(reproduced verbatim)
Canada’s national public broadcaster welcomes CBC/Radio-Canada: Defining Distinctiveness in the Changing Media Landscape, the report issued this morning by the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.
“It’s positively encouraging to see the Committee recognize the value of public broadcasting to Canadians - on all platforms, old, new and emerging,” said Hubert T. Lacroix, President and CEO of CBC/Radio-Canada. “In the face of sweeping cultural, technological and industrial change, Canadians need a place for distinctive Canadian content. This report to the Government asserts the meaning and importance of public broadcasting for all Canadians, and shows how it improves our democratic and cultural lives.”
From the report itself: “The Committee regards CBC/Radio-Canada as an essential public institution that plays a crucial role in bringing Canadians closer together… The vast majority of the evidence stressed the distinctiveness of CBC/Radio-Canada, reflected in the quality, originality and creativity of its programming. Being distinctive should not however mean being inaccessible. Its services must be accessible to the various elements of the Canadian public.”
CBC/Radio-Canada is especially pleased to see that the Committee’s report calls for a new relationship and a renewable arrangement between Canadians and their public broadcaster: their proposed Memorandum of Understanding would establish a seven-year plan which would set out what services Canadians could expect from their public broadcaster and the resources necessary to provide them.
“The proposed seven-year cycle - with increased, committed funding indexed to the cost of living for its duration - would go a long way to help fulfil a new promise to Canadians and ensure that people’s expectations of public broadcasting may be measured and met against collectively set goals,” said Mr. Lacroix. “In all, the Committee’s report has very aptly captured the challenges facing public broadcasting in Canada and provided valuable recommendations for the future.”
CBC/Radio-Canada looks forward to working with this Committee, the Government and the public to develop a new long-term arrangement. Meantime, the Committee’s report recognizes that the continued health of public broadcasting requires a more urgent response on a couple of fronts, including the funding of the transition to HD, and the financing of new digital content.
“I commend the Committee for having produced a thorough and, more importantly, a truly actionable blueprint for the future of public broadcasting in Canada,” said Mr. Lacroix. “And I think I speak for all who believe in Canadian public broadcasting when I say that we look forward to the Government’s response.”
The federal Heritage Committee is recommending that the CBC’s funding be increased from $33 per person each year to $40 — and that the funding increases each year as per the cost of living. It further recommended CBC-TV be less dependent on advertising revenues.
(The CBC has not had a permanent funding increase in more than 30 years, not even to account for inflation.)
In its long awaited mandate review report, the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage says the CBC’s mandate should cover seven years. It will begin public consultations on the recommendations soon.
It also recommended that the CBC and federal government “work toward decreasing CBC Radio-Canada’s relative dependency on advertising revenues for television programming.”
The committee has also given its support to a plan to increase the number of regional radio stations throughout the country, and wants the Broadcasting Act kept up with the times, including digital media and emerging technologies as a way to reach out to Canadians. It further wants resources put in place to provide closed-captioning for 100% of its television programming.
Canadian Media Guild Response
The Canadian Media Guild, which represents the majority of CBC employees, says it “strongly supports” recommendations and urges parliament to move quickly to implement the committee’s recommendations, particularly those that call for enhanced
funding.
“This feels like the first real moment of optimism for the CBC in recent memory,” says Lise Lareau, national president of the Canadian Media Guild. “An all-party committee has said yes to the CBC, yes to expanded radio coverage, yes to more CBC programming, including on the internet, and yes to more money to properly fund these important initiatives. Let’s get on with it.”
The CMG took credit for some of the recommendations, saying the report “echoes many of the proposals the CMG made when it appeared before the committee last spring, including an increase of per capita funding from the government.”
Conservative MPs Reject Recommendations
The Conservative Party wrote its own opinion rejecting, among other things, a proposal to keep the CBC’s television prime-time schedule all-Canadian. It said it considered recommendations like it (like the requirement of submitting a detailed HDTV implementation plan), amounted to micro-managing. “If CBC/Radio-Canada was [sic] bound to follow this particular recommendation they would not be permitted to show classic Christmas movies during prime-time on Christmas Eve, unless it happened to fall on a weekend.”
The party also rejected many recommendations seeking additional funding for specific projects, like HDTV implementation, saying that “stable-long term funding” was more appropriate than one-time grants for specific things. However, it also rejected the long-term funding proposal recommended in the document, saying it wanted to see a proposed budget from the CBC first. “Our members are disappointed that the report doesn’t recommend that CBC/Radio-Canada be invited to provide a full costing of the other recommendations of the committee report. We believe that responsible leadership involves costing out these recommendations before assigning fixed amounts to fund them.”
New Democrats Seek “Skill-Based” Approach to Hiring Presidents and Selecting Board Members
NDP members, in a supplementary report, said Board members and the CBC president should be hired based on skill and competence-related criteria, and that Board members should be non-partisan and better reflect “the regions of Canada, majority and minority language communities, First Nations, men and women, and ethnic and other minority groups.”
Currently, while the gender split is even among board members, all come from major cities. All but three of the 12 are from the Toronto/Montreal/Ottawa regions.
Highlights from the report are still ahead
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The individual who filed nearly 450 Access to Information requests to the CBC has revealed himself to be Michel Drapeau, a former colonel and now a lawyer in private practice.
Former CBC-TV personality Avi Lewis has begun hosting a program on the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera network focusing on U.S. politics and the upcoming American election. 
In the autumn of 2006, Lewis began hosting CBC Newsworld’s The Big Picture with Avi Lewis. In June 2007, CBC Newsworld debuted On the Map with Avi Lewis, a daily (Mon-Thurs) half hour of international news spin. Both shows were cancelled before they reached their second season.
As someone who only works inside the Vancouver plant a couple of days a week (most of my work is outside the building), I was thrilled to discover that you can reach people through our in-house Groupwise Messenger system — even when you’re not in a CBC building.
Vancouver’s Dragon Boat team, the “Wave Catchers,” are on the hunt for seven new members. The team competes in at least two of the big festivals: the Alcan Dragon Boat Festival in mid-June and the Kelowna Dragon Boat Festival in September.
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