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.