Canadian Heritage Committee on June 5th, 2008

[Luc Malo, Bloc, Verchères—Les Patriotes, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

For those among you who have concerns about the precariousness of artists' living conditions--and I think you mentioned it, Mr. Kulawick--I specify, if you don't know it yet, that the committee agreed to make a study precisely on this subject. We should begin our hearings in September, when the House returns. I invite you to come back at that time to examine this situation with us.

I would like to continue in the same vein as Mr. Scott. As a matter of fact, I think it is important--and several of us mentioned it--to try to find a way to offer those musical genres an equal and interesting part of the public waves. It is important to look at this issue while realizing however that Parliament cannot interfere with the day-to-day management of CBC.

I would like you to continue to think aloud with us in order to determine what can be done. We talked about bandwidth, about new frequencies which could be added. It is not necessarily possible but there might be a means to include in the MOU--and Mr. Scott alluded to this--some elements which could lead to a better sharing of public waves.

I would like to hear your comments, but also other proposals which seem of interest to you.

[Richard A. Hornsby]

Thank you. I can maybe weigh in on one comment I made during my initial presentation.

I teach a music and technology class every year at the University of New Brunswick. I have made a point of polling students each year since I started that course about 15 years ago as to how they consume music.

As I mentioned, and I don't think anybody here would disagree, the patterns are changing. Radio, increasingly so, is not where young people are tending to go, whether it's classical music or other music. It doesn't matter about the genre; it's just where they're going. And then there's the downloading, which is a whole other topic.

I really think the CBC should look into the relationship between its radio stations and what could be the offerings over the Internet, to properly target the audiences they're hoping to gain by these new changes, but also to ensure they don't lose the audiences that have depended on strong programming in other areas over time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Mr. Menzies, and then Mr. Knopf.

[Ian Menzies]

I'd just reiterate that I think that's one of the great things, and I know Ms. Whyte also commented on it specifically. Canada Live is one of the initiatives that has already been changed on Radio 2. It does bite into a significant amount of evening programming that was classical, so there's a direct conflict there. But it's not broadcasting just non-classical; they're out recording all sorts of music, including classical, classical hybrids, and every other genre you can think of.

One thing's for sure. I think it would be a great loss at this point to turn away from those kinds of initiatives. That's one of the best things they've done. It's not a specific one-hour show in a format that may or may not have the support or may or may not find an audience. They've had the good sense, I think—and it's certainly the thing I'm most strongly in favour of about what's gone on so far—to open what is a pretty prime-time radio slot to everybody, more or less. You just have to get through. It's down to the same thing the music business is always about, which is achieving a certain level of accomplishment and notoriety and hardworking aesthetic and being recognized by the gatekeepers, who will then go, “It's time to record you.” This also brings an extremely big benefit for the artists I work with--and around the hardships of succeeding in an artistic life--when CBC decides to record a concert.

Another example that's happening for me is a band called eccodek, out of Guelph, which is playing at the Vancouver jazz festival this summer. They are on a very precarious budget out on a western tour, and CBC has come in and said, “We would like to record this”—it's actually Espace Musique on Radio-Canada that's recording it—and that's allowing everybody to go home with $50 in their pocket and making the whole thing survive as a tour. And on top of that, you get all the exposure that comes out of that to the audience that CBC Radio 2 delivers to.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you.

Make it very short, Mr. Knopf, if you could, please.

[Howard Knopf]

I'm glad the committee's going to look at the living conditions of artists, but we have to be realistic here. Some artists will just never make a living, some will become enormously rich and live in castles in Switzerland, and there's not much the system can do to even that out. I don't think we would want to try. That's the way they used to do things in Russia. We don't want to do that here.

A lot of the best-known serious music composers in Canada whom you would all know about earn less than $10,000 a year from copyright royalties. I know that; I work in this system. A lot of them earn less than $100 a year from copyright royalties. Getting played a few more times on CBC is not going to make a difference for those people. It's totally unrealistic to think that you can make a whole bunch of careers happen by opening up Radio 2 to everybody who says they want to be a songwriter or the next “Idol”. I think you have to be very realistic about what Radio 2 can do and what it can't do.

What we do know is that the serious music establishment has depended on it for decades and will be lost without it, whereas the rest of the things we've been hearing about are doing really well. You know, it's a more than $1-billion-a-year industry.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Okay. Thank you.

For the last comment on this, I saw Mr. Flohil being quite energetic to get into the debate.

