Thank you very much. It is a great pleasure for me to be here with you.
I will do most of my presentation in English, but if you have any questions in French I will answer in kind.
I've been teaching for two years at McMaster University, in the communication studies and multimedia department. For 16 years before that, I worked with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In that capacity, I was involved not as a technological expert on new media but in actually taking the kind of work that the engineers were working on with the CRC folks and putting forward the applications for the transmitters to the CRTC. Part of what I did in that capacity was try to translate into plain language why a public broadcaster should be spending your tax dollars on this sort of technology. It comes down to some of the principles that apply to public broadcasting.
Like Pierre, I don't like the term “new media”. If you study the history of communications in Canada and around the world, you'll come across, from the 1940s, a series of articles about new media--the 1940s. This new media was going to change the world. One thing it was going to do was displace radio. Do you know which new media this was? This was television.
Various forms of platforms have come and gone, and through that, the public broadcaster in this country and public broadcasters around the world have been in a constant flux of reinventing their role to fit those new media, but they've kept to some of the key principles. That's what I want to talk a bit about today, to add to the discussion some of the international perspectives in terms of new media and public broadcasting.
The nub of the story is this. Public broadcasters in mature democracies have had to constantly reinvent how they deliver their programming and enhance democratic communication among citizens. The successful ones in the 1940s, 1980s, and now are supported by their populations in three areas: multi-platforms, public service, and public funding.
First of all, on multi-platforms, the best public broadcasters around the world, including Canada, are what I call “platform agnostic”. They're true believers in the kind of content that comes from their local communities, they're true believers in telling the story of Canadians from across the country, but they're rather skeptical about the latest new media as being the solution to the problem of connecting with their audiences. They're often eager to involve themselves. Where their faith is confirmed is when it reaches and connects with audiences in new ways.
Number two, on public service, it really all comes down to whether the program delivery over a range of platforms is on the basis of clear principles of public service. Quite frankly, as we study the history of public broadcasting around the world, we see that across time, those principles of public service and delivering broadcasting content have not changed dramatically in form or content, although they have adapted to the particularities of the local area and to the potentiality of the new platforms.
Third--since we're here, and you guys have quite a bit of control over some money--on public funding, those public broadcasters that are able to adapt to the new media, again in the 1940s, 1980s, and the new millennium, are able to lead in the experimentation on new platforms as well as carry on the traditions of the best public broadcasting. In that way they're always so “10 minutes ago”, they're so “80 minutes ago”, they're so rooted in the kinds of principles, goals, and passions that people like Graham Spry and Alan Plaunt delivered in this building almost 80 years ago.
I will put on the table, as I've put in the presentation to you, four key recommendations that are supported by the kinds of developments around public broadcasting in terms of rethinking their role in the new media environment. These are four recommendations that I would invite you to consider as you move towards making your own recommendations.
First, I think it's always worthwhile for our parliamentarians to represent the express public desire of Canadians to constantly reaffirm the role of public broadcasting, and specifically the central role of the CBC in the broadcasting system.
Second, as my students would say, it's a no-brainer. CBC is in the middle of new media. To continue a Broadcasting Act that doesn't make any mention of new media--different new digital platforms that leave CBC officially a radio and TV broadcaster--is meaningless.
Third, although it's a difficult nut to crack, this committee will probably have to begin to think about ways to re-examine the blanket CRTC new media exemption. That's a big discussion. We might be able to get into that a bit more. But insofar as one is fully able to bring new media content, in some ways not desirable, into a regulatory framework, in the failure of a regulatory solution, we have at our disposal a way to fund Canadian presence in the new media environment through the CBC.
That brings me to the fourth recommendation. I know you would be reflecting Canadians' wishes if you supported increased funding for CBC based on objective measures of the level of commitment that other mature western democracies make to their funding of public broadcasting.
The CBC, like many public broadcasters worldwide, is adapting to new roles, responsibilities, and possibilities in the context of changing technology, evolving societal demographic and linguistic makeup, and a dynamic public policy environment. For the CBC this is the best of times and the worst of times. Many of us who have studied this closely have envisioned the quite real possibility that the CBC could face extinction--this is something that public broadcasters around the world have been thinking about. In some ways even worse than extinction would be the slow and gradual level of increased irrelevance in Canadians' lives.
However, it is also possible that the tools some of the newest media allow in social networking, in terms of user content production, may provide the opportunity to facilitate a level of public participation in the polity that was the initial dream of visionaries like Graham Spry and Alan Plaunt.
The point is that there is a clear role for public broadcasters like the CBC in the digital age. Your committee confirmed this three years ago when you put it front and centre in the Lincoln report coming out of this committee:
many governments in the Western world continue to spend vigorously on public broadcasting. The reason for such expenditures is the realization in many countries that public broadcasting remains a vital instrument for promoting national values and identities
Almost a year after your predecessors--I think Mr. Abbott was on the original committee--reported in this way, the BBC started the process of renewing its charter. It actually echoed many of the things in your report, but as Pierre mentioned, with a really important vision around digital platforms.
They produced a wonderful document called Building public value, which I'm sure some of you are familiar with. They underlined that everything the BBC could do in programming with new media had to go back to its original public service mandate. It said about the digital world:
That world contains the potential for limitless individual consumer choice. But it also contains the possibility of broadcasting reduced to just another commodity, with profitability the sole measure of worth. A renewed BBC [places] the public interest before all else...some key principles can not be up for negotiation if the BBC is to remain recognisably the BBC. There are that the BBC must be available to everyone, deliver value to everyone and be open to everyone. The public interest must remain at the heart of all that the BBC does.
I see that the chair is raising his pen at me, so I'll take the opportunity, if I may, to introduce someone whose ideas...and certainly her visage is a lot more beautiful than mine. This is one of my students at McMaster University, Christina Oreskovich.
Christina has taken a number of courses with me in the last couple of years. Most recently she did a course on Canadian communications policy, and at the same time, she was unfortunate enough to have to sit through what we call the stats course, the quantitative research methodologies course. Christina and a number of the other students made policy interesting by taking the stats course and actually using it to do a survey of first-year university students. They looked at what the current mediascape is, sort of the beginnings of what Pierre was talking about, in the lives of their fellow students.
So if I may introduce--