Canadian Heritage Committee on April 20th, 2007

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

[Technical difficulty--Editor]...in the 21st century.

This morning we have witnesses from the Writers Guild of Canada and the Writers' Union of Canada.

I guess we have the Writers Guild of Canada first on the agenda.

If you would make your presentation, Ms. Parker, then we'll have the other witnesses, please.

[Maureen Parker, Executive Director, Writers Guild of Canada]

Certainly.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for travelling to Toronto on a Friday morning. Of course, the weather is good, so we hope you get out of here and get some even better weather for the weekend.

I am the executive director from the Writers Guild. The Writers Guild of Canada welcomes the opportunity to appear before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage in its study of the role of the CBC as public broadcaster in the 21st century.

Sitting with me is Rebecca Schechter, president of the Writers Guild, and Kelly Lynn Ashton, director of industrial and policy research for the Writers Guild.

For those of you who don't know us, the WGC is the national association representing more than 1,800 professional screenwriters working in English language television, radio, and digital production in Canada. WGC members are the creators of uniquely Canadian stories, such as the hit series Little Mosque on the Prairie, and movies of the week, like the award-winning Human Cargo.

To clarify, because there can be confusion, we differ from the Writers' Union beside us because they represent writers of books while we represent writers of screen material.

In this committee's list of themes and questions, you raised many issues that we could spend all day or longer discussing. However, we'd like to focus on just a few themes: first, the CBC's financial instability and the impact it has on the ability to fulfill its mandate, including specifically the impact on drama on the CBC; second, the challenges and opportunities of digital platforms; and, third, how changes to the governance structure could positively impact the CBC.

Is the CBC fulfilling its mandate, and does it have sufficient funding to do so? The Writers Guild sees no need to change the mandate itself as set out in the Broadcasting Act. It clearly defines what the CBC's goals should be as the Canadian broadcaster. However, the CBC's ability to fulfill its mandate has been severely handicapped by insufficient funding.

Over the years the CBC's appropriation has been slashed. A guaranteed envelope at the CTF was one attempt to address the drop in funding, but let's all keep in mind that the CTF is a fund producer. It allows the CBC to license programs as other broadcasters do, rather than fund their full production costs, which clearly they don't have the money to do. Any cut in the CTF envelope would make it impossible for producers to finance their productions through the CBC, and the CBC would be incapable of covering that shortfall.

CBC is one of the least-funded public broadcasters in the industrial world on a per capita basis. Last year CBC received $33 per capita from the government, while the BBC received $116. Not only does the BBC receive so much more than the CBC, but it also receives stable funding for a period of six years, while the CBC depends on annually approved appropriations. We use the BBC as our yardstick because it is internationally recognized as the best public broadcaster in terms of quality, quantity, and international reputation.

Becky.

[Rebecca Schechter, President, Writers Guild of Canada]

Good morning, everybody.

The CBC needs adequate, stable, and permanent funding if it is to have any hope of fulfilling its mandate to be distinctively Canadian, to reflect the regions, to contribute to the flow of cultural expression, to contribute to national consciousness and identity, and to reflect the multicultural and multiracial nature of Canada.

Only with permanent A-base funding can the CBC plan for the future in terms of development, production, and infrastructure, not to mention allowing it to take advantage of new opportunities as they arise. For example, it usually takes several years to develop and produce a prime time episodic series. The pilot script for Little Mosque on the Prairie was commissioned in June 2004, produced in June 2006, and aired in January 2007.

Financial uncertainty means the CBC can't develop many series because they don't know if they'll have the money necessary to produce them when they're ready. They also don't have the necessary funds to develop many projects. Well-funded U.S. broadcasters know they have to develop many projects in order to produce only the best and to thereby ensure a chance of audience success. In Canada, broadcasters—and particularly the CBC—don't have a very high development-to-production ratio in episodic series.

Adequate funding could have many positive impacts on the CBC's programming and overall health. With sufficient funding, the CBC can return to its pre-1999 levels of production of one-hour dramas—once the cornerstone of the schedule. In 1999 the CBC licensed six one-hour dramas, for a total of 79 episodes or 79 hours of television. In 2006 the CBC was down to two one-hour dramas, for a total of only 26 episodes. That's a fairly stunning 66% reduction over seven years.

Canadians have demonstrated time and again that their favourite programming is the one-hour drama. In a recent BBM listing of the top 30 programs in Canada, 19 were one-hour dramas, despite the American Idol juggernaut and several highly rated hockey games that fell into that period. There will always be room for event programming and sports programming, but the audience's primary commitment to television is to one-hour dramas, like the American programs Grey's Anatomy or House.

