The documentary channel, how new is that now?
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.
3:25 p.m.
Liberal
3:25 p.m.
Vice-President and General Counsel, Corus Entertainment Inc.
We are the controlling shareholder of the documentary channel, so we know Ms. Hodder's colleagues quite well. It's a category one specialty service, and I think it's been around for seven years.
3:25 p.m.
Liberal
3:25 p.m.
Member, Documentary Organisation of Canada
It has been an excellent outlet for independent documentary producers, for the most part, since they don't have any in-house programming. They have been a great purchaser of Canadian documentaries.
3:25 p.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
I just see “documentary” everywhere. We have a documentary channel. Our Governor General used to introduce documentaries. Even now, there are wild documentaries on CBC Newsworld.
That's an interesting point you make, and maybe in our report we should take account of the fact that the CBC is not necessarily making certain kinds of information available that would be useful. That might help through the new audit system.
3:25 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gary Schellenberger
I must thank everyone for their great presentations today. We've had great questions in this particular session. So thank you again.
We'll recess for a very short time while we wait for our next witnesses.
3:35 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gary Schellenberger
Order, please.
Welcome to our next presenters. We'll start off with TVN Niagara Inc., Mr. Wilks; and then as individuals we have Joe Clark, Frank Gue, Viggo Lewis, and John Spence.
We will have to try to keep our presentations fairly short on this, so that we can have some time for questions.
We'll start off with you, Mr. Wilks. I know you're representing a company, so I will give you just a wee bit longer than the other gentlemen.
Thank you.
3:35 p.m.
Wendell G. Wilks President and Chief Executive Officer, TVN Niagara Inc.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It's an honour to appear in front of you, and thank you for the opportunity to discuss the future of the CBC.
I personally have been participating in these kinds of discussions. I was telling my colleagues here that I started in 1959, and I've been involved directly in Canadian television since that time. I started with a CBC affiliate in Medicine Hat, Alberta, my hometown. I worked for the CBC in Alberta when they started in the 1960s in television. I managed CBC-affiliated stations in Calgary, and in Kingston, Ontario, and I was directly or indirectly part of the CBC for about 13 years of my career.
In 1974 I was the founding general manger of ITV Edmonton, which is now part of the Global Television Network, and I was the founding general manager of CTS in Toronto, which on cable in Toronto is on Channel 9.
A good part of my career was spent in TV production. I have created hundreds of hours of TV programs, many of which I sold to the CBC. I sold them one particularly famous TV series, which was called SCTV, or Second City Television. I have produced many television shows for the CBC, including French-language programming, I might add.
Today I prefer to limit my comments to the English programming, and the reason for that is simple. I do believe that when it comes to the French programming, Quebeckers should make that determination and make those comments. Although I have opinions, I don't believe I'm qualified, even with my experience of working in Quebec, to know what the population of Quebec wants or deserves. So I'd like to talk about English television, mainly because French television, in many ways at the CBC, is not broken, and things that are not broken shouldn't be fixed.
In my written brief that I submitted for your consideration, I suggested that CBC is not truly public TV. It once was. It once had a semblance of being such a system, but along the way, CBC leadership became enslaved by ratings success and ceased to connect with the public. I remember when we had audiences as high as 40%. We're down to 7%. And now that the CBC has become less relevant, it is becoming less relevant every year. It's time for action and perhaps to reconsider and make CBC really public television in Canada.
Believe it or not, there was a time when CBC News would never accept TV advertising. Now, Peter Mansbridge and his team of presenters give frequent pause for commercials, interrupting regularly their delivery of news from home and around the globe to sell soap, beds, and beer, and almost any kind of product, unlike the best public television systems in the world, such as the BBC in the United Kingdom and such as PBS in the United States, on which I currently have a television series running. The CBC has opted for a style that does not differ from commercial broadcasters like CTV and Global, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN, and ABC. In markets where I've worked, such as Calgary, the CBC's The National was beaten regularly at 10 o'clock, the nightly newscast, by the independent local television station.
The CBC has got so heavily into commercialism because, they simply say, “We needed the money because Parliament gave us inconsistent funding.” Our Canadian viewers simply could not see any difference in the CBC content from the others, so they lost their unique identity and they lost the viewer trust. Now many Canadians wonder whether their tax dollars deliver and whether CBC English TV even deserves tax support.
