Evidence of meeting #42 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 television.
NDP
Denise Savoie NDP Victoria, BC
I ask because that's another really serious facet, it seems to me, of how it could play out.
Director, Operations and Communications - Film, Television and Digital Media, ACTRA - British Columbia, Union of B.C. Performers
I'm not sure if I totally understood your question. Could you say it again? I was going to respond, but I think before I do so, I want to make sure I understand your question, because it might take us in another direction.
Denise Savoie NDP Victoria, BC
Because I don't understand the economics of what you're proposing, I'm wondering if that is a way to corporatize the Internet.
Director, Operations and Communications - Film, Television and Digital Media, ACTRA - British Columbia, Union of B.C. Performers
There's no doubt there's a global fight on right now for doing just that. There are many books: Darknet by J.D. Lasica is a book I would suggest you read; it talks about how the large corporate interests are absolutely trying to lock down the Internet. That's why I think now would be a very interesting time to build that brand, especially a global brand, and we can do it. CBC is already a global brand, but it can be made more of a global brand. I think it's harder to lock down once it's established, and that's why I think there's a timeframe over the next few years to do that.
I fear that at some point in the future, the system--the model that's in place right now--will try to replicate itself, meaning very few interests control the pipe into your home, and it's a one-way dialogue: you receive content, not the two-way dialogue that is currently available through the Internet.
NDP
Director, Operations and Communications - Film, Television and Digital Media, ACTRA - British Columbia, Union of B.C. Performers
Right now it's still what people term “the wild, wild west” with respect to the Internet. I'll give you an example: peer-to-peer technology, which is Napster. People talked a lot about Napster and how harmful it was to the industry, but those very companies that were fighting through litigation to stop Napster from existing are now using that very technology to help get their content out, so I think we're in an interesting period of time.
Can you lock down the Internet? The answer is yes, you can, and anyone who thinks you can't is mistaken. You can lock it down. It's a form of distribution. It's not yet, but it may be in the future, and my fear is that it will be.
Producer, Vancouver Branch, Canadian Film and Television Production Association
I would like to make a couple of points to answer your question. Obviously making the CBC an Internet destination is really important if it is the first choice for all Canadians for news. Canadians have a huge subscribership, for example, to The New York Times online. I think they do use CBC as an online destination, but anything that can help....
Currently, the CBC receives $1 billion from Canadian Heritage.
Is that correct?
Producer, Vancouver Branch, Canadian Film and Television Production Association
In terms of funding, if we're talking about making.... The CBC is mainly becoming commercial-free; obviously, then, there needs to be a new financing model. I don't imagine this government is particularly sympathetic currently to increasing the funding to the CBC, so I think there needs to be a hard look at other revenue models and at how the CBC is spending its money and at how much it spends on sports. It gets a lot of viewers--is that worth it? It's losing the Olympics; I think that's significant. But what are the other revenue models?
My fondness for CBC comes from Mr. Dressup and The Friendly Giant. Is the CBC exploiting its resources adequately? Is it providing The Beachcombers and all these shows online so that you can download them? That's a practical reality now; it's not even a couple of years from now.
There are other ways that the CBC.... It's very hard in this kind of atmosphere to just throw out recommendations, but I think it certainly warrants study. I personally think that in order for the CBC to survive in the modern world, it could benefit from more money, but I also think there needs to be harder scrutiny of the management and how those funds are allocated. A lot of things could be done differently. There's a lot of money invested in odd places--real estate, for example--that don't need to be there to make the CBC what it is, places where you could squeeze money out of it.
As an Individual
I definitely think more money should be invested in the CBC. When I was in England--that's more than half my life ago--we were contributing by a licence. We had a radio licence and a TV licence, and anybody who had a machine had to pay. It maintained the quality of the programming, it seemed to me.
I don't know whether they still have the same sort of licensing, but it always seemed to have a high standard, and you can't do that without money. They seemed to have very high-standard management and personnel looking after the system. I would hope that would be possible here as well.
Producer, Vancouver Branch, Canadian Film and Television Production Association
The BBC still does have that. Anyone who has a TV set in the U.K. pays a fee that goes directly to the BBC.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gary Schellenberger
I have a couple of statements I'd like to make, and if anyone would like to reply to them, you can get me the answer later. I'd just like to confirm some of the things that have been said here today.
