Canadian Heritage Committee on Jan. 31st, 2017

[Edward Greenspon]

I joined after the 1930s.

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

If you look at a newspaper from 1900 and you look at a newspaper today, you see they haven't changed much in 100 years, other than the ads.

[Edward Greenspon]

Yes. There's more space for editorials.

I have some sympathy and some lack of sympathy. When I was in the newspaper business, I think I was on the reform end. I was the advocate and founding editor of theglobeandmail.com, and I think the newspaper industry.... I can do glass half full and glass half empty, really. I think they've been trying to innovate. I think some people.... I like the fact that we have news organizations with different strategies. To me it's healthy that people are experimenting with different kinds of strategies. Certainly, as we discussed earlier, La Presse has been wonderfully innovative.

There is a disparity in the quality of what newspapers have tried to do and how they've responded to their own crisis, and in the civic function too, and that's another reason I don't think treating everybody equally with tax credits and showering tax credits on them would be as good a means as having something that can judge quality. I recognize that opens up a situation in which somebody is doing that judging, but it seems to me that we've crossed that in this country with other kinds of granting councils.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Thank you, Mr. Greenspon.

Mr. Samson now has the floor.

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

Thank you.

I have two questions.

I will say this in English because I'm grappling with that notion that you brought forward of the double-arm's-length agency. That sounds even deeper than the Senate's sober second thought.

When you say that the government would be responsible for the structure, I expect you are referring to the whole issue of innovation and Canadian content in rural areas, in minority settings.

Are you there yet? You have to apply to access those funds.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Just a moment, Mr. Samson.

Can you take the question? Did you get it in English?

[Edward Greenspon]

Yes, but I didn't hear the last of the words. How would this agency distribute funds...?

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

It's the second part of the question.

It's an application process, so it's those structures put in place by government that you're indicating, and you have to confirm those that I shared and you may have some other pieces to that. How would that application and the determination take place, in your opinion?

[Edward Greenspon]

I purposely didn't want to go too deeply into that, because I feel that if this agency is set up, people are going to have to operate this agency, and they're not going to be me, and how they're going to make their determinations, I believe, will be based on precedents in other funds. Whether applications will be peer-reviewed as they are in academic councils, for instance, I'm not sure, but what concerned me most was the governance structure and that the governance structure be distant from government. I just commend, as I say, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation as a model the committee might want to look at in that regard.

You spoke also about the regional and local challenges. This is an incredible challenge, I think.

I don't want to invoke myself too much personally on the committee, but I'm actually not completely and totally and historically a metropolitan elite. I come from an immigrant family and I had my first news job in Lloydminster on the Saskatchewan-Alberta border. Then I went to the Regina Leader-Post, and I've worked in different sizes of media organizations. I understand in a city like Lloydminster—and there are a thousand Lloydminsters across this country—how imperative news is and how the transmission lines of the community occur through news and the community seeing itself and reflecting itself and knowing what's going on.

This would lead me in two directions to your answer. We cite in the report that Prince Albert, oddly enough, seems to have a very interesting portal type of operation that's built on the base of local radio. Some people may be familiar with it. That may be a replicable model, but it might need some money to try to scale it. Scaling is very difficult, and maybe the fund might help with scaling.

In the CP local initiative, we could start by putting something like 80 reporters out across the country to cover things that are not covered. Through this not-for-profit second service of Canadian Press, this material would be available to everyone: the local blogger, the local radio station, the local newspaper, start-up operations, whatever. It would be available to everyone and it would have high standards.

We believe that news is a public good, and if a community felt that they were losing this public good and they wanted to petition the CP local initiative to say their community needed news or a community group wanted to petition and said they'd like to contract for a reporter to cover their community, they'd have no control over it. They'd just pay a three-year subscription or something like that. These are things that would be measured.

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

I'll stop you there, if you don't mind. I have a quick question on the CBC. I'd like you to touch on that, because we've heard so many people make reference to the CBC.

Could you expand on the recommendation you've made concerning the public broadcaster and how you see it evolving in the future?

