Canadian Heritage Committee on May 13th, 2010

[Alain Pineau]

I don't know whether it's deliberate, but we seem to forget them. They must absolutely be taken into consideration. The subject is quite complex. I was alluding to “deprofessionalization” to a certain degree. That has to be taken into account. We currently have functional definitions of what a professional artist, a professional creator, is. We have the funding systems of the Canada Council, for example, which are based on it.

We have a whole mechanism that's there, that we've developed over the past 50 years. The idea is not to throw out the baby with the bath water; the idea is to adapt things and to go back to basic principles. That's what we're still saying. If you go back to the basic principles of the act that led to the distribution system we currently have, you'll find the answers.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you.

Mr. Rafferty, seven minutes.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to both for being here.

I have questions for both of you, but maybe I'll start with Mr. Pineau on foreign ownership.

We've been hearing that foreign ownership restrictions on telecom companies are being lifted. Do you believe it's possible to put firewalls up around cultural programming and content of these giant firms, such as Shaw, for example, to keep their telecom services independent from their broadcasting service?

[Alain Pineau]

I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a regulator. I would like to see what kind of laws. We are saying what kind of rules, and how this could be approached.

What we are saying is that if we are not very careful, it's through the back door of foreign trade negotiations that we may throw out the baby with the bathwater. That's where we run the risk.

We sound like we're crying wolf and nothing will happen, but it has happened at least once in the cultural sector, with NAFTA in 1997, with the UPS challenge to Canadian support programs for magazines. Canada has found a way to wriggle out of that and create something else that falls within the parameters.

But this is an illustration. I'm told there have been such challenges by private companies in the environmental sector, for example, which is very important.

In terms of what I'm saying here in terms of being careful about regulations that will affect the cultural sector, it actually affects all sectors of activities. We have to be very careful what we do with our sovereignty as a nation in this field.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Maybe you have a brief thought about companies being faced with the requirement of having to divest their business, as it affects culture, in order to transfer ownership of their telecommunications to foreign owners. Could I have just your personal thoughts on that?

[Alain Pineau]

Well, I don't know; you catch me off-balance on this one, because I have never thought of those lines.

I mean, we have allowed concentration of ownership over the past decade, or maybe 15 years, in order to be efficient and compete. The vehicle and the content are more and more difficult to distinguish, so maybe we would lose a competitive advantage, and there may be other ways of trying to prevent that danger we're seeing.

But I say that on a very personal basis.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Pineau.

Mrs. Edwards, how do you see community programming centres, or multimedia centres like the ones you proposed, improving the digital literacy of Canadians? I'm thinking in particular of a riding like mine that is very large and rural and does not have the infrastructure necessary for that to happen. Would you like to make a comment or two about digital literacy and these centres?

[Catherine Edwards]

We are already working on a plan--and they have supported our presentation before the CRTC--with, for example, the Canadian Library Association. We want to work with community centres and with video and film cooperatives that already exist; there are over 100 in Canada. So we want to work with existing organizations that already offer some of these services but don't necessarily have access to distribution, for example. Public libraries often have these free Internet portals and do limited amounts of Internet training, but again, they don't actually have facilities where people could record a town hall meeting and have that distributed.

As I mentioned, there is money in the system right now for community expression that could include extending this kind of multimedia centre to rural areas.

What is the population size of your riding, just as an example?

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

We cover a large area. There is one larger centre at the edge. But the rest of the riding is quite small, in terms of 27,000 to 28,000 people spread over--

[Catherine Edwards]

For the whole riding?

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

--the rest of the whole riding.

[Catherine Edwards]

Can you drive from one end of the riding to the other end in half an hour?

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

No, in about five hours.

[Catherine Edwards]

So it is very distributed.

There's money available for about 50 more regional centres, so what we envision in a case like that is that there might be one facility that's got full studio facilities, training facilities, and computer labs where people can use and access Internet. Then to serve outlying areas there may be just a camera and an edit suite and computers in an existing community centre or library facility, so it may not be a full studio but can remit content because that's easy to do by uploading on the Internet to a regional distribution centre. So there are different strategies to fit communities of different size.