About three weeks ago I had dinner with the Barenaked Ladies. They were playing in Ottawa. Mr. Angus was there. There were four of us from our committee. They spoke so enthusiastically about the new media, about being online, and about how business has to be done differently. They said that in the recording industry the big giants used to just pillage the artists. Today there's freedom, and they can get their music out, and not just them--they're established--but the new people coming along. So I agree that with regard to the new media, the way they talked about it, we're just scratching the surface. What can happen is just immense.
Here's another example. I was flying here yesterday from Edmonton, and we were in a newer plane. On the back of every seat there was a television screen. I know that within the area I was able to see, there were people watching six different things. You used to have one television screen up every so often, and everybody had to watch the same thing. I've been on some of those flights and have watched the penguins go on there for what seemed like days.
I think that choice has to be there. Again, it's been mentioned at different times: promotion, promotion, promotion. I heard this during the feature film review that we had a few years ago. You can make the greatest film, and if it's not promoted, if no one knows about it, no one sees it. Who knows it's a great film?
So I think those are things you're right on with, about how some of these programs are brought forward. You could be watching the news, and in with the advertisements or in the break time when that little promotion comes on, it doesn't matter whatever the program is, if you see it enough times, you're going to at least go there once.
I appreciate the things you've said here today. I thank you for making your presentations.
We can have one little one at the end.
Bloc
Diane Bourgeois Bloc Terrebonne—Blainville, QC
I just want to reassure people. Although there are few members seated at this table, the minutes of proceedings will be taken into consideration. Rest assured that your testimony will be submitted to the other members and we will review it together.
Conservative
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gary Schellenberger
Order.
Welcome to our next presenters.
Before we start, I will mention that Ms. Savoie has had to leave to catch a heli-flight. I think she has a meeting coming up very shortly. I'd like to let you know that although we're diminished in numbers around the table, all of the questions and answers are being kept track of here, and they will go back to the rest of our committee. There will be a report made and everything. So you're just as important as the first people who were here this morning.
Again, I apologize for Ms. Savoie having to leave, and I welcome you here.
We will start off with Catherine Murray from Simon Fraser University. Then Mr. Norman Hill will be speaking as an individual, and Pedro Mora on behalf of the Vancouver Community Television Association.
Your presentation, please, Ms. Murray.
Dr. Catherine Murray Associate Professor, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and honourable members of the committee.
I also bring regrets. My colleague Dr. Druick is quite ill today and unable to be here.
I'm speaking to you as an associate professor of communication from Simon Fraser University, and I have the remarkable distinction of having served as a member of the mandate review committee with Mr. Juneau, which released a report, Making Our Voices Heard, in February of 1996.
I'm also a member of the Graham Spry Foundation, affiliated with SFU, which together with the University of Montreal offers an annual lecture on the future of public broadcasting. I would commend that website to you for further research.
I teach in the area of broadcasting policy, and I'd like to acknowledge today the students of Communications 333, “Broadcasting Policy in the Global Context”, who have been with you this afternoon and watching in a fascinated manner. I'd also like to indicate that I research in the area of cultural diversity, civil society groups, and changing forms of media governance.
I'm going to take the liberty of leaving behind with your secretariat an article I've written on the CBC, which is entitled “Wellsprings of Knowledge: Beyond the CBC Policy Trap”. I wrote it in 2002, partly debriefing my experience of 1996, and many of the recommendations in it are as salient today as they were then.
In the interests of the presentation this afternoon, I thought what might be interesting would be to direct my observations to what has changed since 1996 in the dilemma facing the mandate review of the CBC at that time, and what has remained the same.
1996 marked a time that was widely perceived as a crisis point in public broadcasting around the world, and the specific crisis of budget cuts at that time, brought about by Mr. Martin, which led to the appointment of the Juneau committee, caused major concerns then about the scope of the CBC's mandate and its very sustainability.
There were many faces to that crisis. The first face was the political aspect of the crisis. Then, it was probably defined in terms of Quebec nationalism. Our report was written at the time of the Quebec referendum, and much of its text can be read in that light.
