Canadian Heritage Committee on April 24th, 2007

[Arthur Lewis]

We don't think so. We don't think it's politically saleable for government to put $300 million or $400 million into the CBC to remove advertising, and we don't think there's a necessity for that. If the government were to say it was willing to do that, we would, first of all, say put it into programming, and then if they said okay, then we're going to give them another $400 million, we wouldn't be adverse to seeing most advertising off the CBC, although on commercial sports and so on it doesn't offend anybody. I don't know anybody who is bothered by commercials in the hockey game; they have to take breaks in the game anyway, and there is time between the periods. How much Don Cherry can you take? A few commercials are probably—

[Voices]

Oh, Oh!

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Ah, he's gone to the States.

So it would be a possible mixed system, with the reliance on advertising in sports.

The issue that came up the other day from some of our creative people is that getting an advertisement for a new program on Hockey Night in Canada or during American Idol actually drives viewers to more obscure CBC programs that would not have an audience anyway.

[Arthur Lewis]

Absolutely.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Okay.

The question is on the carriage fee. I like the idea of it in some ways, but it strikes me that we're talking about basically a TV tax on consumers and whether or not that's going to create much more resentment than simply increasing that amount through augmenting from the government. In light of what we just saw with the CTF, and because we had a national hissy fit from Shaw Communications Inc. about having to even pay into the CTF, how do you think we can sell the idea of a TV tax to consumers to pay for CBC?

[Arthur Lewis]

They're paying it now. They're paying for Newsworld, they're paying for RDI, as I said, and they're paying for The Sports Network. It's a hard, cruel world, and I'm sure this is going to come back to bite me, but the reality is that consumers don't get a lot of say in the matter. Nobody asks me whether I want to pay for MuchMusic; nobody asks me whether I want to pay for some of the other specialty channels. If I want certain tiers of service, I pay for programming that I don't necessarily want.

If the average Canadian has to pay a few dollars to help support public broadcasting, I don't think that's the end of the world. There's a limit to what's acceptable, and I would certainly hope the committee would not see that as the prime way of increasing funding for CBC, but it could be $2 to $4 perhaps staged over a period of time on the cable bill. I'm already paying Rogers $150 a month for all the things I get from them, and it just went up another $2. Who is going to notice? People will complain and then life will go on.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

This is where we have different opinions that are starting to bump into each other. There is a view out there in the analog world that rabbit ear service must be maintained, that every Canadian gets free television for CBC and that's part of our social contract. If we're moving towards carriage fees and subscription fees, basically treating CBC as a specialty service, are we not then disenfranchising the people who watch the Montreal Canadiens back home on Saturday night with the rabbit ears?

[Arthur Lewis]

That's a difficult question, but as I'm sure you're aware, the CBC is already proposing 44 transmitters that would basically limit its over-the-air high-definition transmission to major cities, and everybody else would be experiencing what the people of Kamloops, British Columbia, are already experiencing: get it on cable or satellite or you don't get it. We think that's wrong, but that may be the only practical way in the future, given the, I would suggest, highly unlikely circumstance that the government is willing to put up hundreds of millions of dollars to replicate the existing CBC transmission system. In an ideal world, yes, let's do it, but I just don't see the money forthcoming. Certainly in a balance of lesser evils, I'd rather see the money go into programming than towers, and there's always a limit to how much is available.

Certainly, we have said to the CRTC, and I would say to you, that as the Kamloops situation spreads across the country and in small town, rural, remote Canada there are no longer TV transmitters for the CBC, and probably the private broadcasters as well, there should be a minimum cost, a basic service that everybody should be able to get. As to whether you waive the subscription fee on that service, probably yes, and only charge it. Most people, in reality, take additional services and pay Mr. Rogers and others a lot of extra money for movie channels, American channels, and so on, but I wouldn't feel any qualm of conscience about hitting them with another $2 to $4 for public broadcasting.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Mr. Fast.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, gentlemen, for appearing before us today.

When I go into my communities, I don't hear about governance. My residents don't talk about funding and they don't talk about advertising; the one thing they talk about is relevance. Is CBC relevant to them?

It's the one issue you haven't touched on in your presentation to us today. When I go into my community, which is Abbotsford, when I talk to people from surrounding communities, typically when you talk about CBC, you're going to be talking about whether it's relevant to them as families, as individuals. Do they see themselves on CBC? There are many Canadians who do, but increasingly, I hear complaints that my residents don't see themselves in the programming that CBC provides.

