Thank you very much.
I'm sorry about my voice. I had an Air Canada flight, and it comes with a regulatory cold.
My name is Richard Flohil. I've worked in the Canadian music industry since before there was a Canadian music industry. l'm a publicist, concert promoter, writer, and editor, and my far-too-long resume includes spells as an artistic director of folk, jazz, world music, and blues festivals.
I edited a magazine called Canadian Composer/Compositeur canadien for 20 years. I was the co-founder of The Record, a trade paper that lasted for 17 years. Until recently, I had been editing Applaud!, a magazine designed to promote Canadian music outside of Canada.
I'm primarily a publicist. My clients include Loreena McKennitt, for some 22 years; the Downchild Blues Band, for more than 30; the late Jeff Healey; and a variety of newer artists--Serena Ryder, Roxanne Potvin, Justin Rutledge, Shakura S'Aida, and Paul Reddick--as well as a strong independent roots music label, Stony Plain.
CBC radio has always been supportive of all the artists I work with, and I am most grateful.
I want more, both for my artists and their contemporaries and for me as a listener.
I must say, if you'll forgive me, that I'm a little concerned that this committee is treading on dangerous ground. I could be wrong, but I can't recall a parliamentary committee getting even close to the muddy nitty-gritty of radio programming. The CBC is meant to be at arm's length from government, and in my view, this government, with the support of the opposition, should decide on an increased annual budget for the CBC, guarantee it for a foreseeable future, and then get out of the way and let our national broadcaster fulfill its mandate.
This committee is looking into two things: the CBC's decision to cancel the Vancouver radio orchestra and the proposed changes to programming on Radio 2.
The Vancouver radio orchestra should have been pulled years ago. Whatever its cost--and l've heard figures ranging from $400,000 a year to $700,000--it's excessive, especially considering the extremely limited number of concerts it performs. In terms of value for money alone, this orchestra's continuation is indefensible.
The CBC can--and indeed should, and I hope will--use the money to present a much wider and far more inclusive range of music to Canadians in all regions of the country.
Radio 2 is a good place to start. You've heard figures, I know, to indicate the minuscule size of the Radio 2 audience in recent years and the reality that its audience is aging rapidly and, quite literally, dying off. As a 73-year-old, I regret that I might not--at least, not for very long--enjoy the diversity and eclectic musical programming that Radio 2 is promising and will hopefully carry out, whatever this committee's recommendations may be.
The classical music community is single-minded and highly organized. It has good publicists and can make--and has made--a lively racket to oppose any changes in programming at Radio 2. They've had this national radio network pretty well all to themselves for decades. Now they're being told they have to share the wealth, and they are, if I may use an unparliamentary term, pissed off.
Many of these protesters start, I suspect, from an ingrained position that “classical” music--be it orchestral, choral, or chamber music, or electronic new music--is in some way intrinsically superior to other forms of music. I believe this is nonsense.
The greatest single musical figure of the 20th century, Louis Armstrong, proclaimed in his wisdom that there were only two kinds of music: good and bad.
That's my view. Radio 2 has to represent the best of all the kinds of music that Canadian musicians, composers, and songwriters make. That includes classical music; it includes assorted kinds of jazz, intelligent pop, world music that reflects the multicultural nature of this country, aboriginal music, various kinds of folk music--however you define that “f” word--the best electronic dance music, blues, alternative and edgy country, and the experimental pop that has in fact had a late-night spot on Radio 2 after all the classical music listeners have gone to bed.
Whatever problems the music industry faces in Canada today, there is no diminution of the interest in music itself.
So how do artists, new or experienced, build their audience? It's by live performance, of course, but mainly on radio. The catch is that commercial radio stations play, by my guesstimate, less than one percent of the Canadian music available. They play a tiny handful of artists of various degrees over and over again. The CBC, then, offers the only possible national outlet for hundreds of Canadian artists whose music does not fit the rigid commercial dictates of privately owned radio stations.
Radio 2 offers the potential, especially when the albatross of the radio orchestra is removed, for artists in dozens of other genres to be heard nationally on record or from their own communities playing live.
Changes to Radio 2 are coming years too late, and the efforts of the small, vocal claque of classical musicians, composers, and supporters who do not want to share the sandbox must not be allowed to stymie CBC management's attempt to bring Radio 2 into at least the latter half of the twentieth century.
This committee, most respectfully, should not interfere with that process. The CBC is not dumbing down, but building up, and it's attempting to reflect the real range of brilliant Canadian music of all kinds, which deserves to be exposed to Canadian listeners.
My friend Sam Feldman, who runs a major agency in Vancouver, recently talked at a CRTC hearing out there, and he had a great line that I would conclude with: Leonard Cohen once said that songs were letters; it's time to open the post office.
Thank you.