Official Languages Committee on April 1st, 2010

[The Chair, Conservative, Steven Blaney]

Good morning, everybody. As the members are taking their places, we will start this meeting.

Welcome to the seventh meeting of the Standing Committee on Official Languages. Today is Thursday, April 1. Pursuant to Standing Order 108, we are studying the support of the federal government for official languages minority media.

We have the pleasure to have as witnesses this morning two members of the National Campus and Community Radio Association. Mr. Kevin Matthews is the executive director and Shelley Robinson is the membership coordinator. Thank you for being with us this morning.

Joining us via video conference from Montreal is Mr. George Bakoyannis, the secretary-treasurer of the Quebec Community Newspapers Association. Mr. Bakoyannis, thank you for being with us this morning via this technology.

I guess we should begin. I would invite the people from the National Campus and Community Radio Association to begin with their opening statement.

Monsieur Matthews.

[Kevin Matthews, Executive Director, National Campus and Community Radio Association]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good morning, members. I'm Kevin Matthews, executive director of the National Campus and Community Radio Association, and this is Shelley Robinson, the membership coordinator.

The NCRA is a not-for-profit group of organizations and individuals committed to volunteer-based community-oriented radio broadcasting in Canada. The NCRA aims to increase the effectiveness of campus and community radio in Canada through public education about community media and by providing a forum for community broadcasters to share their work, develop their skills, and network. We also help represent community radio to government and other agencies.

Founded in 1981, we now have 76 members, four of which are situated in official language minority anglophone communities in Quebec. There are two other stations in Quebec based in OLMCs that are not currently NCRA members. We also have many English licensed stations in English majority communities that carry some French programming for their local minority francophone community and could use support to increase their services. But given the time limits of this presentation, we have focused mostly on the particular needs of stations serving OLMCs in Quebec.

We continue to work with l'Alliance des radios communautaires du Canada and l'Association des radiodiffuseurs communautaires du Québec to represent the sector and our 134 members who are divided about evenly between anglophone and francophone radio.

Our stations support official language minority communities in several ways. They provide local news and community announcements in the minority language. In many places, community radio is the only place people can hear about services, local cultural events, and government programs available in their official language.

In Sherbrooke, for example, CJMQ-FM is the only station in the area that does emergency broadcasts in English, and at CFTH-FM in Harrington Harbour, they receive most of their press releases from outside the community in French and translate them for the local listening audience.

They also support other minority language media. CIDI-FM in Missisquoi and CJMQ-FM in Sherbrooke both work closely with their local English newspapers, promoting them through ads and by contributing content.

They serve local businesses, particularly those targeting the OLMC, by providing advertising at a very low cost. For example, at CIDI-FM in Missisquoi, $10 buys you a 30-second ad in both English and French.

They provide support to official language minority artists and culture. All of the stations play a lot of local and regional music and make it a priority. They also have times when local musicians come in to play live on air and do interviews.

They allow a place for official language minority communities to tell their own stories. CIDI-FM in Missisquoi has just started a series of history programs about the area, looking back 60 to 80 years, produced in English by their volunteers.

They preserve a special place for the minority language. Even those stations that have a lot of French programming feel their English programming and their standing as an anglophone cultural organization are crucial to serving their official language minority community effectively.

[Shelley Robinson, Membership Coordinator, National Campus and Community Radio Association]

Thank you.

As for specific needs, our members serving official language minority communities tell us their primary challenge is underfunding. Whether to increase power to serve a larger population, to hire more staff to cover more local news and cultural events, or to create outreach programs to engage more volunteers, these stations find themselves financially unable to grow, to plan strategically for their future, to build capacity, and to fully serve their communities.

CFTH in Harrington Harbour needs training in program design, announcing, computer skills, journalism, and volunteer development. CFBS-FM in Blanc-Sablon also wants training for better staff and volunteer retention. The personnel at the station are self-taught, and they'd like outside help to train the next generation and avoid costly learning based on trial and error. They would also like training for their board of directors, who are drawn from the community, to help them understand their governance role in the station.

CJMQ-FM in Sherbrooke wants to increase their broadcasting power from 2,000 to 6,000 watts in order to better serve the township's anglophone community, and they would like to employ more staff. Currently, even the station manager is unpaid and has been for eight years. They also lack strategic resources to fully research the needs of their community and how they can serve it better.

CIDI-FM in Missisquoi estimates they need about seven full-time employees to really cover their local communities. They currently have three. They also identified the need for a regional conference of the stations in Quebec serving the official language minority communities, where they can share tips and resources and develop stronger ties for ongoing support.

