Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Friends of Canadian Broadcasting is a watchdog group, financed by 100,000 Canadians. Our mission is to defend and to enhance the quality and the quantity of Canadian programming in the English-language audio-visual system.
I wish to thank you for meeting with us today. We always appreciate the privilege of appearing before you to present our viewpoint in an effort to influence your proceedings.
As citizens of a small country dependent upon international trade for wealth creation, Canadians have a large stake in promoting abroad our identity and our brand. In large measure, Canada's branding is the product of our audio-visual system, the export of our images and stories to other countries. Confidence in our cultures, a belief in the integrity of our identity, and a projection of those values beyond our borders are key to our national development.
Successful models of national branding among our principal competitors abound. Other than the United States, where Hollywood plays this role, the best international branding models come from countries with strong national public broadcasters, such as Finland, Denmark, Norway, the United Kingdom, and Germany.
The House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage researched investment in public broadcasting by OECD countries in its recent report, Our Cultural Sovereignty, and identified that Canada ranks 20th among 25 countries. These data are reproduced in our written submission; they come from page 178 of the Lincoln report. Canada spends 0.08% of our GDP on public broadcasting, well below the OECD average of 0.14%, and far below the range of 0.28% to 0.19% in the leading countries I just mentioned.
Friends of Canadian Broadcasting recommends that the committee recognize the importance of strong public broadcasting to Canada's identity and branding in the world. As a long-term goal, funding for Canadian public broadcasting should be increased to at least the OECD average. In return, Parliament should establish practical benchmarks for Canadian public broadcasting.
Second, we recommend that your committee re-adopt a recommendation from your December 2004 report that the federal government provide stable, long-term funding to a number of important cultural institutions. Specifically, your committee recommended then that the government should increase funding to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Radio-Canada.
The recent CBC lockout demonstrated what a Toronto broadcasting corporation would sound and look like. As you know, it has also demonstrated how strongly Canadians rely upon our national public broadcaster.
In this respect, you might be interested in data from an Ipsos Reid opinion poll that Friends of Canadian Broadcasting commissioned during the week before the writs of the 2004 general election. In that poll, Ipsos Reid posed the following question: “Assume for a moment that your federal member of Parliament asked for your advice on an upcoming vote in the House of Commons on what to do about CBC funding. Which of the following three options would you advise him or her to vote for: decrease the funding to the CBC from current levels, maintain funding for the CBC at current levels, or increase funding to the CBC from current levels?” Ipsos Reid found that 9% of Canadians would recommend decreasing CBC's funding, 51% would maintain it at current levels, and 38% would increase CBC funding from current levels.
We also draw to your attention a series of recent recommendations from the Senate Transport and Communications Committee, which touched on reforms to CBC's mandate. Among its recommendations, the Senate called on the CBC to reduce its dependency on advertising revenues and professional sports.
Friends of Canadian Broadcasting recommends to the finance committee that it endorse a two-part reform in CBC financing. In return for reducing or eliminating its reliance on advertising revenues, the CBC's public funding should be increased. This funding could come from either general revenues or from charges to the television distribution system akin to the subscription fees charged for services like TSN or Sportsnet. Friends of Canadian Broadcasting notes that such a reform would likely enjoy the support of many of Canada's private broadcasters, it could be introduced gradually over several years, and it would fulfill the Prime Minister's commitment to, and I'm quoting, “...reduce CBC's dependence on advertising revenue and its competition with the private sector for these valuable dollars, especially in non-sports programming”.
In conjunction with these reforms to the financing of public broadcasting, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting endorses a proposal that Heritage Minister Bev Oda made, “That the government should undertake to establish an independent task force to review the mandate, role and services of the CBC-SRC”. That task force should be charged with recommending reforms to the CBC's management and governance, which would remove political patronage from the CBC's board and presidential selection process in keeping with the best international standards for public broadcasting.
CBC is our largest cultural institution. It plays a major role in our democratic life and we must ensure that it remains healthy and that it has the capacity to carry out the important mandate given to it by Parliament.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.