Pre-Budget Consultation Brief to the Finance Committee
September 5, 2006
Ms. Elizabeth Kingston
Clerk
Standing Committee on Finance
House of Commons
Ottawa, ON
K1A 0A6
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Dear Ms. Kingston:
Re: Pre-Budget Consultation Brief: Canada’s Position in a Competitive World
Friends is a watchdog group financed by 100,000 Canadians. Our mission is to defend and enhance the quality and quantity of Canadian programming in the English language audio-visual system. As you know, Friends wishes to appear in Ottawa during the forthcoming consultations. Our comments begin with a short summary paragraph, as requested.
Summary
As citizens of a small country dependent upon international trade for wealth creation, Canadians have a large stake in promoting our identity and brand abroad. Canada’s branding is a product of our audio-visual system, the export of our images and stories to other countries. Confidence in our cultures, a belief in the integrity of our identity and a projection of these values beyond our borders are key to our national development.
Successful models of national branding among our principal competitors abound. Other than the United States, where Hollywood plays this role, the best international branding models come from countries with strong national public broadcasters, such as Finland, Denmark, Norway, the UK, and Germany. The House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage researched investment in public broadcasting by OECD countries in its recent report Our Cultural Sovereignty, and identified that Canada ranks 20th among the 25 countries:
(Source: Our Cultural Sovereignty, page 178)
Canada spends 0.08% of our GDP on public broadcasting, well below the OECD average of 0.14%, and far below the range of 0.28% (Finland) to 0.19% (Germany) the leading countries cited above.
Friends recommends that the Committee recognize the importance of strong public broadcasting to Canada’s identity and branding in the world. As a long-term goal, funding for Canadian public broadcasting should be increased to at least the OECD average. In return, Parliament should establish practical benchmarks for Canadian public broadcasting, on which we comment in more detail below.
Members of Parliament are in a good position to know how important broadcast media are to the functioning of communities all across Canada. Media are an essential element in the infrastructure of local economies. They also facilitate the functioning of our democratic institutions by informing citizens on major societal issues. And they fall under exclusive federal jurisdiction.
Because of their economic and democratic importance, it is disturbing that the ownership of our media is becoming increasingly concentrated and that local programming is in decline throughout Canada. In television this unwelcome development is particularly pronounced during prime time, when most adults are free to watch.[1]
While this trend is evident in all television and most radio media, it applies in spades to the national public broadcaster. In the case of the CBC, this is not just unfortunate; it is illegal, because the Broadcasting Act states that CBC’s mandate is to “reflect Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences, while serving the special needs of those regions”.[2]
When CBC’s current President attempted to kill CBC’s English-language TV supper hour shows all across Canada in 2000, there was a storm of protest throughout the land, and nowhere more strongly than in the House of Commons.
In this pre-Budget consultation, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting recommends that the Finance Committee focus on two broadcasting issues: increasing the size and stability of CBC’s parliamentary grant and ensuring that increased resources are deployed at the grassroots in communities across the country, rather than solely in CBC’s Montreal and Toronto operations.
To this end, we remind the Committee of the recent recommendations of two Commons Committees:
First, in June 2003 your Heritage Committee colleagues, under the leadership of its then Chair Clifford Lincoln, issued a comprehensive report on broadcasting policy called Our Cultural Sovereignty (referenced above, and now widely referred to as the “Lincoln report”). In the last Parliament this report was unanimously re-submitted by your Heritage Committee colleagues for reconsideration by the former government. In our view, the most important of its 97 recommendations focused on grassroots CBC programming:
“The Committee is of the view that it is incumbent upon the CBC to ensure that levels of local programming – based on local needs – are delivered to audiences”.
They added: “The CBC cannot possibly be expected to act on one part of its public mandate – over and above its other responsibilities – if it is not ensured sufficient resources”.
The Committee also called on the CBC to “deliver a strategic plan with estimated resource requirements to Parliament... on how it would fulfill its public service mandate to deliver local and regional programming.”[3]
Second, we recommend that your Committee re-adopt a recommendation from your December 2004 report that “the federal government provide stable, long-term funding” to a number of important federal cultural institutions. Specifically, your Committee recommended then that “the government should increase funding for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Radio-Canada”.[4]
We also draw to the Committee’s attention that in February 2005 CBC management submitted a proposal to Heritage Department to build CBC’s local and regional capacity.[5] Neither the former nor the present government has yet responded to this proposal. As a first step, the CBC’s regional plan should be funded.
The recent CBC lockout demonstrated what a Toronto Broadcasting Corporation would sound and look like. As you know, it has also demonstrated how strongly Canadians rely upon our national public broadcaster. In this respect, you might be interested in data from an Ipsos-Reid public opinion poll Friends commissioned during the week before the writs of the 2004 general election were issued. In that poll, Ipsos-Reid posed the following question:
“Assume for a moment that your federal Member of Parliament asked for your advice about an upcoming vote in the House of Commons on what to do about CBC funding. Which of the following three options would you advise him or her to vote for… decrease funding for the CBC from current levels, maintain funding for the CBC at current levels, or increase funding for the CBC from current levels?”
Ipsos-Reid found that 9% of Canadians would recommend decreasing CBC’s funding, 51% would maintain it at current levels and 38% would increase CBC funding from current levels.[6]
We also draw to your attention a series of recent recommendations from the Senate Transport and Communications Committee which touch on reforming the CBC’s mandate. Among its recommendations, that Committee called on the CBC to reduce its dependency on advertising revenues and professional sports.
Friends recommends that the Finance Committee endorse a two-part reform of the CBC’s financing. In return for reducing, or eliminating its reliance on advertising revenues, the CBC’s public funding should be increased. Friends notes that such a reform would enjoy the support of Canada’s private broadcasters, and would fulfill the Prime Minister’s commitment to “reduce CBC’s dependence on advertising revenue and its competition with the private sector for these valuable dollars, especially in non-sports programming”.[7]
In conjunction with these reforms to the financing of public broadcasting, Friends endorses the proposal of Heritage Minister Bev Oda that “the government should undertake to establish an independent task force to review the mandate, role and services of CBC-SRC”. That task force should be charged with recommending reforms to the CBC’s management and governance which would remove political patronage from the CBC’s Board and Presidential selection process, in keeping with the best international standards for public broadcasting.
And finally, Friends wishes to remind Committee members of the strong support in Canadian public opinion for measures to strengthen our cultural sovereignty. In the poll referenced above, Ipsos-Reid found that 87% of Canadians agree with the following statement: “As Canada’s economic ties with the United States increase, it is becoming more important to strengthen Canadian culture and identity”.
Yours sincerely,
Ian Morrison
Spokesperson
For information: Jim Thompson 613.567.9592
[1] http://www.friends.ca/Resource/schedules.asp
[3] Our Cultural Sovereignty, pages 216-19
[5] http://www.friends.ca/News/Friends_News/archives/articles02020502.asp
