OTTAWA – The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) has found that parts of Radio-Canada’s controversial New Year’s Eve special ‘Bye Bye 2008’ violated the public broadcaster’s codes, regulations and conditions of license.
Radio-Canada and the CRTC received a flood of complaints from viewers about the satirical variety show, so much so that the CRTC, who usually handles complaints regarding the public broadcaster, asked the CBSC to examine the broadcast due to its “considerable experience with complaints about broadcast content” and “its well-recognized panel process” before making its own decision on the complaints
The CBSC’s Quebec regional panel examined the 210 complaints under the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ (CAB) ‘equitable portrayal code’ and ‘violence code’, both of which are conditions of licence for SRC.
In its decision released Monday, the panel concluded that some of the comments and sketches relating to Black people did violate the equitable portrayal code.
“The Panel finds nothing redeeming in the allegedly comedic notion that an American President should be shot, still less that this would be easier to achieve because of the colour of the President’s skin. It was a disturbing, wounding, abusive racial comment. It was, in the sense of [an earlier] decision, “grit your teeth”, “cringe in discomfort” comment. It was abusive […] and degrading […]”, the decision read.
The panel also found those comments in violation of the Television Broadcasting Regulations, 1987, and determined that the fact that the program was intended to be comedic did not absolve SRC of its responsibility to “avoid airing abusive, degrading, or unduly negative stereotypical material”.
The panel did not, however, find comments made about other identifiable groups in breach of the equitable portrayal code, including comments about English Canadians, South Asians, Aboriginals, the poor, convenience store operators (dépanneurs), and immigrants.
With respect to the CAB’s violence code, the panel ruled that a sketch that parodied the violent actions of former NHL goaltender Patrick Roy and his sons violated the code provision regarding violence against women, because it depicted one of Roy’s sons beating up his mother and the mother repeatedly flinching to avoid her husband’s and sons’ aggression.
“There was simply no creative need for the Roy men to beat the mother up and to leave the impression that this element was a constant in their family life. The show’s creators may have viewed these actions as a satirical depiction of the Roy men’s violent tendencies, but, in the view of the Panel, they went too far. They exaggerated the reality at the level of the victim, as much or more than at the level of the perpetrators,” said the decision.
Sketches about other public personalities were examined under the CAB code of ethics, but the panel said that parodies of Céline Dion, Chantal Lacroix, Julie Couillard, the federal political party leaders, former Cabinet Minister Maxime Bernier and others were “typical sketch comedy fare which lightly poked fun rather than bludgeoned the subjects”.
The panel also identified that some of the sketches contained sexual innuendo and coarse language inappropriate for children. While that content did not pose a problem when the program was originally broadcast at 11:00 pm on December 31, 2008, its re-broadcast at 8:00 pm on January 1 2009 required the use of viewer advisories to alert viewers to that mature content, which were not included. The failure to include the advisories “constituted a breach of the high standard provision of the Broadcasting Act".
The CSBC is the industry’s self-regulatory body to uphold broadcast standards.