Once CBC English TV became obsessed with commercial ratings, they declined to near irrelevance, capturing only 7%, as I mentioned. In short, the CBC has been unsuccessful, and they're unsuccessful at the moment, in being unique. As well, they've been unable to be commercially strong. In other words, they failed at the other goal of being commercially relevant. I say, why should they even try? That is not their mandate. Canada needs an independent public TV voice we can trust.
It was not always this way. I noticed the age of some of you, and you won't remember what I'm talking about here, but I dare say there are perhaps a couple of you who might remember This Hour Has Seven Days. It mesmerized the national audience on CBC television. It was not expensive; it was simply brilliant TV. Front Page Challenge connected Canadians with current events and personalities for a quarter of a century. It was not expensive; it was simply a well-conceived format, well written and cast with people who became icons across this nation. CBC grabbed huge national audiences with homegrown folk culture, with Don Messer's Jubilee, Juliette, The Tommy Hunter Show, Country Hoedown, and The Irish Rovers. These were not expensive, but they were well staged, and crisply and efficiently packaged in Montreal, Toronto, Halifax, and Vancouver.
I am not suggesting that we resurrect these formats. I am merely saying that CBC history used creative genius and imagination to win. They did not need a million dollars an hour to succeed. Today, CBC does not even cover the Juno Awards they created. They lost CFL football, and the Olympic Games they pioneered have now gone to the private sector.
More important, Canada is losing its best creative brains. Our writers, actors, editors, producers, and news stars simply leave, making ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC stronger for our loss. There was just no one in Canada allowing them to creatively function.
Canada’s telefilm and cable TV funds have produced nothing except heartaches and duds, with very rare successes, and the CBC in the meantime has almost vanished. You, our elected leaders, spread the few public dollars allocated to culture so thinly that it created a mishmash of mediocrity. Why do we allow this mismanagement to continue? The fault is not all with the CBC. The parliamentary political support is misguided and somewhat lost. They try to be all things to all special interests, and end up pleasing no one.
Why can’t the CBC do more co-productions with the BBC, RAI, and PBS? The answer is that the commercial format makes it impossible for the CBC to deliver what real public TV delivers: commercial-free programming.
Whatever happened to CBC studio dramas, carried weekly for years and years with no commercial interruption? I don't know if anyone remembers Festival. It featured serious weekly plays by the world’s best playwrights. Do we ever see plays from the Shaw Festival or the Stratford Festival today? Whatever happened to the regular symphony concerts, ballets, and operas on CBC? We all know the answer. The audiences are too small to carry high art programming. In other words, ratings trump culture.
Would we more enjoy The Nature of Things, The Fifth Estate, and The National if they did not carry commercials? Do we trust a network to tell us the truth about the companies that are also their sponsors? Children’s programming on every channel should be commercial-free, but on the CBC it's mandatory. Where is the new CBC TV children’s fare? They have bowed out because they cannot raise commercial cash with kids' TV.
Today we are at the crisis stage. It could and should be a crossroads of opportunity. The remedy to cure the disease that has eaten away a national treasure that has only one program in the top 25 viewed weekly by Canadians is simple: our federal government must stop giving our precious cultural cash to the real commercial networks like CTV/CHUM, Global/CH, Rogers, Alliance Atlantis, and even Corus, and put it all where it should be, into a national public TV system. Our government is spreading the money in so many directions that it is like a wine diluted—and I'm a Niagaran; I'm an expert here. It's tasteless and it satisfies no one if it's diluted.
Why do we need a public broadcaster to use government subsidies to buy Hockey Night In Canada rights when the show is profitable? Why is CBC Sports, a great brand, not on a separate channel like TSN or Rogers Sportsnet, which are pay-TV systems? You could sell the company or have a separate sports channel.
In exchange for CBC giving up competing for commercial revenues, the private TV operators give up their government subsidies for their programming. Put all the cash that you are now making available—You need to have a merger, if you like, a merger of the different funds, a merger with the National Film Board all in one pot. You have so many pots that none of them are having any demonstrable effect. I'm not saying that because I'm critical. It's a very sad situation.