[Richard Flohil]

I couldn't disagree with the previous speaker more. What is happening as a result of technology, and what will happen as a result of greater CBC play of a greater variety of music, is that there will be more artists, composers, and songwriters making a living—not fewer. The CBC plays a role in advancing a variety of careers.

My friend here suspects that what is going to happen is that we're going to get more Avril and more Shania and more Céline on CBC, who are all readily available on commercial radio. This is not the point. What CBC Radio 2 will hopefully do with a wider mandate to play a wider variety of music is spread the wealth around. Whether or not it's going to get a younger audience, I don't know. I think older people, frankly, give them the credit for having a far wider taste in music than my friend here suggests.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you.

There's one more intervention.

Ms. Pierre.

[Joan Pierre]

There's one thing we're not looking at, which is that society is changing. With society changing the way it is, particularly in Ontario, you can't afford not to address the music of all those genres that are outside normal classical music.

As I said, I grew up playing piano until I was in my teens. I listened to classical music every single Sunday morning, whether it was radio or whether it was my own CD, but you have to address what is happening in society in general, and if Radio 2 could give airtime to those performers, that's what we're looking for, particularly the opera.

As I say, I'm an arts person, and in all these years that I've lived here and been in the arts, the opera company never came to me to get me to come to the opera. I would go because I will go to something I'm interested in--because I'm a theatre person, and I've always been. What has been happening to them over the last two years is that the audience they have is dying. They're losing people, because it was an older audience that kept going to the opera, and they no longer can even come to the opera; they are in homes.

What are they doing? They're trying to reach out to our community to come to the opera. It's going to happen in every other place; it's going to happen everywhere. So if we don't address that by having programming for people to hear their own music being played, we're going to end up with a lot more trouble down the road.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you.

Go ahead, Mr. Siksay.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Thank you, Chair, and I want to thank all the witnesses for their testimony--even Mr. Kulawick, who thought I might not like his presentation. It's all very helpful, and I think everybody has raised issues we have to struggle with.

I wanted to go back to Mr. Hornsby because he talked about repositioning the CBC Radio Orchestra. I wonder if you could expand a little bit on what you mean by “repositioning” the orchestra.

[Richard A. Hornsby]

Sure, I can try. I think it's a much broader discussion than what I might be able to offer. I might have a couple of ideas, though.

As I mentioned, radio orchestras in other countries--I mentioned Japan and a number of European countries--have become, and have been for many decades, flagships for their particular places. Again, they're not the only institutions doing what they're doing, but they are flagships with a specific mandate to speak to their people and to their particular composers. As a result, Polish orchestras are not always playing German composers; they're actually featuring their particular people and their particular artists as well. They then become, to some extent, a bit of a mouthpiece for that genre of music to the world as well.

I think we don't really have that now, and I would contend that in the way the current CBC Radio Orchestra has been functioning there are elements of that, which are very good, but I would challenge the CBC itself to see how it could actually revitalize that and make it into more of a flagship than it really is.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

It strikes me that commercial radio is part of the problem. It seems to me that commercial radio occupies a significant bandwidth in Canada. It seems as though nobody from the other genres or even from classical music is getting the airplay on commercial radio that might be helpful.

Is commercial radio a problem? Should we be discussing commercial radio and its commitment to these other genres, rather than saying the CBC, the public broadcaster, should be doing it, and trying to solve all these problems through the CBC?

[Ian Menzies]

To the extent that Canadian content regulations already exist, they do, I think, fail miserably to achieve a lot of the things that Canadian content regulations maybe should be trying to achieve. Without bringing in entirely new layers of bureaucracy and jurisdiction and so on, I think it's never a bad idea to look at those regulations, how they're policed, and how you can fulfill them, because the problem seems to be now that you get to play the same Canadian song over and over again to get there, if that's how you want to get there.

I think that would be perhaps a relatively possible and available avenue to go down to try to help commercial radio. I'm not sure it's possible to make any other kind of change, but that could be helpful for sure.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Next we have Mr. Hornsby, then Mr. Knopf, and then Mr. Flohil.

[Richard A. Hornsby]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Siksay, I actually support Ian here. I think we have in our Canadian commercial industry, because of the regulations that did come in the late 60s and early 70s to create the music industry, the names that have been thrown around this table that you know today. It was dismal before that--absolutely dismal, non-existent.

