“COME WITH ME. I’LL show you why I wanted to be president of the CBC.”
Those were CBC president and CEO Hubert T. Lacroix’s first words to me last week as we sat down in the meeting room overlooking the Montreal skyline and St. Lawrence River at Radio-Canada’s headquarters. I jumped to my feet and followed him into his office.
Just inside his door is a headless mannequin dressed in a whimsical suit, topped with a bowler cap. “It might be a bit before your time but do you know who this is?” he asked me, excitedly. I wrack my brain for a few moments trying to recall some of the French shows I saw as a kid and all I could think of was Sol, but these clothes were way nicer than Sol the Hobo/Clown who used to teach us French on TVO.
“It’s Bobino!” said Lacroix, finally jarring my memory bank. When he was hired as CBC president and moved into his office three years ago Lacroix brought along some of his own artwork and was pleased to find out that he could pick a few items from the CBC vault to decorate it, too.
“I wanted Bobino,” he said. A couple of days later, there was Bobino. Well, his clothes, anyway. (Actor Guy Sanche, who played the character, died in 1988). Bobino was the number one Radio-Canada kids program for decades in Quebec and Lacroix told me he used to race home after school to make it in time to see his favourite program when he was a boy (An incredible 5,100 episodes of Bobino were created from 1957 to 1985).
So it was pretty easy for the president of CBC to get across his passion for the place within the first few minutes of our meeting.
Alas, the CBC faces a far different world than the time of Bobino and Bobinette. In the early 1960s, when Lacroix was dashing home, TV had just gone color, everyone subscribed to a newspaper and listened to the radio. There were no other forms of media. No one was watching the Habs play on their phone (because their phones weighed seven pounds and were hardwired to the wall.
But despite all the global media changes, the waves of consolidation and new platforms, the CBC remains. Critics will tell us we no longer need a national public broadcaster. That Canadians can use the multiple web portals and smart phone applications to say what they want to say, whenever and however they wish to say it. Its backers (full disclosure: I’m one) say that because of those multitude of platforms that we need the CBC more than ever as a reliable place for news, entertainment and a reflection of our country’s culture.
But what does its president say? I sat down with Hubert Lacroix (pictured) last Friday for a lengthy interview at the Radio-Canada HQ in Montreal. What follows is an edited transcript.
Hubert Lacroix: What was the first program that you remember watching on a regular basis?
Greg O’Brien: Probably Hockey Night in Canada, and a non-sports one would be Beachcombers (Ed note: If I were to decorate my office with CBC memorabilia, I’d want Relic’s boat. But I’d need a much bigger office… Mais, je digress…)
HTL: Did you watch any of the children’s shows, like, the Friendly Giant and…
GOB: Oh, of course. Friendly Giant, Mr. Dressup… All that is in my memory, too.
HTL: If you speak to the people of my generation, everybody will talk to you about Bobino, perhaps because at that time, a Bobino concept was a completely new one. You couldn’t find anything like Bobino in a Francophone environment.
GOB: And that would’ve been at what time?
HTL: I’m 55, so that’s 1961, ’62, ’63, something like that. That’s when we all related to Bobino and to La Boites à Surprise and to Pirate Maboule and to all these great characters that were created in the minds of the people that showed us these programs. So Bobino strikes a chord.
GOB: And that’s why you joined CBC?
HTL: (laughter) I joined CBC because I really believe in what the public broadcaster can do. I had the great fortune of working for Radio-Canada as a sportscaster… because half of my life was law, the other half was, for years, basketball. I was the women’s basketball coach at McGill and the women’s basketball coach for the Quebec Provincial Program. So I’ve spent literally half of my life, from 1973 to 1995 or ’96 coaching hoops.
…It’s a great game, and in ’84 I was the president of the Quebec Basketball Federation… One day Radio-Canada phoned me up and said “we’re going to Los Angeles, in 1984, and we’d like francophone to be the colour person on the radio.” I said, “Wow.”
So I did that, did ’88, did ’92, did ’96. Did the world championship games in 1990. I was lucky enough to be in the gym when the first (NBA-starring) dream team was put together in 1992 in Barcelona. That was spectacular stuff. And then… there was a sports show on Radio-Canada that maybe was 6:00 or 5:30 (before hockey on a Saturday night). Sort of a pre-game, or an opening show to the hockey game that we had on the radio. And I was asked for a few years to do the amateur sport part. So I was a full-time partner in a law firm, and I would leave sometime during the week with my recorder, and I would interview amateur athletes about what was going on because I was very interested by amateur athletes and amateur sports.
