Canadian Heritage Committee on Oct. 25th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

No. You've reached seven minutes.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

I'd like to come back to the airtime cuts. What do I tell my fellow citizens...

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Dan, I said you've ended your seven minutes.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

Oh, you did; Sorry.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

That's okay.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

Thank you. La prochaine fois.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

We'll now go to our second round. This is a five-minute round.

We will begin with Mr. Waugh.

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

Thank you.

I don't have to tell you that you're the envy of the broadcasting industry. The private broadcasters in this country do more with less. They're looking upon the model of the CBC with envy because you got $675 million. You didn't have a business plan, yet you had $675 million given to you. Then you had to scurry and get your business plan together.

I take it your business plan to digital will absorb most of the $675 million, then? I take it that's where you're going? I see that Robyn Urback has been hired from the National Post. You're hiring other high-profile people to work on your digital plan.

When the government gave you the $675 million, is that when you started the game plan for five years?

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

You know that I will not agree with the comment you just made, sir, that we had no business plan. The 2020 plan had been there for a long time.

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

But not with money attached to it.

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

Yes, because what we did with this was we actually said in our 2020 plan what our objective is for the public broadcaster. The connections we were making with Canadians, as we saw them, gave us feedback about what they wanted from the public broadcaster. That was more local content, more digital content, and more Canadian content.

When the dollars came to support us and to give us the breathing room that we no longer had as we were trying to transform this leading institution, the most important leading institution in the cultural sector in this country, the locomotive for so many more people who actually work in our industry, well, we were able to say thank you. We're going to do more Canadian content and we're going to actually reinvest where Canadians asked us to reinvest, because we had to cut because of the environment we were in. We actually went full speed ahead in the digital space, because that's where Canadians are and that's where they expect us to be.

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

But when you developed the 2020 plan, you didn't know you were going to get any more money, because you were developing that in 2014. Right?

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

Absolutely.

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

So you didn't have a number out of the air for—

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

No, but we actually knew, sir, exactly what we had to cut and we knew exactly what we wanted to do should dollars be involved.

We actually met, in the context of the campaign that led to the 2015 elections, with all the parties. We explained what we wanted to do. We sat down with the Liberal Party. We sat down with the NDP. Actually, the only government that didn't want to sit down with us was the Conservative Party. It was to listen to what we wanted the public broadcaster to be. Based on that, I can assure you that we knew exactly, if a reinvestment was going to come, what we wanted to do with the dollars.

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

The reinvestment, then, of $675 million over five years: is it enough, is it too much, or what is it?

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

This reinvestment allows us—let's remember it's $75 million this year and $150 million for the next year—to have some breathing room and deliver the 2020 plan, or some of the initiatives we have in the 2020 plan. It allows us to react to the cuts we had to make, and it's a reinvestment in the right direction.

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

I would argue that the private guys have been cutting as much as you, if not more.

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

I don't think that we have the same objectives in mind.

The mandate we have is to deliver Canadian content to Canadians in prime time, which the privates don't have as an objective. They have a different business model, and that, sir, is okay. We are very proud of the Canadian content that we put in prime time on our programming schedules. We are very proud of our initiatives on the missing and murdered indigenous women. We've very proud of some of the digital environments we are going to create to be able to speak to our millennials as they are waking up to news. They are very interested in news.

I was very surprised that some of the witnesses who were in front of you said that millennials are not interested in news. We absolutely don't agree with that statement.

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

Will you reinvest in Saturday nights?

You lost Hockey Night in Canada. That was part of your ad revenue loss. Hockey Night in Canada probably funded a lot of your news over the years. We always knew that, especially in the playoffs when news was pre-empted.

On Saturday nights, instead of seeing five NHL games, one of them on your channel—or two, because you do the early game and then you do the night game—will you put Canadian culture back instead of taking this product from Rogers television?

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

In the context of the hockey contract, let us remember a few things.

First off, like CTV, like Bell, CBC was surprised by a decision that all of the hockey went to Rogers, on a national basis and on playoffs, for $5.2 billion for 12 years. That's water under the bridge. Obviously, though, we lost the advertising revenue that came with that—

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

How much advertising did you lose?

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

Just a second, please.

We lost the advertising revenue, but then we also reduced the costs accordingly.

We didn't make money. I've said this in front of this committee before: we did not make money with the six-year contract that ended in 2014 when Rogers rebid. When you say that it funded a whole bunch of things, I would like to remind you of something I've said here before: we did not make money with the hockey contract. However, it was an important locomotive in the context of what Canadians wanted to see, and it allowed us to bundle other shows when we went to advertisers to support the programming schedules for Canadian content in prime time.

I'll let Heather perhaps talk to you about what could be when this agreement with Rogers ends, what is in the plans, or what Saturday night could look like.

[Heather Conway]

I would love to have Saturday night for Canadian culture. Canadian feature films, in fact, would be—

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

You will have that opportunity.