Presentation to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage in Vancouver

Listen to Statement - 19.6 MB runs 47:47 (including Q & A session) - Also available as a Podcast

Mr. Chair and Committee members: welcome to Vancouver. My name is Anne Ironside. I am a Vancouver-based member of FRIENDS of Canadian Broadcasting's Advisory Council and a strong supporter of Canadian public broadcasting. FRIENDS is a watchdog group for Canadian programming in the English language audio-visual system, with the support of 100,000 Canadians, 25% of whom live here in BC.

Appearing with me is Ian Morrison, FRIENDS' Spokesperson. As you know, FRIENDS submitted a brief on February 26 and has also encouraged our supporters to participate actively in your important investigation.

Here is our essential message:

CBC's Board of Directors should be chosen at arm's length from patronage, drawn from among the best and brightest Canadians, and this Board should have the authority to hire, and if necessary, fire its CEO. Almost four years ago, the Lincoln report recommended that, quote, "in the interest of fuller accountability and arm's-length from government, nominations to the CBC Board should be made by a number of sources, and the CBC President should be hired by and be responsible to the Board".[1]
Parliament should instruct CBC's Board to attach a high priority to the Broadcasting Act's mandate to "reflect Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences, while serving the special needs of those regions".
Parliament should invite CBC's Board to develop a business plan to address its regional responsibilities, wean itself from dependence on television advertising and foreign programs, and strengthen the presentation of Canadian stories in prime time.
To fund that plan, Parliament should offer to increase CBC's budget progressively by annual increments of at least $100 million over the next five years. It's an investment in up-dating Canada's social infrastructure.

As the Lincoln report made clear, such an investment would bring Canada only to the average of OECD country spending on public broadcasting.[2] To put this in context, by 2012, Canada would be spending 15¢ per citizen per day to support a vigorous, locally-relevant public broadcasting system.

Ian…

Anne vous a résumé les principales recommandations de notre soumission du 26 février, et il nous fera plaisir d'en discuter plus longuement si vous le souhaitez. As an additional contribution to your important work, we have also commissioned and offer you today a research report from CMRI (Canadian Media Research Inc.) Trends in TV Audiences & Public Opinion, 1996 – 2006, with special reference to CBC English Television. This report provides data on such topics as TV set ownership, direct-to-home satellite subscription trends, over-the-air reception and new video technologies. It also features trends in TV viewing levels, market share and audiences for Canadian programming, as well a review of public opinion regarding television and the CBC in particular.

I would like to touch on highlights from this research: first, on the necessity of maintaining over-the-air transmission facilities in all parts of Canada. CMRI's report indicates that ten percent of Canadians depend on over-the-air transmission to receive their TV signals. This is not expected to change in the coming years. Because they access fewer channels, these Canadians account for only 7% of viewing hours. The percentage of over-the-air TV reception is much higher among French-speaking viewers – approximately 15%.

Fourteen percent of viewing of CBC's English Television Network is over-the-air. In Windsor it's 51%; in Leeds/Grenville 32%; Peace River North 24%; the Kootenays 17%; Fredericton 11%. Here in Vancouver it's 10%.

According to BBM, there are 26,100 people who watch TV off-air in Okanagan-Kamloops (our friends at Save Our CBC – Kamloops are on your agenda this afternoon) and 188,700 here in Vancouver.

In view of the importance of over-the-air reception to three million Canadians, we were more than somewhat concerned to read in the CBC's television policy submission to the CRTC last autumn that, and I quote, "over-the-air transmission will only remain a viable distribution technology for the distribution of television programming in major urban centres". [3]

CMRI conducted a special survey for the CRTC last autumn among a representative sample of 1,000 Canadians who do not subscribe to cable or satellite TV. In that survey, CMRI asked: "If you could receive only one station off-air, what would that be?" Forty-five percent of English-speaking respondents said "CBC-TV" and 49% of French-speaking respondents said "SRC TV", far ahead of CTV, Global, TVA and TQS.

FRIENDS therefore urges you to take up this matter with the CBC next week and to remind their management that all Canadians pay for the Corporation and all are entitled to receive its programs, whether they live in "major urban centres", or elsewhere.

We also wish to raise with you some questions about cbc.ca arising from CMRI's research. According to BBM data, Canadians use the Internet for non-work purposes for an average of less than four hours per week, far less than the 26 hours they spend watching TV. Even teenagers spend twice as much time watching TV as they do surfing. Including usage at work, Comscore reports that Canadians spent 5.5 hours weekly on the net.

cbc.ca ranked 20th among Canadian domains in March 2006. Its monthly reach was 4.2 million users, but it had only 475,000 daily users, and they spent an average of less than seven minutes on cbc.ca. This represents one five-hundredth of all Canadian web traffic. At any given moment in March 2006, cbc.ca was serving only 2,200 users, approximately the number of viewers assembled by a very small specialty TV channel.

The corporation has not been forthcoming with Canadians about the cost of cbc.ca. We estimate that cbc.ca costs at least $20 million net of revenues and employs 5% of CBC's workforce.

It is a legitimate question for parliamentarians to find out the extent of the taxpayer subsidy to cbc.ca at a time when the English Television network, for example, is retreating from its commitment to air Canadian programming in prime time. We urge the Committee to probe management on this topic. You will be asserting Parliament's right to determine priorities for the expenditure of taxpayers' money.

CBC TV's prime time schedule depends heavily on sports, to the exclusion of other programming. Over the 2005/06 TV season, 23% of CBC TV's schedule was sports and this accounted for 48% – almost half – of the total CBC prime time audience. Most of this was professional sports.

By contrast, less than 5% of CBC TV's prime time audience watched Canadian drama series or movies of the week. Foreign drama, on the other hand, accounted for three times the audience of indigenous drama on CBC TV. FRIENDS recommends that the Committee insist that CBC Television present Canadian programs in prime time, as it did just seven years ago, when 96% of its prime time schedule was Canadian, compared with just 79% today. This represents a quintupling of foreign programs in prime time:

To illustrate, our written brief contains a graphic showing CBUT Vancouver's prime time schedule over the past three weeks compared with the same sched in the year 2000.

Friends has published "red charts" over the past two decades to map Canadian and foreign programs offered by over-the-air broadcasters in ten Canadian cities. We wish to table with the Committee today our most recent red chart. It depicts what has been available over the air here in Vancouver during the past three weeks. CBC's Canadian offerings compare with 39% for CHUM/City, 30% for Global Vancouver, 18% for CTV, 16% for Global Victoria and CHUM's A Channel in Victoria:

Some of us were present seven years ago when CBC's President was invited before this Committee to explain why he had decided to terminate CBC's regional supper hour programs. I distinctly recall Mr. Scott's intervention on that occasion. This Committee mobilized a huge outpouring of public sentiment, forcing President Rabinovitch to compromise on thirty minutes of regional news during the supper hour. We find it an ironic but positive development that CBC has now come to its senses and has announced plans to restore 60 min supper hour regional news.

The CMRI research we table today may explain this turnaround. When CMRI's 2006 TV Quality Survey interviewed Canadians about their interest in various types of programs, 61% said they were "very interested" in local news. No other program category came close. The second most popular category was "national news" (46%) and the third was "international news" (33%) followed by Hollywood movies (27%). CMRI's research reveals that local news on television is the top priority of the Canadian people.

Merci de votre attention, et de l'invitation de participer à vos audiences ici à Vancouver. We will be pleased to make ourselves available if you would like to explore these issues with us further on a future occasion.
We wish the Committee great success in this important investigation.

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For information: Jim Thompson 613-447-9592

Our Cultural Sovereignty, page 567.

Ibid., page 178

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