The only way Canadian one-hour dramas can hope to penetrate the top 30 is if enough series are produced with adequate budgets and if they are aired in consistent time slots and receive adequate promotion.

The CBC's Intelligence was critically acclaimed, but couldn't find an audience because it ran against the highly rated House, which is not only very expensively produced, but is also, like all U.S. TV, promoted to within an inch of its life. Intelligence also failed to resonate because it only had 13 episodes to build an audience; U.S. series have between 20 and 24 each season, giving them lots of time to grow and maintain their audiences.

[Maureen Parker]

Questions have been raised during this committee's review as to whether the Broadcasting Act needs to be amended to include digital content and delivery as part of the CBC's mandate, or whether it should even be in that business. As Mr. Rabinovitch has said to this committee, “At the end of the day, it's the content that counts”, not the method of delivery, or, in other words, the CBC's mandate is to create content that addresses the needs of the regions and reflects Canada back to it. The mandate does not limit how the content is to be delivered or in what format it is to be produced.

The CBC needs to be competitive with its fellow broadcasters and has a positive obligation as the public broadcaster to test the boundaries of digital content and delivery as part of the flow and exchange of cultural expression. That means distributing TV by any and all platforms, including digital, and making the back catalogue of programs available through digital distribution. While the cost of digitizing the old content is being assisted by the Department of Heritage, there is still the issue of use rights to the talent, and the CBC needs to have funding to cover that cost.

Digital platforms also mean reaching out to audience with additional content that keeps them engaged between episodes or seasons, provides them with additional information, back stories or characters, and provides them with ways to interact with the world that the program has created. We know the growing list of terms: webisodes, mobisodes, mangasodes, interactive television, interactive storytelling, ITV, and so on.

Rarely does the CBC pay for additional digital content by increasing its licence fee to producers who commission the work from screenwriters. It is absolutely wrong to ask screenwriters and other artists to subsidize the CBC by working for free, and it is unconscionable that our public broadcaster would take this position and try to make it appear reasonable. The answer to keeping pace in the digital world will not come from squeezing free work from artists such as screenwriters or refusing to pay use fees to talent. Rather, the CBC needs sufficient funding to take advantage of new opportunities that digital platforms provide, because if it doesn't, it's going to lose more of its audience and cease to be relevant.

The CBC also needs to update its infrastructure for digital and HD transmission. The FCC in the U.S. ordered the switch from analog to digital broadcast by February 2009, which means that U.S. broadcasters will only be broadcasting in digital signal after that date. This includes the ability to broadcast in HD, which will have greater penetration as households convert to digital.

Conversely, the CBC has said it will need another 10 years before it will be competitive with HD and digital production and broadcasts. It costs money to produce in HD, to license programs in HD formats, and to broadcast in HD. It is inevitable that consumers with new HD TVs will switch to U.S. channels broadcasting HD programming if they can't get what they want on the CBC. Additional moneys for HD and digital are necessary if the CBC wants to stay competitive.

As a public broadcaster, the CBC needs to reflect a diversity of voices. We think the CBC does this best when it offers the public a variety of choices: historical programs, performing art programs, comedy, regional dramas, professional sports, and local news.These are all of interest to Canadians across the country. If these are not on the CBC, many of these programs will not be anywhere else. This is why we have chosen to have a public broadcaster, but when the CBC is not adequately funded, it relies too heavily on advertising revenue and sacrifices many worthy programs in the name of ratings.

As well, it's only by being distinct that the CBC can hope to attract audiences away from other broadcasters. No matter how you look at it, the CBC is competing with every other broadcaster for their audience. The CBC share of audience has consistently fallen since 1993. While some of the drop in audience is due to the growth of specialty channels, the CBC has lost half of its audience since 1993, while the private conventionals have only lost one sixth. When an audience migrates to another channel, it takes time and a lot of programming to earn back their trust and loyalty. CBC is slowly moving in the right direction with shows like Little Mosque on the Prairie, but it is only one series in one half-hour in an entire schedule. More needs to be done to win and keep audiences.

[Rebecca Schechter]

The CBC should offer distinct or niche programming in order to attract that audience, but it's unrealistic to suggest that the CBC should get out of the advertising and ratings game completely and leave the field to the private broadcasters. We do believe there is a place at the CBC for ads and for ratings, but neither should be the primary motivator of programming decisions.

As we mentioned in our submission, we're concerned that the CBC has placed too great an emphasis on event programming because of its overreliance on advertising revenues. It had to do this because of the erosion of government funding over the years. One of the risks of this strategy in an increasingly competitive market is that the CBC can lose event programming, as it did with the Vancouver Olympics, to private broadcasters with deeper pockets. The entire industry was worried about the consequence to the CBC and Canadian television if the CBC didn't secure a renewed agreement with the NHL. While we can now breathe with relief again, we should not relax. The extreme reliance on one private contract makes things inherently unstable.

