Ms. Duncan says, “of course, Little Mosque On the Prairie” as she has a featured continuing role, a starring role, in Little Mosque on the Prairie, one of the new programs that CBC is having great success with.
CBC has an ongoing tradition of commissioning dramatic adaptations of Canadian literary and theatrical works. Examples are Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride, Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy, and St. Urbain's Horseman, Mordecai Richler's tale of immigrants enriching the social fabric of Montreal in the early part of the 20th century. All have recently or soon will have been aired on the CBC. My point is that it's quite unlikely that any of those stories, any future Canadian stories, could be brought to life on television screens in this country were it not for the CBC. CBC's drama programs have endeavoured to be on the cutting edge, and we believe that Canadians want the choice of challenging programs--a wonderful alternative to what we could call “homogenized products”, which are beamed into this country from the United States.
We think the CBC should be not as obsessed with audience ratings as they are stressed by some of their most senior management. The aims of a public broadcaster, in our opinion, should never be dictated, to a large degree, by whatever sells--high-fibre cereal or lottery tickets. While we do not believe the CBC alone has a responsibility to pay for and schedule Canadian English language dramas, we believe it certainly has a greater responsibility to do so. Over the past seven years, CBC's level of financial support for Canadian drama has generally been about the same as that of the private sector. In the spring of 2005, the CBC announced that in addition to its traditional support, it did intend to invest an additional $33.5 million in Canadian drama in the next two years, which, one hopes, could have added 100 more hours of dramatic programming to the CBC's schedule in 2006 and 2007. We want to see the broadcaster be able to do that and to do more.
The CBC also stated that its goal was to double the amount of drama and entertainment programming broadcast on its main network. ACTRA really believes that CBC television, if adequately resourced, could set the bar in the broadcasting of drama, the kind of bar that Mr. Murdoch spoke to us about earlier today, a benchmark that should be matched by the private Canadian broadcasting networks.