It's been said that CBC is supposed to be the face of Canada that we see reflected back at us. I think there is an assumption that there is one face of Canada we all agree on. I would suggest to you that's not the case. In fact, Canada has many different faces, although we may have a defining set of underlying values, given our multicultural society, our pluralistic society, something we pride ourselves in.

What suggestion can you make that is going to make CBC more relevant to the average Canadian? Let me just point you in a direction. I believe the appointment of an ombudsman was a good first step, but I suspect there's more we can do to make sure the programming we show on CBC attracts Canadian viewers who are looking for Canadian content, and not only Canadian content, but content that speaks to them and reflects their face back at them.

Your comments.

[Arthur Lewis]

I think your concerns are well-founded, but I would throw back at you—this may sound like a trite cliché—that relevance costs money, and if you want the relevance, you have to pay the bill.

In terms of regional programming—and you've heard many calls already for increased regional programming—the CBC came to the Liberal government of the day about two years ago and said they wanted $87 million to increase their regional programming in television, radio, the Internet. They got no take-up, no interest. This committee heard the presentation. A lot of it came in response to recommendations from your 2003 report. The government of the day wasn't interested.

Because of that, the CBC went back informally some months ago—I believe it's probably coming up to a year now—and raised something they called the 20/20 plan, which was going to cost only $20 million a year, was only going to deal with radio, and was going to deal with mainland British Columbia, the London-Kitchener-Waterloo area, and the Hamilton area. You heard from those people in Hamilton the other day. CBC wants to provide service to those areas but doesn't have the money. So show them the money and they'll deliver the relevance.

Now, if you want to talk television, drama, and other types of programming that reflect Canadian realities, again, the CBC—and you heard all this on Friday in Toronto—is not doing enough. Give them the money. They want to do a lot more drama. Drama is what primarily reflects back our lives. It's what CBC is trying to do with Little Mosque on the Prairie, and would be doing, I'm sure, in a multitude of ways, if it had the money to do it.

[Paul Gaffney]

Can I give you a little background to this dilemma? It's one the CBC has faced for a long time. When the cuts began to get serious in the early 1990s, one of the great dilemmas that was debated internally was this. How do we reconcile the need to be a national public broadcaster with roots out there in all the communities of Canada and a network service as well?

The hard reality is that—I'll pick a weird number—I can make a program for, say, $100, and I could put it on the network and it covers everybody. If I make the same program, or some variation on a theme, in each of 15 or 20 regions, it costs me 15 or 20 times $100. When money is tight, you begin to say to yourself, economically speaking, it makes more sense to try to make the program at the network level for $100 rather than at the regional level for $2,000, to pick those numbers. Now, what I can also do is maybe reach out a bit into the communities and put a little content into that $100 program and maybe spend $200 on it, but I'm still much further ahead. The problem is, I get to a point where I can't maintain any reasonable semblance of regional production facilities because money is getting too tight. If I'm going to protect the organization itself, I have to protect the core, which is the network service. So, by way of background, the struggle went on at that level.

I would argue, however, that compared to every other television service and radio service in the country, CBC provides a great deal more regional content than anybody else. CBC radio, certainly, is rooted right out there.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

I'm not only referring to regional programming; I'm also talking about people who are complaining about media bias, who feel their face is not reflected back to them.

We've heard from aboriginals, we've heard from francophones, and just last week in Toronto we heard from people who want to articulate a Conservative voice, that they're not being represented. They're frustrated that this publicly subsidized public broadcaster is actually not serving the needs of Canadians as broadly as it should. I think that's the struggle you're going to find out there. If in fact the CBC becomes increasingly irrelevant to Canadians, it's going to have a tough time sustaining support within Canadian society. That's a challenge for you to look at more specifically as you put forward resolutions to this problem.

[Arthur Lewis]

I have to say, I don't want to dump on another witness, but I read the transcript of Ms. Landolt's testimony and I thought a lot of it bordered on the absurd.

There was an idea put forward—I think it was on Friday—that the ombudsperson at the CBC should perhaps not be a CBC employee or a former CBC employee. I think that's an idea that perhaps has merit and should be looked at. And this person should be seen to have completely clean hands, no bias, no influence. I think that's something you might want to consider.

I used to work in the CBC newsroom, and you get into the middle of an election and the phones ring off the hook, and the Conservatives call up and they tell you you're biased in favour of the Liberals, and the Liberals call up and tell you you're biased in favour of the Conservatives.

