The CBC 'won't look much like it does today' when this government's done with it.Here's a sneak peek of what the Tories may be planning
The Western Standard
Cyril Doll - Monday,11 September 2006
There are few cultural events broad enough in their appeal and sufficiently potent in resonance to unite Canadians coast to coast. Christmas almost gets there. Canada Day? Not quite. But each Saturday night at 7 p.m., from October until April, there's one event that brings together Canadians from St. John's to Victoria. Since Foster Hewitt first shouted out to radio audiences, "Hello, hockey fans," three generations of Canadians have united as a nation before their radios and televisions in the comfort of their homes to watch the Toronto Maple Leafs lose on Hockey Night in Canada.
But the tradition may be about to end. On Aug. 10 came news that HNIC's spectacular run on the public network will likely end in 2008, with word that Bell Globemedia, parent company of cable TV's The Sports Network, is planning to seize control of the weekly face-off, currently watched by nearly 2 million households. In a colossal-sized bid for the show, TSN reportedly is preparing to offer the National Hockey League a staggering $1.4 billion to be the exclusive Canadian broadcaster of games for 10 years--a privilege that's been the CBC's since Prime Minister R.B. Bennett first created the network's precursor, the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission, nearly 75 years ago.
It's an offer that media watchers say the CBC, which last paid $65 million for the 2005-2006 NHL broadcast rights, could never hope to match.
That's grave news for the Mother Corp., which is likely still trying to cope with the harsh reality that it will no longer be able to call itself "Canada's Olympic network." Last year, Bell Globemedia's CTV network (in a partnership with Rogers Media) outbid the CBC--which had been broadcasting Olympics almost without exception for decades--for the exclusive rights to air the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver and Whistler, and the 2012 Summer Games. Once again, CBC's pockets simply weren't deep enough: the winning bid was US$153 million, 110 per cent higher than what the CBC had paid for the rights to both the 2006 and 2008 Olympics.
But even if the CBC still had the means to outflank private broadcasters with its billions in federal cash the way it once did, it might not be permitted to do so. In June, a Senate committee weighing in on the future of the increasingly aimless public broadcaster recommended it be required to end all commercial advertising, including sports broadcasting. Really, the committee was simply laying down the law for a network that had years ago drifted from a clear mandate, lured by the money and prominence of big commercial broadcasting. As a Crown corporation, the CBC is bound by the Broadcasting Act, passed in 1991 by Brian Mulroney's Conservatives. The act outlines the network's mandate, while ensuring the public's tax money is used for "predominantly and distinctively Canadian" programming, reflecting the country and the regions in French and English. Last year, Ottawa subsidized the CBC's $1.7-billion annual budget to the tune of $937 million, complemented with $322 million in advertising revenue (a number surely to plummet without Hockey Night in Canada).
But the Toronto-based network's sins of commercial avarice, as well, some say, as its arrogance and its political activism, have convinced too many Canadians that the network simply cannot be reformed to walk the straight and narrow. While the biggest threat facing most media organizations in North America is the explosion of competition from new media, Canada's public broadcaster faces a truly existential threat to its business: a governing party with a long history of impatience for the CBC and a significant number of Canadians indifferent to--or even bitterly opposed to--its presence on the national media landscape. Last year's lockout of CBC workers by management (which was widely seen as a bid to slash costs by suspending paycheques for three months) only made it obvious to many Canadians left without CBC programming that they can get by fairly well without the network, leaving nagging questions about the value of that billion dollars they send it each year. Meanwhile, even left-wingers are perturbed by the way the CBC's English-language television schedule has become infested with reruns of non-Canadian shows, such as Frasier, The Simpsons and Coronation Street, as well as Hollywood films.