All of these challenges relate to funding. With better resources, stations could offer more training to staff and volunteers, better salaries and benefits to retain skilled and experienced staff, and more resources to recruit and train volunteers from the community. More than anything, this kind of support would mean they could better serve their local official language minority communities.

Many of these challenges are shared by English stations operating in majority anglophone communities that also offer access and programming to local francophone minority communities. Chronic underfunding means there is no money to translate training materials into French or to hire staff who could speak to programmers in their official minority language.

Thus, in addition to specific support for stations based in OLMCs, support for the campus and community radio sector as a whole also helps strengthen services to official language minority communities.

On funding, the short story is that the community-based radio sector has a public service mandate, but with no guaranteed funding to accomplish it. Stations get money from local fundraising, advertising, student fees, and a tiny amount from government and other grants. In 2008, NCRA members raised an average of 3.1% of their revenue from government sources. By comparison, 14% was raised from private donations, from listeners, and from community funding drives.

Currently, the Government of Canada has no specific program for community radio. Stations that apply to federal funding programs are competing for that funding with other kinds of community organizations, including arts groups and other social service organizations.

To resolve some of these concerns, the NCRA, ARC du Canada, and ARC du Québec founded the Community Radio Fund of Canada, now in its second year of operation. Together, we are working to address the gap in funding for community radio by pursuing contributions from Canada's private broadcasters, the federal government, and other donations.

In Quebec, the Minister of Culture, Communications, and the Status of Women has a program for community radio, though it's not available to campus stations. Without it, though, CJMQ-FM in Sherbrooke says they would have to close their doors. We congratulate the provincial government of Quebec for its success, but this is not enough to let stations serving official language minority communities do much more than survive. They deserve to flourish.

[Kevin Matthews]

In the past year, the NCRA, ARC du Canada, and ARC du Québec participated jointly in the CRTC campus and community radio policy review. Our comments to the hearing addressed several areas of the policy in which our stations need more flexible and realistic regulation, but the dominant topic of the hearing was the need for sustainable funding of the sector.

We encouraged the CRTC to direct a mandatory portion of the CCD benefits that private radio stations pay toward the Community Radio Fund of Canada, as it has been certified by the CRTC to receive these benefits, and support for community-based radio is support for Canadian culture.

At the same time, we addressed our stations' service to official language minority communities. To respect our limited time here, we must refer you to our submission to that proceeding, which we will append to a brief to this committee in the near future, and which is also available online attached to that CRTC proceeding. The proceeding number is 2009-418.

The copyright system in Canada presents barriers to campus and community radio that also affect official language minority communities. Copyright reform will affect our stations' ability to support local artists, including those based in OLMCs, and will affect not only our stations' ability to adopt new technologies but also of course their delicate financial position.

To save time, we will refer you to our participation in last year's public copyright consultation, at which we laid out our agenda on copyright reform for the good of community-based radio. We will also append this submission to our forthcoming brief.

If Canada's new copyright legislation is not reflective of our needs, it may inhibit our stations' support of emerging and independent artists and their ability to allocate resources to local culture and information programming, and it might possibly inhibit them taking their arts support activities into new media.

Earlier this year, while we prepared our testimony for the CRTC hearing, the NCRA, ARC du Canada, and ARC du Québec assessed the gap between the funding we get and the cost of performing our mandate. We are urging the federal government to play its part in addressing this gap, as CCD benefits from private broadcasters are based on their revenue and are not sustainable or consistent enough for a healthy community-based radio system. Official languages is a piece of this puzzle.

At this time, we recommend core funding, via the Community Radio Fund of Canada, at a level of $30,000 per station to support core operations and thereby enable all stations to better serve official language minority communities. This is more than one full-time salary at most stations, which achieve remarkable results on shoestring budgets.

For the 140 campus and community stations that serve Canadians in nine provinces and every territory, this core support would cost the federal government just $4.2 million, would result in better support to official language minority communities, and would directly affect hundreds of communities, thousands of volunteers, and tens of thousands of listeners across the country.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Steven Blaney]

Thank you for this well-prepared presentation.

We'll now turn to the secretary-treasurer of the Quebec Community Newspapers Association, Mr. Bakoyannis.

[George Bakoyannis, Secretary-Treasurer, Quebec Community Newspapers Association]

Good morning. My name is George Bakoyannis, and I thank you for the opportunity to be here today. I am the secretary-treasurer of the Quebec Community Newspapers Association. I am also the publisher of five community newspapers, three of them being official language minority community newspapers.

I am here today representing the interests of 35 or so members of QCNA and that of our association. Our association has been in existence for 30 years, and it supports English language community newspapers in Quebec. QCNA is a funded beneficiary of Canadian Heritage, and as such, we recognize the importance of official language support programs.