Now, the crisis is determined and defined in terms of our international obligations in Afghanistan, through the multi-lateral NATO. I note that after 9/11 we have seen a remarkable politicization of government communications policies around the world in the name of the war on terror. We have seen a close-down on security access to information in public journalism, and even disputes and resignations forced upon chairs of public broadcasters such as the BBC, or of the president of the BBC, because of problems of disclosure around allegations that there was faulty intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction.
I note that the head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the United States is under attack for partisan appointments. Our own past chair of the CBC resigned because of inappropriate remarks construed as offensive to some.
Certainly what has changed since my time on the watch in 1996 is the scope and news culture in which crises embroil our public broadcaster. But I think there is good news here. Public opinion and quality ratings indicate a high degree of public trust in CBC news, and there has not been the same meltdown of partisan meddling as has been seen at the BBC, for example. The CBC has built its foreign news bureau and in a very important move has repositioned CBC International away from hard news to more general life information, I think in part to fly under the radar of other better financed and more propagandistic international radio sources. But I think the CBC has grown beyond its current role in self-regulation of news quality and news standards.
I served as the chair on a national ombudsman process during the federal election in 2004, and while I can say I attest to the general validity of the process, it is no substitute for two elements that are necessary to protect the editorial independence and excellence of CBC news standards; that is, taking the office of the CBC ombudsperson outside the CBC; and secondly, restructuring all press councils and broadcast standards councils into a single news body more publicly accountable to citizens, journalists, and editors and more accessible in the adjudication of news disputes and promulgating better news standards.
In a world where CanWest Global's news coverage comes under fire from Reuters for inappropriate stereotyping of terrorists in an imbroglio in 2004, preserving a space for public debate over ethics of the media is never more important, and the CBC has a lead and large role to play.
The news environment in which the public broadcaster functions has never been more supercharged. In terms of meeting its international and national news functions, the CBC continues to outspend on a head-to-head basis on news gathering, do more high-value investigative reporting, which is measured by peer awards or in databases that have to do with access to information requests, and so forth, and has never been more open in submitting its news standards to high levels of public scrutiny and sustaining more foreign news bureaus.
Its value has been defended by the Senate committee on the future of the news media. The CBC's role is never more important in a news environment fraught with dangers in reporting in a world increasingly divided by ethnic, national, and religious fundamentalism, promoting, as Graham Murdock, a past Graham Spry chair, has indicated, inaccessible or uncrossable lines between us and them.
I want to rewind once again and say that then the crisis was technological. Few foresaw in 1996 the competition over 100 Canadian digital channels or over 100 international imported channels in Canada, or few saw the growth of the Internet and the challenges that podcasts and online media content through social sites like YouTube would pose. At the time, our committee was of the view that these were interesting developments, but I think it is fair to say that we did not predict they would grow as quickly as they have. At the time, we made a recommendation to amend the Broadcasting Act of 1991 to ensure that the CBC could make its services available on the Internet and make the most innovative new uses of new media as possible.
In light of a subsequent decision by the CRTC not to regulate new media or the Internet, nothing in the 1991 act precluded the CBC subsequently from developing its own Internet portal. Today, cbc.ca, as many have mentioned earlier, is among the top three in Canada, attracting more than two million hits a week. Studies of its performance during the recent election, especially in providing more accessible election coverage to younger voters, two in three of whom choose not to vote during our federal elections, have been largely positive.
The drive to develop new media was pioneered by Radio 3, which was based here in Vancouver, and we're very proud of the team that developed it. A study of Radio 3 that was done by one of our graduate students, who I believe is here today, Anu Sahota, argues that it is precisely this kind of innovation in new media that a public broadcaster must do.
I am tremendously impressed by the contribution that the new and indie music sites available on cbc.ca are making to the Canadian soundscape, and I applaud the corporation for creating this musical digital commons with shareware. The fact that Radio 3 moved to the commercial digital stereo satellite radio network is unfortunate, in my view, and it diluted the record of innovation at the corporation.
On the whole, the new media opportunities are not as well developed as they are or could be at the CBC. I would argue that the CBC needs to embrace the idea of a TV 3 or TV 4 or TV 5, as you've heard this afternoon, on the web, providing a portal for indie documentary and other emerging TV producers to share their work and rival YouTube for the post-first privilege.