When we are watching drama in Canada, 97% of the time we are watching foreign drama. That means 3% is all we watch. We are watching U.S.A. and foreign drama, and our movie production at the box offices of the theatres in our communities across Canada is less than 3% of the revenue. Thank God for Quebec producers.
What I am suggesting does not impact private independent Canadian TV creators. They simply deliver any government-subsidized programming to the national public broadcaster, the CBC, instead of to Global or CTV.
The private TV system would get back its commercial dollars, about $300 million a year. The CBC gets all the allocation in the envelope that's from your department. That's what we're suggesting.
Don't tell us that Canada hasn't got the talent to compete against the U.S. We are the best in the world. We can produce movies for TV, soap operas, sitcoms, drama comparable to all the best of the world.
You here have the power to breathe new life into this very sick network. It would be a banner day when the Government of Canada finally supported real public TV. Make CBC TV like CBC Radio and you will help to save this nation. CBC is more than a broadcaster. It must become the glue that sticks our nation together. If we cannot save the CBC, we might end up not being able to save our nation, and I do believe it's that important.
Just as my last thought, I read a column this morning. It was written in a local newspaper by a gentleman named Knowlton Nash, who had a distinguished career leading a section of the CBC. In his column he talks about what you're doing here today and its importance and significance. He says this should not be just like all of the various commissions or Senate hearings and special hearings that have considered this future since 1936, when CBC television was conceived.
The leader of the CBC, Robert Rabinovitch, said you should have this kind of hearing every ten years to get a renewal of the CBC, but frankly we've had it. I've been here since 1959, and I've participated in at least ten of these kinds of exchanges. They are healthy, but nothing ever gets done.
This is the time to create one of the biggest public mergers in history, and only you can make it happen. The rest of us are totally helpless. It's the parliamentarians who should proudly say, “We're the sponsors of the CBC; nobody else is the sponsor. We parliamentarians, on behalf of all Canadians, sponsor the CBC.” What a banner day that would be for Canada.
Thank you.
3:45 p.m.
Joe Clark Media Access, As an Individual
Hi there. Thanks for having me.
My name is Joe Clark. I live here in Toronto. This is the third time I've given evidence before this esteemed committee. I was here in 2002 and also in 1990. I hope this will be the time when something actually happens after my appearance.
I have a 25-year interest in accessibility for people with disabilities. I do consulting work for clients on accessibility. It's mostly web accessibility, and topics like captioning and audio description. I've done a couple of little jobs for CBC here and there, but I don't have any contracts with them at present. I give lectures and presentations around the world on accessibility and other topics, and I wrote a book on web accessibility.
So let's start with some terminology. I think everyone in this room knows what captioning is. It is a transcription of dialogue and important sound effects for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. For live shows and a few other programs, we use real-time captioning, which usually involves a stenographer typing on a specialized keyboard, although now some people are trying to use a certain type of voice recognition. There are two main presentation styles for captioning. If you've watched a live show with captioning, you've seen scroll-up captioning, in which words appear from left to right and then are pushed up another line and a new line comes along. The other option is pop-on captioning, in which a single caption appears as a stationary block and is replaced by another stationary block or a blank screen.
Today I don't have time to talk about two really important topics, which are audio description for the blind and accessibility on the web, including accessibility of video on the web. You can ask me about those later, if you wish. Today I'm only going to talk about captioning.
What's going on with captioning at the CBC? Well, did you know CBC is the only broadcaster in the world that has to caption every second of its broadcast day? That's because a deaf lawyer, Henry Vlug, filed a human rights complaint about missing and inadequate captioning, and he won. Starting in November 2002, CBC claimed to comply with that decision by captioning everything on CBC television and Newsworld. But they aren't captioning everything. For three years, I watched CBC and took notes. I found well over 100 cases of missing or inadequate captioning. I published my results in November 2005, and it seemed that I was being taken seriously.