Our association exists because of funding we receive from Canadian Heritage. Our other financing comes from an advertising clearing house. Basically we have one client, and that is the federal government. We work very closely with the public works department to provide services and clear advertising for our member papers in Quebec.

There are many items that we could talk about, but I chose two in order to be brief and not take too much time. One is the support from the federal government for official language minority media, and I think this is very pertinent to the meeting we're having today.

Last year at this time I was present at a consultation in Ottawa on media advertising on official language minority media. I met with some people from Public Works. They presented me a brochure with some information regarding advertising from the federal government and where it has been going in the last few years.

In a graph that was presented to us, we saw that federal advertising has been increasing not only for newspapers, but also for TV and radio. The biggest increase, I would like to say, was in newspapers. The graph shows that, in 2004-05, the federal government spent $868,000 on advertising in Quebec, in minority media I'm presuming. In 2007, that number doubled—again, this is only for newspapers—to $1,938,000. That's a very healthy increase.

But we have a huge problem at QCNA because between those two years we had a decrease in the amount of advertising that came to our member papers. In 2004-05, QCNA cleared from the federal government about $300,000 of advertising to our 35 or so members. Compare that to 2006-07, when barely $65,000 went to our members from the federal government.

So while the budget doubled, minority community newspapers in Quebec got 75% less advertising than they did in 2004-05. It's a huge discrepancy, and one that we would like to see changed in a way where a certain portion of the advertising spent by the federal government would be earmarked towards community newspapers.

I'm not as well prepared as my counterparts from radio, but I can tell you that our needs are just as great as theirs. We have newspapers that are just basically hanging in there.

I can talk about one of my papers that is barely hanging in there. It's called Parc-Extension News. It's a small newspaper that covers an area of Montreal that is called “the Port of Canada”, basically because most new immigrants to Quebec end up there. We're talking about unemployment and welfare in the neighbourhood of 40%. It's a very deprived area.

We have a newspaper there. We've been publishing that paper for 17 years. I can tell you, if it weren't for the little we get from the federal government, and the very little we get from the provincial government and from the City of Montreal, that paper would not exist. It would just not be viable with only advertising from the businesses in the area.

The other thing I would like to talk about is the Canada Periodical Fund, which I also think is important and very crucial for community newspapers and our association. We were very happy to see the changes made to the Canada Periodical Fund, and we're hoping that special consideration will be given to minority language community newspapers.

What we would like to see also is the inclusion of free-distribution papers, with of course some rules and regulations. Because of the way the market is here in Quebec, paid newspapers that were eligible to get this Canada Periodic Fund had to change their way of distribution to stay relevant and competitive in the market. They had to compete with other newspapers that were doing door-to-door distribution, or basically blanket distribution. Having done that, they lost their funding from this program. We would like to see that funding extended to papers that have free distribution, or what we call controlled distribution.

I'll just stress the point that the federal government is doing a wonderful job supporting French papers outside Quebec. The APF, or the Association de la presse francophone, is clearing ads for its members, which are about 35 newspapers across Canada--French papers--outside Quebec. While English papers in Quebec are getting in the neighbourhood of $100,000 in advertising, our French counterparts outside Quebec are getting 10 times that. Having said that, I think there is some room for improvement, and I hope we can get this worked out as soon as possible.

[The Chair, Conservative, Steven Blaney]

Thank you, Mr. Bakoyannis.

Now we will proceed with the first round.

Before I begin, I would just like to extend my best wishes, on our first day, to our clerk, Isabelle.

It was your birthday yesterday, Isabelle.

Mr. Bélanger, you have the floor.

[Mauril Bélanger, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

No. I won't take the floor at the moment.

[The Chair, Conservative, Steven Blaney]

Excuse me. Ms. Zarac, you have the floor.

[Lise Zarac, Liberal, LaSalle—Émard, QC]

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for being here with us today. I am going to address Mr. Bakoyannis first.

There have been changes in the federal programs. We know that the Canada Periodical Fund now covers the Canada Magazine Fund and the Publications Assistance Program. The government says it made these changes as a result of consultations done from January to April 2008. Mr. Bakoyannis, since you represent 700,000 readers, have you been consulted

[George Bakoyannis]

Our association has been consulted. Our executive director, Greg Duncan, has been at quite a few meetings, and we have voiced our concerns and opinions. Yes, we have been consulted.

[Lise Zarac, Liberal, LaSalle—Émard, QC]

Right.

I would like to know the form in which you were consulted. Was it by a survey or an open discussion with the department?

