Canadian Heritage Committee on Oct. 25th, 2016

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

The qualities that CBC directors should have: education, of course, and experience and knowledge.

Can you tell me how many of your current directors would be ideal candidates right now, according to the note you sent to the minister?

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

You do understand that I'm not going to comment on the quality of my directors.

We have a board right now that has been working with us for a long time. I understand that the minister is putting together a process by which new directors will be added to our board. We look forward to these directors, because we now have a number of vacant seats.

It's important for the broadcaster to be able to do its job, to have a board of directors to deliver on the mandate of the board.

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

Advice to your current—

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Mr. Waugh, I think that's it. Thank you.

Now we go to Ms. Dabrusin.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Thank you.

I was really happy to hear that we were talking about hockey. We talked about how there isn't the same hockey programming that there used to be. We were talking about men's hockey. I want to flag that there's an opportunity out there, the Canadian Women's Hockey League. They play on Saturday nights.

In fact, this Saturday, Brampton and Toronto will playing. Go Furies. I think we should be talking a bit more...because we're studying women in sports right now.

Some of the evidence we've been hearing is that one of the challenges faced by female athletes is that there's less media coverage for them. Because of that, there's less sponsorship, less financial support for women in sports.

I was looking at your inclusion and diversity plan. As far as hiring women and having women at boardroom tables is concerned, CBC has been doing well. The point is that it also gets reflected out. I want to ask what the opportunities are to better reflect women in sports on the CBC.

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

I'll answer that question in terms of the Olympics, and then I will ask Heather to help me explain how the sports strategy has evolved.

In this current context, you know how much we are invested in the Olympics. We're invested in the Olympics, allowing us—not only allowing us, but ensuring that not only men's sports but also women's sports are seen on a Saturday afternoon on Sports Weekend. The stuff we do between Olympic Games will involve skiing and luge. It will involve all sorts of sports that women actually play and that are in this window on Saturday afternoons.

On sports strategy, Heather, perhaps—

[Heather Conway]

Our sports strategy is very much to focus on amateur and elite performance sports.

Women's hockey is something that I'm a fan of. I'd love to see more women's hockey. We do have contractual arrangements with Rogers for Saturday nights until June of 2019. That would be the first opportunity to have a window to look at programming other kinds of either cultural content or amateur sport on the network.

We're not feeling that it wouldn't be an interesting thing for us. Our sports folks are deeply interested in all of our professional and amateur sports that are not in that category of $75 million to $100 million to $1 billion in rights fees. It's impossible to recoup your investment on those.

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

There are all sorts of other ways for us to bring this to Canadians. We can stream. I mean, television is only one of the windows available for women's sports.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

I'm sorry, but I'm running out of time.

One of things we're also looking for is more voices about women in media reporting on sports. Actually, CBC does have a number of women reporting on sports, which is wonderful. Radio-Canada, I believe, has Marie-José Turcotte and Chantal Machabée, so you have women who are doing very well.

Perhaps you could suggest to us people who could come before our committee to give the perspective of women who are reporting on sports and what a woman's experience is in reporting on sports, because that is not a traditional field in the same way for women.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

Whoever answers, could you do it very quickly? We're really over on this particular question.

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

Sure, we'd be happy to make suggestions.

There are a number of national federations and provincial federations that have a number of athletes and a number of spokespeople. They are in this on a daily basis. I think that's where you should go first.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much.

Now we go to Mr. Maguire for three minutes, please.

[Larry Maguire, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I was asking earlier about competition in some of the industries. Just to go back to that, other mediums have come before us in this process as well, and they indicated that the CBC was one of their biggest competitors—was a reason for them not expanding, and that sort of thing—because of your funding. I believe that there are over 7,200 employees, and 66% of the budget is a parliamentary appropriation, so you're getting about $1 billion a year from the federal government of the $1.5 billion in revenues. They felt that was inappropriate from their perspective.

As far as competition goes, it's very difficult for them, they felt, do their job of getting the news out there, because they're surviving on advertising where—from the notes we have—you have 16% in advertising revenues. I would like you to comment on that.

As well, 9% of your revenue is from subscriber fees for specialty services and 9% from other income. Can you describe what the specialty services would be, and also the other, because 9% seems to be a fairly large number of other income?

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

Sub-revenues are easy to identify. That is the price you pay to your cable provider to get RDI or CBC News Network, mainly. We have three or four other specialty channels, including the documentary channel and, in French, ARTV and Ici Explora. Those specialty channels you have to pay for, because, as I'm sure you know, you don't pay for the CBC feed that the cable provider delivers to you, nor do you pay for Radio-Canada, in the same way that you don't pay for CTV, TVA, or the other conventional broadcasters, which is an issue in itself. I'm sure that in the two minutes I have, I don't have time to go into this really important subject matter, which would be value for signal, so I'll stop there.

The other question was on the other income. In the other income, we have all sorts of rent dollars that we create by our own activities, such as in the Canadian Broadcasting Centre in Toronto, where we have actually leased a number of square feet. What we try to do is look within the assets that we are given and try to make them efficient and monetizable so that all of these dollars go back into creating Canadian content.

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

I do have one question.

On October 6 I was talking about advertising revenues. You're on digital. You're on TV. I asked Ms. Helen Kennedy, the director general of broadcasting and digital communications at Canadian Heritage, about Radio-Canada, about advertising there.

You've done the two platforms, but you haven't done the third platform, which is radio. I see here the quote, “We don't want ads on radio.” Is there a reason there are no ads on radio? At one time there were ads. If your revenues are down everywhere else, why wouldn't you look for revenue from radio?

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

The CBC sound, the Radio-Canada sound, the Première Chaîne, Radio One, the sound of our radio network—

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

Yeah, I know.

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

—there is no way in the world that we want to mess with that. This is specific to us. It's important. Canadians want it this way. There's no intention whatsoever of linking ads to those two radio networks.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

[Heather Conway]

Radio listening around the world is down. We are up.

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

Television is down, too.

[Heather Conway]

We're up.

[Hubert T. Lacroix]

We're up. That's the message.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

We'll go now to Mr. Vandal and Mr. Breton, who are going to share their time, I gather.

[Pierre Breton, Liberal, Shefford, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.