

The challenges we are facing are severe. All conventional television broadcasters are struggling with declining revenue, as advertisers are shifting their money to live programs like professional sports, and, increasingly, to online. For CBC/Radio-Canada, our commitment to Canadian programming is much more expensive to produce and broadcast, particularly in prime time, than what the private broadcasters are doing, which is mainly simulcasting American programs.

This then brings up our funding model. Among the 18 most important international public broadcasters in the world, CBC/Radio-Canada now ranks 16th in terms of our level of per capita funding for public broadcasting. That's third from the bottom. Again, you have that chart in your folders.

This puts in plain sight the fact that we've received no permanent increase to our base budget since 1973. As I keep reminding everyone, we still don't have access to a credit line to manage our cash flow, or situations like the one that we lived through in April. The steps we just announced will balance our budget for this year, but that's not enough. That doesn't work. We simply can't be in a position where we have to keep cutting the public broadcaster every second year in order to balance the yearly budgets.

We've begun the work for our next strategic plan, the one that will take us to 2020. We'll have more to say about that at the beginning of the summer. But I can tell you right now that we have to make some very difficult choices about what kinds of services Canadians will expect from us and what we can deliver to them. In this context, we will need to do less.

In 2020, we need to be a smaller and more focused public media company, one that is more agile and can adjust as the media consumption habits of Canadians change. But we still need to live up to the spirit of the mandate that we were entrusted with more than 75 years ago: to inform, enlighten, and entertain.

In many ways, I think you can see our future when you look to our recent coverage of the Olympic Winter Games. In Sochi, we reached over 33 million Canadians in 17 days. More than 10 million Canadians—one in three—followed the Olympics on computers, tablets and phones, consuming about 14 million hours of video content offered live and on demand. Our French and English services worked together to maximize our resources. We partnered with other broadcasters. We used the latest technology to deliver a unique personal experience to every Canadian, while simultaneously bringing Canadians together to celebrate our country and the performances of our athletes. I believe that moments like this demonstrate the best of CBC/Radio-Canada. This is what we strive to give Canadians in the future.

Mr. Chairman, we would be pleased to take the committee's questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Michael Chong]

Thank you, Mr. Lacroix.

We have an hour and a half for questions and comments.

We will start with Mr. Godin.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Lacroix, welcome to the Standing Committee on Official Languages. I know that you do not like people calling you Mr. Lacroix, so let me start again. Hubert, welcome to the Standing Committee on Official Languages, and welcome also to your team.

I have difficulty grasping your meaning when you say that, despite all the budget cuts, CBC is continuing with the same mandate, as it has done for 60 years.

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

I am sorry. I did not hear the last part of your comment.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

I have a hard time grasping your meaning when you say that CBC will continue with the same mandate, as it has done for 60 years, despite the incredible budget cuts. In other words, the mandate will not change despite the budget cuts. I have difficulty believing that.

Let us not forget that, in 1994, when the Liberals were in power, there were cuts of $400 million. You would think that people wanted to forget that the Liberals made cuts of $400 million.

Now, the Conservative government is making budget cuts of more than $115 million. That is without counting indexed salaries and expenses, which could not be done, correct?

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

Correct.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

We are talking about millions of dollars, and everything is supposed to keep working like a charm.

Governments, especially the current government, want to see CBC disappear rather than to support it, don't you agree?

As you pointed out in one of the graphs that showed the per capita level of public support, Canada is at 33 and France is at 68. I do not know whether the numbers are percentages or dollars. Whatever they are, a democratic country like ours does not provide a huge amount of support to its national television broadcaster.

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

Mr. Godin, there are various aspects to your comments; let me start with the mandate set out in the Broadcasting Act.

Today, I wanted to highlight the fact that, each time a decision is made at CBC/Radio-Canada, the goal is to provide Canadians with services that will live up to the three verbs I mentioned. Those verbs are contained in the act and they influence us in the way in which we deliver our services: to inform, enlighten and entertain.

I did not tell you that we are going to continue to do that as if nothing had happened; quite the contrary. In my remarks, I said that, for the moment, given the cuts we have just made, we are greatly reducing the programming we provide to Canadians. The goal of the public broadcaster, of the two senior managers with me today and of all the other members of our team, remains to meet the expectations of Canadians.

With that background, I am telling you today that the environment in which we are working is very complicated and the cuts will force us to deliver less programming to the Canadians who listen to us, watch us, and use our services. However, I can assure you that the objective of each of the decisions we make remains to fulfill our mandate.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

Mr. Lacroix, two reporters' positions were eliminated in Moncton, in the Atlantic region. There are two RDI journalists in Moncton and you are eliminating one of them. That represents half. For us, eliminating one reporter's position at RDI means that we have lost 50% of the staff. Your mandate is to produce news, but what kind of news?

Moncton is two and a half hours from Bathurst. If an RDI reporter goes off to Saint John, forget it, there will be no news.

What is CBC's mandate? It has a mandate on paper, but, in reality, you cannot fulfill it.

You are not going to get me to believe today that CBC can fulfill its mandate seriously and honestly by making unacceptable cuts. CBC's mandate, Mr. Lacroix, is to serve Canadians all over the country and in minority areas, whether that is in Edmonton, Alberta or Prince George, British Columbia. These cuts are going to affect many more people that we are being led to believe.

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

You are absolutely right, Mr. Godin. I did not say today that we could meet the expectations of all Canadians everywhere, given the current environment.

In the documentation, there is a graph that shows the level of public funding per capita that public broadcasters receive in various countries. In Canada, that level will be $29 per person in 2014-2015. The lower that contribution, the fewer services we can provide. In England, each person contributes $97, in a country with one time zone and a population of 70 million.

We provide services that match what we receive. Of course our financial resources have to fit. The choices we are making tear us apart. I call them Sophie's choices, just like in the film. With the financial resources currently at our disposal, we are trying to fulfill our mandate, which is to enlighten people and make them think.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

Official language minority communities are affected by the cuts to a greater extent.

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

Quite the opposite. We consider that the regions have to do their part for the effort, given the extent of the cuts. However, according to our mandate, the regions are key to our daily services. I will ask Ms. Pleszczynska to explain to you how we consult people. We go to the communities to find information that will allow us to focus our efforts. The conditions of licence we have in the regions will be met. For the moment, that will be the public broadcaster's contribution in our financial context. We can no longer do as much as we did before.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

You mentioned programs like La Sagouine and La revue acadienne. The people in minority regions saw themselves in those programs, but they no longer exist.

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

We made that choice in order to be able to keep the news service.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

I know that is a choice, but CBC's mandate has been reduced. You cannot have me believe that the mandate can be fulfilled as it has been for 60 years with cuts that are as drastic as these.

The minister got up in the House yesterday and said that her government was not responsible for this, it was CBC. Are you not doing your job or is the government not giving you the means to do it?

[The Chair, Conservative, Michael Chong]

Thank you, Mr. Godin.

Mr. Lacroix, you have the floor.

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

Do you want me, Mr. Chairman, to answer the last comment?

[The Chair, Conservative, Michael Chong]

Yes.

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

In a context like this, I always come back to the same thing. We announced major cuts in order to balance our 2014-2015 budget. The environment we find ourselves in is changing. We have given you a picture of the funding to which public broadcasters have access, according to the services they provide.

What I am telling you is that, with the resources at our disposal, we have to make choices. The Broadcasting Act has not been changed since 1991. The mandate it gives us is still the same: to provide broad programming that informs, enlightens and entertains. Given that, we have had to make the choices that we have been discussing.

[The Chair, Conservative, Michael Chong]

Thank you.

Mr. Gourde, you have the floor.