My name is Aggie Brockman, and I'm speaking as a private citizen of Canada.
Other people have talked about how important the CBC is, and certainly it's very important to me. Probably a number of people here have been in small communities in the north and have been interviewed on the local radio station. The way it works is that the local radio station in Fort McPherson or Behchoko or Paulatuk will cut out of CBC for an hour or two a day and have local programming. Then they'll cut back in. Woe the person who forgets to flick that switch back to CBC; the phone starts ringing right away. People want the local programming, and it is an opportunity for that, but they also want to be switched back to CBC.
As other people have said, it's a very critical service here. If the principal in Fort Good Hope wants people to know that the school is closed today, that's how it happens.
I feel very strongly about the aboriginal language programming on CBC. We get three hours and fifteen minutes Monday to Friday and one hour on Saturday. I think it's very important. I was looking at the CBC mandate, and I noted that aboriginal language programming wasn't there explicitly. But perhaps it should be, and that might be something this committee could consider for areas of the country in which we have large populations of aboriginal peoples. It's critical, as Lois said, to knowing where we live. It's also a critical element in language maintenance, which I think is a significant issue here.
What I'd like to say is that there are some things that shouldn't be privatized. Really, CBC is the only game in town that can provide a certain type of and level of service in the north.
Is CBC serving us well, and does CBC get enough money to fulfill its mandate? Obviously it doesn't for the francophone community, regretfully, and I hope your committee will make some recommendations around that. I suppose it doesn't meet people's expectations in some other ways. I speak a bit from experience because I worked at CBC, although quite a long time ago. Currently CBC news is often unable to cover events if the events happen on a weekend, or after 5 p.m., due to overtime costs or whatever other barrier. I don't think that's serving us well. A lot of things happen after hours--this hearing, for instance.
I don't think there's an ability for news people to travel the way they were able to in my day. It's important that there be that ability to travel, and not just when there's a specific major event like the winter games in Whitehorse. You need to be able to travel to small communities to build relationships, to tell the stories that may not be earth-shattering but that are important to people. Those stories don't get covered if people are never in those small communities. Instead, people rely on Yellowknife-based stories, like the courts, which our newspaper would actually cover. So a lot of good stories don't get covered because of travel limitations.
I think there's an emphasis on sports programming, certainly on a national level. I'm not sure if that's because it generates money while other things, such as arts and culture, do not. We see the purchase of American and British sitcoms on television, instead of original programming. On radio and TV we see repeated programs, not always new programs.
We see people doing the easy interviews. Even regional programmers do interviews around national stories, without a northern slant, because those are easy. They're interviews that would be set up by southern producers, so not focusing on the northern stories.
We see no increase in northern-based television production on CBC, even though television has been here in the north for more than 25 years.
Those are some things for which I think we need more money, not less, to make sure that we're better served.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to be heard.