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.