GATINEAU – As the CBC awaits to hear how much of a budget cut it will have to take, the CRTC is not going to try and put the Corp. through a licensing hearing just now.
Last summer the Commission postponed the CBC’s license hearing until June 2012, citing a couple of reasons, the primary one being that the public broadcaster does not yet know what its future operating budget will be. Fast-forward to now and the situation is no clearer. While the federal government has let it be known the CBC will not be left out of federal cuts in the next budget, expected in March, the Corp. still has not been told where, exactly, its parliamentary appropriation stands.
The Commission said when it put off the hearing in 2011 it would issue a public notice February 1st to set timelines to re-start the CBC’s licensing hearing, but it received a letter from the broadcaster yesterday (January 31) asking for another delay. Restarting the process now would mean the CBC would have to file an application in April or May, which would not give it enough time to properly incorporate the new financial restrictions it may be facing by then.
“The Corporation anticipates that this narrow window will not be sufficient to allow it to reflect on and operationalise its plans given that its budget is expected to be announced in late February or March. The Corporation respectfully submits that more time is needed to establish its future operating budget prior to imposing licensing conditions,” reads the letter to the Commission from the CBC’s chief regulatory officer Steven Guiton.
The Commission agreed today in a release, saying it “considers that it would be inappropriate to set a hearing date for the renewal of the CBC’s licences until the CBC has had an opportunity to establish its future operating budget. The Commission is therefore postponing the licence renewal hearing until further notice.”
– Greg O’Brien
