CBC-TV trying to put a bad year behind it, looking for optimistic turn in 2006 by John McKay

Toronto - If 2005 proved to be an "annus horribilis" for CBC Television, the year ahead will see the public broadcaster grappling with the lingering financial fallout from the NHL lockout and the aftermath of its own devastating labour disruption, plus the uncertain shape of a new federal government upon which it depends for critical funding.

Despite a freefall in ratings and low staff morale, however, CBC executives are confident they are clawing their way out of an abyss with a return to a prime-time schedule that is 80 per cent Canadian and plans for a major overhaul of its TV news operations on Jan. 9.

"The networks - both the main network and Newsworld - are fully recovered," says Richard Stursberg, executive director of English television.

"In fact they recovered faster than I thought they were going to.

"To come back that quickly is good work."

Still, it was quite a slide for a network that reigned supreme over the Canadian airwaves until 1991. That's when Ottawa made the first of what would ultimately amount to some $400 million in cuts and which reduced the once-proud broadcaster to the Canadian equivalent of PBS, not quite a beggar-bowl operation among increasingly successful private-sector counterparts, but barely able to fulfil its traditional cultural mandate.

Now to survive, if not thrive, the CBC wants more money, about $100 million more a year, to increase its drama quotient. (The Corp overall gets nearly a billion tax dollars annually but surprisingly, that is only 46 per cent of its overall budget. The other 54 per cent is earned privately, primarily through ad revenues.)

While they insist the ratings are back to pre-lockout levels, consider two recent TV movies of roughly equal quality, both sports-related heroes who lost their memories.

CTV's The Man Who Lost Himself: The Terry Evanshen Story, netted 1.5 million viewers.

CBC's The Walter Gretzky Story: Waking Up Wally drew about 800,000. But even that is better than the first CBC miniseries out of the gate after the union lockout. Il Duce Canadese - a drama about the wartime internment of pro-Fascists in Montreal - pulled in a shocking 178,000 pairs of eyeballs. The Trudeau miniseries prequel also attracted fewer than a half-million watchers.

CBC interim programmer Eva Czigler admits those dramas didn't get the kind of build-up they deserved during the lockout and that private rivals had another advantage.

"You can't underestimate the value of huge number lead-ins that CTV has in its American programs where they can promote their Canadian properties," Czigler noted.

Ian Morrison, spokesman for the independent watchdog group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, calls CBC management's decision to lock out its unionized employees "a calamitous mistake."

"I think it'll take a long time for CBC to recover," he said.

Canadian Media Guild president Lise Lareau adds that contrary to Stursberg's optimism, working in the CBC these days is like being in a bad marriage that requires counselling.

"Partly because the ratings have not bounced back and it's always depressing to work on shows that are not seen or heard widely," Lareau says, adding that another problem is that nobody has been made accountable for a lockout that has widely been viewed as unnecessary.

"A smarter management would say 'It's over. You know what? We made a mistake, we miscalculated. It wasn't the best move. Let's move on.' "

While in this marriage the dishes are no longer flying in the kitchen, Lareau laments that in the end the lockout accomplished very little and destroyed a lot.

CBC president Robert Rabinovitch, in an October appearance before a skeptical, even hostile Commons Heritage Committee, insisted the summer lockout was a necessary pre-emptive move before the union crippled key fall programming with a strike.

He said, too, it would help secure the CBC's future with the flexibility gained in the right to hire more contract and part-time employees.

"People have asked whether the lockout was worth it," Rabinovitch told MPs. "My answer is yes."

With more than a year to go in his mandate, Rabinovitch did make the point that the CBC has not had a permanent increase in its tax funding in 30 years and that, like other broadcasters, it is still praying for more secure, long-term funding instead of the present year-by-year dole that makes creative planning difficult if not impossible.

Still, the CBC does have grand plans for 2006, including major - albeit delayed - "big ticket" biopics on Tommy Douglas and Rene Levesque and, on the very day of the second federal election campaign debate, that major revamping of its flagship newscast The National, the anemically performing early evening Canada Now and all of CBC Newsworld.

Stursberg promises new content, strategies and presentation nationally and regionally.

"You're going to see a National that's going to be broader, with some new special features and a new look. I think people will find it a very attractive, deeper, more accessible newscast."

Canada Now will also begin featuring local news first, and regional supper-hour shows - promised for St. John's, Edmonton and Montreal in 2005 - will be belatedly fulfilled.

So far, only St. John's is up and running.

"St. John's is smokin'," Stursberg boasts adding that new half hours will be launched in the other two markets as part of the Jan. 9 overhaul.

The CBC is also facing CRTC hearings on its seven-year licence renewal in 2006, and while the regulatory body cannot by law yank any of those licences, it can impose severe performance demands on the broadcaster.

Bring them on, says Stursberg.

"We look forward to going down to talk to the commission and to talk to the public about what it is that we're attempting to accomplish here, how we're doing and what it is that we need to be able to be successful in the future."

And Morrison does see some tunnel light.

"They got the NHL back," he notes. "There's going to be hockey, hockey, hockey.

"And because of the gradual rise in revenue from that, the CBC may have a little more . . . commercial activity. The NHL tap may be flowing."

Also appeared in the Globe & Mail, The Telegram (St. John's, NL), The Leader Post (Regina, SK), and the Guelph Mercury.

© Canadian Press