Saying that this Conservative government has a cool relationship with the national network would be putting it lightly. The Reform/Canadian Alliance contingent of the party has been outright hostile to the CBC; former Reform party leader Preston Manning advocated selling pieces of it off. The belief that the CBC is actively biased against the Conservative party has only been affirmed by the press gallery's war with Prime Minister Stephen Harper--a battle led by the CBC's delegation on the Hill--and bloggers have recently caught CBC manipulating news footage to portray Harper in a negative light. (In Quebec, meanwhile, Radio-Canada irritates all federalists, both Tory and Liberal, who have for years seen it as a hotbed of pro-separatist sentiment). According to one source inside the Heritage Department, the minister is still waiting for CBC President Robert Rabinovitch to hand over a report he received months ago, after commissioning a study on bias in the CBC. Rabinovitch has insisted that he's already forwarded the report to the ministry, but staffers in Heritage, who say they haven't received it, wonder if the executive is suppressing what they suspect turned out to be a much more damning study than was anticipated. Still, despite all the bad blood, the Conservative government has so far been cryptic, even muted, about its plans for the broadcaster. But look closely, say government insiders, and you'll find ominous signs that big changes are coming soon. What kind of changes? Allows one cabinet insider: "It won't look much like it does today."
When Heritage Minister Beverley Oda addressed the Banff World Television Festival on June 11, government flacks had apparently spread a rumour that she'd be announcing a mandate review for the national network. Instead, Oda--a former commissioner of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission--surprised the 1,450 delegates when she instead gave a speech about technology's effects on the industry. She did come up with one announcement: she'd asked the CRTC to produce a study on technology and the media and report back by December. But when it came to the CBC, Oda would only reassure the audience that her government was not looking to shut the broadcaster down. "Let me be clear," she stated. "The CBC/SRC will remain."
CBC supporters in the audience applauded an announcement that sounded like support for the status quo (Oda, currently on vacation, was unavailable to comment for this story). After all, the Tories, anxious to disarm voters in Quebec and Ontario, have been outwardly distancing themselves from their western Reform-party roots on many issues. Perhaps the legacy of anti-CBC rhetoric was gone, too. In the last federal election, Conservative candidates were instructed by their policy pocketbook to answer any question regarding the Crown corporation's future as follows: "[We will] ensure that the CBC and Radio-Canada continue to perform their vital role as national public service broadcasters." It sounded good on its face, but many believed it was loaded with subtext.
When Ottawa-based Friends of Public Broadcasting, a media watchdog group, pressed the party, they received what a Tory press officer referred to as a "one-size-fits-all response to broadcasting issues." The statement read: "It must be a true public service broadcaster, relevant to Canadians. The Conservative Party will focus the CBC-SRC services on its mandates as public broadcasting services."
But close observers noted something written between the lines: the CBC has a mandate to provide certain services. Anything beyond that--purchasing U.S. reality shows for their commercial benefit or outbidding private broadcasters for lucrative sports properties, for instance--was not considered part of the package.
As an acolyte of the free market, the prime minister has made it clear that he sees the CBC as an unfair player in the media marketplace, using taxpayer dollars to hinder the entrepreneurs in the private sector. "I've suggested that government subsidies in support of CBC's services should be to those things that are not . . . do not have commercial alternatives," Harper said in 2004. "And I think when you look at things like main-English-language television, and probably to a lesser degree Radio Two [CBC's music programming], you could . . . [put] those on a commercial basis." More recently, Harper has said that while "The CBC/SRC is and will remain Canada's public broadcaster . . . [W]e would seek to reduce CBC's dependence on advertising revenue and its competition with the private sector for these valuable dollars, especially for non-sports programming." He once told the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, while he was still in Opposition, that he would like to "seek to reduce or eliminate mass-audience American programming from [the CBC's] schedule."
It's not hard to see why: in June, the CBC famously announced it was rescheduling its National news program to an hour later so it could broadcast the U.S. reality talent show The One. Worse, the CBC infuriated Canadian-content supporters when it aggressively used the American-produced show to counter-program against CTV's Canadian Idol, which had the honour of being both number one in the ratings and a purely homemade show (even if the concept was borrowed). Canada's public broadcaster, in other words, was not only failing to stick to its mandate of providing "vital" content to domestic audiences, its executives had actively sabotaged Canadian-produced programs to make money.