Then I would come in, give it to the techies here in the building. And they would make me sound like I was a pro. So I was always extremely impressed by the technical knowledge and how these guys were patient with me because I’m not a professional. So I’d come in with all these questions that were all jumbled together, and when you heard me on air, you thought I’d been doing this for 40 years. They were very good. So that was also a very, very important connection I had with CBC.
GOB: How long has it been since you coached a basketball game?
HTL: The last time I coached was my girls who graduated. They formed an all-women’s team… so their love of the game continued. And I coached their all-girls team until maybe, ’97.
GOB: Do you still play?
HTL: No, I don’t. I run. I just have no time to play. I can’t actually commit my time to be in the gym at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday night. So I can’t do that anymore. So I’ve turned into a marathon runner. I enjoy running.
GOB: That’s great… Now, as you know probably, I’ve been bugging Marco (Dubé, director of corporate communications) to do this interview since my October interview with Mr. Rabinovitch (the former CBC CEO). Now, I’m not going to ask for a direct response to every comment that he made, much of which many disagree with, some of which I disagree with. Just so you know my personal standpoint, I really do believe that, despite our multi-platform media world, we need a strong public broadcaster in Canada. And I think it needs to be properly funded.
So I think some of the questions Mr. Rabinovitch raised are very legitimate but I don’t want to be just the interviewer here. I want you to know my point of view as well.
HTL: Sure.
GOB: So you’ve been here three years now?
HTL: Yes. Starting No. 4.
GOB: Let’s just start with the big picture. Looking back, what are you most proud of in your time here?
HTL: I think that the public broadcaster right now is in a much better situation with respect to labor relations, I’m very happy with the senior executive team that we built. We just confirmed Kirstine Stewart last week. I think the ability and the reality of CBC and Radio-Canada is to work more and more together and leverage not only the brand but also the knowledge – the extraordinary knowledge and expertise that live in both sides of our house – and seeing them working together and having the same priorities.
Now, they obviously respect the linguistic market, but I’ve never – in three years – seen a greater effort at working at projects together, at sharing. I see the senior leaders and the senior managers always connecting with each other. If they have a good idea, they’ll bring in Radio-Canada, and if Radio-Canada has something they’ll share with somebody else. I think we have still a lot more to do in that area, but I see a lot of that and I’m very happy with this.
GOB: What’s the usual corporate speak, “breaking down the silos?”
HTL: Yes. I think there are many silos in this corporation and that we have to take them one at a time. It’s like building relationships. We build them one at a time with the CBCers that work here, one at a time with the Radio-Canadians. And I think we’ve improved the relationships. And when you improve the relationships, then you can do great things.
GOB: Can you give me an example or two of sort of how they are all working together that maybe viewers might see on air or listen to.
HTL: Espace Musique, Radio 2, new platforms did a great contest (called Evolution, a contemporary music composition competition)… where both sides of the house got involved with an idea and they actually won a President’s award. We resurrected the President’s award to celebrate the great things that we do at CBC/Radio-Canada.
One of those winners was a project, a contest that we did out of Banff that was on both sides of our house, all platforms, initiated in a three-station, different management team context: Montreal with some people, Toronto and Winnipeg. And it delivered a great program.
Another example of improvement at CBC/Radio-Canada was that we went through some really, really tough times for about 20 months. We’re about finished our two-year recovery plan. It has a finite date on it of March 31, 2011 because it’s the second financial year that would be affected by it. We had to eliminate a lot of employees.
The work done with the unions, with ourselves, with the different components allowed us to map out a plan that, even though it was extremely difficult to go through these times, allowed us to survive and in 2011 on the 14th of January at 3:37, we’re doing as well as we ever have on both sides of our house in radio, in television, internet services. So that’s simply because we have some great people here.
GOB: How many positions were eventually eliminated?
HTL: Around 800. Seven-hundred and ninety-something full-time equivalents, we call them.
GOB: Now that you’re past that, what are your priorities for 2011?
HTL: One of the very important things that we wanted to equip this corporation with was a plan. Because of the funding model that CBC/Radio-Canada has to live with, most of the strategic part of our work had been done within 12-month cycles because that’s the way we’re funded.
