Canadian Heritage Committee on May 19th, 2016

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

What is the cost of the radio programming?

[Jennifer McGuire]

I'll have to bring that to you. I don't have the costs with me.

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

Yes, that's okay.

The budget was Christmas for CBC, $675 million. Did you have any input with this government on a five-year strategic plan? Or was it, here's the money, go to it? Did anyone have a plan to ask for money and say what you were going to use the money for if you did get it?

[Jennifer McGuire]

Certainly, the focal point for the money in the context of news and local news was to put it back into programming. On the English side, the local services have been transforming to digital first, but at the same time we also took almost 10% of the budget out. We have some reinvestment to do to ensure sustainability and then obviously growth.

We have announced that we will be adding a local service. We will be adding a station in London, Ontario as part of our commitment to the new money. Obviously, the investment for CBC goes beyond news. There will be investment in the television schedule in our digital capabilities, in terms of fixing some of the technology pieces and other programming initiatives.

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

I think regional news has been all over the map.

Go ahead.

[Michel Cormier]

With respect to news services, like our colleagues at the CBC, we will of course invest in the regions where there have been cuts. We will also invest a great deal in the digital and mobile sectors, since they are growing and we must establish a greater presence in them. We will also focus on local programming and journalism. We are not seeking to return to the way Radio-Canada was before the cuts. We are looking forward.

We will make optimal investments to make the best possible programming accessible to as many Canadians as possible.

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

I would say your regional television has struggled. Sometimes you go to an hour-and-a-half format and then a year later you're back down to a half an hour. You still don't provide any weekend television local news.

[Jennifer McGuire]

I would agree with your comment.

There have been very different strategies with respect to television. Radio has been a pretty static strategy in terms of local service. From where we are sitting now, our view is that the obligation for CBC is to really invest digitally.

The goal is to treat local services as an ecosystem. Our radio services are very successful, but they reach a set demographic.

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

Yes.

[Jennifer McGuire]

If we are going to provide public service journalism and public service service to millennial Canadians and younger Canadians, we have to reach them where they're consuming content, and that is on digital platforms. It's not a well-known fact and it might surprise you to know that CBC online reaches almost 52% of millennials digitally. They're engaged and they are engaging in news content but they are not engaging in that content on television.

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

That's different from what we were told last week by La Presse, who said the younger people are not interested in news digitally.

[Jennifer McGuire]

That has not been our experience.

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

That has not been your experience.

I looked at the bundling. I see CBC is on HD so that means I pay a fee to CBC also on these bundles, right? I mean, each channel on there gets some money.

How much money does CBC make out of Kevin Waugh?

You know what I'm saying, though. We're going to the $25 basic bundle, but I did notice in there that each channel gets money, so CBC also gets a revenue stream from Kevin Waugh who would buy that bundle.

[Jennifer McGuire]

It's a different service.

Our news channel is a paid service. The fee for that gets negotiated by BDU.

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

Yes.

[Jennifer McGuire]

They're currently renegotiating that in the context of pick and pay.

[Michel Cormier]

Mr. Waugh, I would simply like to point out that CBC's main channel and Radio-Canada's main French-language channels are made available free of charge.

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

In Saskatchewan I will say this. I feel for you French guys in Saskatchewan because it's such a small market, yet you're dealing with the Gravelbourgs and the Zenon Parks, and its pockets. To find resources to feed francophones in Saskatchewan or, in fact, Manitoba is very difficult, I would say. You're having a struggle.

[Marco Dubé, Executive Director of Regional Services, French Services, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation]

I am very proud that we are still providing services to francophones in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta. As part of the digital shift we have started, we will be expanding our web-based production, from morning to evening, seven days a week. We still provide radio services to francophones in those provinces.

We also offer a 6 p.m. newscast for francophones in those regions. A large part of the promise that Radio-Canada made was that it would still be there for francophones across the country, even in communities where they form a minority.

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

I noticed in your presentation this morning you did mention...on how to deliver more local services at less cost. Can you explain that because you are going to get a healthy increase in your budget, and we do hear there are still cuts coming down the pipe?