(They looked especially foolish after The One ended up charting the lowest ratings in U.S. network history and was cancelled by ABC after only two episodes).
The CBC hasn't been content only to battle entrepreneurs in the media sector: the network attempted to use its publicly funded advantage to tilt the playing field in the real estate sector as well. In March, it tried to get Toronto city council's permission to lease out up to 30 per cent of its downtown headquarters to tenants, though the city voted unanimously against the proposal.
How the Conservatives will specifically define a "true public broadcaster" might have been answered had the Tories chosen to put the CBC's mandate under review, as Oda was expected to announce in Banff. In fact, a senior broadcast executive says that a review had been planned but was cancelled at the last minute. Oda reportedly confided to her former colleagues at the broadcast regulator that the prime minister had told her not to bother. If the government already knew what changes were needed at the CBC, then a review would be superfluous. "Up until three days before the announcement, it was all green lights, and then in the last few days all the indications were the minister was asked not to proceed," says the executive, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of government reprisals.
"The future of the CBC is up in the air," says Arthur Lewis, executive director of Our Public Airwaves--an organization made up of supporters who want the CBC to abandon commercial advertising. "There's a serious disconnect between the mandate and the funding. The government, recognizing it, said during the last election that they were going to do a review of the mandate, but now they've gotten cold feet or put it on hold," says Lewis. "Frankly, my suspicion is they put it on hold because they recognize it's a no-win situation for them. Do they really want a report coming back saying you either have to slash the CBC's mandate or put more money into it?"
If putting the CBC on a stricter mandate is the plan, it will necessitate a major overhaul of the Mother Corp. The CBC currently relies on commercial advertising to cover roughly a third of its annual budget. Stripped of its most marketable assets either by competitors--as with Hockey Night in Canada--or by the feds, the CBC will be reduced to a shadow of its current self. Meanwhile, there are signs that the Conservatives are of a mind to cut the broadcaster's access to public funding, as well. In June, the Tories refused to support a motion presented in the House of Commons by Liberal heritage critic Mauril Belanger calling on continual financial support of the CBC at current levels. "One can infer from that that they're not prepared to support public broadcasting at the same level, at least," says Belanger.
That has media observers speculating as to how the Tories will restructure the Crown corporation, given the opportunity. The first step, says Michael Geist, Canada research chair of Internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, may be for the government to first define what it believes a "public" broadcaster should be. "Our public broadcaster has been looking for points of differentiation and essentially raison d'etre to show that it's somehow different from what the private broadcasters can offer," says Geist. One potential model is that of the British Broadcasting Corp. Rather than continuing to approach public broadcasting with a top-down approach--with management determining what programming Britons should consume--the BBC has gradually been moving toward a model that reinterprets its public nature, allowing the public a hand in the programming. The BBC website, for instance, allows Britons to act as citizen journalists, uploading their own news reports and opinions to share with their countrymen. "It gives the public the clear right to remix and reuse the content. The CBC could be doing much of the same thing," Geist says. "It would give Canadians the tools to create their own social commentary based on the news of the day."
In reality, it may be too late for the CBC to reorient itself in the manner of its British counterpart. The BBC's funding levels are about three-and-a-half times that of the CBC on a per capita basis, but even the federal Liberals aren't fans of spending more money on Canada's moribund broadcaster. Recall that it was Jean Chrétien's government that slashed the network's funding by more than $400 million in the 1990s to balance the budget, and the Liberals refused to increase it even after they began posting multibillion-dollar surpluses. With the door almost certainly closed to more tax money, others are speculating that the Tories actually favour a model more along the line of the American Public Broadcasting Service, which is public in the sense that rather than accept advertising, about 40 per cent of its budget--which, at US$531 million is miniscule compared to the CBC's--comes mainly from corporate donations and pledge drives.