You know very late, or very close to the beginning a new year through the federal budget process how many dollars you’re going to get. You look at what the revenue side is going to bring through conventional advertising revenues, and the kind of activities that we have at CBC/Radio-Canada to increase our top line – and then you plan accordingly.
… What we did as a team, and I’m very proud of it, is we worked for close to 12 months on trying to give the public broadcaster a map towards 2015. And this map, I hope, will be the route we will take together to get to where we want to be as a public broadcaster with some key priorities around our mandate and about how we deliver it to Canadians.
Now, this might all sound very corporate, but it’s very practical in what that means. And it also is an incredible exercise, Greg, because it means that around the table, the eight people that work with me every day on our senior executive team, put in the necessary time – and it was a painful exercise to see how they could realign themselves around a concert of priorities without losing their own identity – and moved the plan of the broadcaster, going forward, on a five-year horizon.
And that is something that of recent memory had not been done at CBC/Radio-Canada.
We’re very proud of what we’ve done and we’re about to announce its key elements. We think that this plan carries until 2015 and ’16 and we’re not the only public broadcaster that’s been doing this. The BBC did this. ABC just did the same thing in Australia. All the public broadcasters in the world are being challenged in this environment where they need to find a way where the mandate that they get through the different Acts that create the broadcasters in this world is reflected in their activities every day.
GOB: Can you give me any sort of preview on what this plan will say?
HTL: I won’t give you elements of the plan yet. But what I can tell you, though, is that it’s about differentiating ourselves even more as a public broadcaster.
Look at the things that I’ve been saying since day one I’ve been here: You can’t be a public broadcaster without a public; you need to ensure that a public broadcaster, to deliver on its mandate, is deeply rooted in the regions; and you know what’s going on in the digital world.
You also look at the competitive environment in which we are. Our funding model forces us to raise about $325 to $350 million of conventional advertising money every year to survive, on top of another $300 million, which comes from our different activities (for example, CBC News Network earns about $80 million annually, RDI, $50 million) Those decisions in the context of our mandate have to all make sense.
GOB: To turn to funding for a minute. Do you find it’s still worth still pounding on the door of the federal government to say “okay, we need to raise the parliamentary contribution, the taxpayer contribution,” or have you beaten your head against that wall enough. Collectively, the CBC has for decades been told what you get is what you get and there’s no more. So do you stop asking?
HTL: This plan is about giving CBC/Radio-Canada some autonomy and some direction by itself based on the environment that we’re in. I realize that there’s a deficit of $57 billion in government right now. That’s a big challenge for our federal government. I’m more into ensuring the stability of our funding, and showing not only the government, but showing Canadians that we have a place in an environment where we’re the only national broadcaster that is not held by a BDU.
We are not vertically integrated, but we have a whole bunch of services and platforms. I strongly believe in what we do every day, which is deliver information in a non-biased way, transparent way to Canadians so that they can form their own opinions.
And if you look at the other groups being organized around us, we now stick out as the only one, the only safe place, the only non-commercial place, for Canadians to have a conversation. So that’s, I think, why we wanted this plan. And it’s not a plan that asks the government for more money. It’s taking charge of our own destiny by ourselves within the mandate that hasn’t changed for 20 years.
The Act, which asks us to offer services to all Canadians and invest in the most financially reasonable way in order to inform them, enlighten them and entertain them, hasn’t changed. But our view of it, and the mission that we see and our interpretation of that mission has to be linked to the realities of 2011 and beyond. And that’s what this plan is going to do.
GOB: Realities have changed quite significantly in the past year. You touched on vertical integration, Shaw-Canwest, or Shaw Media now, and soon to be Bell/CTV together. How do you play in this space? How do you get programming? How do you compete news wise when they have such an advantage of pure size and resources over the CBC?
HTL: I think the CBC has to be, in everything it does, different than the other broadcasters. And I think that’s what you see in our television schedule. Prime time has been the subject of a lot of conversation because of what we offer there and we have shown that we can create, produce and show great Canadian programs, which is the model that, as you know, the privates can’t do because they can’t fund it that way.
So if you look at prime time at CBC – and I’ve said this so many times – we are the greatest supporters of Canadian content. We show it in prime time. That’s what we do on the radio, that’s what we do on television. We will continue differentiating ourselves that way. I think there’s a great future for the broadcaster, particularly in an environment where everybody around us is so vertically integrated.
