So we’ve all read the reports about what CBC’s head honchos told the Heritage committee, but what really went on in that room?You won’t find out on their website.
I tried, given that our president encouraged those with concerns to “examine the transcript of the broader discussion”.
Here’s the full text of the meeting minutes:
The witnesses made statements and answered questions.
Ah, thanks. At least it beats the committee’s FAQ:
There is no data currently available for this item.
Instead, I got some data from someone who was actually in the room.
“There’s a big square table with about 30 people around it, with the CBC bigwigs seated at foot of table,” said Katy Heath-Eves of CBC’s media relations. “They began by speaking for two minutes each about the corporation’s strategic direction and priorities – nothing earth shattering.”
Then there was a carefully orchestrated Q&A session, with each committee member allowed something like seven minutes to ask a question and have it answered to their satisfaction.
That’s where the fun began. Jim Abbott (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage) took on the NHL question, NDP heritage critic Charlie Angus tackled reality TV, and then the brass “got their hands slapped” about Prairie Giant.
Testiest of all was Tom Lukiwski, Conservative MP for Regina-Lumsden-Lake Centre (who was filling in for Conservative MP Chris Warkentin from Peace River.) He used the opportunity to take umbrage “on behalf of all Canadians” for the film – a repeat of his gripe in Parliament that the production was “a dishonest portrayal of Saskatchewan history”. (Apparently his son was somehow involved in the production, but presumably not the dishonest bits.)
Heath-Eves said that the CBC executives came off well on other issues. Richard Stursberg used stark numbers to illustrate the economics of airing Canadian drama instead of American simulcasts. Robert Rabinovitch spelled out what CBC really needs: a clear, up front “contract with Canadians” outlining what they want from their public broadcaster, so CBC can figure out how much it would cost.
“It was strong, and convincing,” Heath-Eves said.
I’ll take that over falling off a chair.
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Speaking of links…
It’s nice to finally link to the proper standing committee site, instead of the default one that gets inserted whenever I type Canadian Heritage. Tod set up WordPress with aLinks, which automatically inserts links to frequently used keywords. That’s really cool, if it’s what you actually want to link to. But it’s not always as clever as it thinks.
For instance: When I was travelling the globe, I met the Governor-General of Australia, who talked about his new national post office building.
Does anyone know how to manually override or remove aLinks? Please let me know. There’s also an ugly line break problem after links in Internet Explorer that I’m trying to fix…
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“All Canadians” does not include me, Mr. Lukiskiw. And as an expat child of Saskatchewan, I don’t consider provincial history slandered either.
Perhaps the Honourable Member might be mollified, however, by a mini-series on Premier Gardiner’s battles with the KKK…?
You can’t override it, according to the PDF in the aLinks distribution. To disable it, go into the WordPress admin menu, then to Plugins, and then click the “Deactivate” link next to it. Note that by disabling it you’ll also be removing it from all posts.
If you do keep aLinks around, apparently you can set it to be case-sensitive, which would avoid the auto-linking of “the globe” and “national post” in your example, but not “Governor-General”. The documentation says it’s found in a Settings menu; I think that’s the WordPress 1.5 location, so probably check one of the submenus under Options in WP 2.0.
Odds are the extra space in IE is a CSS issue, although it could also be the outbound click tracker in aLinks doing some weird page manipulation. I don’t have IE handy anywhere to track it down further than that (I’m Windows-free at home) but I can confirm I don’t see the display glitch in Firefox (1.5 or 2.0 beta), Safari or Opera.
Finally, for what it’s worth, it looks as if you’re logging in as Tod to post; at least, the syndication feeds list Tod as the author of each post. If you want you can get WP to show your info where appropriate—just create your own account (or use one you’ve registered for commenting) and grant it sufficient rights to post, then log in as yourself instead.
I know you think you’ve got a smart little post here ridiculing the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage’s Web site, which surely deserves ridicule. But what you want is committee *evidence*, not minutes, and the committee’s name never, ever was “Canadian Heritage,” making your various erroneous links and cries for help rather off the mark.
Actually I think it’s neither smart nor little, but thanks.
Unless I’m looking in the wrong place, the meeting “evidence” is listed as “not available”, which is even less helpful than the one-liner. Give our president’s suggestion that we “examine the transcript”, I went looking for one and came up empty. (I also wrote to CBC Communications, and they don’t have a transcript either.)
As for the Canadian Heritage links, those are the selfsame automatic aLinks I was complaining about in the Nerd Alert. I didn’t write them. I’m hoping Tod will return before I have to learn how to take this blog apart to fix things I don’t like