[George Bakoyannis]

It was a discussion. It was an invitation to our executive director, Mr. Greg Duncan. He attended the meeting and represented our association, and of course the interests of our newspapers. There were no other invitations for newspapers or publishers like me.

[Lise Zarac, Liberal, LaSalle—Émard, QC]

Right.

Do you feel that the recommendations you made were reflected in the new fund? Do you see evidence of your recommendations in the new program?

[George Bakoyannis]

I know for a fact that our executive director presented those recommendations to the people holding the meetings, but up to now, we still don't know. I know that there have been some changes to the program, but they don't go far enough to include free-distribution papers or controlled-distribution papers like mine. I have five newspapers, and none of my papers are getting funding from this program--none.

[Lise Zarac, Liberal, LaSalle—Émard, QC]

Right.

Did you receive funding before? You mentioned five of your newspapers.

[George Bakoyannis]

Personally, I never received funding. I never received funding because all my papers are free-distribution papers. They are controlled-distribution papers. We don't sell the papers by subscription; they are distributed to a certain geographical area.

[Lise Zarac, Liberal, LaSalle—Émard, QC]

Right.

Now, in this fund, there is a new criterion requiring a minimum of 5,000 copies. How do you think that will affect funding for newspapers exactly?

[George Bakoyannis]

It gives us the possibility of actually going out and trying to sell 5,000 copies in order to qualify for the program, but I don't see why we have to go to this length in order to be able to get a program that we personally believe we're entitled to. We are providing good information to communities that otherwise would not get that information in a minority language paper such as ours.

As for finding a way to sell 2,500 or 5,000 papers, I'm not sure what the number is. I think it might be 2,500 because of our minority situation. We have the possibility of doing that, but I am not sure if that's the right way to go about it and I am not sure which part of the funding we would get. Would we be funded for the 2,500 that are sold, or would we be funded for our total circulation? In the example I gave you of Parc-Extension News, we have 10,000 copies distributed in a certain area.

[Lise Zarac, Liberal, LaSalle—Émard, QC]

The minimum is 5,000 copies. Do you think that is fair and achievable for some regions that may not have a circulation of 5,000 people in those places?

You say it forces you to sell more. But is that achievable?

[George Bakoyannis]

You know, I really don't think it's fair, because I am looking at the list of all the people who are getting the funds; some of them are huge multinational corporations that I personally think don't need the help of the federal government, and here we have newspapers that are basically struggling. I am talking about official language minority papers: English in Quebec and French outside of Quebec. I'm not talking only about Quebec here; I'm talking about my French counterparts outside Quebec. They're in basically the same position that we are. I don't think it's fair.

Pushing us so that we are going to have to go out and sell 2,500 papers or 5,000 papers--I'm not sure what the number is--in order to qualify for this program is, I find.... Yes, you're going to have some people who are going to go out there and get very creative and do this in order to get the program, but I don't think that's the way it should be done.

You were talking about 35 papers in Quebec and another 35 papers outside Quebec, and how some of these papers are already receiving this funding because they are smaller papers outside metropolitan areas. If you're publishing a paper in a small town and your distribution covers a 30-square-kilometre area where you cannot do door-to-door distribution, then you have to use Canada Post or some other method. You have no choice but to have a subscription-based newspaper. However, in our communities in Montreal and surrounding Montreal, the market doesn't work like that. We are competing with many other papers. As an English paper, I am competing with three or four other French papers in the area, so we can't go to subscription only; our numbers would drop down to such a number that it would be impossible to compete.

[The Chair, Conservative, Steven Blaney]

Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Zarac.

We'll now go on with Monsieur Richard Nadeau.

[Richard Nadeau, Bloc, Gatineau, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

First, I would like to congratulate our friend Yvon Godin. His bill relating to bilingualism for Supreme Court judges was passed yesterday. It is an important step forward for Canada that the judges on its highest court will understand both official languages of the country, Canada. It should have been done a long time ago, but it is never too late to do it. I would like to mention this.

Good morning, Mr. Matthews, Ms. Robinson and Mr. Bakoyannis. I am pleased to see you today. We met with your colleagues in the French-Canadian media not long ago. I noticed one aspect of the situation in particular, and I would like to hear your thoughts on that. It is the interdepartmental question.

Are there programs or support from the federal government, apart from Canadian Heritage, that encourage you to apply? Or are you aware of federal programs or departments that can help you in your efforts to disseminate information to the people who listen to you and read you?

[Kevin Matthews]

Are you referring specifically to funding programs?

[Richard Nadeau, Bloc, Gatineau, QC]

I'm referring to anything that can help you.