WHAT IS THIS NOW, THE FIFTH week of the CBC lockout? Is it ever going to end? Who really cares? I think many of us do, but it’s starting to crystallize in my mind what it is I really care about.
I work and travel extensively both in Canada and abroad and am, in fact, writing this piece on a plane between Miami and Manhattan. I’m a bit of a news junkie, too. Outside Canada I tune into BBC World and CNN. At home, I look mostly to CBC’s Radio One as my source of news and information – although I have been a regular viewer of CBC TV news since well before the those halcyon days of Knowlton Nash and Barbara Frum – when The National made its wonderful move to 10 p.m.
So – as a long-time CBC consumer – what effect is the lockout having on me? Well, I believe now more than ever that we Canadians need CBC Radio. After weeks of stumbling around the dial trying to avoid Howard Stern and to pick up something to fill my yen for news and current events, I more firmly than ever believe in the value we Canadians get from CBC Radio.
In a brilliant touch, the University of Toronto’s radio station CJUT, last week made available (daily from 6 to 8 a.m.) a slot where Toronto’s top rated CBC Radio program Metro Morning is being duplicated by it’s own original CBC staff. They’re calling it CBC Unlocked. This is both giving me my fix and reminding me how annoying this “labour disruption” is.
Conversely, I notice just how little CBC English language TV means to me in the 500 channel universe. Lloyd Robertson provides a great national news program now conveniently on both the CTV network and on their revamped Newsnet.
The cutting edge sitcoms of our day, Trailer Park Boys and Corner Gas, come not from the CBC but from Showcase and CTV, respectively. Remind me again why we need to spend our precious tax dollars on CBC English TV EVP Richard Stursberg and his band of bureaucrats, and pricey unionized help? With their amorphic government mandate to do all things for all people they have failed to do anything well enough to make me interested in continuing to pay their freight.
The CBC lockout makes it blatantly obvious that CBC English language radio is valuable and unique, while its TV counterpart is dated and redundant. Let’s break the paradigm and spend our cultural tax dollars where they are of most benefit. Same old, same old, is not the answer.
As a Canadian who has traveled and worked the length and breadth of this country I do have very positive memories of CBC TV. Summers during my university days I worked the bush camps at the top of Manitoba. This was in the early to mid ’70s – and not only did we not have cable or satellite service – we had no TV my first summer in the bush. The big treat was 16mm movie night in the dining hall twice per week featuring some real tier-three film epics!
That next summer, getting a CBC Northern service broadcasting to us was like being reconnected with the rest of the country. These days though, every mining camp or hydro base is part of the 500 channel universe.
Even in the early ’90s this kind of Canada-positive Canadian experience with CBC TV was a thing of the past since cable had opened even the far north to multichannel TV. In my visits to the cable operators in Iqaluit and Pangnirtung, on Baffin Island, you could start to see that a single CBC service provided by government was becoming a bit of an anachronism. Even CBC Newsworld, which I have watched in countless hotel rooms across Canada, now has good parallels from the commercial broadcasters.
And, does sports really have to be done by CBC anymore? We have a plethora of broadcasters who can do everything from hockey to curling to the Olympics – sans the subsidy from the public purse.
Show me the need, in 2005, for CBC English language TV.
I guess I’d like to still be a supporter, but before we decide to spend any more of our money on this anomaly let’s at least listen to Conservative Party culture critic (and former CTV veep) Bev Oda, who has called for a full Parliamentary debate on the CBC, and give it a thorough review.
Steve Quinn is president of TVC Canada and vice-president TVC International.
