Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank this committee for coming to Montreal. I know it's a big operation to leave Ottawa. It certainly makes it a lot easier, I think, for all of us here to be able to meet with you, so it's appreciated.
I'd like to introduce our delegation from ELAN. Ian Ferrier is a writer representative on the board of directors. I'm a film and television representative. Guy Rodgers is our executive director, and Anna Fuerstenberg is a theatre representative.
ELAN is the English Language Arts Network of Quebec, and it has reached a milestone this month. We now have a thousand members.
You may say, “A thousand members of English-language artists in Quebec? Impossible.” You may wonder who these artists are. You've seen or heard of our work, if not recognized our names.
We are musicians such as Oscar Peterson, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Oliver Jones, Arcade Fire, Rufus Wainwright, and Susie Arioli--the current chair of ELAN--and her band.
We are writers of plays, crime novels, and poetry such as David Fennario, Louise Penny, MacArthur prize-winner Anne Carson, Leonard Cohen, and Mavis Gallant.
We are dancers such as Margie Gillis, Vincent Warren, and Lin Snelling, a former chair of ELAN.
We are painters and video artists such as Betty Goodwin, Ghitta Caiserman-Roth, Nelson Henricks, and Ingrid Bachmann.
We are actors such as Clare Coulter, Christopher Plummer, Walter Massey, and Jack Langedijk.
Of course, we also work in film and television. We are producers such as Arnie Gelbart and Kevin Tierney, whose film Bon Cop, Bad Cop broke box office records in Canada.
We are directors such as Brian McKenna, Colin Low, and John N. Smith, who is best known for coming back to Montreal after directing the hit Hollywood movie Dangerous Minds, with Michelle Pfeiffer.
Of course, some people, from Norma Shearer to William Shatner to Donald Sutherland, never came back. Producer Jake Eberts keeps a cottage in the Eastern Townships and donates to McGill, so he is here in spirit.
I took the time to list all these names so that you know who we are--a vibrant official-language minority that has an impact across Canada and around the world. We only wish that many of us didn't have to leave Quebec to make a living doing what we love to do and can do so well when given the opportunity. As I read in The Globe and Mail this morning, “Most people work to make a living, but artists make a living in order to work.” I thought that was an appropriate comment.
Exactly 75 years ago, public broadcasting began in a room like this, before another parliamentary committee. A young Graham Spry spoke five words that clarified the issues and galvanized those parliamentarians. He said that Canada faced a simple choice in broadcasting, “the state or the States”.
Today let me say, as loudly and clearly as possible, that we support public broadcasting. We support it unequivocally and passionately, as creators and as viewers and listeners. As Canadians, we need public broadcasting because it connects us to every corner of our country and to ourselves. It provides a diversity of viewpoints and programs that we cannot get on commercial TV or radio. We hope that someday, CBC television will become a public broadcaster just as CBC radio is.
Right now, chronically underfunded for decades by short-sighted Liberal and Conservative governments, the CBC has been driven to maximize commercial revenue. The more commercial revenue the CBC must make, the more it compromises its public service mandate and the goals of the Broadcasting Act.
The CBC simply does not have the funding to fulfill its mandate under the act. I think Parliament--the government of the day--has to look in the mirror when it wonders what can be done.
Yet it is not possible to look at the CBC in the 21st century in isolation. We must look at it as part of the broadcasting system. The English Canadian broadcasting system is a mess.
Three years ago I did a study called Through the Looking Glass: A Comparison of broadcast licence fees in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. I discovered that Canadian broadcasters receive the lowest per capita TV advertising revenue among the countries studied. Why? Probably because of spillover advertising from the United States. In turn, among those countries studied, English Canadian broadcasters pay the lowest licence fees as a percentage of budget. Why? Because the public subsidies designed to support independent Canadian production have ended up indirectly subsidizing the broadcasters. They can afford to reduce the licence fees they pay for Canadian content and still meet their CRTC obligations. I suggest the CRTC as well should be looking in the mirror.
What do they do with the money saved by paying low--world-record low--licence fees? Here the private broadcasters differ from the CBC. The private broadcasters use the money saved in underpaying for domestic programming by overpaying for American programming at auction in Los Angeles. That's driving up the cost of these programs to a record $688 million last year, which was 12% higher than the year before.
In the end, English Canadian commercial broadcasters pay more for foreign programming than they pay for domestic programming, unlike any other broadcasters in the developed world. We are a record-setter in that regard.
When private broadcasters spend two-thirds of a billion dollars—and I did say billion—in program money in Los Angeles instead of Canada, the independent Canadian producer and the creative community here must absorb the cost. The situation has been getting worse over the years for Canadian producers. The average independent English Canadian program budget has fallen by 41% in constant dollars from 1984 to 2001.
As we can see, there is money in the commercial TV system to improve the quality and quantity of Canadian programming, but it needs to stay in Canada. We need private broadcasters to spend more on Canadian programs than they spend on foreign programs.
Generally speaking, the CBC does not compete with private broadcasters as long as it follows a domestic programming strategy while they follow a foreign programming strategy. Our private broadcasters in fact have even given up the freedom to program their own prime time schedules to benefit from simulcasting American network programs.
We need a public broadcaster that is not driven by commercial objectives of the private broadcasters but is publicly funded. That means significant and dependable increases in parliamentary appropriations, not more advertising.
Here in Quebec, CBC radio is especially needed by the arts community to hear news about what is happening in our disciplines. We need radio production in Montreal that uses our talent and that speaks to anglophones throughout the province.
With the abdication of cultural programming on CBC television, CBC radio is our lifeline. It does more than any other broadcaster, but erosion of funding has cut its quality. CBC radio needs more public funding, not advertising, as the Association of Canadian Advertisers has requested before this committee.
We need more TV program expenditures by the CBC and more decision-making here. We need better communication with the CBC. We need to see the CBC's executives on a regular basis so that relationships can be developed. Unlike you, they leave Toronto not very frequently.
We would like an advisory committee between the CBC and the production community that can grow up and manage a national terms of trade agreement with independent producers.
We would also like the Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund budget increased. That is the one production fund that is not controlled by broadcasters and therefore spends money in the regions on the smaller producers. Dollar for dollar, it is the most important source of production funding in English Quebec.
Should increasing the CBC budget be a parliamentary priority? Yes--at least more so than increasing the military budget--because in the 21st century, we need to redefine our idea of national sovereignty. The 49th parallel is a media border, a cultural border, not just a geographical line. We can only defend our country and the minds of our people with TV and radio programming that helps us see ourselves and our country, not someone else's. We want to work, and we want to see our work on our screens, big and small, without having to go to Hollywood to be paid with our own dollars to create someone else's vision.
That's the end of what I have to say. I'd like now to pass the microphone to Ian Ferrier, a writer representative from ELAN. He'll talk about radio.