Certainly few foresaw that the CBC could embrace new media, but it needs to do far more to be the pivot of the digital commons. I believe, too, that our committee, and especially the Lincoln report, saw the CBC as absolutely basic to the idea of preserving a public space on the digital commons. I believe the Lincoln report went further than we did, that the CBC must work together on the public Internet with the not-for-profit and community broadcast sectors of the new environment, something that the CBC has not yet done at all.
One of the most important calls the standing committee can make is upon the Minister of Canadian Heritage to coordinate a strategy to protect community, independent, and alternative media, with the CBC as its hub, on Canada's emerging digital commons. In my vision, CBC TV 3 would link campus TV, community TV, and a number of other not-for-profit program providers, as the hub across Canada.
To flash back again, then the crisis was fiscal. We were faced with over $300 million in cuts. By the year 2000, I note, Minister Copps did reinstate an annual $60 million a year for special-purpose broadcasts, and then the Canadian Television Fund emerged and earmarked some proportion of its holdings derived from public tax money and cable subscriber funds. These moneys were directed at independent productions licensed to the CBC slate.
I would say that today we do not face quite the same level of public debt or fiscal crisis of the state. In fact, given the unprecedented surpluses facing government today, there is a possibility existing for reinvestment in public broadcasting. The CBC has been faced with year-to-year uncertainty. Its appropriation of about $1 billion is diminishing under inflation, and in constant dollars, as many have commented, we have a corporation that is about one-third smaller than it was about ten years ago.
More to the point, today we have far better data comparatively about the rate of public investment around the world. It seems to me that a number of different sources have now confirmed that Canada is among the lowest of all OECD countries in its investment on a per capita basis, at a time when we are experiencing among the highest rates of population growth. This does not compute.
Even adding in provincial spending on educational broadcasting does not change the overall picture. What I would argue is that in a federal state like Canada, where there is a bifurcation of jurisdictions between culture and education, the data around the world, from the Mackenzie Group, from the Nordicity Group, indicate that culture does not do well.
The CBC is Canada's largest institution. It is a cultural institution, and it is not given enough to do its job. I have seen the need for stable long-term funding, and I support the continuous and repeated refrain over many public inquiries such as your own, for a long-term charter and stable long-term funding. I further support an annual increment to the base of parliamentary appropriation, because we have seen what the lack of certainty on public moneys can do.
Over the past ten years, the CBC has increased its reliance on advertising. You've already heard today how sports viewing as a proportion of CBC's share went from just over 30% at my time in 1996, to almost 50% today. In recent years, however, we've seen a cataclysmic drop of $90 million—almost 40%—in CBC ad revenues. Since the merger of CTVglobemedia, the CBC has been outbid for major sports properties like the Olympics by a three-to-one margin.
Our committee argued for a reduced reliance on sports properties like the Olympics, and economic necessity and the loss of market power vis-à-vis these new concentrated private sector sources is really doing for the CBC by default what public policy should. What has happened is that media mergers and consolidations are undercutting the CBC's right to negotiate major properties. It will get out of sport by default and may now reframe sports to the cultural pursuit, or focus on amateur and less popular sports in North America, possibly like soccer.
Its hemorrhaging of ad money will deeply continue to wound it. I stand behind the mandate review committee and the Lincoln committee's recommendations that the CBC step further back from ads if the requisite public money is in place to replace ad money.
In terms of critical mass, ad revenues today provide almost 50% of the operating costs of CBC TV. That is far too high. A quantum of around 20% to 30% in the period of transition to buying back our public broadcaster is probably more sustainable.
The drive to replace revenues has led to what I call a “creeping privatization of policy” mindset at the CBC. In recent hearings about the future of private broadcasting, the CBC has intervened before the CRTC to support the private broadcasters' opportunistic case to get cable subscriber revenues from basic cable—that is, a fee for carriage of local CTV and Global signals, for example—because of the lack of ad certainty.
The CBC, if this fee for carriage of local signals is introduced, stands to make anywhere from $12 million to $30 million, which is nowhere near what it needs. But it is driven by desperation, I think. The fact that local retransmission rights raise issues of copyright reform and issues of universality and raise problems of access for those 12% of Canadians who do not get digital cable is completely lost on the CBC policy perspective. In this case, self-interest, in light of a declining revenue base, won out over public policy interests in the framing of their position.
