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.