The price of our ambivalence by Douglas Bell

With the possibility of the first regular-season NHL game in 16 months being televised on Hockey Night in Canada without play-by-play or Don Cherry, the implications and ramifications of CBC's lockout of its employees rise by the hour.

On the other side, of course, are those editing op-eds and letters to the editor who would, with the conclusion of labour hostilities, have to fall back on the tired and tedious subjects of war, famine and pestilence. Still, both sides seem determined to fill every inch of newsprint and airtime sniping at one another over who ought to work when and for how long and with what remuneration.

In all of this, the more fundamental question as to the place of the CBC in Canadian life seems at best to be postponed and at worst ignored. In short, both labour and management have buried the lead.

Several years ago, I had a short-lived and undistinguished run as a federal government speechwriter and policy wonk. At one stage I was hired by then minister of federal-provincial relations Stephane Dion's chief of staff, Françoise Ducros (yes, that Françoise Ducros).

In the midst of my research, we had a discussion concerning the CBC and its place in Confederation. I was a naïf on the subject, thinking that the CBC was fundamental like Parliament, the Privy Council or the Supreme Court — a sacrosanct institution beyond the reach of partisan bickering and retail politics.

Guess encore. Ducros pointed out that, while the public was unified on the issue of the CBC's existence, the cabinet was equally unified in the belief that talking and acting tough on the CBC, i.e. confronting it on the issue of left-wing bias and funding cuts at propitious moments, was a political winner borne out by polling, notably in the West.

In short, politicians playing political games with the CBC can have their cake and eat it, too. As long as they promise not to destroy it all in one go, they can still gain a political advantage by administering death by a thousand cuts.

The implications of this attitude came clear to me during a recent interview with Robert Rabinovitch, president, CEO and acting chair of the CBC. If this guy doesn't speak for the corporation, nobody does. The subject of our discussion was an interview he had conducted with worldscreen.com in 2001.

WSN: How is the CBC funded?

Rabinovitch: The CBC is funded, from a public-broadcasting point of view, in the worst possible ways. We are a combination of advertising and a public grant from the government, which comes on an annual basis as an appropriation. Therefore we are vulnerable, unlike the BBC, which gets its license fee every 10 years. We also raise about 30 per cent of our money through advertising, and the advertising, in turn, can mean less distinctive programming, because the purpose of advertising is to deliver eyeballs.

Please note the phrase "the worst possible ways" — not "in a manner that could use improvement," not even "wretched," "terrible," or "dismal." The. Worst. Possible. Ways.

I asked him if, four years later in the midst of the worst labour dispute in the history of the CBC triggered by management, i.e. him, if this was still his position.

"This very much remains my position," he said. "If you add the instability caused by the cuts we have taken over the last 20 years, the constraints therefore on program planning where it takes three to four years from idea to getting a story on the air, etc., the impact on the CBC is obvious."

So the labour dispute is, it seems, a creature of the worst possible relationship between government and broadcaster. I put to him Ducros' formulation and asked how he saw this impasse resolving itself.

While he put the conundrum in a slightly more soothing light, the obvious problem remained unresolved. "There is nothing to be gained," he said, "by cutting the CBC, as the Conservatives have discovered, but there is little to be gained by helping the public broadcaster either."

And hence, one supposes, the effort at nickel-and-diming the problem by confronting the issue of contract versus permanent employees. It's like the little Dutch boy sticking a finger in the dike while three blocks over the water pours through what used to be the levee.

Rabinovitch admits that the ideal situation would be "a fixed allocation for a period of time, e.g. 10 years adjusted for inflation, à la BBC."

But, as he says, there's no political percentage in helping the CBC.

There are those who suggest that Rabinovitch is wrong on the facts. Ian Morrison, spokesperson for the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, replying to Rabinovitch's assertions, writes in an email that, in fact, "Funding the CBC is popular with Canadians. In a series of polls we have commissioned, most recently in May 2004, Ipsos Reid has found 50 per cent of Canadians would like CBC's funding to be maintained; 40 per cent want it increased."

Moreover, he says that while former prime minister Jean Chrétien "hated the CBC," both the current prime minister, Paul Martin, and the minister of finance, Ralph Goodale, are receptive to increases recommended by both the Commons finance committee and the Lincoln report.

"And in a minority parliament where the government has to be responsive to MPs' opinions, both the Bloc and the NDP favour increasing support to the CBC. The Conservatives are now on record supporting stable, long-term funding... so the timing may be good."

All of which may be true, but it is one thing to commit rhetorically to what in principle seems the right thing. It is quite another to act in the face of the obvious implication of the very numbers Morrison quotes to support his case.

Sixty per cent of Canadians at best favour the status quo. And whatever the thinking that undergirds those numbers, any politician would be loath to let the air out of that eminently puntable political football.

In other words, the CBC means more to Canadians in the abstract than it does in the here and now. We needn't commit to or feel guilty about the lack of a properly funded public broadcaster so long as we continue to object to its elimination. And Canadian politicians, relieved of their obligation to lead, are only too happy to exploit our ambivalence.

Last year I attended the International Emmy Awards in New York (The Newsroom, the show on which I had acted and served as a story editor, was up for best comedy). At one stage in the proceedings, I shared a drink with a very nice guy from Norwegian public broadcasting who asked me how the CBC worked. I told him.

"But that's ridiculous," he said. "Don't Canadians think the CBC's important enough to be run properly?"

I didn't respond for a long time, and then my new Norse buddy said more or less exactly what I was thinking. "Maybe we ought to get another drink."

Douglas Bell is a Toronto writer, actor and journalist.

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