OTTAWA – Auditor-General Sheila Fraser isn’t as worried about the appointment process at the CBC as Friends of Canadian Broadcasting Corp. or the unions, which complain it’s too political.
Asked repeatedly by Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage Committee members on Tuesday about the appointment process for the CBC’s chair, other board members and president, Fraser would not criticize the government.
“You have to recognize that the CBC is a Crown corporation and the government is the shareholder of the CBC and it is usually the shareholder who appoints the president,” she said. “The real issue is to make sure you have the skills and competencies needed around the table.”
Fraser criticized the CBC though for not managing its TV program backlog; both CBC English Television and Radio-Canada had 6,000 hours of unused programming when Fraser last conducted an extensive audit of the public broadcaster in 2005.
“I’m not commenting on whether the amount [of excess programming] is appropriate or not, but these are assets that are paid for and we expect the CBC to know if they have been used,” she told the committee studying the role of the public broadcaster in the 21st century.
Fraser acknowledged some changes have been made – such as CBC English Television appointing a manager to keep tabs on its TV programming inventory – and that others were in the works since her audit.
The committee called Fraser before it to discuss the findings of her 2005 audit. The audit also criticized the CBC for having insufficient benchmarks for assessing its progress in meeting its objectives, and for accounting differences that made it impossible to compare the English-language network with the French-language one.
Fraser referred to a “lack of performance measures in its strategic plan,” a shortfall she said CBC executives acknowledged existed back in November 2005 when she discussed her report with them.
“There were no concrete performance measures in its strategic plan,” said Assistant Auditor General Richard Flageole.
Broadcast targets, such as meeting the needs of Canadians, are difficult to measure, noted Office of the Auditor General Principal Julie Charron. She told the committee that the CBC needed to develop more measurable objectives, such as its French-language radio network’s goal of spreading its reach to 90% of Canada.
“Strategic planning is a critical guide to facing changes down the road [such as new technologies and audience fragmentation],” Fraser noted. “The corporation has to have a strategic plan that identifies those challenges and the changes that will be made as a result.”
The auditor-general’s next full audit of the CBC won’t occur until 2010, although there will be annual examinations of the public broadcaster’s books.