The Canadian Human Rights Commission forwarded my findings to CBC, which eventually bothered to respond. The CBC agreed that all of the different kinds of captioning errors I found had happened or could have happened, and they claimed to be tightening up their procedures. But the CBC sounded defensive and angry on other points. CBC claimed that subtitled movies don't need to be captioned, even though sound effects are never subtitled; that scroll-up captioning was just fine for dramas and comedies; and that real-time captioning absolutely should be used for programs that aren't live. They angrily defended themselves, using terms like “disagree strenuously” and “dispute vehemently”.
Then the Human Rights Commission tried to scuttle the case. My lawyer made the mistake of using the word “complaint” in a letter to the Canadian Human Rights Commission, and they seized on that and made it sound like there was never a complaint in the first place, and I'd have to file one from scratch. Basically, the Human Rights Commission tried to cancel its own investigation. CBC captioning hasn't really improved. Nothing has been completely fixed. I'm still taking notes, and the results are up on my website.
Now, if CBC can't maintain 100% accessibility, who can? If a public broadcaster cannot maintain a legal requirement to provide 100% captioning, what hope do we have for 100% captioning anywhere? Why would private broadcasters, who'll do anything to save a penny, put in any effort at all to get to 100% captioning? What hope do we have for audio description for the blind on most programming or all programming?
On several occasions, I've offered to meet with CBC to talk about captioning and accessibility in general. But they've always refused, and they did that even after they promised to meet me away back in 2002. I think it's all very embarrassing that I proved that CBC isn't living up to its requirements and that the Canadian Human Rights Commission has been asleep at the switch and hasn't been enforcing its own ruling.
Okay, what about French captioning? Well, back in 2004, retired Senator Jean-Robert Gauthier, who some of you may know personally, and who was a hard-of-hearing person, filed a complaint against Société Radio-Canada concerning captioning. As part of the settlement process, CBC agreed to submit a report on the state of captioning, particularly real-time captioning, on Radio-Canada and Réseau de l’information. I read the report, and I wrote the only known critique of it. All they were proposing was to increase the pool of real-time captioners by two people, and they weren't going to guarantee 100% captioning. There wasn't any discussion of quality standards.
And what about quality of captioning? Well, CBC has a lot of problems there. First of all, they still insist on using all capital letters, a ridiculous holdover from the 1970s. They have a homegrown captioning standard that isn't the same as the standard used at Radio Canada. Having two standards means you don't have a standard.
And neither of those standards was published, let alone tested. They use real-time captioning for shows that aren't live. They don't prepare their real-time captioners well enough. If you watch sports programming that doesn't involve professional sports, you'll find that most of the proper names are mangled, because they weren't provided to the captioners in advance. A lot of these shows are actually pre-recorded and shouldn't be using real-time captioning in the first place. CBC is totally in love with scroll-up captioning because it's so cheap, and they use it on completely inappropriate shows like fictional narrative programming. It's impossible to follow a drama or a comedy using scroll-up captioning. Try it sometime.
They refuse to caption subtitle programming or outside commercials. Only commercials for the CBC itself, things like promos for upcoming shows, are supposed to be captioned, and even then sometimes they aren't. They refuse to use Canadian English. You'd think this kind of colonialism would be extinct by now, but CBC uses British English, and they don't even get that right.
Now funnily enough, I have a solution to this problem. I'm the founder of the open and closed project. It's an independent non-profit research project that I've been incubating for five years. Our goal will be to write a set of standards for the four fields of audio-visual accessibility: captioning and audio description, subtitling, and dubbing. There are no such standards, at least none that were developed in an open process and were tested with viewers. We're going to spend four years developing the standards, and then a year testing them in the real world. We'll publish the specifications and train and certify practitioners. At that point, it will be possible for broadcasters like the CBC and producers and the CRTC and viewers to insist that all their accessibility be open and closed certified.
Also at that point, there won't be as many kinds of captioning as there are companies doing it. Everything will be standardized. There will just be captioning. There won't be CBC-style captioning or CTV-style, or the style of whoever had the lowest bid. We need half a million bucks for the first year, and $5 to $7 million for the whole seven-year project—which is peanuts. We've applied for funding from the social benefits spending from several of the broadcast industry mergers. We have bubkes so far, but that can't last, because we have support from all over the place.
We have industry support. We have signed support letters from captioning and description providers, software makers, and broadcasters in four countries.
