CBC mandate review underway
Well, it’s begun.
Federal politicians started meeting this morning to develop a report for the Heritage committee on the future role and mandate of the CBC.
The CBC is currently operating under the mandate approved by Parliament sixteen years ago. That Act tells the CBC it should provide programming that:
- Is predominantly and distinctively Canadian.
- Reflects Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences, while serving the special needs of those regions.
- Actively contributes to the flow and exchange of cultural expression.
- Is in English and French, reflecting the different needs and circumstances of each official language community.
- Strives to be of equivalent quality in English and French.
- Contributes to shared national consciousness and identity.
- Is available throughout Canada by the most appropriate and efficient means and as resources become available for the purpose.
- Reflects the multicultural and multiracial nature of Canada.
Why does it need changing? Partly because of the large-scale changes in media technology, the Internet, media concentration, and so on. The world is pretty different today than it was in 1991, when the Broadcasting Act was passed.
The Toronto Star says it believes several major questions are on the minds of politicians through this process:
First, should CBC television focus all its energy on trying to win large audiences as Richard Stursberg, the current executive director of English programming, believes? Last year, he cancelled a raft of Canadian drama shows because he didn’t believe their ratings were high enough and veered away from public broadcasting with a series of reality shows and lusty dramas such as The Tudors, a co-production with Ireland about the life of Henry VIII. Such shows draw bigger audiences and ad dollars but tell Canadians little, if anything, about themselves.
Second, should it stick with part of its mandate by running programs like the Royal Winnipeg Ballet even though they are ratings disasters?
Third, how much money should Ottawa give to the CBC? Now, the broadcaster gets $950 million a year from the government. Another $550 million comes from advertising and other revenues. The amount of tax money is substantial, but Ottawa’s grant has fallen by 20 per cent in the past 15 years when inflation is taken into account. Indeed, only the United States and New Zealand give less government money per person to their national public broadcasters.
Fourth, is a public television broadcaster needed any longer now that private broadcasters, although dominated by foreign content, produce some popular Canadian shows such as CTV’s Corner Gas?
The Star noted that the Commons committee will likely study a 2006 Senate report that recommended “CBC Television should be more like CBC Radio, focusing on high-quality news and information programming, services not available on other stations and better regional programming.”
What do you think about the current mandate? Would you like to see changes?
NOTE ABOUT COMMENTS: This post/thread is about changes to the mandate. Not about how the CBC should be shut down, etc. The usual “I hate the CBC” comments will not be approved.
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I’ve said for the last 7 years, as private broadcasters pulled out of local programming and news (with the exception maybe of the major markets) that the CBC should pick up the slack in this area. Mid sized communities are left with no voice on the airwaves – gone are the local election coverage, community events and most importantly, local news programming. With the CBC taking a big lead in new media, why not open small – news stations across the entire land with new media affiliates serving there own communities and tying into the main CBC news services? Do what the other guys aren’t doing and do first!
I thought that the Toronto Star op-ed piece was spot-on in terms of the concerns that need addressing.
I’m not convinced that every show CBC airs has to be a ratings success. Mr. Stursberg has a long way to go to convince of the value of his doctrine, never mind some of his cancellation decisions. I still miss Da Vinci’s City Hall and This is Wonderland, for example. Restoring those shows could certainly help address the Mandate issues.
As to imports, I have little complaint about Doctor Who and its spinoffs to name some examples. CBC did this with good American shows once upon a time. M*A*S*H, for example. Importing the best of what other nations do as a spur to the domestic content producers to do better themselves is a worthwhile effort.
Regional news programming’s improved considerably, at least in my neighbourhood. I can’t speak for everyone in Ottawa-Gatineau, let alone the rest of Canada, but that’s my opinion.
More to follow as I think of it…
To begin, could we have Newsworld in high definition, please? Love those documentaries.
I agree that CBC-TV should be more like CBC Radio, “focusing on high-quality news and information programming”. But don’t make it too good – I’m not going to watch more than an hour or two a day anyway. TV has to compete with radio, podcasts, and (gasp) printed media. PBS, Discovery, National Geographic, and HDNet have all raised TV standards. So should CBC-TV.
“Dr. Who” and “Torchwood” may not fall under “news and information programming”, but they are fun.
I think the Ceeb needs to have it addressed that they focus more on diversity. By this I mean reflecting the reality of today’s Canada culturally, and try to close some of the gaps in the service. Don’t see/hear much for new Canadians on CBC, and don’t get me started on youth.
All this focus on news is interesting. I didn’t see that anywhere in the mandate language, but it’s just assumed that a public broadcaster should be in the news business. I would say the same about arts and children’s programming.
The need to bring in revenue is killing the product. I’m not against popular programming, but the constant push to generate advertising is exhausting the content morally and creatively.
Is a public broadcaster needed anymore? Well, are Canadian content rules needed still for music played on radio? I think yes to both, our neighbor to the south still cranks out a lot of content. It’s still nice to have a place to see/hear our own Canadian music/TV/movies. It would be nice to just be able to watch cool new Canadian movies on TV, not just on the plane, and in rep cinemas. (I like watching new Quebec films, I don’t always have the opportunity to see them)
I don’t know, television is more expensive to produce than radio is, I’m suspicious that to stay afloat, they really do need ad revenue for TV. Maybe dismantle the regular off-air TV stations, and air Newsworld over-the-air in their place?