The CBC should be able to soldier on regardless of which event programs it wins or does not win. This can only happen if ad revenues are the icing on the cake, with the cake being the reliable, stable government funding of the CBC budget.

Sports can and should be one element in an integrated programming schedule. In fact, we believe that Hockey Night in Canada belongs on the CBC at all costs, because it draws audiences to our public broadcaster, it attracts substantial ad revenues, and, quite frankly, it's our national obsession. Professional sports, local and national news, well-promoted drama series, comedies, specials--these all attract audiences to the CBC and drive audiences to other less broad-based areas of the schedule.

Little Mosque On the Prairie is again an example of what the CBC would be able to do on a larger scale if there were more money. Little Mosque was highly promoted on the CBC before it aired, including with ads on Hockey Night In Canada, which guaranteed a large audience for the promotion. CBC also dedicated a substantial amount of its publicity budget to Little Mosque, plastering billboards around major cities and staging a memorable publicity stunt with camels and free falafel in downtown Toronto.

The result was an unprecedented 2.1 million viewers for the first episode. The series held an average audience of 1.2 million viewers through its eight-episode run, which put it on par with U.S. series like Lost and Criminal Minds. Unfortunately, because of budget limitations at CBC, this priority on Little Mosque had another result: lack of promotions for other worthy series.

Yes, we want more drama on the CBC. Should it become the only home of Canadian content? We think not. This idea has been floated in the past and more recently in front of this committee. As far as we're concerned, it's a non-starter. Canadian audiences would not be well served by turning the CBC into the only home of Canadian programming. Already, with consolidation in the private sector, most recently the CTVglobemedia acquisition of CHUM, Canadians are seeing the diversity of voice in broadcasting shrink considerably. If CBC were the only home of Canadian content, then we would drop from having three gatekeepers for our voices to having one. There would be fewer programmers to pitch, a narrower range of ideas would be broadcast, and a much smaller talent pool would develop. This is not in the public interest, and we cannot point to its being a successful model in any country around the globe.

Further, private broadcasters are given their Canadian content obligations at the price of their simulcast privileges, priority carriage, and a host of other protections they receive from the CRTC to shield them from competition with U.S. broadcasters. Private broadcasters have a role to play in a Canadian broadcasting system using simulcast U.S. programs to drive audiences to Canadian programs. Canadians learned about Little Mosque while watching Hockey Night In Canada. They also learned about Corner Gas, Degrassi, and Robson Arms when each of these shows earned the coveted post-American Idol time slot on CTV.

A healthy Canadian broadcasting system needs to have a balance of audience-driven private broadcasters with Canadian content obligations and a well-funded public broadcaster with its Broadcasting Act mandate as its primary focus. Both need intervention and support to allow the Canadian broadcasting system to flourish in the face of the significantly larger and better-funded U.S. market.

[Maureen Parker]

It's hard to talk about mandate without talking about the adequacy of the CBC's budget. CBC acknowledges this when it talks about having a contract with Parliament, the to-do list set out in the Broadcasting Act. Parliament now needs to provide the CBC with the money to get the job done. The specifics should be worked out by the CBC board and the management team.

This brings us to governance. We do not expect Parliament to authorize a larger appropriation for the CBC without improved governance and accountability for how the money is to be spent. This committee has received many worthwhile suggestions for improving the CBC governance structure. Whatever changes are made, the board needs to be a more effective management vehicle.

CBC management, and specifically the president, need to be accountable to the board rather than to the Department of Canadian Heritage. This is the standard model of board governance, and the one used by the BBC Trust. The board should have the time and the skill to provide oversight of CBC management decisions in a way that Heritage is not set up to do. The board can act to ensure that management plans both support the mandate and are the wisest use of the financing available. In turn, they will report to Heritage and to Parliament.

In order to do that, though, the board needs to be composed of individuals with relevant experience in broadcasting, distribution, development, and production. We do not think just anyone has the right expertise to sit on the board of the CBC.

The BBC Trust requires its candidates to be able to demonstrate an understanding of public broadcasting. Right now the CBC board is operating in a vacuum, without any formal structure for input from the viewers or other stakeholders. Taking another lesson from the BBC, we suggest that the CBC establish formal councils made up of representatives from regions and stakeholders--like writers--who can regularly provide the board with insight and perspective on the impact the CBC is having. Given the right tools, the CBC board can ensure that its funding, at whatever level, serves its mandate.