I support stable, long-term funding for the CBC. I simply point out that the last crisis facing us in 1996 is the same crisis facing you today. It was a crisis with respect to public transparency and public governance. The picture was bleaker in 1996, to be sure. A lot has been done to modernize systems at the CBC and bring in more transparency. I note that there have been two recent external audits of the CBC by the Auditor General of Canada, and the CBC has undertaken major reforms of the type that were identified in our report in 1996. Collective bargaining arrangements have been rationalized, internal efficiencies have been realized, and significant gains have been made from the rationalization of real estate. And certainly the renovations here, for example, to the CBC in Vancouver will make it a hub of a cultural district and will realize large community spinoffs.
My sense is that the efficiency gains to be realized by modernizing the corporation and streamlining it have now almost come to a close. There is not much more fat to be wrung from the animal. But the Auditor General, in her largely positive review, notes in the report of 2005 a continued need to establish corporate-wide performance and management targets and indicators and to communicate better with external stakeholders. And that the CBC must do. I only note that a similar charge was made to the Minister of Canadian Heritage and Status of Women in a later study of cultural industry programs that are also administered.
While the financial house at the CBC may be in better public order, warranting, I would argue, a serious re-conceptualization of public reinvestment in our public broadcaster, one main impediment remains. As we stated in our Making Our Voices Heard : Canadian Broadcasting and Film for the 21st Century, and as the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting has so ably argued over the past ten years, it is imperative to ensure that the process for appointment to the board of the CBC is less partisan so we do not get into the same trap President Bush got into with PBS. And I would suggest that your own committee has a role to play in this.
We must see the board become more broadly representative of all scientific, cultural, creative, technical, and business leadership in this country. The board must have the right to appoint the president and to insulate her or him from the partisan spin and pressure cookers of the day. Despite major changes in the federal political scene in this country, I am reminded that Parliament has, and continues to have, a consistent multi-party voice in support of the CBC, which is also supported by public opinion polls across this country.
What has changed since 1996 is the emergence of a neo-conservative press that is driving elite discourse on policy issues in this country, one in which CBC-bashing has become quite common. What has also changed is the breathtaking convergence of private ownership in the mediascapes in this country, which is something the CRTC will be examining in a new hearing. In such a converged landscape, the need for the CBC to provide local services, as they become victim to decisions made by central offices outside this province, has never been higher. What is odd is that public interest advocates—those who want a more democratic communication sphere protecting the rights of our citizens—have been relatively silent.
What the parliamentary committee can do is instruct the minister to ask the CRTC to review, for example, the public-benefit policies in place during this merger and acquisition binge and provide an account of exactly where these moneys go and how effective they have been. In the forthcoming news about the sale of Alliance Atlantis to a U.S. investment consortium in partnership with CanWest, for example, who is challenging the disposition of the specialty channel? Why would one channel, patently the heart of a renewed public broadcaster as a central hub of Canada's digital commons, not be given back to the Canadian taxpayers who subsidized its launch? Perhaps it is time for a discussion on the public benefit of reinvesting the History Television back to the CBC, where it belongs. The CBC, after all, is Canada's largest audio-visual archive of record in this country, and it only makes sense.
What has not changed, quite simply, is that Canada needs to build public institutions that foster a sense of citizenship, a citizenship that is cosmopolitan, that values diversity, that is committed to address problems through deliberation rather than force. The CBC is one such institution, and the challenges facing it have never been more enormous but its opportunities never more unrivalled.
Thank you very much.
Norman Hill As an Individual
Mr. Chairman, committee members, thank you very much for inviting me to appear on this panel. I'm a great CBC supporter, and I welcome the opportunity to present my views to you today.
There's no question that the CBC is in crisis and that it desperately needs major reform. For years now, the CBC has been chronically underfunded by government. In fact, the CBC has suffered massive cuts to its funding and it has been deprived of the reliable long-term funding essential to planning its operations. As a result, the CBC has been forced to increasingly rely on advertising revenue to survive. Depending on private corporate advertising has compromised the CBC's objectivity and its ability to protect the public interest. At the same time, the CBC has drifted towards a private sector style of management, which is totally inappropriate for a public broadcaster.
