Mr. Speaker, I rise to participate in this debate. While I agree with much of what the motion before us states, I must also hasten to add that I agree with the amendment introduced by the Reform Party that would strike out the words after the phrase "for the next three years".
I must chide the Bloc members. As the official opposition they must also concern themselves with the whole country. The government has done a disservice to the CBC not just in Quebec but to the CBC and public broadcasting across this country. Therefore, I hope the amendment introduced by the Reform Party will be accepted by the House so we can vote in favour of the whole opposition motion.
The need for public broadcasting like that of the CBC is greater today than ever before. Both government members and Bloc members have mentioned this. Reform Party members have basically spoken against the CBC suggesting that it should be privatized and sold. I find them to be a bit sinister or really naive.
Historically, every political party in Canada, whether from the left or the right have agreed there is a need for the state to intervene and to play an activist role in order to maintain a sense of national identity and a sense of cultural identity. The reality of a small, populated country like Canada living next to a very large, dynamic country like the United States means that if we are going to maintain a sense of who we are, we are going to have to do something in a collective way.
As I have mentioned before, all the political parties, whether it was the Conservative Party, the Liberal Party, the New Democratic Party or the old Social Credit Party, whether they were parties to the left or the right, have agreed on this basic premise, except of course for the Reform Party. That is why I wonder whether the Reform Party really understands the national interest in this sense or whether it is naivety or sinister intent.
If we did not have institutions such as the CBC, if we did not have a more interventionist government policy when it came to cultural issues, imagine what Canada would be like. Imagine what Canada would be like if we did not have the CBC. We would be totally Americanized. We would not have the jobs. We would not have the ability of Canadians to hear and see each other.
It is in the national interest to maintain a strong Canadian cultural policy and a cultural identity so that we as citizens can hear and see each other. To let the market decide in the way the Reform Party advocates is doing a disservice to the country because we will not be able to hear and see each other.
Market forces will operate and market forces are such that it is cheaper to have an American program on television during prime time than it is to have a Canadian program. The economics are such that it does not make any sense in terms of profit to have and produce Canadian programs. I would think that Reform members would understand that.
Let us turn to the record of this government. It has not been a good one when it comes to cultural matters. It started off with Ginn publishing. It has the inability or lack of desire to stand up for Canadian publishing companies to ensure they remain in the hands of Canadians so that Canadian writers will have their works published.
Then we come to the budget. The minister of heritage had given public assurance to the CBC that its funding would not be cut, that it would have stable funding for the next three years. Despite that fact, lo and behold on budget night we realized, it realized and the country realized the dimension of the cuts.
It is now obvious from the budget that the CBC cannot carry out its legislated mandate. The government and the minister particularly have done a disservice by giving a false sense of security to public broadcasting and the CBC by stating that its funding would be assured for the next three years. It gave public broadcasting in this country that assurance. It was a false assurance and the government and the minister have done a disservice.
Instead of the government thinking through what type of new public broadcasting should be initiated before it announces cuts, it instead has done the whole thing backward. It has announced cuts and who knows, maybe more will be coming. Rumour has it that we might see a budget this coming fall with more cuts.
Rather than having a vision as to what a new form of public broadcasting should mean in Canada and how we can get the resources together to fulfil that, the government starts from the opposite direction. It decides how much it is going to cut and then lets the pieces fall where and how they may. That is not careful planning. It is not smart management. It is mismanagement. It is running the terrible danger of public broadcasting destroying itself in this country.
The reform and changes government members talk about occurring out of blind cuts and slashes rather than something that is being done in an intelligent manner are now occurring within the CBC. The debate within the CBC now is whether it can adjust to the cuts other than just by cutting and cutting or by starting first to rethink what public broadcasting can and should be and then working from the ground up.
In other words, the government is starting in the wrong direction and in the wrong way. Rather than rethinking things through and starting from the bottom and working up, it is jumping in with cuts and cuts. It is not thinking through what those cuts will mean and how they will be implemented. There is no blueprint, no vision about what public broadcasting should be.
I do not have much time in this debate but I would like to put on record some of my suggestions and my vision of what public broadcasting should be.
It should start from the ground up. The regions and regional broadcasting should be the heart and core of public broadcasting. I would be furious if all the cuts were done at the regional
level and the head office was not touched at all. I am critical of past CBC cuts for not attacking the head office and instead attacking the regions as was done in the 1980s.
I think we all agree and I think the people within the CBC also agree that the head office remains bloated. It does not need the hundreds and hundreds of people in the financial section. I believe there are 200 people dealing with the relationship of the CBC, the CRTC and the government. It can be much meaner and leaner on that level.
The CBC has to be based on the regions, the alliances and the networking in which producers, creators and reporters can work at the regional and local community level. The national system should be an alliance, a bringing together of the different regions forming a national system.
The internal relations between management and employees have to change. They are changing. It is already happening. It has to be accelerated. Sitting in on the committee, I heard some very positive things of what the CBC is doing.
For example in Windsor, a station that was shut down, the CBC and the employees got together and said: "Okay, let us reopen this". It is operated in an entirely different way. Producers, technicians, reporters and performers are all working together in a non-adversarial, non-hierarchical way. Lo and behold, even the reporter or the producer will carry the camera, or plug in the lights. There is not a strict code that differentiates the jobs that the different unions and the different technicians and people do. It is a whole different way of operating a station.
I understand this is working well and it is exciting. It is a way the new creative juices can flow. That is exciting. As I see a reformed public broadcasting and a reformed CBC, I would like to see the winds of experiment done all across the country.
In the same vein, another point I would like to bring forward is a more syndicalist approach as a solution to the problems of the CBC. I know in the first round of cuts in the 1980s the CBC shut down the Saskatoon station. I understand that the employees in Saskatoon wanted to run the station. They tried to buy the equipment to run the CBC station in Saskatoon themselves.
This should be highly encouraged. The workers within the CBC should have the ultimate control, not some hierarchy in head office in Ottawa or Toronto. It is the local actors, the local producers, the local reporters, the local technicians working together in a co-operative way operating our television and radio stations. A more syndicalist approach is what I would advocate as a model for the CBC to seriously consider.
In closing, I must mention my disappointment with the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. I am an associate member and not a full time member on the committee. This committee has been meeting since last fall and it still has not tackled the fundamental issues. It keeps going around in circles. Part of the problem is that this government has no sense of leadership and no vision to present to the committee.
If anything, I would tend to think that the government members on that committee are more divided among themselves as to what direction public broadcasting should be going in. There is no understanding that the degree of cuts the CBC is facing will necessitate a total change in the mandates. We have not had a discussion in terms of seriously looking at the mandates. I would tend to think that much of the work the committee has done has now been made obsolete by the speech the Minister of Finance delivered on budget day. We have to go back to square one and look at what the legislated mandate of the CBC is and start from there.
The government's lack of vision and lack of direction when it comes to public broadcasting is doing a disservice to the CBC. This government is being driven by the finance department, not that we do not have a serious problem when it comes to debt and deficits. Politics in Canada will be defined in terms of how different political parties propose to deal with the debt and deficit.
This government's reaction to public broadcasting is not a wise one. It is not an intelligent one. It is not one that has been thought through. It is being driven by the finance department. In the end, it might cost Canada even more money or loss of the resources we have built up over the years in our public broadcasting system.
Hopefully, the House will accept the amendment of the Reform Party and that we will be able therefore to support the motion as presented to us by the Bloc Quebecois.