We appreciate the standing committee's concerns about the CBC and its ability to fulfill its mandate. Again, thank you for allowing us to share our perspective with you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you for that.

Ms. Windsor.

[Deborah Windsor, Executive Director, Writers' Union of Canada]

My name is Deborah Windsor, and I'm the executive director of the Writers' Union of Canada. I'm delighted to be here.

Good morning. Thank you for giving me an opportunity to participate

in the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage's investigation into the role of CBC/Radio-Canada as a public broadcaster in the 21st century.

The Writers' Union of Canada was founded by writers, for writers, in 1973, and it has evolved into the national voice for approximately 1,600 authors of books, in all trade genres, with a mandate to promote and defend the interests of its creator membership and all Canadians' freedoms to write and publish.

To ensure that Canadians enjoy the option of a viable and culturally distinctive public broadcaster in the 21st century, the Writers' Union of Canada urges the Government of Canada to put in place a formula to provide increased stable funding to CBC/Radio-Canada so that it can provide programming as prescribed in its existing mandate as set forth in the Broadcasting Act of 1991.

We encourage the government to take appropriate measures to stabilize broadcasting policy in Canada in order to guarantee this stable funding, to guarantee adherence to the cultural diversity inherent to our cultural sovereignty, and to guarantee the continued existence of public broadcasting in all forms as a viable choice for Canadian broadcasting audiences.

We encourage the government to provide funding to CBC/Radio-Canada to ensure that this country's public broadcaster can take advantage of the 21st century's technology options and increase its efforts to protect Canadians from the homogenization, deterioration, and narrow informational alternative that results from media convergence and foreign ownership of media.

The relationship between this country's writers and its public broadcaster, the CBC, has been in existence virtually since broadcasting began in this country in 1906. Over time, Canada's writers and the CBC have shared a welcome and inspired responsibility in articulating the wonder, magic, diversity, and integrity of this country's diverse culture and imposing geography.

This successful marriage of writing and broadcasting has not only helped to make household names of writers such as Pierre Berton, Morley Callahan, Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Gabrielle Roy, and others too numerous to mention here, but the integration of radio plays, essays, commentaries, fiction, and poetry into the daily programming on CBC/Radio-Canada has served to broaden the artistic and cultural foundations of Canadians for many decades.

The Writers' Union of Canada endorses the mandate of CBC/Radio-Canada set out in the Broadcasting Act of 1991. We feel the eight mandated requirements represent our similar collective perspective on how best to reflect this country's cultural and informational requirements successfully. In recent years, however, the Writers' Union of Canada has become alarmed at changes in CBC/Radio-Canada programming that reflect a turning away from the aforementioned mandate.

We have written letters to the CBC and we have met with CBC representatives to express our distress at a number of specific changes. These include what appears to be a general move to infuse CBC programming with broadcasting influences from the Internet, various private broadcasting sources nationally and internationally, and perceived digital broadcasting developments, which results in duplicating programming more properly provided by private sector broadcasters.

This gradual abdication of CBC/Radio-Canada's mandate has resulted in significantly reduced literary content in CBC programming. This dramatic reduction in programming featuring books and writers has had a negative impact on publishing in Canada. As writers, we do not believe that a demographically younger audience has no interest in culture and literature. In our estimation, any pursuit of younger listeners by CBC/Radio-Canada needs to include a healthy dose of literary culture.

Much of this general deterioration in programming can be attributed to a lack of stable and appropriate funding, an increasingly fuzzy approach to management based on a failure to align or clarify broadcasting mandates and policy in general, and a lack of commitment to guiding principles pertaining to foreign ownership, media convergence, and cultural sovereignty, which Canada has traditionally upheld in order to promote this country's artistic and cultural diversity.

We have presented you with a brief that will examine these related components of the current and future CBC/Radio-Canada policy and programming, offering you a series of recommendations along the way.

It is the view of the Writers’ Union of Canada that CBC/Radio-Canada has a vital role to play in Canada’s cultural community in the 21st century. That role is clearly defined by the mandate given to it in the Broadcasting Act of 1991.

Distinctively Canadian in nature culturally, historically, and artistically, CBC/Radio-Canada programming has been deteriorating in recent years because of a lack of appropriate funding. Accordingly, the mandate of this cherished institution has fallen victim to shortsighted and unrealistic austerity measures and ambivalent government approaches to such issues as media convergence. To reverse this deterioration, the Writers’ Union of Canada respectfully makes the following recommendations:

First is that the Government of Canada immediately put in place a formula to provide increased funding to CBC/Radio-Canada to permit it to provide programming prescribed in its existing mandate so that Canadian radio audiences have the option of listening to a distinctly Canadian public broadcaster.