In my youth, the CBC was a proud institution that produced quality Canadian programming. Today it is a pale shadow of its former self. Much of the CBC's current programming consists of American or other foreign TV programs. Recently we've even seen American so-called “reality” TV shows bumping The National from prime time. Programming of this sort, American pop culture programming of any kind, clearly violates the mandate of the CBC. It is inexcusable that CBC management has allowed this to happen, and it is even more outrageous that the Government of Canada has been so wilfully negligent in its treatment of the CBC.
Critics may argue that the CBC has outlived its usefulness, or that we should privatize it, but the fact is that the CBC is more relevant now and more essential to Canadian unity and independence than ever before. In a world of corporate globalization and increasing U.S. regional dominance, we need a revitalized CBC to protect the public interest, to promote Canadian culture, and to foster Canadian unity and independence. In order to reform and reinvigorate the CBC, I believe that the following actions are essential.
First, Parliament must ensure that the senior leaders of the CBC, its board of directors and president and CEO, are not appointed based on partisanship or patronage. Therefore, the CBC leadership should not be appointed by the Prime Minister or the government. Instead, perhaps the CBC leadership could be chosen by an all-party House of Commons committee made up of an equal number of MPs from each party represented in the House of Commons. This way we could make sure that the CBC better reflected the priorities of all Canadians, not just those of the governing party.
Second, Parliament should give the board of directors of the CBC the power to hire and, if necessary, fire the CBC's president and CEO. The CBC's board of directors should always include a majority of people with Canadian public sector broadcasting experience. The CBC president and CEO should always come from the ranks of the CBC staff. This way we could be sure that they have the necessary depth of experience and commitment to the organization.
Third, Parliament must provide the CBC with sufficient stable long-term funding so that it can fulfil its mandate, including revitalizing grassroots programming and vastly improving Canadian content. No matter what the fiscal circumstances of the government, the CBC plays a vital role in our culture, and it should always be protected as a priority for government funding. But now in this age of massive multi-year budget surpluses, it is disgusting that the CBC has suffered crippling funding cuts so that it even has had to shut down its costume department. In a prosperous society like ours, this simply cannot be tolerated.
Fourth, Parliament should ensure that if it increases government funding, the CBC will simultaneously phase out private advertising. There's no place for private advertising revenue at a public broadcaster, and if the CBC were properly funded by the government, there would be no need for it.
Fifth, Parliament needs to strengthen the CBC's mandate from one of being “predominantly and distinctly Canadian” to one of being “overwhelmingly and distinctly Canadian”. Only this kind of crystal-clear mandate will ensure that the CBC focuses on broadcasting almost exclusively quality Canadian programming.
Sixth, Parliament must ensure that the CBC fulfills its mandate “to contribute to Canada's shared national consciousness and identity”. To achieve this, the CBC should make large increases to arts and cultural programming, for example, by producing more contemporary Canadian dramas, historical documentaries, and TV movies. Canadians need to see and hear uniquely Canadian stories in order for our culture to thrive.
Seventh, Parliament should direct the CBC board of directors to give high priority to the instructions of the Broadcasting Act that the CBC “reflect Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences, while serving the special needs of those regions”. The CBC needs to build its programming capacity at the grassroots level in communities all across Canada, so that it serves the needs of those communities and is at the same time representative of Canada as a whole.
Eighth, Parliament must prohibit the CBC from becoming involved in partnerships with private broadcasters. Canadian private broadcasters are an absolute disaster in cultural terms. The level of corporate concentration of broadcasting and media in Canada is appalling. A few massive corporations have unprecedented influence on Canadian culture, and they project a corporate neo-liberal agenda of privatization, deregulation, and destruction of government and the public good. If the CBC were to become involved with them, it would be a terrible conflict of interest. The CBC's role is to serve the public interest; the private broadcaster's goal is to maximize the profit of its shareholders and to further its agenda of corporate control. The CBC must remain true to its mandate of serving the Canadian public interest, and it can only do that by preserving its independence and integrity.