But Oda's decision to postpone the CBC's mandate review in favour of a CRTC study on technological changes in the broadcast media may be another clue as to what the Tories are thinking. A July report released by the regulator already confirmed that more than 9 million Canadian households (out of the 12 million total counted in the 2001 census) subscribe to cable or satellite services for their television programming.
That number is growing rapidly as cable companies move into more homes by offering Internet and telephone services, while telephone companies expand into Internet and TV. Meanwhile, the costliest element of the CBC is the transmission infrastructure that provides free over-the-airwaves broadcasts coast to coast, as its mandate requires. "Imagine how much money it costs the CBC to broadcast over the air, everywhere in the country," says a senior government source. "It's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars." By moving the television arm of the CBC away from VHF and exclusively into cable or satellite pay services, or even the Internet, Ottawa could alleviate much of the need to prop up the network with taxpayer cash or with money it makes competing in the commercial marketplace. The CBC's recent decision to not replace its transmitter in Kamloops, B.C., a sizeable market, may be a sign of things to come (see sidebar - in bold below).
And at least by compelling Canadians to voluntarily shell out for the network through donations or pay-TV subscriptions, rather than Ottawa obliging us to, the CBC would truly be forced to offer this country a service that private broadcasters won't--or go out of business trying.
HOW'S THIS FOR A REALITY SHOW: CAN A CITY OF 100,000 SURVIVE WITHOUT CBC-TV?
Does the CBC have something against Kamloops, B.C.? Resident Hugh Jordan thinks so. During the first week of August, Jordan claims the Radio One transmitter in his area was acting up and he couldn't listen to his tax-dollar-funded favourite show. He phoned the public broadcaster to enquire about the interruption only to be told the network was unaware of any problem. The program interruptus even inspired a local newspaper columnist to reminisce back to the eighties, when frequent blackouts were par for the course at the Kamloops transmitter. "There's a history here of the CBC being pretty negligent," laments Jordan.
But while radio reception may be intermittent at best, Kamloopsians are even more irked at the CBC's decision to end English TV broadcasts in the city of 100,000. From here on in, the so-called public broadcaster will be available only to those residents willing to pay extra for cable or satellite services. And a new local group called Save Our CBC Kamloops is fighting the shutdown, claiming that it's unfair to force residents in the B.C. town to pay for the service twice--through their taxes as well as having to subscribe to a pay-television provider. "They're treating us like we're a backwater," Jordan says.
The CBC's mandate, as laid out in 1991's Broadcasting Act, states that programming shall be "made available throughout Canada by the most appropriate and efficient means and as resources become available for the purpose." But when the local station carrying the public network switched in February to retransmit CanWest Global broadcasts instead, the CBC decided that the cost of building a new CBC-only transmitter--about $2 million--just wasn't worth it. On Aug. 14, Fred Mattocks, the head of CBC English programming said he couldn't justify investing "the millions it would cost to provide relatively few viewers with over-the-air transmission."
Then again, the CBC's never had a reputation for frugality (it's notorious in media circles, for instance, for sending a platoon of correspondents to press conferences where most outlets send one or two people). Arthur Lewis, executive director of Our Public Airwaves, a CBC advocacy group, doesn't think it was the network's decision. "As a matter of principle, public broadcasting should be available to all Canadians as an article of faith," Lewis says. "However, to be fair to the CBC, there are other forces at work here." He's eyeing the government, which has yet to announce a mandate review of the CBC--something many supporters and detractors both feel may be necessary to renew the network's focus. "I suspect that either the new Conservative government has said no or more likely, 'Lets put this on hold' pending a policy shift," Lewis says.
But as long as we're speculating, maybe the Tories--many of whom come from the old Reform and Canadian Alliance parties, where shuttering the CBC was a longstanding priority--are anxious to see how well Kamloops can get along without the public broadcaster.
At least that way they'll know if it's something the rest of the country can handle.
