Madam Speaker, let us cast our memories back to a few months ago, to September 2008. Canada was in the middle of an election campaign. The then Liberal leader challenged our current Prime Minister to be honest with Canadians and admit his dreams of closing the CBC. There is only one problem with this. It was actually Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau who once threatened to put the key in the door of Radio-Canada. Subsequent Conservative leaders actually increased the CBC's budget, but not for long, though. By the time the Chrétien Liberal government came into power, the CBC funding would eventually be slashed hundreds of millions of dollars. But I am getting ahead of myself here. Let us start at the beginning.
I am happy to speak today about the CBC. The member for Honoré-Mercier has moved a motion regarding the role of CBC Radio-Canada in promoting national, regional and local programming services to linguistic minorities throughout Canada. The member wants the government to provide the CBC with bridge financing to maintain 2008 staffing and service levels.
First, I would like to say that while we are always saddened to hear of job losses, when the president of the CBC referred to the readjustments of the national broadcaster, he said the CBC would have had to undergo them regardless of whether there was bridge financing.
The broadcasting industry in Canada is undergoing substantial hardship and, like any other industry, has had to adjust. All broadcasters have had to work within budget constraints, whether it is through a loss of advertising revenues or from other realities in this age of new media. They have had to make tough choices.
We have much faith in those in management at the CBC. We strongly believe they will be capable of making the right decisions and will be able to continue to operate and serve all Canadians, including official language minorities across our great country. They understand they need to tighten their belts, just like all Canadians are doing right now, and be cautious with taxpayers' money.
We hope that the CBC will ultimately be able to deliver the services and trust that it will be able to deliver these services and news products that Canadians expect from it. We will be monitoring the decisions of the board members very carefully to make sure that they respect CBC's mandate and treat the employees fairly.
The CBC receives over $1.1 billion per year from our government. The management should be able to manage the company with this unprecedented level of government support. In fact, the budget allocating these funds was just passed by a majority of the members of this House, including the hon. member for Honoré-Mercier, who voted for the bill at all stages.
Our funding of the CBC has increased annually since we took government. In fact, in four successive governments, we have increased the funding to the CBC each and every budget.
We have made some very specific promises in our party platform. We have followed through on our campaign promises. We have made that commitment in our budgets. We have not changed anything. Our Conservative government has increased its support for the CBC year after year.
The Liberals suggest we should be providing the CBC with bridge financing to help it survive the current economic crisis. The current Liberal leader suggested that this would enable the CBC to maintain its current number of employees and that there would be no job loss. I guess he should speak to some of the executives at the CBC.
In fact, Richard Stursberg, executive vice-president of English services, said just last week that when the CBC asked the government for bridge financing, it was for the same amount of money. He said, “It was for $125 million, and with that amount of money, if they had given us the bridge financing, we still would have had to cut 800 people”. This is regrettable, but it is the reality broadcasters are facing.
CBC President Hubert Lacroix also spoke to his employees last week on the state of the affairs at the CBC. He outlined its economic status and told them of the changes that were going to take place at their office. He spoke very highly of our Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages. He said:
I have met with [the minister] on several occasions. He is a man that I could get along with and respect, and with whom I could build a business relationship. We seem to share a number of convictions regarding what Canada's public broadcaster should be, including, ... the need to review the public broadcasting model to eliminate the reliance on advertising revenue to fund some of its activities.
Allow me to take members on a walk down memory lane, just a few years back in time. Let us go back to 1993 and the Liberal red book, where the Liberals promised they would make no cuts to the CBC.
I just heard a member saying they would like to bring in a multi-year funding model, blah, blah, blah. It sounds a lot like the 1993 red book. However, let us see what the Liberals do when they promise no cuts.
We remember Jean Chrétien crossing the country, waving the red book and campaigning on all the promises. On the very last page of the book, in the very last paragraph, it says:
a Liberal government will be committed to stable multiyear financing for national cultural institutions such as...the CBC.
One would think they would be able to remember this, because the last statement of a book is often what one takes with oneself.
I think I heard a member quote that almost identically just a few minutes ago. I think he has read his 1993 Liberal red book. I did not believe them then, and I do not believe them now.
Of course, none of the promises that were made in the red book were ever kept. I have outlined some of those this morning.
Giving credit to the hon. member of the NDP who raised a point of order just a few minutes ago, between 1994 and 1997, the Liberals cut the CBC's budget by at least $414 million, cutting 4,000 positions. It was so much money that the president of CBC quit his job. He was so offended at the Liberal cuts that he left.
I defer once again to former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. Everybody remembers Peter Gzowski. He was a great Canadian. When former Prime Minister Chrétien was on the late Peter Gzowski's radio show, he said that if CBC were to close its doors tomorrow morning, nobody would be in the street protesting.
Moving on in time, we see the Liberals in a bit of a bind. Many have publically spoken out against the CBC, people such as the member for Pickering—Scarborough East, who was talking to the National Post in February 1996. He was discussing his opposition to tax increases in order to fund the CBC. He said:
It's my belief that the Canadian people have had enough of the GST and the PST. They don't want a CBC-ST.
By 1997, the Liberals were campaigning with another red book. Do we remember them waving red book two? It had another promise. Tucked away in the back pages of their platform, they had a preamble this time, admitting their failure on their promise of multi-year funding that was not realized. It read exactly this:
In 1993 Liberals made a commitment to stable multiyear funding for national cultural institutions such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).
