OTTAWA – CBC president and CEO Robert Rabinovitch called on the federal government to come up with a long-term strategy for the public broadcaster, including spelling out how it would be funded.
Appearing Thursday before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage which is in the midst of an examination of the role of the public broadcaster in the 21st century, he said that strategy should be enshrined in a formal contract, as is the case in Ireland, South Africa and Hong Kong. In the United Kingdom, the BBC operates under a Royal Charter that is formally renewed, after debate, every 10 years.
“This is the kind of clarity and predictability we seek. Anything less is really paying lip service to the ideal of public broadcasting – while watching it wither,” he said.
A concrete contract is needed now given the widening gap between the CBC’s funding and what is expected of it, and given the rapidly emerging on-demand broadcast environment.
“The government needs to put dollars next to the priorities, and based on that we would go ahead,” Rabinovitch told cartt.ca after his committee appearance.
Asked by MPs how much money the public broadcaster needed, Rabinovitch would not specify a figure.
“I’m not going to duck that question, but I’m not going to give you an answer,” replied Rabinovitch. “It depends on what you want from the CBC.”
If regional TV programming were deemed a priority, an extra $130 million would be needed, he said. If the government wants the public broadcaster to extend local radio programming to the 8 million Canadians living in centers currently not serviced by the CBC, it would cost from $20 to $25 million, and as much as $100 million would have to be added to the budget if the priority was to convert all of its facilities to high definition, he added.
While demand for both the quality and diversity of product has skyrocketed, the CBC has not received a permanent increase in its public funding base in the past 33 years – since 1974, complained Rabinovitch.
Referring to a June 2006 study conducted by Nordicity Group Ltd. on behalf of the CBC, Rabinovitch pointed out his network operates on public funding that amounts to about $30 per person – which is less than half the $80 per capita average spent by the 18 industrialized countries in the study on their public broadcasters.
The CBC receives about $1 billion in public funding to deliver a service in French and English over five and a half time zones. In contrast, the BBC gets $7.3 billion in taxpayers’ dollars to provide a service in one language and one time zone. About 55% of the budget of CBC Television comes from private sources, such as advertising and subscriber revenues, CBC Television executive VP Richard Stursberg told the committee.
Belt tightening at the CBC cannot be squeezed any thinner, Rabinovitch said, noting that there has been $75 million in ongoing annual cost savings over the last seven years and that more than $93 million in revenue was generated last year through such things as merchandising and better use of its real estate assets.
The CBC faces “serious financial pressures,” he told the committee. “The plain fact is, if these pressures are not addressed – seriously and soon – there will be no more rabbits to pull out of the hat.”
Despite the resource problems, Rabinovitch said the CBC was still “doing well across the board.”
The public broadcaster’s radio services have enjoyed a decade of almost continuous growth in audience share and loyalty; its French Television service has a had a string of successful shows, including Les Bougon and Tout le monde en parle; CBC Television has maintained a stable prime-time share over the last four years of between 7% and 9% (the same as Global and more than double the largest specialty TV channels); CBC Television had 15 of the top 20 Canadian shows in terms of audience share last season; and its websites are among the country’s most visited media sites; and it gets more than 1 million podcast downloads a month.
In an age of a proliferation of new TV channels, video-on-demand and pay-per-view as well as new distribution systems, such as TV and radio viewing on laptops, Blackberries, cell phones and iPods along with the emergence of satellite radio, YouTube and the iPhone, the head of the CBC sees the public broadcaster’s future not as a provider of TV and radio, but as “a content provider that is platform agnostic.”
For example, he noted, that CBC programming, such as Ideas and Quirks and Quarks, is reaching a younger 18- to 34-year-old demo via podcasts than the audience that tunes in via radio.
He also outlined to the committee why a public broadcaster was necessary – because it cuts to the core of public policy priorities and does things that private broadcasters either cannot or will not do. These include putting Canadian TV programming in prime time, providing commercial-free, entertaining children’s programming, servicing the North and other remote areas, producing original current affairs programming, providing a Canadian perspective on international events and airing high-culture shows.
However, he told the committee it was increasingly becoming difficult for financial reasons for the CBC to produce home-grown TV drama.
A priority for the public TV broadcaster is first and foremost Canada drama and also new light entertainment, he told cartt.ca. He defined light entertainment as being like the two-hour special Test the Nation show that aired on Sunday and the French talk show Tout le monde en parle.
$60 million in supplemental funding
Rabinovitch told the committee all of the $60 million per year the public broadcaster was just granted in supplemental public funding over the next two years will go to programming. About 60% of the money will go to television and 40% to radio, and $10 million will be spent on cross-linguistic shows, he added. Those cross-linguistic shows would be conceived from the outset to be shot and produced in both English and French and would include multiple platform components for radio, television, the Internet and other new media.
The CBC has received $60 million on a one-time yearly basis in supplemental funding since 2001 in additional to its annual public funding, which currently amounts to about $1 billion.
“This two-year commitment from Canadians provides a measure of stability, which allows us to plan for the future, enhancing the Canadian programs we can offer across all of our services and platforms,” the CBC said in a statement issued Thursday.
