Thank you. Good morning.
As mentioned, my name is Troy Reeb. I currently serve as the senior vice-president in charge of Global news, radio and station operations for Corus Entertainment. In a previous capacity, I also served six years as chair of the broadcast consortium on debates and elections and oversaw the process that helped to create the highly successful and highly watched 2008 and 2011 televised leaders' debates.
I will recognize right off the bat that the word “consortium” conjures up images of a grandly organized body, though I should point out that we are very much competitors every day of the week, and we do not speak with a single voice despite the fact that we are all here in front of you today. In the case of the consortium, it simply represents an ad hoc agreement of various news organizations to work together in the public interest. Its creation stems from a desire of the parties to not participate in multiple debates, and a desire of the broadcasters to not be pitted against one another for the right to hold a debate and then to reach as large an audience as possible when a debate was held.
The consortium was never designed to limit the number of debates. I say to you firmly today, the more debates, the better. Indeed, during past elections Global News and other members of the consortium have staged their own supplementary debates. We've staged regional debates, specific topic debates, often featuring candidates beyond the party leaders. This diversity of debates should be encouraged, but there should also be at least one well-produced national debate in each official language that meets broadcast and journalistic standards and is distributed as broadly as possible to Canadians.
To be frank, a chamber of commerce debate does not meet that test. A debate live-streamed by an online magazine does not meet that test: proper lighting, camera placement, pacing, topic choices, a skilled moderator, a set not emblazoned with advertising. As we saw in 2015, all of these things matter, and all of these things also cost money.
A witness earlier this week pointed out, quite correctly actually, that one could now stage a debate and distribute it online for almost zero cost. What he failed to point out is that without production values, proper facilities, and I would say very importantly a journalistic frame for that debate, then there would be almost zero viewers as well.
In the past, consortium debates have been paid for by the participating news organizations and distributed to other media either on a cost-share or sometimes free basis. It has, of course, been up to the individual choice of any media organization as to whether they choose to carry it, and often that's based on whether it meets their standards and the standards that their audience would expect of a debate. This needs to continue to be the case, regardless of how future debates are produced. We, as broadcasters, as journalistic organizations, have the responsibility for upholding our conditions of licence and our journalistic standards. The ability of news organizations to make programming decisions independently is as key to the free functioning of democracy as is the ability to engage in vigorous debate.
I look forward to your questions later, and I'll turn it over to my colleague, Wendy Freeman.