We have grassroots support. I set up a micro-patronage program to pay for fundraising for the full project. Two hundred and fifteen people made voluntary financial contributions, and dozens of them wrote support letters.
We're friends with all the right researchers. Not only are we on a first-name basis with all the right researchers in the accessibility field, but we've got verbal agreements with some of them.
But the open and closed project does not have CBC's support. Now, some staff are privately supportive, including one person who wrote us a support letter. But we need more than that. It would mean a lot, really, if Canada's national public broadcaster accepted the need for outside independent standards and supported their development. Support could mean anything. It doesn't have to cost money. A good place to start would be a public statement. But for that to happen, CBC would have to get over itself and stop being so arrogant and defensive. By the way, not only has the CBC failed to support the open and closed project, it has held secret closed-door meetings with other broadcasters and other audio description service providers to rewrite existing standards.
To sum up, CBC has an unusual captioning requirement, and they aren't living up to it. They're angry and defensive when you ask them about it. The Human Rights Commission refused to enforce or even investigate its own ruling. CBC cooks up its own standards rather than supporting independent open standards.
Thank you.
3:55 p.m.
Viggo Lewis As an Individual
With your permission, Mr. Chairman, I'll kick it off.
First of all, thank you very much to you and members of the committee for the opportunity of appearing before you.
I'd like to introduce my colleagues. With me today are John Spence, who is editor of cbc.watch.ca, a website devoted to documenting and discussing issues of bias and balance in CBC programming, and Frank Gue, a retired professional engineer from the fields of manufacturing, management, and education. My name is Viggo Lewis. I'm a retired businessman with a background in manufacturing companies in Canada and the States.
I'll kick off with a six-minute presentation, followed by two minutes each from my colleagues. We're very conscious of your time requirements.
We have submitted a written brief that recommends, in summary, first that CBC's mandate should be revised to include two clauses from the Broadcasting Act that deal with the requirement that Canadian programming “be varied and comprehensive, providing a balance of information” and—the second clause—“provide a reasonable opportunity for the public to be exposed to the expression of differing views on matters of public concern”.
This recommendation in itself is not enough. It is one thing to have a mandate and policies, and quite another to ensure that the mandate is carried out. So we've attached to this recommendation two others, which we consider to be an integral part and of equal importance, namely first: that just as CBC undoubtedly has in place controls to ensure compliance with other important matters of corporate policy, such as safety, equal opportunity, and so on, so should controls be established to ensure that programming bias is eliminated and balance becomes the order of the day; secondly, that all future ombudsmen be appointed from outside the ranks of present or past CBC employees.
The current policy of appointing present or former CBC employees to this position places too great a burden on the individual appointed to provide impartial judgment of past colleagues and friends with whom he or she has been associated for years. Further, that person should be able to see with clear lenses, and not those provided by the CBC.
We've submitted our brief based not on opinion or perception, but on facts. As we have shown in our written brief, it is a fact that CBC management readily admit to the public perception of left-wing bias and lack of balance in their programming, and we've provided evidence of our own to support this admission and concern. On the other hand, CBC management resolutely deny that bias and lack of balance exist.
Now, whose perception is correct? We believe it's the public's perception, representing all hues of society, that is the correct one.
Why have we made these recommendations? What good will they do? How will they improve the state of broadcasting in Canada, especially since the need for journalistic balance is well-covered in CBC's journalistic standards and practice?
The answer is that the need for balance in an organization that is the most broadly-based and substantial broadcast journalism organization in Canada, funded by all of us, is huge. The CBC occupies a unique position of trust in Canada and by virtue of its size and coverage exerts enormous influence on public opinion, and these steps will help ensure balance.
CBC fulfills sections of its mandate, such as reflecting the multicultural nature of Canada, being distinctively Canadian, contributing to the flow of and exchange of cultural expression, and so on. By contrast—and this is important—by its own admission it fails to live up to its own journalistic standards of providing balance, as perceived by the public. This is unacceptable, and so we say that since its mandate is absolutely silent on the subject of balance, and since this subject is of such importance, it should be written into CBC's mandate.
If the heritage committee endorses this recommendation, it could and should act as a tipping point to CBC policy and action in the future and help increase its audience, and we think that's important.
