Evidence of meeting #47 for Canadian Heritage in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was cbc.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Jean-Claude Carrière  Community Project Officer, Association canadienne française de l'Ontario - Région Témiskaming
Ian Morrison  Spokesperson, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting

4:30 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Michael Chong

Thank you, Mr. Morrison.

Madame Lavallée.

4:30 p.m.

Bloc

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

Thank you. Welcome, Mr. Morrison.

Have you read the five-year plan that the CBC has presented here?

4:30 p.m.

Spokesperson, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting

4:30 p.m.

Bloc

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

You haven't read it. That's too bad because I had a lot of questions to ask you about it. Certainly the CBC would like to have stable funding and would like the $60 million, which I might call unpredictable money, paid year after year at the last minute by the government, to be included. Obviously, you agree that the CBC should get stable funding, established for the next five years?

4:30 p.m.

Spokesperson, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting

Ian Morrison

That is consistent with recommendations of this committee over the years, too; it's not a new idea. It's something that has been suggested for quite a while.

The problem is that it's a bit of a vocabulary question. By that I mean that no one is going to take away the sovereign capacity of the Minister of Finance to make fiscal decisions. A government can say it is going to provide stable funding and then, because of circumstances that it deems priorities, decide to not do it. The government is sovereign.

So I think the real issue is not just the question of stability but the issue of resources. As I tried to point out in my short presentation, based on committee data that this committee has generated, there's an underinvestment in public broadcasting in Canada.

4:30 p.m.

Bloc

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

Thank you.

You aren't wrong when you say that the government can finally do what it wants even if it agrees to accept the five-year plan and promises stable funding over five years. It's true that it can change its mind halfway through, but its reasons need to be better than they ordinarily are. That creates pressure.

4:30 p.m.

Spokesperson, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting

Ian Morrison

The contribution can be better guaranteed.

4:30 p.m.

Bloc

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

Yes.

I would like to address the subject of the $40 per capita. I don't know whether you have read the last report of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, last June, about television and issues related to local television. It talks about funding for the CBC. The committee did recommend that the CBC be given stable funding, but unfortunately the committee as a whole did not adopt the $40 per capita suggestion. But the Bloc Québécois did incorporate that proposal in its supplementary report. I would invite you to read that report from last June.

You say you haven't read the CBC's five-year plan, but do you think the CBC has improved its services in recent years?

4:35 p.m.

Spokesperson, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting

Ian Morrison

I am more familiar, as you know, with the anglophone services than the francophone services. From a distance, I am very impressed, as a viewer, with the francophone services. But I have, and the supporters of our organization have, a lot of concerns around certain changes in radio, and certainly with the English television network a lot of concerns around quality, a lot of concerns around chasing, in the case of television, advertising dollars at all costs, as opposed to sticking to the mandate that Parliament has given it.

4:35 p.m.

Bloc

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

In French, when we talk about Radio-Canada, we include the whole corporation. We don't distinguish between the CBC and Radio-Canada. So when we talk about Radio-Canada, to us that means the CBC and the SRC. It includes both.

March 21st, 2011 / 4:35 p.m.

Spokesperson, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting

Ian Morrison

I agree completely.

4:35 p.m.

Bloc

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

Excuse me?

4:35 p.m.

Spokesperson, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting

Ian Morrison

I agree completely.

4:35 p.m.

Bloc

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

So let's get to the French service then. You really seem to focus your political activity on advocating for and promoting the English CBC network. Am I mistaken?

4:35 p.m.

Spokesperson, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting

Ian Morrison

The Friends of Canadian Broadcasting is an anglophone watchdog group. As I said, we're a watchdog for Canadian programming in radio-television and new media on the English language side.

We hold hands with, when we can find them, people with similar values on the French language side, but we do not pretend to be more than we are. We do not pretend to be speaking for the very different problems of the French language audiovisual system.

4:35 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Michael Chong

Thank you very much, Mr. Morrison.

Thank you, Ms. Lavallée.

Mr. Angus.

4:35 p.m.

NDP

Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Morrison, for coming.