Given the severe constraints the government has faced in dealing with the deficit, we have not fulfilled this commitment.
The member for Mississauga South talks about a promise not kept. I do not think the Liberals kept any promise in the 1993 red book, but I digress once again.
I will continue the quote:
As we restore health to the nation's finances, our financial commitment to Canada's public broadcasting system will grow.
What happened next? We can guess it. Their election promise was ignored. Cuts continued after the 1997 election, with the CBC budget reaching a low of $745 million in 1998-99.
Today, under a Conservative government, it is $1.1 billion. That is record funding for the CBC. It was $745 million under the Liberals, and $1.1 billion under the current Conservative government.
In 2000, we heard about programming cuts and so forth. What did they do in 2000? They cut supper-hour programming right across Canada.
I will bet some Canadians valued that programming. The Liberals cut it.
However, they did not stop there. Members such as Roger Gallaway continued to introduce motions to cut the English network's government funding.
Former Liberal cabinet minister Stan Keyes spoke about the CBC and said that the CBC has become a monster, quite frankly. He said that it's a billion dollars we have put towards CBC television and we witness direct competition between a public broadcaster and the private sector.
It is not only the Liberals who are against the CBC, though. I just wanted to highlight them since they brought the motion and they are showing the most hypocrisy on this issue. They are also the only other party that has ever formed government in the House, so we can only look to their record.
When we look at the NDP and the Bloc Québécois, what can we say about them? Members of the NDP say that they support the CBC, yet on every occasion they have had to prove it, they failed. They have voted against every Conservative budget since 2006.
Here is the problem with the NDP's position on the CBC. In 2004-05, this Parliament increased funding for the CBC, and the NDP voted against it. In 2006-07, we increased the funding for the CBC, and they voted against it. In 2007-08, we increased the funding for the CBC, and the NDP voted against it.
In 2008-09, we increased the funding for the CBC; the NDP voted against it. Then there was our 2009 economic action plan. One gets the picture.
As for the Bloc Québécois, its members have also voted against recent increases to the CBC. The Conservative government is delivering the goods, but the Bloc Québécois is voting against it.
The CBC has been around for quite a while. Its mandate and role have been defined and redefined over the years.
The Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage studied the CBC on a number of occasions with a variety of differing views on what the role of the broadcaster should be. There is a consensus amongst most members that the CBC should provide services to all regions of the country in both official languages. There is also agreement that minority linguistic communities also depend on the reception of news and information services provided to them in the communities in which they live.
At the end of the day, political members of all stripes have pondered the issue of the CBC and broadcasting in general. The present Liberal leader and member for Etobicoke—Lakeshore, for example, in pontificating about the role of public and private broadcasting in North America, in a Toronto Star article in 1989, said:
I see our efforts as a struggle against the fragmentation of the broadcasting system in North America and against the assumption by existing public broadcasters, including CBC, that their audiences are fools who can't think for themselves.
Editorialists have weighed in on the debate as well. Across our country there have been a number of opinion pieces written regarding the public broadcaster.
The Chatham Daily News, in November, said:
The CBC gets 60 per cent of its funding from taxpayers. Spending frugally should be a given.
The Hamilton Spectator, in February of this year, said:
Whether it's called a bridge loan, a bailout or supplementary funding, the CBC request for federal money to tide it over is simply not fair to other struggling broadcast organizations...The CBC must...reinvent itself for the future as a condition of additional funding.
In Saturday's La Presse, Vincent Marissal reiterated the comment by his colleague, Nathalie Petrowski, saying that:
...Jean Chrétien's Liberal government made severe cuts to the corporation's budget 10 years ago or so. The former Prime Minister... had gone as far as to contend that losing CBC-Radio-Canada would not be a big loss to Canadians.
Earlier, in the days of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the Liberals [referred to] Radio-Canada [as] “that separatist nest” and dreamt of cleaning up that subversive outfit.
Marissal concluded with a question:
...how come the Liberal Party, the Bloc Québécois and the NDP, despite numerical superiority in the Commons, failed to act sooner, before the budget was passed for instance, to force the government's hand?
It has been known for at least three months that CBC/Radio-Canada was walking a tightrope, but answers obtained from all three parties yesterday suggest that they did not see the crisis coming.
The opposition is raising quite a ruckus, but it is rather pointless for the cavalry to move in once the battle is over.
André Pratte in a La Presse article over the weekend said, “if the CBC has hit a dead end today, it's not because the Conservatives were cheap, but as a result of a decline in advertising revenue as a result of the recession. In addition, the public broadcaster is facing the same structural problems that the private broadcasters are generally experiencing: costs are increasing, but demand is decreasing as a result of the appearance of new media on the broadcast landscape. Some people say that the Government of Canada should simply give more money to the CBC. However, who believes the CBC is managed on a tight leash? If the government has to support them, then with it must come the assurance that taxpayers' money is well invested”.
In conclusion, I would like to acknowledge the work and representation the CBC provides to many Canadians.
There are serious challenges facing the Canadian broadcast industry, and representatives in this industry, including the CBC, have to tighten their belts. As most Canadians can attest, there are tough choices that need to be made.
As with most Canadians, personal budgets must be established and followed. The same goes for the CBC. We are confident that the management knows how to make the best decisions for the future of the public broadcaster, keeping in mind the responsible spending of hard-earned taxpayer dollars and the service that is important to all Canadians from coast to coast to coast.
