Good morning, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.
I'm Arthur Lewis, executive director of Our Public Airwaves. We're a voluntary organization devoted to revitalization of public broadcasting in Canada.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should confess that I worked for CBC for many years as a reporter and producer in TV news and current affairs.
With me is Paul Gaffney, a member of our coordinating committee. I'll introduce him more fully in a minute.
Obviously, your study of CBC and its mandate speaks to the very issues that concern us the most, and we very much appreciate the opportunity to participate in this very important discussion.
Our Public Airwaves believes that CBC's current legislative mandate is as relevant today as it was when that act was first written.
To fulfill that mandate, we believe that CBC needs a long-term agreement with the government, increased multi-year funding, new funding for expansion of regional programming, access to additional TV channels, wider cable and satellite distribution of existing specialty channels, a reduction in reliance on commercial revenue, greater access to cable and satellite subscription fees, and major reform of the CBC's governance.
The past two decades have witnessed explosive growth in the number of new television channels available to Canadians. This growth has created a serious imbalance in our broadcasting system because the vast majority of those new channels have been private commercial services delivering heavy doses of American programming. During the same period there was almost no growth in the number of public broadcasting channels delivering predominantly Canadian programming.
As your committee noted in its 2003 report, CBC/Radio-Canada was badly served by the CRTC's repeated refusal of licences for new specialty channels, while private sector competitors greatly expanded their array of specialty channels.
In a recent brief to the CRTC’s TV policy review, Our Public Airwaves recommended that the commission attempt to right this wrong by requiring cable and satellite distributors to provide carriage in their first tier of all of CBC/Radio-Canada specialty channels. This is in keeping with one of the basic tenets of public broadcasting: universal accessibility.
As first proposed by this committee in its 2003 report, CBC should also be encouraged to apply for additional licences in order to return our broadcasting system to a better balance of public and commercial services. This would provide CBC with substantially more shelf space for the display of Canadian programming, something akin to the multiplicity of channels provided by the BBC.
At this point I'd like to more fully introduce my colleague, Paul Gaffney. Paul spent many years working for CBC, starting as a TV production assistant and later as a producer and director of news and current affairs, and then TV program manager here in Ottawa, where, parenthetically, he was my boss. More recently he was director of strategic planning and senior director of corporate affairs for CBC. He also served as executive director of the office of the president.