The goal is to be able to reach 90% of Canadians so they can get to one of these centres and access tools and training within 30 minutes on public transportation, and there's enough money there to do it.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

We have no public transportation where we're at.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Do I still have a moment, Chair? Okay.

One thing that the Internet age is illustrating to us is how many people interact personally with their media sources like Facebook and Twitter and those sorts of things. How would your proposal help foster a more interactive approach to community programming?

[Catherine Edwards]

Well, community television traditionally, because it has a mandate to serve communities, has pioneered things like phone-in television and getting mobiles out into the community at community events. Even in a pre-interactive Internet age, the community television sector was always pushing the edge of interactivity.

An example of how that's morphed in the age now, with Internet, is one of the most advanced uses of community TV right now, a theatre company called Headlines Theatre in Vancouver. This company has 20-minute plays they develop in the community around things like homelessness, and meth addiction, which they present live in a theatre. People can intervene in the actual play and go up on stage and try to work out solutions. They're also broadcast over the local community channel, so people from home who are watching can actually call in and influence the outcome, too. They tell an actor, “Hey, why doesn't he try this?”, and the person goes up on stage and does it. They have now added an Internet component--it's Web streamed--so that people around the world who are also facing the big-city homelessness, meth addiction, and other problems can type in their suggestions from across the world and have these things appear on stage.

So because its mandate and its interest is to facilitate the community, community-run organizations find those new applications for new media better than anyone else, because that's their job.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you.

Last questioner is Mr. Galipeau, please.

[Royal Galipeau, Conservative, Ottawa—Orléans, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

First I want to speak to Mr. Pineau, whom I have known, moreover, for a number of years.

Just to put me in context, since it's been a long time since we've discussed this issue, I would like to know this: how many members does your organization have? Are they individuals, Crown corporations, private corporations?

[Alain Pineau]

We currently have approximately 570 members, 200 of whom are individuals who support the work we're doing. The others are organizations, and I can name a few of them for you. Most of the people who have come or who come and appear before you are representatives of member organizations of the conference. We are an umbrella organization. For example, we have the Royal Opera Canada, ACTRA, the Canadian Actors' Equity Association, on the English side, the Canadian Museums Association, the UDA, on the union side. There's also the APFTQ, the Association des producteurs indépendants. We also have organizations which themselves are federations, unions or professional associations. CAPACOA is one of them, which respect to announcers. There is the Regroupement des centres d'artistes autogérés du Québec, the Canadian Dance Assembly, on the Canada side, the Vancouver Arts Advocacy Alliance, the Saskatchewan Arts Alliance. This is a very varied representation of member organizations of the CCA which support the national work we do and that also reflect it to their members.

[Royal Galipeau, Conservative, Ottawa—Orléans, ON]

With respect to funding, your members do—

[Alain Pineau]

Sixty per cent of the funding for the Canadian Conference of the Arts comes from a contribution agreement with the Department of Canadian Heritage, which thus acknowledges our work. Nothing in that applies to our public representation work. That's for our research and reporting work. The rest comes from the membership and self-generated revenue.

[Royal Galipeau, Conservative, Ottawa—Orléans, ON]

I want to know whether you think widespread access to the Internet promotes or reduces the consumption of Canadian content.

[Alain Pineau]

Theoretically, it should promote it. When we talk about regulation or adapting the regulatory system to the digital universe, to the Internet, to wireless and all that, we definitely don't advocate the same remedies that applied to another technology. What's important today is to make the content available and, for that to be done, first and foremost, there has to be content.

With regard to all possible forms of financial support—direct, indirect, private, public—we're in favour of that in order to generate Canadian content. The law of supply and demand does not apply to our culture. We know that; that's been recognized for a long time. We are too small and spread out over a large area.