It might mean that we’re going to change the way we do things, though. And we might actually think partnerships and exchange of services and doing less things in a proprietary way.
GOB: More with independent production companies, you mean?
HTL: Or with other broadcasters, and – I mean, the world’s changing so fast and so much that the old proprietary way might not be the way of the future.
GOB: You look at your prime time schedule, and you’re trying to do what all the other broadcasters are doing: Be original and different and win ratings. That’s not easy to do. If everyone could do it, then everyone would.
HTL: Can I challenge you on win ratings?
GOB: Sure. But you can go back to some of the things CBC used to do that were different, but very few people watched, 100,000 people would watch or something like that. Sure, it was different. It was on in prime time. It was Canadian. But if nobody’s watching, is it successful?
HTL: Well, I just said the concept is you can’t be a public broadcaster without a public.
GOB: Right. So shoot. Challenge away.
HTL: I’ll challenge your win ratings because ratings are an important matrix or an important measure by which we look at everything. But if it was only for that, I think that you wouldn’t see the prime time schedule that we have. You wouldn’t see the documentaries that we put in… you wouldn’t see the current affairs shows that we’re very proud of in prime time.
And we do things, Greg, I really believe in this, we do things that nobody else would do. And I’m just going to give you a couple examples of things that we’re doing now. And I had a conversation with Sylvain Lafrance this morning on this.
Champions of Change. This great showcase of volunteers and what that represents to Canadians, and what we’re going to do this weekend. It’s a combination of what Mark Kelley at Connect has been doing to identify these champions: 2000 applications were submitted for these champions of change.
A hundred and twenty-five thousand people voted on this idea that they really respected their neighbor or their friend or their cousin or their father doing volunteer work. We’re going to put this in a really obvious prime time position. We’re going to talk about this, and I think that’s our role of connecting with Canadians.
We’re going to do tomorrow night’s Gala de la Personalité de l’année La Presse. It’s something we do with La Presse, about volunteers, again. There’s 350,000 people that are going to see this on a Sunday night. We normally do 1.4 to 1.7 million on Sunday nights with Tout le Monde en Parle. But we think that that aspect of celebrating 52 different people during the week, we should be putting that on prime time on our schedule. And sure, that night we won’t get 1.7, but ratings are not always what we look for.
GOB: Now, let me take the cynical new-media-true-believer’s point of view on this, that it shouldn’t be on at prime time, and on a broadcaster, that you should just build a Facebook page around it and celebrate that way, and that’s the way it should be done in the future – with something else be on the air.
HTL: If I’m in this job X years from now, we might have this conversation again and you might see that. But let’s take Champions of Change which has its Facebook page, which has all of these things on top of the prime time stuff. The reality is that 91% of people still watch this live on Radio-Canada on Sunday night because that’s the way they consume television. But it’s changing really, really fast.
You know about all the questions that broadcasters are having across both borders and probably around the world about the prime time schedule, whether you’re still going to do programming according to a schedule or whether there’s going to be a transition where outside independent producers, let’s say, are coming in and leasing the 8:00 to 9:00 p.m. slot and taking from their own server, sending it directly into the 8:00 to 9:00 slot, and then… what is it going to mean, the show, the content? There’s all sorts of issues with that.
And then one day, let’s say you’re on a Being Erica page, and are told at midnight on Tuesday… you will see the next episode from… in French, it would be TouTV right now. You’d pick it up there and there’s going to be no prime time schedule at the broadcaster. It’s simply going to be a page, or it’s going to be an environment where you’re going to pick and choose what you want whenever you want it.
Friday Night Lights in the states, for one full year was on Direct TV and you had to pay if you wanted that season one year before NBC put it on its schedule. So the environment’s going to change…
GOB: And the business models with it.
HTL: Absolutely. But right now, people are still watching television, so that’s why it’s in prime time and it’s being watched.
GOB: And that’s the point people have made about TouTV: Where is the business model? Aren’t you just giving your content away? How are you making money off this? And if you do it in English Canada, how are you going to make money off it? That’s the big question.
HTL: There’s no business model right now that’s very evident out there for these initiatives. TouTV is a stroke of genius from Radio-Canada’s digital team because it’s not only about Radio-Canada, as you know, it’s the programming of a whole bunch of other public broadcasters that you can actually get there through that site.
GOB: I’d like you to do one it in English, to be honest with you.
