Madam Speaker, the Reform members will be splitting their time today.
It gives me great pleasure to rise today to discuss this motion which has been put forward by my hon. colleague from the Bloc Quebecois.
It is important to note that it seems a little particular that we are debating this issue in the House when this exact issue is before the heritage committee. We as a committee have been reviewing the CBC for quite some time, focusing primarily on the issue of the role of the CBC in a 500 channel universe.
When the committee began this endeavour in September of last year, our mandate also included how to fund the CBC and report to the finance minister with recommendations for budgetary cuts in this year's budget. That timetable was postponed. We then set a new tentative date to conclude and make our recommendations to the House as a whole by the beginning of March. It is obvious the committee did not meet that timetable.
Presently we are still reviewing the CBC. No action plan or recommendations are in place. Therefore perhaps it is appropriate that the Bloc has introduced this motion to debate this issue on the CBC.
It is also abundantly clear to me and to most Canadians that this government is unwilling to deal with the fundamental issues such as the CBC and its financing. Since our arrival in Ottawa this government has introduced discussion paper after discussion paper while ignoring the pleas of Canadians for action.
If we look at the Liberals' latest budget, we see they have begun to sing from the same songbook as the Reform Party. Canada's national debt and deficit have moved from the back burner to the mid-range burner. These notorious tax and spend Liberals are beginning to see the flaws in such a policy, yet they are still attempting to hold onto all government entrenched programs through an ever decreasing amount of resources.
The fact is however that Canada does not have a revenue problem but a spending problem. This spending problem is perpetuated by the fact that the federal government continually spends billions of dollars on programs that could be done by the private sector at no cost to the taxpayer. This would ensure that the necessary funding would be available for priority departments such as health, education, defence and veterans affairs.
In terms of privatization, this government has taken a step in the right direction, however it has not gone far enough. Every ministry has one or more areas in which the government is providing a service which is in competition with the private sector or could be done more effectively by the private sector.
We as a government must balance our books which means all areas of public financing must be evaluated for efficiency, cost and effectiveness. It is for these reasons we are looking at the financing of the CBC.
The CBC's primary mandate should be the provision of distinctive culture specific information and drama programming. In an increasing multichannel environment the current mandate to provide a wide range of programming that informs, enlightens and entertains is too broad.
It is also clear that the mandate of the CBC is to provide Canadians with predominantly Canadian programming. What Canadians are being subjected to is extremely questionable in terms of meeting this prescribed mandate.
The issue is no longer whether the CBC has adequate funding. That has passed long ago. Rather, it is the structure of the CBC. In particular, the CBC has not adjusted to the realities of the marketplace. It is outdated, highly centralized and expensive.
We must constantly remind ourselves that the Canadian broadcasting environment has changed radically since the original conception of the CBC.
New technologies and new services change viewing tastes and fundamental changes in advertising behaviours have transformed the broadcasting environment. Do not forget that in a world where the CBC is no longer the only national service, does it make sense to use scarce public funds to subsidize the provision of commercial television programming?
In this new world of broadcasting, consisting of many more options to television viewers, public broadcasting cannot effectively maintain the objective that it is all things to all people.
It is therefore essential for survival in this multichannel universe that the public broadcaster be willing to reinvent itself. It is quite evident the corporation is unwilling to do that.
The president and the former president of the CBC stated revenues were not their mission. We must therefore as parliamentarians address this area for them. Since revenues are not the mission of the CBC, what is?
How can a private company such as CTV make revenues its mission while still adhering to Canadian content regulations? CTV last year spent $488 million while the CBC spent $561 million on Canadian content programming. This is not a huge difference considering we spent over $1 billion for the operation of the CBC and nothing on CTV.
CTV spends close to the same as CBC on Canadian productions. The difference is that one is government owned and one is privately owned. One is a drain on the public purse, the other adds to the public coffers through taxation of profits.
Had this government privatized the CBC it could have saved the taxpayer approximately $800 million and this number does not include revenues that would have been generated from the sale of approximately $1.5 billion in assets, which the CBC currently holds.
The sceptics will rise and say that if we privatize the CBC, Canadian culture will perish, Canadian culture cannot survive without government intervention. Surely they jest. Canadians are extremely talented. They produce, write, paint, create. They do this not because the government says it is okay, but rather because they want to create. The fruits of their labour will sell if it is quality, and it will not if it is not.
Art and culture should be created not because government thinks it is so, but because the artist wants to do it. The more government gets involved, the more things seem to go awry.
I would like to make a comparison between the privatization of Air Canada, Petro-Canada and the possibility of similar action being taken with regard to the CBC but I see my time is running out.
I would like to amend the motion of the Bloc. I move:
That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word "years".