To conclude, we feel that we need a public broadcaster, but we need a balanced public broadcaster. CBC—and I'm sure you're well aware of this, because you faced them—faces many costly demands by various interest groups. But these recommendations are unique, in that they appeal not to a single interest group but to the public as a whole and are not costly.
Thank you for your attention and invitation to take part.
I'll turn it over to John Spence.
4 p.m.
John Spence Editor, cbcwatch.ca, As an Individual
Thank you very much.
I'm the editor of CBC Watch, a website entitled www.cbcwatch.ca, that was established early in 2004 for Canadians who had enough of the bias activism and extremism of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. CBC Watch includes viewpoints on issues that the CBC wilfully neglects to include in issue debates. CBC omissions are to the detriment of the overall public debate. Since conception, the website has had more than three and a half million individual visits—that's not hits. CBC Watch is a website that doesn't cost Canadians a single penny. The website is currently being revamped, and it's going to relaunch in May.
The website regularly exposes clear CBC policy violations of stipulations of the Broadcasting Act. It also exposes various other actions, productions, or omissions on behalf of the CBC that undermine the integrity of broadcasting in Canada.
Contrary to what many CBC supporters believe, it's not an anti-CBC website. CBC Watch is an anti-CBC-bias and anti-CBC-activism website. Unlike the CBC, CBC Watch is not required to be balanced by any Canadian statute. Subparagraph 3(1)(i)(iv) of the Canadian Broadcasting Act states that the CBC must “provide a reasonable opportunity for the public to be exposed to the expression of differing views on matters of public concern”. Clearly the CBC has failed to do that, so it is our position that portions of this section should be added to CBC's mandate.
The CBC knows it has this problem. In a memo released in November 2003, CBC news head Tony Burman admitted that the CBC commissioned a study and found that Canadians found the CBC to be biased. Exactly in what ways Canadians found the CBC to be biased is not known. The CBC refuses to release detailed data of the multi-million-dollar study to the people who paid for it, the Canadian taxpayers. What's interesting about Tony Burman's reaction is that he actually took solace from the fact that the study showed that Canadians did not find the CBC as biased as CNN.
In other words, Burman seems to think CBC bias is okay, as long as it's not as biased as some private American cable news channel. Sorry, but the law says that's not good enough. The complaint system at the CBC is not meant to correct or address any ongoing bias, even if the CBC uncovered that bias. It is a smoke screen. There is little if anything accomplished by CBC's in-house complaints response mechanism.
Former CBC employee Robert Fulford—his wife is a CBC producer—put it best when he said:
But citizens who complain to management receive CBC-justifying letters that inevitably explain that the CBC is consistently fair. These letters are so long and tedious that they fill with glue, perhaps fatally, the mind of anyone who reads them. I think of this process as Death by Ombud. Its purpose is to ensure that the citizen in question will never, ever write a letter of protest again.
So we have recommended that future ombudsmen be appointed from outside the ranks of the CBC.
Later in that same column, Mr. Fulford writes of the CBC's lack of diversity of viewpoints:
Many journalists find working for the CBC highly educational. Certainly it was for me. In the days when I first began broadcasting on the CBC, the term “politically correct” didn't exist. But no one at the CBC needed a term. They lived by it without knowing what to call it. As I listened to them I began to realize that they all read the same publications and thought the same thoughts. Many became friends of mine, but I developed an aversion to their eerie uniformity of views.
This was in the National Post on September 23, 2006.
Critics at the private news media argue that CBC's bias provides a counterbalance to the private news media organizations. Private news media outlets are allowed to have editorial bias, and balance can be achieved across the private media spectrum. The CBC, however, is required by statute to reflect all Canadians, not only left-wing Canadians, or be both an interpreter and the counterbalance. It has to be balanced. To ensure this, we have recommended that controls be instituted. Unchecked CBC bias over time becomes a false Canadian historical record.
Again, the CBC is required by statute to reflect all Canadians, not only left-wing Canadians. It's required to be balanced, yet it refuses to be fair and objective in its presentation of issues, ideas, organizations, and political issues. To ensure balance, we have recommended that procedural and hiring controls be instituted.
Thank you very much for this opportunity.