HTL: Is it the French Hulu of Canada? Not quite… Right now, you’re quite right. The business model around these kind of initiatives is far from being obvious.
GOB: Given time, though, they will reveal themselves. I think we all forget how early it still is in all of this change, and how many things are changing at the same time. Broadcast going from black and white to color, okay, that’s a no-brainer. Easy. Going from analog to HD, again, this is the way we should be going. But now, going from TV to all of these different platforms, and then you spider web from there to all of these different form factors and operating systems, on phones, on pads, on laptops… The word I often use is bewildering.
HTL: If you told me before I walked into CBC/Radio-Canada that people would prefer, or actually seek, watching television on their phone, a screen that big, and following a hockey game or following a show, or actually happy to be receiving it on their little phone instead of on their 52-inch theater environment with the big speakers and the chair at the home, I would have said, “I don’t believe you. You’re insane.”
Now, I see the complete opposite. I see the screens on the little phones being so clear it’s spectacular. I see shows being produced in two formats. One format for your phone so that everything is done short and medium shots, and not long shots because you won’t be able to see the long shot on your little screen, and then a format for television. The reality is, people are using their phone for Jetsons kind of things.
GOB: I saw people crowded around a smartphone during the World Cup because the game was live and that was the only screen.
HTL: Exactly.
GOB: In looking back at your time so far, is there anything that you haven’t been able to accomplish – which is disappointing that you haven’t been able to push forward yet?
HTL: I hope that before I finish my term, I will be able to convince the powers that be about stability in our funding, and getting management tools to allow us to smartly manage in the best possible and the most efficient ways these great assets that we have – because I consider that I have assets I trust from Canadians, Crown assets.
GOB: And by management tools, you mean…
HTL: Credit lines, an ability to use the assets on our balance sheet in the normal way that a corporation would use it. Your credit line at the bank is higher than CBC/Radio-Canada, because we don’t have a credit line.
That’s the difficult position we are in because when we lose a dollar of revenue, there are one of two actions we can take. We can actually push it to the year after, or we can cut it in this year. But in an environment where out of every dollar there’s, let’s say, half of a dollar that goes to severance because we’re a people business, we’re a content business, it triggers the indemnity issue that goes with that cut. So when we cut a dollar inside our shop, it’s more. We cut much more than that because there is a severance for that.
And because we don’t have an ability to manage this with any kind of credit line at a bank and spread it over time like any normal corporation that I managed in my life, the effect of the kinds of re-orgs that we need to do when we need to do them, it puts a lot of stress on our finances when things get complicated.
GOB: And to me, one of those complications right now is the transition to digital on the TV side.
HTL: Yes.
GOB: And I’ll tell you what I think again. (CBC’s OTA transmitter) infrastructure upgrade is something that the government should be paying for… and I know I’m in a bit of a minority in that opinion. But to expect you to get to digital so the government can auction off the (700 MHz) spectrum, and at the same time, the Act says CBC should be available to everybody, well, seems the government certainly should be paying for these digital transmitter upgrades. But you have to fund these internally.
HTL: Yes, we are.
GOB: And no credit line.
HTL: As you know, we have a plan right now that allows us to do 27 transmitters. We put this out in June, and it’s not going to meet all the requirements that we’ve been asked to meet. Once it’s all done, it’s going to cost us about $60 million. We think that it’s important to realize that in the context of what we did, the – we’ve chosen the 27 places as the stations where we originate programming, which makes a lot of sense. And that is, in our view, the best possible way within the constraints that we are facing, i.e. the government will not give us dollars to help us do this infrastructure. We are going to go at it this way and we’re working very hard in trying to get to the August 31st, 2011 date.
GOB: So what do you do with the rest of the transmitters, though, because there’s a lot of them?
HTL: So we decided to – as a public broadcaster, we’re going to keep the analog service in – going as long as we can in the markets where we can. Because as you know, the CRTC forces us to shut it down in the markets which are mandatory markets, and we don’t have digital transmitters. So that’s going to happen. And we’re going to try to see as long as we can how the analog transmitters are going to hold for the people that still will want to do this.
And at the end of the day, this 27-transmitter plan, we think that less than 1% of Canadians will be affected. Affected meaning that they will, if they want to continue getting our service, have to go to a cable provider or a satellite provider for our signals. So we think that’s a reasonable plan.
GOB: And those transmitters, they do not serve a lot of people and they cost what, $20,000, $30,000 a month just to power?