I want to go back to some of the fundraising letters in the Conservative Party talking about CBC and Mr. Finley, the senator who is now up on election charges. He said he was asking Conservative supporters whether or not they thought that spending money on the CBC was a bad use of taxpayers' dollars. He said, “I will personally share the overall results and any comments with the Prime Minister. People like you drive our policy development.” Do you have any sense of what those Conservative voters told Mr. Finley, who then told the Prime Minister, in terms of whether or not to attack CBC's funding or to keep it stable?

4:35 p.m.

Spokesperson, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting

Ian Morrison

No, but it's not because we did not ask. By the way, the questionnaire was not to Conservative voters; it was to Conservative donors. So that's a subgroup of the overall population. What I can tell you from our own research is that a strong majority of people who would vote Conservative are also supporters of public broadcasting, through a number of indicators. But because that fundraiser, to which I drew attention, concerned us somewhat--I'm now talking about something that happened more than two years ago--we did two things. We asked the Prime Minister to answer the question himself: what did he think? He didn't reply to us, but a Southam news or maybe a CanWest news journalist reached him and asked him that during the campaign, and the Prime Minister replied that he could only say he supported government budgets.

So we went to Mr. Nanos and asked him to do a poll of the Canadian population, and we found that the answer was 63% that it was good value and 25% that it was not. We shared that information with the Prime Minister.

4:35 p.m.

NDP

Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON

Thank you.

You've covered governments going back a number of years. I'm looking at your data in terms of the general lack of committed support for the public broadcaster. There's a perception now that there's a hostile undercurrent. We pick that up at committee when CBC comes here. We never seem to hear a positive question about what the CBC is doing from our colleagues in the Conservative Party. There seems to be a full-on attack. The key government ministers make the announcement that CBC lies all the time. Is that a perception? Or do you think there is more of a hostile approach, antagonistic approach, between the present government and the public broadcaster?

4:40 p.m.

Spokesperson, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting

Ian Morrison

The problem is two messages. We have a lot of supporters. We encouraged them recently to write to their members of Parliament--I guess you would be included in that--with their concerns about Mr. Del Mastro's comment. What we found was that when those people lived in Conservative ridings, they got a response from their Conservative members of Parliament, and with a few exceptions--Chuck Strahl, for example, and Tony Clement--they wrote their own letters. Mostly there was a common theme to the letters. I had intended to bring it with me today, but I only have it on my iPhone, and I turned it off in respect of this thing. Basically, the message that came out, I assume from some kid in the Prime Minister's Office, and that was then the base for the Conservative responses, contradicts the concern you have, because the essence of it was, “We support public broadcasting very strongly.” The Liberals went after public broadcasting. The letter actually said that the NDP and the Bloc had voted against the CBC budget every year since the Conservatives came to power.

So in my judgment there was one thing that was true in there, and that is, under Mr. Chrétien's leadership, the CBC suffered greatly. But on the comment about the Bloc and the NDP, you weren't voting against the CBC any more than you were voting against the Governor General's salary, or old age pensions, or anything.

4:40 p.m.

NDP

Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON

It was the Senate salaries we were definitely voting against.

4:40 p.m.

Spokesperson, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting

Ian Morrison

The key point was that there was this sophistry in this letter that was suggested, where “We're supporting public broadcasting more than any other government in Canadian history.” And that would be true only if there were no such thing as inflation. So the people who received the letters saw through that, and what they're left with is an impression that there's a hidden situation.

In our poll, the Pollara poll, Pollara found that--and I didn't have time to quote it--52% of Canadians believe the Harper government is underfunding the CBC so that it can turn it into a private commercial broadcaster, 24% disagree, and 23% just don't know.

4:40 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Michael Chong

Thank you very much, Mr. Morrison.

Mr. Del Mastro.

4:40 p.m.

Conservative

Dean Del Mastro Conservative Peterborough, ON

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Morrison, whenever you've quoted me, you've always taken off the first sentence of the quote. Is there a reason why you did this?

4:40 p.m.

Spokesperson, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting

Ian Morrison

You're a very loquacious person, Mr. Del Mastro—