Second is that the Government of Canada take whatever measures appropriate to stabilize broadcasting policy in Canada to reflect guarantees for stable funding and adherence to cultural diversity inherent to our cultural sovereignty.

Third is that the Government of Canada provide additional funding to CBC/Radio-Canada to ensure that its public broadcaster can take advantage of the 21st century technological opportunities.

Fourth is that the Government of Canada dramatically increase its efforts to protect Canadians from the homogenization, deterioration, and narrow alternatives that result from media convergence and foreign ownership.

I respectfully submit this short presentation. You have the long brief.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you very much for both of those presentations.

Now we'll go to questions.

Mr. Scarpaleggia.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Thank you for those excellent, very well-prepared, and comprehensive presentations.

I agree with the need for stable funding, but one issue that interests me is the relationship between the CBC and the CTF. Do you believe in the current model, whereby CTF funding sort of makes up for previous cuts to CBC's budget? Do you believe that's what the CTF does, can do, and should continue to do into the future, assuming that CBC and CTF will have some level of appropriate, sustainable funding?

In other words, if there were stability in both of those funds--considering that the CBC has funds--would that be just as acceptable to you as the situation was before the CTF, when CBC was the channel for funding productions, and so on?

[Maureen Parker]

I think CTF financing is absolutely essential. I wish I could believe that down the road there will be enough money available for the CTF to go exclusively to other private broadcasting productions.

I think it's important to remember that the CTF is a production fund. It doesn't run with CBC. It's a fund for various types of productions: drama, documentaries, varieties. That production then finds a home on many different networks.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

I understand that, but from your point of view, representing writers, do you care where the money comes from?

[Maureen Parker]

No. There's a licence fee that's paid for a program and then that program is sold to a broadcaster. What we want to ensure, of course, is that there's enough money in the production and development system to finance productions properly.

CBC doesn't cover the cost of everything out of the CTF. The CTF--and this is a very different issue--doesn't spend enough on development, for example. The CBC does take on a lot of those development costs. The CTF is primarily a production fund.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Can you elaborate on your point about the CBC getting involved in the development of the CTF? What do you mean by “development”?

[Maureen Parker]

My boss, Rebecca Schechter, is also one of the creators of Little Mosque on the Prairie, so maybe she'd like to talk about what development is.

[Rebecca Schechter]

Development is when you write the script, essentially. When they want to put a series on the air, the first thing you do is have an idea for what the series should be and then go to a broadcaster, often with a producer, and pitch it. If they like it, they commission a script. That's the first stage of development.

There is some funding at CTF for development, but not a lot. I don't know whether it's at CTF, but there is supplemental funding. But it needs to be supported elsewhere.

Then from the script stage.... The CBC right now is shooting pilots of some of the scripts they get written, and then evaluating the pilots and deciding whether the project should go on the air or not, and then going forward with full production.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

But it's basically because the CBC has this capacity to run pilots that private producers don't have.

I guess what I'm getting at is, wherever the money is coming from, somebody has to develop the idea for a script, whether it be a private broadcaster, a private producer, or in-house at the CBC. We're trying to sort out why the development can't be done totally by the private sector, why it has to be the CBC that is doing the development.

I'm trying to find a reason why the CBC should be more involved in development.

[Rebecca Schechter]

When you're pitching a project, if you have an idea for a series, you might take it to all three—the only three broadcasters that are out there—to pitch it. They have development people who listen to your idea. Two of them may love it and one of them may not.

It's very hard to get that development going without the belief that a broadcaster is committed. Producers rarely—almost never—develop something in isolation from at least a commitment from a broadcaster to partly fund the development.

The private sector, in fact, can't work in isolation from the broadcasters. In the case of the CBC—

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

The CBC is more apt to take risks on developing Canadian stories than a private broadcaster would be.

[Rebecca Schechter]

Well, what we want is that they put more of our stories on the air; that they'll have more time slots to fill, so they'll develop more shows to fill them.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Thanks.

[Maureen Parker]

I don't think it should be the only home—

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

No, I understand that.

[Maureen Parker]

—but they do it best.

But what we think is that the CBC has a particular voice. They're interested in types of production that CTV isn't. We talk a lot with the broadcasters. CTV will say they're looking for shows that put everyone in the tent, like the Corner Gas show. That appeals to everyone of all ages; it's clean comedy, etc. The CBC will put something a little edgier on, because they'll have a different time slot, etc.

That's why you need the variety of broadcasters.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Don't get me wrong. I have no problem with the CBC having the financial resources to be an incubator for more leading-edge Canadian drama or content. I was trying to understand the relationship.