The point I would like to hear is the reference to an independent study.
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.
4:10 p.m.
Conservative
Ed Fast Conservative Abbotsford, BC
The point I would like to hear is the reference to an independent study.
4:10 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gary Schellenberger
You can ask that question when it comes around.
Go ahead, Mr. Scarpaleggia.
4:10 p.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
It seems to me that real democratic debate means the largest plethora of different opinions. Broadcasters who are chasing ratings are going to be more restrained in their criticisms of corporations or the economic system, or a government, a Conservative government. And since most of the broadcasting industry is privately owned, it would seem to me that you would like to have a critical voice offering an alternative point of view. And maybe it's not 100% objective in the scientific sense, but if you take the industry as a whole, then you have a greater diversity of opinion.
That, I think, is important to consider as well.
4:15 p.m.
As an Individual
I'd like to respond to that.
In fact the CBC's sponsored study found that the CBC was a toady to the Liberal government. I'll read to you, if I may, a quote from the study: “According to the quantitative opinion data, CBC News not being perceived by as many English Canadians to be 'politically biased' or always reflecting current government opinion of events”—and at the time of the study it was a Liberal government—“ would further enhance these core values.” In other words, he's saying the CBC would do better than to parrot the Liberal viewpoint.
I think this flies in the face of your point.
4:15 p.m.
As an Individual
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Just to respond to Mr. Scarpaleggia's point that one would expect journalists to perhaps attack the party in power, fair enough. You've described a lean. I'm not describing a lean. I'm describing somebody who is so far left, you can't see him from here. I'll give you a specific example, and I'm sorry to have to bring it up, but I must. The CBC will resort to flat lies. If you wish to have an example, I can give you one.
4:15 p.m.
As an Individual
At an important policy conference for the provincial PC government of the time, it was announced that Mike Harris was resigning, and of course that raised quite a hullabaloo. The CBC reported that the policy conference instantly degenerated into a leadership contest—a flat lie. I was there.
4:15 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gary Schellenberger
Thank you.
You've gone a little over time.
Madame Bourgeois.
4:15 p.m.
Bloc
Diane Bourgeois Bloc Terrebonne—Blainville, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I don't have any questions for Messrs. Gue, Lewis or Spence because, since I live in Quebec, I don't follow politics in English Canada. So I'll leave the floor to the other committee members.
Mr. Wilks, you have a lot of expectations of this committee, and we're going to try to meet them as best we can. Moreover, that's why we're here.
As for Joe Clark, the homonym of the other one, I would like to ask you specifically what your demands are. You've produced a beautiful document, and you explained all the complaints you're filing in detail. If we had only one or two demands to make of the CBC, could you properly summarize what they would be?
4:15 p.m.
Media Access, As an Individual
That's pretty simple, actually. The CBC should be a standard bearer for accessibility in Canada. That means on its television networks, for example, 100% captioning and a large quantity of audio description on the web, accessibility for people with disabilities there; and point number two, all that accessibility should be carried out according to independently developed open standards. It's easy.
4:15 p.m.
Bloc
Diane Bourgeois Bloc Terrebonne—Blainville, QC
So you would like access for persons with disabilities and you would like this done openly. What does that mean?
4:15 p.m.
Media Access, As an Individual
No, it would be according to standards that were developed openly through independent outside process. The standards are developed openly. They're not closed standards.
4:15 p.m.
Media Access, As an Individual
For the web, there are already existing international independently developed standards that could be adhered to, so that's already in place. For broadcasting, for things like captioning and audio description, my organization wants to write those standards independently.
4:20 p.m.
Bloc
Diane Bourgeois Bloc Terrebonne—Blainville, QC
That's good, thank you.
If I understand correctly, both you, Mr. Clark, and the people here seem to be saying that the complaints system at the CBC doesn't work well and that it would be in everyone's interests to put better control measures in place. Is that in fact what you told us?
4:20 p.m.
Media Access, As an Individual
Not specifically, because I don't have complaints about journalistic objectivity, as the other members of the panel might, nor do I have complaints about funding mechanisms or which documentary errs and which documentary didn't. I don't have those sorts of complaints.
When you get right down to it, discussing accessibility on the CBC is a sort of internal matter. It's a matter of their own production operations. In fact, if you go to the broadcasting centre here in Toronto, it's on the sixth floor in the program broadcast services department. So when it comes to complaints, I'm not in the same category as my esteemed colleagues on this table.
However, you are bringing up a point that CBC is not very good at dealing with criticism. They really only have two modes. They flinch. The first thing they can do, especially if some right-wing organization provides criticism, is just flinch and cave in completely. The example of that would be, let's say they produced an historical docudrama about a famous politician from the prairies, and that docudrama, even though it was fictional, showed the politician wearing his watch on his right arm when in fact he wore it on the left, and after a fusillade of complaints about this terrible historical inaccuracy, CBC gives in completely and agrees never to air it again and to stop selling the DVDs. That would be an example of their flinching.
The other case is the one I've experienced, where the CBC are complete rat bastards about things. You prove to them that they've made a mistake and they grit their teeth and seethe and angrily insist that, no, they didn't make a mistake. They dispute the definition of what a mistake is. They go through an entire list of things, but it's all done in anger and defensiveness.
So if we were talking about improving the complaint culture at CBC, I'd say they should get out of those two modes of just flinching and being arrogant and defensive all the time.
4:20 p.m.
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
Thank you very much for the presentations this afternoon.
Mr. Clark, I'm interested because captioning is a huge issue in our home. We don't watch movies that aren't captioned. The TV is off if it's not captioned, because my oldest daughter is deaf. We've seen lots of captioning where it suddenly turns into Norwegian script. When they have to have somebody's name, there are 13 j's and two x's and it's incomprehensible to read. There are delays where the punchlines are long gone when you're still trying to catch up to the captioning.
In terms of DVDs, I don't know if you've checked. In most Canadian movies that I see—Well, we don't watch them because they don't have captioning, period. American films all have captioning. Are you aware of whether CBC products that are available for DVD come captioned?
4:20 p.m.
Media Access, As an Individual
Let's go through those things one after another. Errors: I assume you're referring to real-time captioning, like a newscast, for example?
4:20 p.m.
Media Access, As an Individual
If it's an uncommon proper name, and those things happen every single day, then the real-time captioners do not have that name in their dictionary. They either have to laboriously spell it letter by letter, and that can happen several times in the course of a sentence, or just put in frenetic strokes and hope it gets translated correctly, and that often doesn't work. By the next day, though, if that name is still in the news, the name is put in the dictionary, but you won't see that.
Delays—are you also referring to real-time captioning on live shows?
4:20 p.m.
Media Access, As an Individual
The human captioner has to hear the audio, think about it, type the right keystrokes or re-voice it, and then that has to be translated by the computer software, sent back over the phone line, and then sent back to you. There is an unavoidable three- to nine-second delay, even in really good real-time captioning, and that will never change.
Now, for DVDs, it's true: most studio releases in the United States have captioning in part because of a settlement in a class action lawsuit that came through in 2006. A lot of the DVDs in Canada come from small, independent producers, or—let's put it generously—rather economical, spendthrift producers, and they don't even bother with French audio track or French subtitling. So it is quite common to find Canadian DVDs that don't have captioning. The CBC DVDs that I have watched have had captioning, and several of them have had audio description. I have not done a check to see if this is consistent across the board.