[Jennifer McGuire]

I think there are two things going on. CBC did have cost reductions connected to the overall budgets, but we're also re-engineering our newsrooms to be multi-platform newsrooms. In the past, you would have had separate newsrooms for local, for radio, for television, and separate assignment processes. What we have been doing quite aggressively, probably more aggressively than most, is integrating our services. So we're having a single, multi-platform assignment process and pulling out any duplication in coverage, and then sharing the content more effectively across platforms. This has been key to our ability to be able to reinvest in augmented journalism like investigative and enterprise journalism at a time when we're actually downsizing, and it allowed us to expand our service particularly in digital mobile. We are now 18-hours-a-day continuous service on digital mobile. We've maintained our footprint on radio. We shrunk our footprint on television, and we did this with a 10% reduction in cost.

Now, we've cut too deep. We have to make some adjustments, but I think changing the way we work is key to our ability to compete in this kind of digital age.

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Larry Maguire]

I think I've already given you a few extra seconds there, Mr. Waugh, so we'll move forward.

Monsieur Nantel.

[Pierre Nantel, NDP, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank everyone for being with us here this morning. I am always pleased to see representatives from CBC/Radio-Canada. I am a big CBC/Radio-Canada fan and very much attached to the network.

Surely some witnesses in the group are people from my generation who remember that the Canadian national anthem was followed by grand music and images from across the country and magnificent animation.

Some people have frequently dragged CBC/Radio-Canada through the mud in recent years. Personally, I never perceived it as a dusty old corporation as others did, quite the contrary. I probably see it from a Montreal perspective. I come from the Montreal region, and, as a Quebecer, I feel very well served by Radio-Canada's French services. I believe this idea of a national radio and television network and national Internet services could be emphasized more without necessarily falling into classic Liberal horn-blowing. I think you should make that a more prominent part of your mandate.

I would also like to point out that, for many years, your corporation was accused of adopting programming and an approach that were not friendly enough. I believe the opposite is true. I still remember that you were the first broadcaster, by a long shot, to include the Internet in your media offerings, while others—private interests—were definitely more afraid of it. It was your mandate to do that, and you did it very well. Your slogan has been “radio, television and the Internet” for a long time now, or at least for the past eight or nine years.

That will definitely be the subject of my better question. There are different levels of efficiency when it comes to reaching audiences on your various platforms. Things are going very well in radio on the whole. You definitely have the incredible advantage of being able to broadcast without advertising. I think the formats, offerings, types of interviews, subjects, and the cross-Canada aspect are even more striking on radio than on television, at least when it comes to news. The success that radio has achieved by comparison with the challenges facing English-language television is quite representative of what the media are experiencing in Canada. Private radio is generally doing well on the whole and has not felt the impact that has hit television.

You frequently refer to your digital developments as an easier, more economic, and more flexible way of gathering local news. We heard a great deal about that during our study. One of the obvious aspects of our study is to ensure that the linguistic communities and minorities outside Quebec have access to services. You are clearly the leading player on this issue, but the odd paradox is that you are planning to offer more services over the Internet. However, there is no Internet coverage in many of those places. How do you react to that?

[Marco Dubé]

High-speed Internet access in remote regions is still an issue for all Canadians and the country as a whole. It is not simply an issue for CBC/Radio-Canada.

At the same time, high-speed Internet access is expanding. Our priority is to be able to offer content as this service becomes available to Canadians. Our corporation produces content, and our first concern is to produce reporting, images, and programs. We are not responsible for the pipeline, if I may use that term.

Now I want to talk about the efficiency of our resources. Earlier you saw the story by Martine Laberge, who is our video journalist in Hearst, in northern Ontario. Video journalists are reporters who do the filming themselves, who do their own editing, and who write their own stories. They work alone.

We think this is the way of the future. We have been doing this for a long time, and we are going to develop this approach by equipping video journalists with much simpler tools. Cameras are less expensive now. We can use more smart phones. By making this part of digital coverage on our websites and on social media, we can reach audiences across the country much more efficiently.