HTL: It’s an expensive proposition. The maintenance of it – and we have to decommission some of the sites when we do take these transmitters off the air. We have to make sure that we respect the environment – and we have the largest broadcasting infrastructure of anybody in the world… It’s close to 1000 transmitters.
GOB: And all this speaks to some of the other issues that CBC faces and that you’re going to be speaking about, I’m sure, through the year and into your license renewal in the fall, right?
HTL: Yes. That’s what CRTC has been telling us. It’s going to be in the fall.
GOB: So, you’ll keep talking local into local and value for signal, which you’re going to be still continue pushing forward throughout this year?
HTL: Because I know you follow the industry really well and you’re very knowledgeable about the industry, you know how I reacted when this decision was put out.
For the first time in our life, probably… I’ve not been told that we have ever sat at a table in front of the CRTC, beside Global and CTV on anything. For the first time ever we were there as three saying “hey, this is the same issue for everybody here. We produce a signal. We don’t get paid for it. Somebody else is getting paid for it. The BDUs are making a ton of money right now. The CRTC knows about this. Let’s change the environment.”
And I was extremely disappointed, as you saw from my reaction, when they carved us out and said “yeah, there’s an issue here. We recognize the business model is broken, and we will allow a negotiation between the BDU and the broadcaster for the conventional signals to happen if the Federal Court says we can. And that’s it.
So when I saw that, got really annoyed. And as a reaction to my annoyance and my public comments, the chair of the CRTC put out a letter, which is on its web site saying “don’t worry Lacroix. Stop being upset with me and with us. We will deal with the CBC as soon as we’ve dealt with the privates.”
So you better believe that when the license renewal process comes up, we’re going to put our hand up. Actually, we might actually bring a copy of the letter so that the CRTC doesn’t forget about what’s on its web site, and say, “Don’t forget about us.” But you know the environment’s changed now.
GOB: Well, your partners in front of the Commission now all under BDUs.
HTL: And it’s going to be the right pocket paying to the left pocket. So maybe this issue will not be for the other players around the table. I know it won’t be as, maybe as crucial as it was and still is for CBC/Radio-Canada.
GOB: Let’s talk a little bit about the other platforms as well. You saw Mr. Rabinovitch’s interview. He thought that the CBC in its current form can’t continue. It has a bit to do with funding and process. Well, you read the interview.
So there was a thought that he brought up there is that maybe the CBC should just be digital and radio. Does that make any sense to you?
HTL: I’m not going to comment on what Robert said. But we think that television has a great future in CBC. We like what we see. We like what we do. Look at the number of people that watch us on Radio-Canada, the people that watch CBC, and when you bring in constantly a million, a million-plus on all sorts of Canadian shows that we produce by ourselves – and the way that we’ve been able to take these programs and to deliver them to Canadians on all sorts of platforms, there’s not too many broadcasters in the country that are as leading edge on the platforms and the web sites as we are.
You’re going to see some spectacular stuff coming up on our CBC.ca platform. You’re going to see our presence on the iPad expanded – we realize that we need to take these programs and to deliver them to you.
Now, over time does it mean that you’re still going to sit in front of a screen at 7:00 p.m. forever and wait for the show to come on? Probably – as we talked about a few minutes ago – that relationship with your screen and the television set in your house will change. But the television part, the content part, I see only good things happening to it.
GOB: Now, how are all the multi-platform options affecting your news? There’s still the 10 o’clock news, The National, and there’s still a sizable amount of people who watch that. But from my own personal point of view, at 10, I’m pretty informed by then. I’m in front of a computer a lot, I’ve got a smartphone.
But the one thing that’s missing from my news pie, I guess, by 10 or 11 at night is local. There’s not a lot of stuff about Hamilton, where I live, spread around the web. If I want to find out about the Leafs or NFL football or politics or whatever, there are many places to find it. But if I want to find out about what’s going on in Hamilton, there’s not a lot.
So can you speak to that in terms of the CBC’s overall news strategy across all of your platforms? And also, could you weave that into the regional aspect of it, doing local news, and using the CBC’s assets to draw that together.
HTL: I need to make a distinction here between the two markets. What Radio-Canada is doing and has been able to do, and then what CBC’s doing.
