You're supportive of the Canadian Television Fund and how it operates?
Evidence of meeting #52 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 cbc.
Evidence of meeting #52 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 cbc.
3:20 p.m.
Conservative
Ed Fast Conservative Abbotsford, BC
You're supportive of the Canadian Television Fund and how it operates?
3:20 p.m.
Vice-President and General Counsel, Corus Entertainment Inc.
Yes, I am, very much so.
3:20 p.m.
Conservative
Ed Fast Conservative Abbotsford, BC
All right.
We've had a number of witnesses before us, not in this review, but earlier when the CTF funding seemed to be threatened. Vidéotron and Shaw appeared before us. They were not supportive of the Canadian Television Fund and felt that they would prefer to do their own in-house productions rather than relying on government funding as well as putting in some of their own money into this fund. Would you disagree with their position?
3:20 p.m.
Vice-President and General Counsel, Corus Entertainment Inc.
There is a range of positions they put on the table. Fundamentally, our view is that this country—and you certainly don't need Corus to tell you this—ust isn't big enough. We sell programming in 120 countries around the world, so we know the world market pretty well. You simply can't make the big-budget productions in Canada without some form of support in the form of a CTF, and there are other funds as well, such as the Shaw Rocket Fund. Corus has funds. Most broadcasters have different kinds of funding. We really need that, as an industry, to support the development of high-quality programming. So fundamentally, that's our first view of that.
As we suggested earlier, there does need to be some assessment of how some of those funding mechanisms work. I would put that in a category of whenever you develop any kind of a policy system you need to step back from it every once in a while and see if it is working in the manner you would hope it would work in the context of how the world is changing. For example, one of the changes we're looking for is less of a bias against vertical integration. We make that argument and we use our track record to say, “Look, we've made terrific programming. We've put hundreds of millions of dollars of our own money on the table. You should allow us, not all the time but some of the time, to use some of these funds in order to create a program that's going to run right through the broadcast properties that we own.” Similarly, with the CBC, there should be times when if it has a terrific idea, it should have the ability to access those funds and do the same thing.
3:20 p.m.
Conservative
Ed Fast Conservative Abbotsford, BC
Are you supportive of the current Canadian content requirement you live under?
3:20 p.m.
Vice-President and General Counsel, Corus Entertainment Inc.
It depends a little bit on the channel that we operate. I guess fundamentally one of the things that we're going to have to look at as policy-makers and as regulators and as broadcasters is that the system is very rapidly moving from linear-scheduled programming to on-demand.
At Corus, for example, we were one of the first radio companies in the world to podcast. We were doing that literally before all the American magazines started jumping up and down about it. We have launched and have been running now for almost a year in the United States a VOD service on Comcast Digital, Comcast being the biggest cable operation in the United States and I think the biggest in the world. We went to them and knocked on their door for about a year, and they are now carrying something that we call Vortex. It's all Canadian children's shows available on demand, and it's been enormously successful. We're just thrilled with it, but it's not scheduled. People go into a menu, and they pick the shows.
So we have to start looking at that. What does “Canadian content” mean in a linear schedule when in fact people don't want to necessarily watch in a linear way? We're starting to see it with the incidence of PVRs, personal video recorders, for example. People are starting to schedule themselves. You'll notice that The Sopranos, which we're running on Movie Central in the west, runs on Sunday night in first play, and then we will play it in a linear way as well. But if you have any of the cable systems digital, you can go in and take The Sopranos whenever you want it.
So the 60% Canadian content, is that still relevant? To a certain extent it is. And we mean it when we say that we're not going to survive if we don't make Canadian programming of every genre. We'll just get eclipsed, because it's the viewers and the advertisers who are going to drive this, not us. Our whole bias in Corus is to be focused on where our advertisers are going and where our viewers are going.
I can tell you personally, I've just come back from the trade show in Las Vegas, the National Association of Broadcasters show, and I sat in a room like this. Of course, we had the unfortunate events of Virginia Tech, where the video was shot by one of these. I saw something even more dramatic than that, where someone had a video camera running in real time on a cellphone, and they were broadcasting it to another cellphone, which was plugged into a screen as big as that wall, and the quality was just awesome. I saw another cellphone with a screen that rotates into a 16 by 9 format, and I watched an episode of the David Letterman show. It was better than most of the old TVs that I have in my house. All of this is to say that the world is changing very, very quickly.
Some of the crucial elements we need are things like the CTF. We need to look at every single rule we have and ask ourselves the question, is this going to get Canadian programming produced and in front of Canadians? In fact, is it going to be something they want to watch or buy or download or however else they're going to do it? I think the good news is that we have a terrific chance.
3:20 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gary Schellenberger
Thank you for that.
We might get in a few more short questions.
Mr. Scarpaleggia.
3:20 p.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
My question is to Ms. Hodder. What is the status of the Canadian Independent Video Fund?
3:20 p.m.
Executive Director, Documentary Organisation of Canada
The Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund, CIFVF?
3:20 p.m.
Liberal
3:20 p.m.
Executive Director, Documentary Organisation of Canada
It is. Robin Jackson is one of my colleagues, and they are continually down to the wire, wondering whether or not they will get funded. This year I know it was delayed. They had their hearings before the Treasury Board, and they were given the go-ahead right at the last moment.
That fund is specifically set aside for educational programming in film and video. It's not broadcast funding. It's one of the only non-broadcast ones out there.
3:25 p.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
It's a documentary fund, but it's more of an educational documentary fund?
3:25 p.m.
Executive Director, Documentary Organisation of Canada
Yes, that's correct.
3:25 p.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
My understanding of your position is that the CBC does not purchase enough Canadian documentaries. Is that what you're saying, in a sense?
3:25 p.m.
Member, Documentary Organisation of Canada
Yes. Our positions are based on commission and purchase.
3:25 p.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
I don't doubt that, but it seems so counterintuitive, because every time I turn on CBC Newsworld or RDI, there's a documentary on. I guess a lot of them are coming from outside.
3:25 p.m.
Member, Documentary Organisation of Canada
Yes, but you have to ask yourself if that documentary is an in-house documentary. Is it commissioned? Is it commissioned from a Canadian producer or from an international producer? It's never clear.
3:25 p.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
You were saying the CBC does a lot of in-house documentaries?
3:25 p.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
Too many, in your view; more should be commissioned from the outside.
3:25 p.m.
Executive Director, Documentary Organisation of Canada
We would like to know how many are in-house and out-of-house. In fact, this was part—
3:25 p.m.
Executive Director, Documentary Organisation of Canada
We have been searching and searching, and I have professional researchers looking to figure out what the division is between in-house and—
3:25 p.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
Why do you think this information is not being made available? Is it strategic information?
3:25 p.m.
Executive Director, Documentary Organisation of Canada
It could be. It could be disclosing the fact that they have much higher proportionate spending for documentaries that are done in-house versus their commissions. It's hard to know.
We recently had our hearings before the CRTC for the documentary channel, and this is one of the issues we raised with them, about this in-house programming. I won't go into that, because they are the CRTC rules, but the situation remains. They've stated publicly that they spend 20% of their funding on the documentary genre, but as for how much of that goes toward the in-house versus independent, it is only for them to know.