You, obviously, by the fact that you're here, reside in a riding that has a predominance of Conservative voters, so I would expect you to hear that from the people in your riding. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the Liberals hear that the CBC is biased in favour of the Conservatives—they can speak for themselves.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

We have to move on.

Mr. Boshcoff.

[Ken Boshcoff, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Thank you very much.

In the case that you've been presenting here, are you talking mostly about television, or are you including the radio component of it, in the general sense?

[Arthur Lewis]

Television is a money-eater. There have been a lot of cutbacks in radio, but they're not as noticeable. As long as you have a voice—into a microphone, as I'm doing here now—you don't see the fact that a lot of the people working behind the scenes have been cut and the quality is reduced, the research is reduced, and so on. Good radio takes a lot of money. Good television takes a lot more. Television, we all know, is the problem child. We're concerned about both.

[Ken Boshcoff, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

In the report we have, it says:

With respect to regional and local programming, the Task Force noted that budget reallocations had begun to degrade the CBC’s capacity to reflect the regions to themselves and one another.

I'd noticed this in my area particularly, which is Thunder Bay—Rainy River and northwestern Ontario, and the parallel exists for northeastern Ontario. We're talking about a riding that goes from Minnesota to Hudson Bay and James Bay, from Lake Superior to the Manitoba border, has two time zones, and is larger than France. All of northern Ontario is larger than many European countries put together. It's huge. I can see the physical evidence—the reduction in staff, the vacant offices, and those types of things—from the local bureau, and when I hear about that, I wonder if it is a trend that we should be concerned about: the reduction, the diminishing, the phasing-out of those kinds of operations. It seems to be an incremental thing whereby you don't hire a regional manager and you don't replace a reporter. It's done by attrition and other means, but certainly it becomes something that's plainly evident.

[Arthur Lewis]

That's how the CBC has stayed on the air. I worked in Ottawa at the supper hour program for many years. I left in 2000, just at the point when they cut the supper hours back to half an hour and they cut the staff by 40%. One of the reasons I left was I thought this is not what I want to do. This is going to take all the fun and pleasure out of it, rushing to, as we say, feed the goat, get something on the air.

Recently, when the CBC went back to a full hour, there was no increase in staff, so the same people who were barely hanging on producing a half-hour program are now expected to produce an hour. The same thing happens in radio.

Certainly you should be concerned. That's why the CBC needs more money.

[Ken Boshcoff, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

And those issues of local news or regional issues, the placement of regional stations from coast to coast to coast, to me, are the nature of a public broadcaster, whether it is radio or television, so you're making a very strong case for it.

How do we engage the public to support that? Even though many of the places these regional stations reach are often the only Canadian radio or television, it's still a matter of finding public support for it, and as has been mentioned earlier by the Conservative side, there are people who would rather not have this happen.

[Arthur Lewis]

Strangely enough, this circles back to the issue of governance, because I think—and I don't want to turn this into a heavy attack—one of the largest failures of the current president has been in selling the CBC to the country. I think the president of the CBC should be on the hustings. He should be out there telling Canadians why they need to invest more in public broadcasting and what public broadcasting could provide to them. But when your appointment and your reappointment is determined by the government, when you have to go cap in hand to the government every year for that $60 million—It started with the Liberals and now the Conservatives are playing the same game. We give it to you—actually the Conservatives gave it to the CBC for two years—but it's a short leash and it restrains the CBC. I think some of the onus is on the CBC to go out and do this, but it has not unfortunately been making its case to Canadians in nearly a forceful enough way.

[Ken Boshcoff, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Then it all comes down to the question of whether it is a legitimate concern for regional broadcasters. Should we as elected representatives be engaging our constituents to support the local programming in a more active way? Is there a role for the elected representative?

[Arthur Lewis]

Well, hear, hear! I'd love to see the CBC doing it, but I'd also love to see MPs getting their constituents in Hamilton, London, Guelph, the mainland of British Columbia, and several other areas out there beating on the doors of the CBC and the government—there's no point beating on the doors of the CBC actually, because they want to do it, they just don't have the money—and saying, we want this service. So I would encourage you to agitate and advocate. The more voices the better.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you.

We'll go to Mr. Kotto.

[Maka Kotto, Bloc, Saint-Lambert, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I'm going to move away from the current discussion to bring us to a more—how would I put it?—philosophical debate. Today, is it the responsibility of the public broadcaster, like the CBC/SRC, to act, as is the case in some eastern countries, as a sounding board for the policies or the ideology of the government?