Invisible hands slowly dismember prostrate CBC by Dalton Camp
Source : Toronto Star
September 12, 1995
A good deal of Mike Harris-sort-of-common sense has been appearing lately in one or another of my morning papers on the subject of the CBC: What to do with the CBC? How to get rid of the CBC so no one notices. How to save Canada by burning down the CBC. How the CBC would be improved by not being allowed to cover sports events or do local news.
All of the above are matters deserving of consideration, further study, surveys and the time of parliamentary committees. It seems to me, to address the first-mentioned matters briefly, it would be impossible to shut down the CBC without anyone knowing it. Not even the present government strategy of gradualism, winding down the CBC by attrition, would slip by unnoticed when viewers turned to their CBC channel and found only snow.
As for arson as a quick fix, it is not recommended, but something like speeding in Ontario - okay only as long as they don't catch you at it. No, what is needed here is courage; if the present government no longer believes the country needs a public broadcaster, then the present government should shut down the CBC. But until it works up the nerve to follow its impulse, it should stop clinging to so slender a reed as a parliamentary committee.
Still, I know so little of the serious issues that have engulfed the CBC, since Moody's took over the country, that it is news to me the CBC is in trouble because it televises sports. How could this be?
According to a former CBC employee, writing in one of our national dailies, "No other single endeavor has done as much damage to the integrity of public broadcasting in Canada as the CBC's costly pursuit of sports-coverage revenue."
I didn't know that.
It must be true since, in a related news item - same paper - an unexpected report by a House of Commons committee dealing with the CBC, recommends - or did, until a failure of nerve - that "professional sports programming, especially live broadcasts of games and other sports events, ought to play a minor role on all the CBC networks."
Having done with sports, there is pressure to get the CBC out of the regional and local news business. Using the ratings system as a measure of worth - unfortunately, a method rarely applied to politicians - the Commons committee feels that wherever the market is "saturated," the CBC should "drop local news programming and only provide local news via the radio."
This inside stuff presumably was leaked to my morning paper by Liberal MP John Godfrey, the committee's chair, or by someone else sporting Godfrey's writing style. For the record, the committee's chair appears to have been in a minority, since the expurgated and agreed-upon majority version of the published report departed in substance from Godfrey's leaked one.
It is not worth worrying over which committee report we should be reading, now that we have two. The issue is whether the CBC can long survive with so many private interests and so much self-interest hard at work to destroy it without seeming to do so. Certainly, the "issue" of the deficit has presented the best opportunity in the long life of the corporation for its detractors. In an economic era in which, sanctioned by government example, ordinary people are being treated like cattle, the reduction of Canada's public broadcasting system to shambles could be seen as only further evidence of hard times.
The CBC, of course, should have as much right to broadcast "live" sports events as anyone else in the business. It should be able to build audience loyalty, just as anyone else, and to use one part of its programming in order to attract an audience for another part - just like anyone else in the business.
There are those critics of the CBC who lament the fact it doesn't always do broadcasting as a business. Then there are other critics who lament the fact that sometimes it does. Now we hear it should get out of the local news business because "local television news is well supplied in many large metropolitan centres."
What centres does Godfrey have in mind? There are God knows how many "centres" that are served wretchedly by "local television news" purveyors. What about them? And there is hardly anyone else in the local news business who covers and reports on the regions of Canada.
Pity our MPs. Clearly, we did not elect them because they were brighter than the rest of us but because they weren't. And we and they are caught up together being subsumed in greater global conglomerates - managed, monitored and manipulated by forces and institutions and corporations we will never see or know.
Owning one national communications facility, such as the CBC, which owes nothing to Mitsubishi or General Dynamic or Krupp, is surely worth keeping. What we know about the CBC, in a world in which economics is power and so much power is out of our hands, is that the CBC would never willfully betray our national interest or sell off our Canadian heritage. And we are its only shareholders.
When you hear people talk about reducing the role of the CBC, or selling off its assets, look closely at who's talking - it won't be a voice speaking for the people of Canada, but for shareholders of another kind of corporation.
Dalton Camp is a political commentator and broadcaster. His column normally appears Sunday and Wednesday in The Star.