Radio-Canada has decided that it understands exactly what you’re saying, so it has changed the way you look at Céline Galipeau in the evening. There’s a newscast for you on RDI, the news network, from 9 to 10 with Geneviève Asselin which if you missed (the news) all day and you don’t have an idea of what’s going on… you’re going to get a more regular, here’s what’s happening today newscast. At 10:00 when Céline comes in – and she is, as you know, the Peter Mansbridge of Radio-Canada – she will come in, pick three or four or five key news items of the day, and she’ll go deeper in those and you will not have the whole range of what Geneviève Asselin did. So there’s two clearly distinctive news programs in the evening on Radio-Canada. It’s an experiment. It’s interesting. We’ll see where that goes.
But it shows you that we recognize that at 10 p.m. when you sit there, there is a different way for you to look at the news. That’s only on the television side. CBC has changed its delivery of The National in a way to make it more interactive, more now, and has also done some of these pieces, depending on the news item that will either go a little deeper – look at what we did with (convicted murderer Russell) Williams, and how we treated that piece of information on the 10 o’clock news.
But also – on your cell phone and on your computer, on whatever widget you’re using, you can download Peter Mansbridge’s 10-minute National from our web site starting early evening, which is a condensed way of delivering the news to you.
One day, perhaps you’ll see on your cell phone or on your web page or on our web pages national news and then tailored for you in your area of where you are regionally. That’s, perhaps, one way for us to ensure that we can be very, very local in addition to the 5 to 6:30 newscast that we now have in every important region now in every region where we are.
…You’re going to see a lot of our efforts going to the generation that’s behind ours, and unfortunately I’m going to put you in mine right now. The generation that’s following us is a generation that doesn’t really believe in rendezvous television. So we need to make sure that we get that news to them in whatever format.
So it might be that it’s going to be only, or differently-delivered to you, and focusing on where you are in the country, splitting it up, but not with a person that’s going to read a bulletin, either standing or sitting behind a desk… Perhaps Canadians watching the news will not need somebody to walk them through the news, to hold their hand as you’re walking through the five or six or ten key items of the day. But they will understand that if they go to a site, or what they get is going to be quicker, it’s going to be more interactive, but it might not be in the same kind of format we’re used to.
GOB: It sort of spins back around to you saying you need the public to have a public broadcaster, and therefore you must give them choice. There’s a sizable number of people who do want to be walked through the news, and see the news presenter, and have Peter go step by step by step through everything. And there’s other people who just want to speed through it all and get to the clip that they want to see, and then off they go.
And it’s up to you to try and figure out how to serve those people and all those choices and all those myriad forms and functions now.
HTL: But that’s a fun challenge. It really gets CBCers excited because we’re very good at what we do. And I only see… really interesting challenges. Their ability to deliver the news, and the changes that we’ve made inside our corporation over the last two years in reorganizing the news, and that’s on both sides of the house, allows us to instantaneously work with all the platforms, have one place where somebody decides, okay, this is a news item for everybody. It’s not radio finding out about something, getting it on the radio, TV misses it, then what happened to new platform, or whichever way else you want to give the example.
And you’ll also see that both sides of the house will talk much faster now because the technology also allows us to be instantaneously in contact with each other.
GOB: I also want to talk a little bit about sports as well.
HTL: Now you know I’m a sports guy..
GOB: That’s right. And here I thought you were just a lawyer.
HTL: You know what, I’m still a member of the bar, but it’s been a long time since a person’s actually said to me that I’m a lawyer.
GOB: Do you miss it at all?
HTL: I miss the interaction with my colleagues. I think that law firms are incredible environments. I love the people that I work with. I love the teams in which I worked. I liked the intensity of the transactions. I was a securities, corporate lawyer. A loved my clients. I liked the idea of being a special advisor to my clients, much more than I did doing the actual paper, but I did the actual paper and realized that it was important for them that I did it and did it correctly.
GOB: Speaking of negotiations, let’s talk about sports and rights. There is much doubt, I guess, or much trepidation as the next hockey deal will come about. That’s near and dear to Canadians’ hearts, so we’ve got to talk about hockey… And if you’re talking about TV, you’ve got to talk about Hockey Night in Canada. You can see the consolidated players out there, so you know for sure CTV and/or Rogers will come to the table when the national Saturday-night hockey deal comes up. Do you envision CBC having the wherewithal to hold onto those rights, and where do you see CBC going in terms of the rest of the sports world? Do you see just amateur sports for CBC? Do you see more sort of “second-tier” sports, like, soccer?