Not a huge fan of the CBC — it has its place though. Have always been a little perturbed by its political bias.
That off my chest I really do enjoy some of the programming — but think CBC should move its standards higher — less pablum (reality shows, simpsons and the like) can find that elsewhere. Few other broadcasters provide a place for quality programming, good documentaries or investigative news pieces.
The CBC should be focusing in this area of helping Canadians understand themselves and their place in world — shows like Little Mosque also add value (can’t stand it personally). However don’t like the Michael Moore style of broadcasting — the CBC has to be unbiased no matter what the issue.
The shows like the Tudors and Corrie although well made and interesting could easily be shown on commercial channels — that would included Dr Who.
The CBC is still important to me and I will gladly contribute my tax dollars towards it. It’s good to have a place to hear our own story and to watch it unfold on a daily basis.
My frustration of late is simply how so much of the programing is coming out of Toronto, or the B.C. mainland, or Montreal. I want to hear more stories from Edmonton or Brandon or Saskatoon or Thunder Bay.
We need to live into that commitment more than a lot of other things right now.
I remember when Newsworld started, there was some pressure from the CRTC to decentralize the service somewhat, and not have all the news passed down from on high from Toronto. Or am I misremembering the crtc’s role in this?
At any rate, at some point this trend was reversed. The corp is increasingly centralized in Toronto, and it’s starting to affect the nature and quality of programming. Listening to CBC Radio from Halifax is more and more like listening from the moon.
It’s also infected our corporate culture: there’s this pernicious term around the CBC:, “the regions”. Guess who “the regions” are: all of Canada, except Toronto.
I feel strongly that the survival of CBC will be thro regionalism. Most of the country outside urban centres is barely hanging on & yet CBC is the main method of communication.
I read “special needs of those regions” in the mandate, & it is the north, opening up to everything else southern. CBC needs to keep up on this, with aboriginal & Inuit language broadcasts.
And, as during the lockout, there are community radio pockets where CBC could step in & set up some kind of co-operative movement, with both sides (& listeners) winning.
To those who complain about bias, I’d suggest that by law, preference and tradition, the CBC should always have at least one understood and accepted bias: a continued belief in the value of Canada’s existence and survival.
I think CBC Radio has set a model television should follow: thoughtful, opinionated and questioning. It’s everything commercial radio can’t be.
And obviously there’s the Web, which is the most successful platform the CBC has.
Bias? Pft. The rules for CBC’s journalists are notoriously strict(er than any other station in Canada). Journalism is the art of trying to understand though—it’s a profession for bleeding hearts. Not everything is news though—I’d rather hosts of arts or lifestyles shows to have opinions. They’d be boring otherwise, and their shows would be ignored.
The national CBC doesn’t need to change its mandate so much as it needs to start adhering to it. As discussed in other threads, the CBC’s mandate is to:
-reflect Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences, while serving the special needs of those regions,
-actively contribute to the flow and exchange of cultural expression,
-contribute to shared national consciousness and identity,
You obviously cannot “reflect Canada its regions to national audiences” when you’re producing a hugely disproportionate number of your shows out of one region. You can’t contribute to the “flow and exchange of cultural expression” when the huge majority of the flow is going in one direction, out of one relatively small region and dumped on the rest of the country. The effect of this cannot be to produce “shared national consciousness and identity” because very little sharing is going on. Instead what is happening is a suppression of Canadian culture and an attempt to force Toronto culture onto the country. I think we in the rest of the country need to begin to understand what’s happening as an act of violence being committed by the CBC against Canadian culture. I don’t know whether this is a deliberate thing or whether the CBC just cheaped out after the budget cuts and started hiring unqualified people from their backyard and hosting shows out of Toronto to cut costs. This produces no real savings, however, because it produces programming that is not only inconsistent with its mandate but that does damage to Canadian culture. If the CBC needs to run more shows like Martha Stewart and The Wheel of Fortune in order generate money to produce quality shows that are consistent with its mandate then so be it. But the decision to become largely a regional Toronto media outlet broadcast nationally was not a solution, because to the extent that the CBC has done this it has abandoned its mandate altogether.
To sum up, I think the mandate is not the problem. The problem is that the national CBC has abandoned its mandate to a very significant extent by becoming largely a regional Toronto media outlet which broadcasts nationally. To get it back on track I really think it needs to sell off, or sublet, or otherwise get rid of the TBC, and to decentralize and become Canadian again. There may have been cost savings to the centralization in the TBC, but when you see very culturally regional shows like Q and The Hour become feature shows for the CBC it’s clear that the cultural costs to this centralization have far outweighed any savings. (And there are many other examples as well, btw. These are just two of the most recent and most extreme and even shocking examples.) First and foremost the CBC needs to become Canadian again, and I think the way to do that is to give the CBC back to Canadians and to dust off the mandate and to start adhering it.