[Edward Greenspon]

I don't think there's any solution to a trustworthy flow of civic news in the country that CBC would not be part of. I also don't think it would be good to have too much CBC and too little anything else, because part of a democratic solution is diversity of voices and perspectives in assigning the news.

We say three things about the CBC. We say about its mandate, which is to inform, enlighten, and entertain, that the “inform” part, given what's happened in news, should be heavied up, if you will.

Second, we say that it should get out of the digital advertising area, because this is distorting to newsrooms across the whole system, since every day they get feedback on how many eyeballs saw a story, not on the quality of the journalism or the impact it might have had journalistically. It's pushing them in the wrong direction from where the CBC should be going.

Third, we say we should start thinking about, considering, and perhaps experimenting in a small way with what's called a creative commons licence, meaning that CBC's news material would be available to this much wider media ecosystem that Mr. Van Loan described earlier. We recognize that might sideswipe certain news organizations that are also doing an important job. We want to be careful not to create a moral hazard situation here, so we propose starting with the not-for-profit sector, which is a new sector of news, if you will, that's emerged over the last three to six years, and go down that road.

We think it's a good idea in some ways. Theoretically we believe it's a very good idea for what used to be a public broadcaster to be a public provider of high-quality information to the entire system, which is also having trouble discerning between high quality and low quality. However, we want to proceed cautiously on that because of the perhaps unintended consequences that could occur.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Thank you, Mr. Greenspon.

Considering the Conservative side seems to have passed on their question, I will—

Oh, you didn't pass. I'm happy I checked.

Go ahead, Mr. Waugh.

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

Let's just pick up on the CBC digital advertising, because it's only $25 million. We were here when the president of CBC indicated that they made $25 million out of digital advertising. It's not a lot of money that they've made to date.

Now, what they have done is stripped newspapers of their talent, I would say. Many newspaper columnists—Robyn Urback, Jason Warick, David Hutton—have gone over to CBC digital. I would say that's where they're getting their input. Torstar and others were here. Right now in terms of the digital input, they're ahead of the newspapers, but advertising-wise, $25 million doesn't seem like a lot of money to me.

[Edward Greenspon]

I agree with you. I don't think $25 million.... I was a little bit surprised at the number when I saw it. I thought it would be a bit higher, but there you go.

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

I will say that for television, it's over $300 million. If they do no ads for television, which they tossed in on us late—

[Edward Greenspon]

Yes. Let me come back to that in a second.

I would say a couple of things. I don't think anybody would want to recommend that CBC not be in the digital business. Digital is the future. If you're saying CBC shouldn't be digital, you're saying CBC shouldn't be. You're not saying that today, but in five or 10 years, that's the inevitable conclusion. CBC needs to be in the digital business. Perhaps they don't need to replicate everything that is well supplied elsewhere, but I want to come here and speak of principles, not substitute my judgment for CBC management's judgment.

I think the bigger problem of the number of journalists in the system is not where they might be working, but whether they're working, in large measure.

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

You didn't mention the $300 million.

[Edward Greenspon]

Yes, let me come back to the $300-million decision.

Madam Joly, and I'm sure the committee, is looking at the broader questions of the entire system and the digital impacts on film and television and other aspects. Ours was news. News isn't a major part of television advertising, and I don't think it's distorting to news in the way that I think it is actually distorting to digital. Figures that we have for CBC.ca show that about 75% of traffic comes there for news, and for Radio-Canada it is about 70%, if I remember the numbers. If I'm off slightly, I apologize to the committee, but those numbers are about right.

Those are news entities. CBC Television is a much more mixed entity. I'll leave it to the wisdom of you folks to figure that one out, but the digital one seemed obvious to me, because it was having effects on the news culture.

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

I say that because when they lost the Hockey Night in Canadacontract, they lost a lot of money for their news products. That's been well cited since they lost Hockey Night in Canada to Rogers. They've never made up that revenue to operate their newsrooms.

[Edward Greenspon]

I feel tempted to go down that road, but I don't think I should.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Edward Greenspon]

I could go down that road with you privately, Mr. Waugh—

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

Yes.

[Edward Greenspon]

—but I don't think it's my place here.

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, York—Simcoe, ON]

The Globe and Mail wrote a great piece on that investigation.