OTTAWA - There were bouquets and brickbats Thursday for a sweeping report by MPs of all stripes calling for stable, multi-year funding to help the CBC survive a fast-changing media climate.
The House of Commons heritage committee split along party lines over the future of the public broadcaster, with members of the minority Conservative government writing their own dissenting report.
But MPs on all sides agreed the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. should be able to depend on longer-term funding as it uses new technology to satisfy ever-evolving consumer tastes. They say Ottawa should commit to the CBC for at least seven years, and budget amounts should be indexed to the cost of living.
"CBC/Radio-Canada must have access to the resources it needs to remain a service accessible to the vast majority of Canadians," said Conservative committee chairman Gary Schellenberger.
The actual cost of ensuring that access, however, was a point of divergence. Tory MPs rejected the majority recommendation that per capita funding should increase to at least $40 from $33.
"We cannot support inflexible recommendations that arbitrarily assign figures to the funding of CBC/Radio-Canada," says the Conservative dissenting report.
The proposed hike would boost the public portion of the broadcaster's yearly budget to about $1.35 billion a year from the current $1.1 billion, which itself is up $71 million from last year.
Another $400 million comes from advertising. The Conservatives agreed last year to add $60 million more this year and next.
The Tory refusal to commit to actual multi-year increases "has smoked out somewhat the Conservative government's position on public broadcasting," says Ian Morrison, a spokesman for the watchdog group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting.
"The Conservatives in their minority report are effectively setting the CBC up to fail by agreeing rhetorically with almost all of the words about what the CBC should be doing, but refusing to commit the resources that would be required to make that happen.
"Not addressing the mandate-resources gap is a major flaw. And it's consistent with a number of statements we've tracked over the years from (Prime Minister Stephen) Harper himself."
These include Harper's 2004 musings while official Opposition leader that perhaps CBC funding should be focused on services "that do not have commercial alternatives."
Morrison, who tracked the heritage committee's work, also noted a sudden change last November that derailed what was "a move toward a unanimous report."
"All of a sudden ... the Conservative members just one day shut up and the parliamentary secretary (to Heritage Minister Josee Verner) did all the talking. My conclusion was the members were being ordered by the Prime Minister's Office to step in line, and no longer had freedom to exercise their own judgment."
Richard Stursberg, the CBC's executive vice-president of English services, had a much rosier take on the report.
"The extent of unanimity is striking. It's essentially endorsation of the importance of the CBC to the social and cultural life of the country."
Stursberg says it only makes sense that the government would not commit to actual funding before talks with the public broadcaster hammer out its future course. "First, we have to work our way through this contract. I take it that they're just simply saying to fix a figure now is premature."
Lise Lareau, head of the Canadian Media Guild representing CBC workers, said "this feels like the first real moment of optimism for the CBC in recent memory."
The government has six months to respond to the report and its 47 non-binding recommendations.
But there's little love lost between the Conservatives and the public broadcaster, and no guarantee the government will act - especially if it wins a majority in an election that could well come sooner.
Relations hit a low point last December when the CBC launched an internal investigation after Doug Finley, a senior federal Conservative party official, wrote a formal letter of complaint over allegations that a CBC reporter fed questions to a Liberal MP to ask Brian Mulroney during a parliamentary hearing.
The broadcaster announced last month that Krista Erickson, an Ottawa-based CBC-TV reporter, had been reassigned to Toronto after her actions were deemed "inappropriate." She is challenging the decision.
The open letter angered the union representing CBC journalists, which said it smacks of political pandering.
Tory members disagreed with other key recommendations of Thursday's report, including a proposal to force the public broadcaster to show strictly Canadian content during prime time, Monday through Friday.
The dissenting opinion says the Tory government disagrees with any move to "micro-manage our independent public broadcasting corporation." Nor was there any unanimous agreement on an NDP push to ensure the CBC board can appoint and review the performance of its president.
Government members also rejected as "unacceptable" a call to boost the CBC's role in the development, promotion and distribution of Canadian feature films.
"We do not believe it is responsible to ask a public broadcaster to become a feature film company."
© Canadian Press