I would seriously also support, maybe, another look to see how we could actually try...it's not regulations; it's actually to sort of help those commercial stations create more opportunities for Canadian talent that could be in these broader areas. We're getting stuck again in pigeonholing types of music. I really think that's terrible territory to get into. We should be embracing all of this, a lot of them, whether we talk about folk musicians, of which I have tons around me in New Brunswick, and a lot of others, and the type of ethnic mix we have in New Brunswick, which is hugely different from what's in Toronto or Vancouver. I want to see that reflected. I don't get that.

In terms of CBC coming to my province, I don't have CBC recording facilities in my province. I have to convince them to come from Halifax. And they're not coming this year. You won't hear a classical musician from New Brunswick recorded on the airwaves this whole fiscal year.

I think the commercial radio stations might have a place in which we can actually start to bolster the Canadian content, frankly.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Mr. Knopf, and then Mr. Flohil.

[Howard Knopf]

On the orchestra question, Mr. Siksay, a lot of people now are too young to know how much we've lost in the last 40 or 50 years. The recent appointment of Chris Boyce, who is the director of programming at CBC, which got a lot of publicity, is apparently a very brilliant young fellow. He's 36 years old. He was born several years after Igor Stravinsky recorded the symphony of songs with the CBC orchestra in 1963. This is one of the great recordings of the 20th century by the greatest musician—excuse me, Mr. Flohil—of the 20th century. I don't think anybody would seriously dispute that, except you.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Howard Knopf]

In all seriousness, this was a legendary moment for Canada--a legendary moment. That recording brings tears to my eyes when I hear it, it's so beautiful.

What happened? The next year, the CBC chopped that orchestra. That's Canada for you. Now, the little surviving remnant we have of that tradition is about to be chopped. Meanwhile, over in Europe, the BBC has five orchestras and a choir, I believe. France and Germany have, I believe, multiple radio orchestras of the highest calibre. We can't even seem to afford one. And as I pointed out, we're going to blow more money in increased copyright royalties than we're going to save by cutting that orchestra, not to mention other greater expenses.

We can't roll back the clock to 1963 and we can't reincarnate Igor Stravinsky, but we don't have to totally bury that tradition.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Mr. Flohil, then Mr. Kulawick.

[Richard Flohil]

Commercial radio's use of music is to do two things: one is to define its proposed audience that it wants to sell to advertisers; and second, commercial radio uses music to keep the commercials from banging into each other. That said, as I said earlier, and as others have mentioned, there are hundreds of artists who get no airplay and yet are artists of quality, composers and writers of quality.

I'm really sorry the classical music community is having its sandbox interfered with. The fact is, they've got to share the wealth. That is part of this.

Mr. Knopf has just mentioned another thing about which I took issue with him on an industry website, that somehow the increased royalties the CBC will have to pay to SOCAN will eat up all the savings. I believe this is nonsense, frankly. CBC's payments to SOCAN are based on a tariff, which in turn is based on the population of Canada. They may down the line, if indeed a wider range of music is being performed, renegotiate that deal. They're welcome to do that through the Copyright Board. Whether that will happen or not, I don't know. But at the moment, there would be no increase.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you.

Mr. Kulawick, for the conclusion of this answer.

[Geoff Kulawick]

Just to address the last comment Richard was making, if there were an increased tariff, it would find its way into the hands of the songwriters, and that's not a bad thing, because creators of folk songs are just as worthy as composers of classical music, in my view.

The other thing I wanted to bring up is that there seems to be an issue here about what is good for the classical musical listener or what is good for the classical music composer and musician. The problem with the changes to the CBC is from some of the classical music musicians. My feeling is that the change to the CBC may actually have a net benefit, the reason being that very few Canadians are being introduced to classical music if it's not introduced to them in a forum that they wouldn't otherwise go to automatically. Right now you have no young people and no people from various ethnic backgrounds going to CBC Radio 2, because it has not given them any reason to go there.

If the CBC Radio 2 format is more diverse, including classical music, but with other genres reflecting more of Canadian society, you might find that the new Canadian from the Caribbean would be listening to a show that they absolutely love that connects with them personally, and then the classical music show comes on because they left it on the dial, and they hear Tchaikovsky for the first time performed by a Canadian. There is a potential new classical music fan who will buy a ticket, who may buy a CD by a Canadian classical composer. So this actually, in my view, has the potential of expanding the audience, drilling it younger, for classical music. This would be a great benefit to the classical musicians that I know and work with. They love seeing younger people attend their shows and discovering their music.