Thank you, Mr. Chair and distinguished members of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.
The Stand on Guard For CBC coalition, of which I chair the executive committee, accepts the wisdom of an arm's-length relation between the government of Canada and the CBC/Radio-Canada. Yet we argue a vigorous role for your committee and for the government of Canada vis-à-vis the CBC and de CBC Radio Orchestra. I will tell you why in a moment.
I want to make sure I get to my main points, so I'm going to skip to the end and give you those now.
I'm going to propose, for various reasons, that the president and board of the CBC should be asked to take their decisions far more in the open than they do at present, and second, that your committee is justified to undertake a detailed inquiry into CBC procedures and practice, particularly of the past decade, that it is within your jurisdiction.
The methods of appointment of CBC presidents and board members should be reviewed on a variety of grounds, and general CBC funding should be restored to 1996 levels in inflation-adjusted dollars by 2011.
Those are four propositions I would like to leave with you, which I claim to be within your jurisdiction. I'll repeat them, if you like, later in the meeting.
I have two that I would love to see proposed to the CBC board of directors, if possible. One is that concert and classical music come to occupy about half of all Radio 2 broadcast time and be offered in an all-classical format in prime listening hours. That is our wish. Second is that retention of the CBC Radio Orchestra is a central and prior consideration in rebuilding Radio 2.
I'll offer one or two arguments for some of those points.
The coalition has heard repeatedly that CBC is in the middle of a period of hard times and the CBC Radio Orchestra must go. We take the opposite tack. It would be far better to expand the orchestra's budget, perhaps to $2.5 million per annum from present levels, with annual adjustments for inflation, and have 20 or 30 studio broadcasts each year. At that level of funding, the orchestra would still cost about one-tenth of one percent of overall CBC expenditures and revenues. In return, Canadians would sustain an improved Radio 2 programming and many new commissions of Canadian music.
The difficulty, of course, is that we must persuade the CBC board of directors and the CBC's management team of all this. Where, then, and how should your committee and the Government of Canada intervene in the CBC's affairs?
I want to suggest that the question of overall funding is definitely within the jurisdiction of the committee and the government. That's one way. Another way is to consider how the CBC arrives at its priorities, and whether or not that is done sufficiently in the open, with reasons given to the people of Canada so we can understand their reasoning and arguments as best we can.
Is my time up?