Canadian Heritage Committee on Dec. 2nd, 2010

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for coming.

I'd like to start off, Monsieur Seguin and Madam Milligan, with the plan the CRTC has for addressing closed captioning. In my family, we have a rule: if it's not closed-captioned, we don't watch it. This meant that many years ago my kids said let's ditch the cable, dad; it's beyond useless. There's nothing worse than watching television and finding out what happens about a day later when the captions are coming up.

It also meant that we didn't watch a lot of Canadian movies, because Canadian movies didn't need to be captioned unless they were from Quebec. If they were from Quebec, we got to watch them because they had English subtitles. So we watched a lot of American action shows, because they actually caption their films and caption them well.

I'm looking at the CRTC's current approach, of 2040. Is that correct?

[Beverley Milligan]

Yes. I guess it's not necessarily a CRTC approach to 2040; it's that if they go at the same rate they're going now, that's when we'll finally get there. So that is the correct year, at the rate they're going now and are continuing with.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

But my daughter will be a little old lady then.

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

Imagine what that will make you.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

I'll be long gone, probably, at the rate I'm going and with the people I hang out with here. My heart won't be able to take it.

It's almost audacious in its meagreness. I see that in 2009 they spent $37,154 on closed captioning.

[Beverley Milligan]

What's interesting is that on the other side they don't record the closed captioning that is “brought to you in part by”. I don't know whether you are familiar with that particular piece of advertising. It was originally created to underwrite the costs associated with captioning. We were a charity and we know that we did quite well, having that advertising. But it's not recorded anywhere; it's not measured anywhere. The lack of measurement doesn't allow us to even create a business model for accessible content. We believe, and what's available technically tells us, that we can reach 100% accessibility by 2020, and there are so many inroads around descriptive video and technology.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you.

I'd like to follow up, but I'm running out of time.

Mr. Von Finkenstein made it very clear to us that the prime directive of the CRTC is to interfere as little as possible in the market. The CRTC has very few requirements, it seems, for compliance measures that we can actually judge. I try to find out on any given day whether people are meeting their obligations, and we're just told, don't worry, be happy, it's a great new world of vertical integration.

Do you feel that you have enough information to have a sense of whether people are even bothering to meet the targets?

[Beverley Milligan]

Absolutely not. The CRTC puts out a monitoring report. If you search that monitoring report, which is supposed to be a snapshot of broadcasting, the word accessibility doesn't exist in it, nor the word captioning, descriptive video—nothing exists in it. There's no empirical evidence to tell us what is going on.

All of it is being driven by the accessibility community. One of the things we're doing is of course the monitor project, in which we are actually monitoring broadcasters across the country. It is all accessible organizations driven. We need more empirical evidence, certainly, from the CRTC.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Madam Edwards, just in my closing time, I think you've been presenting some very interesting and innovative opportunities for getting people involved in accessing our public airwaves. Again, if I go back to Mr. Von Finkenstein and the prime directive, the prime directive was stated again and again when he met with us: it's to interfere as little in the market as possible. It seems to me that either I'm not hearing him completely or he's missing part of the picture.

Is it not correct that the broadcast system in Canada is based on the public broadcaster, the private broadcaster, and the community component? Do you believe that the CRTC, as it is constructed now, has a sense of balance in terms of the three obligations of the broadcast system?

[Catherine Edwards]

Not at all. As I said, right now companies in the private sector are controlling the community sector, and the community sector hasn't been given any access to any of the sources of funding available to the other sectors. At the spring hearing one of the things we said was instead of creating really complicated regulations to try to force big BDUs to do something they clearly don't want to do any more, we don't care about those channels they're running. If they want to run those channels, let them do it. The point is they were collecting money from subscribers for access. If you gave us separate licences and the communities administered them, they'd be answerable to themselves, and we wouldn't get into these same complicated “lack of reports” and “lack of accountability” that the accessibility is raising.

We find that by having everything consolidated like that it's causing more trouble for the CRTC, because then they have problems trying to monitor to make it fair all the time for little operators, whereas if they'd kept the playing field level in the first place, there wouldn't be that need for all this follow-up legislation and reports to monitor it. It's a problem.