Ninth, Parliament needs to ensure that the CBC maintain its focus on news and current affairs programming. In this world of increasingly concentrated corporate media, Canadians need the CBC more than ever to inform us about what is really happening across the country and to provide us with thoughtful, in-depth analysis. This is one area that, tragically, has seriously deteriorated in recent years. A number of events of great significance to the independence and integrity of Canada have transpired in the last ten years, but have been largely unreported or only superficially reported by the CBC. For example, the coverage of the security and prosperity partnership of North America, which I believe will result in submerging Canada in an anti-democratic, U.S.-dominated North American entity, has received only a passing mention on the CBC. Yet this is precisely the kind of pressing threat to Canadian sovereignty that the CBC has a unique responsibility to provide meaningful coverage of.
Tenth, Parliament should direct the CBC to continue coverage of major Canadian sports, such as hockey. There's no question that hockey is a significant part of the Canadian identity.
I urge the committee to recognize the perilous state the CBC is in now, and to follow the recommendations above in order to save the CBC. If you do not act now to save the CBC, Canada will lose a great institution, which has played a vital role in building and preserving our nation.
Once again, thank you very much for having me here today, and thank you for considering my recommendations.
Pedro Mora Vancouver Community Television Association
Thank you.
I think I'm just going to repeat for the third time the same message. I happen to agree with them almost 100%. I have just two pages here.
My opinion is the CBC relative to all private stations has been the most balanced in presenting regional and cultural information as well as in reporting news.
The CBC, as mandated, has contributed to a distinctive Canadian identity, and because of its independence from for-profit ownership it has to a greater extent contributed to a national social consciousness rather than to promoting consumerism. However, with the global event of Internet starting in the nineties, the traditional diffusion of information has gradually evolved at least on two fronts. First, the CBC hierarchical top-down one-way traditional system has increasingly become outdated and replaced by a non-hierarchical horizontal independent media where ordinary lay people are interacting in the diffusion of news and information.
Second, the issues prioritized by a few CBC professional reporters and producers are not necessarily accepted as the same as the issues concerning most citizens. In other words, the limited choice of issues from one team of professional broadcasters needs to be expanded to more public participation. Therefore, I suggest that one of the organic ways for CBC to keep up with the evolving communication trends is to include in the Broadcasting Act a CBC mandate to open some community access programming to non-profit, non-religious, non-partisan, local independent media producer groups.
A precedent to this suggestion is the CRTC's regulation in 2002 that required privately owned cable television stations to grant community groups up to 25% access on television. This CRTC requirement, which includes more public participation, should be extended to CBC as well.
In reference to the governance structure, the hierarchical corporate governance of CBC and Radio-Canada needs to democratize itself by having an elected board of directors. I don't mean it has to be elected by every citizen in the country. I would accept an election by all 309 legislators, but there should be some form of election rather than just appointments by one person. And that should be for each local station. Furthermore, the access to programming should have an advisory board composed of all its participants.
If the Canadian heritage committee and the democratically elected ministers have in mind a democratization of information and communications, a fundamental principle to keep in mind should be to democratize the governance structure of CBC, because, after all, that is what democracy is all about.
In regard to partnerships between CBC and private broadcasters, the uniqueness of CBC is precisely its public ownership, which theoretically at least may not be influenced by privately owned interests. Selling a proportion of CBC to for-profit partners is effectively dismantling that original uniqueness.
For-profit partners would impair CBC from carrying out its present mandate, and eventually the for-profit partners would transform CBC into another commercially efficient enterprise. This simple prognosis is based on the ancient fact that the main interest of any business is to make profit. The present mandate of CBC of providing a public service is not in the least concerned with profit.
I suggest that we adequately maintain CBC's uniqueness as a democratic medium for information and keep it separate from the for-profit broadcasters, who may continue advertising their products and services on their own.
With respect to the new media, if CBC were fully funded by taxes, the emergence of new media would have no financial implications for CBC/Radio-Canada's overall budget.
With regard to regulating the new media, CRTC, in conjunction with local municipal governments, should extend its transmission regulations to municipal wireless networks. We have traffic bylaws to avoid chaos. We also need regulations for low-frequency networks to avoid abuse.
Thank you very much.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gary Schellenberger
Okay. Thank you for that.
I turn now to Ms. Fry for the first questions.
Liberal
Hedy Fry Liberal Vancouver Centre, BC
First of all, I want to ask Catherine Murray whether she has a printed presentation.