HTL: I want to go on record here in saying that you just used the words second-tier for all the soccer fans in Canada. That I did not. If I used that sentence or I used that expression, all the soccer fans in Canada will throw things at me.
GOB: (laughter) Er, I am a soccer coach….
HTL: Clearly, we understand the environment is changing. We understand it’s a big challenge. Hockey Night in Canada and CBC – we’ve been hockey. It started with us. We are very proud of what we do in Hockey Night in Canada. We are going to ensure that we position ourselves where we can do something about still being a player in the hockey world when this contract ends (in 2013).
I feel very confident that we will find a way for us to be there in some way. Sports are important. Key events in sports are important to the public broadcaster because they draw Canadians together.
I don’t think that there are many other times where people get together in family environments, in communities, in regions or around a drink watching than during those times where there’s a red and white flag and one of our athletes is doing really well somewhere. And all of a sudden, the country unites behind the quality of that sport event, or the quality of our result. Because of that, I think the broadcaster has to play a role there. And I feel very confident that we are going to continue doing this.
…We also have two sports licenses right now that the CRTC granted to us that are there for us to consider. What are we going to do with them?
GOB: Are those going to launch?
HTL: We’re looking at what we could do with content because there’s a lot of sports there, a lot of properties going out. TSN did TSN2. You’ve got-
GOB: The new Sportsnet channel.
HTL: You’ve got your sports channels. You’ve got everybody wanting to get in there in some way in a very crowded field with very important sports. Some of the sports teams now have their own network. What is it going to mean? We’re following this with great interest. But you’re talking to a sports guy.
GOB: So we’ll see, I guess.
HTL: Remember, this is three years from now, the Hockey Night in Canada contract is going to end in three years. There’s a lot of stuff a year ago I thought didn’t exist, look at the iPad.
GOB: I had one other question for you, too, about the pestering by Sun Media (owned by Quebecor) of the CBC. To me it’s unfair. And I’d like to get your response to that.
HTL: I have a lot of respect for Pierre Karl Péladeau as a person. I actually was a director of Donohue Inc. for close to 10 years. Donohue was in the chain of a companies that’s owned by the Péladeaus. One of the public companies in which they had a controlling interest was Donohue Inc, so for close to ten years, I was the sole outside director that met with Pierre-Karl, his father and the CEO of the company at that time, the chairman, and I was the only outsider there. So I have only respect for what he has built. He’s a very intelligent guy. He’s an entrepreneur. He’s a maverick.
I find – I’m surprised of the content of the articles that I read every day in the “down-the-drain” campaign. And I’ll leave it at that.
GOB: Okay. I was telling Marco as we were talking leading up to this, that I thought a lot of the criticism was pretty unfair. CBC’s one of the more open organizations in the country.
HTL: And we would like to think that’s the case. I’ll make one more comment on this. Brian Lilley, who’s been writing about us every day has written over 60 of these articles, I think, over the last couple of months on CBC/Radio-Canada. You know how many times he checked facts on his articles and wrote – and rung us up to check out?
Three times.
GOB: The one question I never asked is most people agree that CBC does radio really right. You lead or are near at the top of the listenership in most of the major markets in the country. When you’re putting together this new plan, was there a portion that said “okay, what can we learn from the radio side where people are listening, people are talking about it, people are clearly loving it? What can we learn from the radio side to apply to the TV side, to apply to the new media side?”
HTL: Radio, you’re absolutely right, is a key part of our trademark and how you perceive CBC/Radio-Canada. I think we do things well on both sides of the house. I think now that we’re as integrated on the three platforms as we’ve ever been, I think by osmosis, the quality of the pieces of the news, the current affairs and what they bring to our party is complemented by what television does and what the new platforms are doing.
So now, I think that what you will see more and more is not only radio doing the radio thing, but you will see the radio pieces and the radio content showing up on the web. You’ll see television influencing radio and sharing stories much more. So directly and indirectly the quality of the radio teams and the quality of – the famous corporate word, the synergies – you’re going to see this, because we don’t think any longer that there is radio over there in that corner, and what can we learn from radio.
On the contrary, it’s now everybody around the table, and their knowledge is actually being implanted and informing the evolution of CBC services in everyday environment. So it’s not about what are they learning, but it’s them around the table now in any kind of plan that we have for strategy 2015 going forward.
