The government provides the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation with a parliamentary appropriation to provide a national public television and radio broadcasting service for all Canadians in both official languages. This service is primarily Canadian in content and character.
As a crown corporation operating independently from government, the CBC is not required to provide details of its expenditures beyond those which are contained in the audited financial statements of its annual reports.
(a) The Canadian Broadcasting corporation does not break down its funding by province; rather its funding is allocated to French and English radio and television, and administrative and other services associated with its production, programming and distribution.
Effective April 1, 2000 the corporation has announced an increase to the base funding for its radio services of $10.2 million. This new funding is being shared roughly 60:40 between the English and French radio services respectively and will be directed at enhancing and enriching the quality of their program schedules as well as for new initiatives designed to extend CBC's radio services to more Canadians. These latter initiatives are currently under developement by both the English and French language radio services.
(b) and (c) CBC's English and French language radio services have a combined annual funding platform of roughly $260 million. This represents close to 20% of CBC's total annual spending for its operations including specialty services.
Of the $260 million spent annually on CBC's radio services, roughly 60% goes toward funding CBC's two English language radio services: Radio One and Radio Two. The remaining 40% funds La Première Chaîne and La Chaîne Culturelle, CBC's French language radio services. As a percentage of CBC's total funding package, therefore, this equates to close to 12% being spent on CBC's English language radio services and 8% begin spent on CBC's French language radio services.
This funding relationship does not migrate much from one year to the next as can be seen from the following which has been extracted from CBC's annual reports for the respective years provided:
($ Millions)—1996/97—1997/98—1998/99 English Radio—$167—$156—$157 % of total funding—12.1%—12.6%—12.4% French Radio—$101-$98—$104 % of total funding—7.5%—8.0%—8.1% Total Radio—$268—$254—$261
*Excludes funding for downsizing and revenue from one time special events such as the Oympics.
Amounts for the 1999-2000 fiscal year will be available once the CBC's annual report is tabled before parliament early next fall.