Mrs. Crombie asked about the community access media fund. Appendix 2, which you'll get next week, has the way we see it being structured and operating and budgets for individual channels and so on.

[The Chair, Conservative, Michael Chong]

Thank you, Mr. Angus and Madam Edwards.

Mr. Richards.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Thank you.

Thank you all of you for being here today. We have a fairly good diversity of opinion, thought, and interests represented here at the table, and it's always nice to have. Because I do have limited time, I'll focus mainly on one of the groups.

My first question is out of curiosity, but it does lead into some other questions that will apply to what we're studying here. It's about described video. Obviously we're all aware and everyone is familiar with closed captioning to some degree. But described video....

Mr. Seguin, this probably is a question for you. Explain to me a bit how it works and how it's done. It must be very difficult to try to follow the action, as far as the audio that would normally take place, and then have to try to have the video described simultaneously. I'm just curious as to how that works and how it comes off for you.

[Yves Séguin]

Thank you for the question.

Descriptive video is the process of adding an audio track to the program so whenever there are pauses in the dialogue the narrator will describe scenes, action, costume changes, whatever is happening on the screen that a non-visually-impaired person would be able to see, for the benefit of those of us who are not able to see what's happening on the screen. Obviously, as I'm sure you can understand, it will greatly assist in providing a better understanding of the movie or the program you're watching.

As a challenge, I would recommend that committee members turn their back to their television for one day and try to watch and report on what they were able to comprehend. How many times do we hear “for more information call the number at the bottom of your screen”? That's all well and good, but as a consumer I don't have access to that number at the bottom of the screen. If I want to see if my stocks are going up, or mainly down, when you look at the stock report that's exactly what you're doing. You're looking at it. You don't get the audible information conveyed to you.

So that's the process. It's to render images in a narrative way so you can follow the programming.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

So it's only when there are gaps in the regular audio of the program you're watching?

[Yves Séguin]

Of the dialogue. Obviously if there's music the narrator can speak over the music, and it won't interfere with the dialogue itself.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

So I guess when you have sequences where there is a lot of dialogue, it probably is still hard to follow. Or is it an acquired talent?

[Yves Séguin]

When there's lots of dialogue obviously one can follow along, and usually not too much action is going on. You'll have two or three people talking to one another. But it's when you hear the music. Sometimes by the tone of the music you can guess that something pretty bad is about to happen, but it would be nice to know exactly what that is.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Right.

I watch a lot of sports and news, and obviously those would be ones that would be maybe more conducive to it. But I am interested. I think I will give that a try, the challenge you've thrown out at us. It would be interesting to see how it would be.

Is it something you have to subscribe to? I understand that it's only about...is it 10% currently?

[Yves Séguin]

No, it's four hours a week that broadcasters.... So it's more like 3% or 1%, or whatever it comes out to be.

No, you don't have to subscribe specifically to it, but you do have to know how to activate the video description service, which in itself can be an obstacle. Look at your digital box and your remote control. Obviously, all of that is menu-driven, and there is no voice output for it. To be able to select the video description track can be a challenge in itself.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

What type of programming has it? Is it for certain types of programming? Obviously you probably can't access it for live programming. Is it mainly on syndicated programs? Is it in the first run of new shows, or do you have to wait for syndication?

[The Chair, Conservative, Michael Chong]

Thank you, Mr. Richards.

Go ahead, Mr. Seguin.

[Yves Séguin]

Well, there is a mix and match, basically, but most often, the video track will be produced after the fact. More often than not we would be getting programs that are reruns, not actual first airings of programs.

Beverley, I don't know if you want to add something.

[Beverley Milligan]

We have done some experimentation in live programming, as well. In fact, CTV broadcast Dancing with the Stars live, and it was just fabulous.

[The Chair, Conservative, Michael Chong]

Thank you very much, Mr. Richards.

Mr. Simms.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Actually, I enjoyed that little interchange. I might pick up on the--