4:05 p.m.
Frank Gue As an Individual
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I'm Frank Gue, and I see that I have a great deal in common with Mr. Wilks, because I'm a very old-time broadcaster, as in “Flash, Washington: State Department reports Japs attack Pearl Harbor”. I was a news editor that quiet Sunday morning.
In this file is 13 years of criticism of and also support for the CBC, mostly Radio One. Mr. Lewis has rightly suggested that the CBC give heavier emphasis to balance and to bring it forward into the mandate itself. The need for balance is exemplified by a 99-day sampling that I did of CBC Radio One. A listener, catching whatever he catches in his busy day, would have heard 31 items pejorative of Conservative people or parties to one pejorative to the Liberals and none to the NDP. A different auditor would get certainly different numbers, but the message would not have changed since I took this sample.
Concerning commentators, the CBC unfortunately at times hides behind commentators and says they can't be responsible for what the commentators say, but the CBC can be responsible for the commentators they choose. And of the commentators they choose, the CBC gives the left wing—I dislike the expression, but it seems to be understood—ample time, but gives competent, often brilliant, world-renowned right-wing voices very little time. Suzuki gets an hour; Hargrove, twenty minutes; the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, ten minutes; the Fraser Institute or the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, virtually nil.
The ombudsman and the producers to whom he refers complaints about balance write courteous letters, while seldom, if ever, acknowledging any problem. Their typical argument is that balance cannot be determined from a single program, and certainly one would have to agree with that, but then refer back to the 99-day sample.
CBC management's challenge is move balance into the mandate and reorient and control people accordingly.
A word about control: it is extremely clear that certain producers have local policies that conflict head-on with the CBC's policies, and I can give you examples. The CBC must use commentators of all shades and keep score using, as Mr. Lewis said, outside, non-broadcasting, and I might say also non-academic auditors. And please, do improve the status and the powers of the ombudsman.
Thank you very much.
4:10 p.m.
Conservative
4:10 p.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
Mr. Gue, when you heard those 31 comments critical of the Conservative government, or of the Conservatives or of Conservatives, was that during the time that we had a Conservative government?
4:10 p.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
That we had a Conservative government. When did you—
4:10 p.m.
As an Individual
Yes, it was. There was a Conservative government in power provincially and the Liberal government in power federally.
4:10 p.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
I guess my point is that if you read Jeffrey Simpson, for example, far from being an extreme leftist, he'll say to you that one of politicians' greatest complaints is that the media is too conservative, and other politicians will say the media is too liberal, and they'll say now that there's a right-wing bias in the media generally. This is why I find this issue so complicated.
It seems to me that journalists per se have a natural bias against authority, because their job is to keep authority from abusing power. So that's an endemic thing. So if the authority happens to be left-wing, I would expect that the journalists would be critical of that authority, maybe challenging some left-wing tendencies in the government or what have you.
I find this whole thing very problematic. I just don't know what to say to these charges of bias. You said you had examples also of situations where the local CBC producers' policies were in conflict with the national CBC policy. You said you had many examples. Could you give me one?
4:10 p.m.
As an Individual
Yes, I could give you one. I could give you many, but I will certainly give you one, and a recent one.
There was a one-hour program, a Saturday morning program, The House, which I listen to religiously. It's usually an excellent program, and the CBC does extremely well, usually. Perhaps this was a couple of months ago. That hour was absolutely poisonous. You should look it up. If you wish, I could give you the exact date. It contained no information that could, by any stretch, be labelled The House. It contained endless innuendoes, such as references to an extremist sect of some sort in the United States, with the dark message that this was also Stephen Harper's home church. The entire hour was consumed that way. I left the hour, that program, angry, really angry.
I consider myself a broad-minded person. I listen to the left; I listen to the right. The left are not all idiots and neither are the right; you've got to listen to them both.
4:10 p.m.
As an Individual
May I add to that?
I'd like to address the point you made, to which I think we're all sympathetic, that it's the job of a journalist to critique the party in power, and indeed all parties. But in the case of CBC, they conducted an extensive study in 2003, and I'll read a quote—
4:10 p.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
I appreciate your point. I would just like to get in a few more questions, if you don't mind. I do understand your point, but—