LET'S START WITH TWO MAIN themes: first, a description of how new technologies may continue to impact the media; and, second, a discussion of whether the CBC is the best mechanism to deliver a public subsidy to support public service broadcasting.
It's not my intention to question the rationale for public service broadcasting, but I believe that any discussion of the CBC should deal with more than short- or medium-term issues. If we ignore the longer-term structural questions, we run the risk of prescribing short-term solutions that might prove to be unsustainable. So let's jump forward 10 years to get some idea of how the media environment might look in 2025.
- In 2025, it is likely that there will be few, if any, printed daily newspapers in Canada, and it is also likely that their transition to online digital formats will not match their current scope in print.
- In 2025, there might be no local-broadcast television stations in Canada. It should be obvious that both of those potential developments pose serious issues for the future of local journalism.
- In 2025, we will still watch a lot of television, but the structure of the TV industry will come to look less and less like broadcasting and more and more like e-commerce for programs.
- In 2025, it will be even more important to be able to give Canadians the tools to produce and to discover Canadian content.
- In 2025, radio will still likely fit within our concept of broadcasting.
- And, in 2025, the Internet — and multiple devices for receiving it — will have become even more ubiquitous than today.
That future environment should be part of the context for your inquiry into the CBC, and that leads us to an important question: What is the CBC? A Crown corporation? Yes. A broadcaster? Yes. But it is also something else. The CBC is an intervention created by Parliament because it was felt that the resources available in the private market could not fully supply one or more desired outcomes.
“The CBC is an intervention created by Parliament because it was felt that the resources available in the private market could not fully supply one or more desired outcomes.”
But once Parliament's decision to intervene has been made, the debate should not stop there. In fact, a two-stage process is required: first, deciding to intervene; and second, crafting the form of the intervention. However, the CBC appears to have avoided an analysis of how an alternative structure might use the same funds to achieve better results in pursuit of the same goals.
You have received from the CBC something called the 2014 Media Environment, dated November 19, 2014. On page 19 of that document, the CBC states: "Like other countries, the Government utilizes two key tools to fulfill its objectives: public broadcasting (CBC/Radio-Canada) and regulation (CRTC)."
But there are not just two main tools of public policy. There are three and the third tool is pump-priming, mechanisms like the Canada Media Fund and other supports for program production. With that in mind, we should consider whether public funding of a facilities-based corporation, for television in particular, will still be the most effective way to use those public funds.
That same CBC document makes reference to a study from Deloitte about the CBC's value to the Canadian economy and it provides an estimate based on the CBC's current structure. But the CBC Deloitte study then went on to compare the current CBC/Radio-Canada with an alternative that would effectively remove the CBC's parliamentary appropriation from broadcasting.
Implicit in this appears to be a CBC assumption that, if Parliament decided to spend that $1 billion in support of public service broadcasting, then the only delivery mechanism worth considering was the facilities-based CBC.
Yet, surely that does the taxpayers of Canada a disservice. Would it not have been possible to test more realistic alternatives to the status quo? For example, here is one possible alternative:
- Leave CBC/Radio-Canada's English and French radio services unchanged.
- Leave CBC/Radio-Canada's specialty TV services unchanged.
- Reallocate most of the parliamentary appropriation that was allocated to CBC/Radio-Canada's conventional television to a super-fund that would help to fund the production of Canadian programming, particularly Canadian drama and comedy.
That is one of many ideas whose economic impact might have been assessed and that would have been far more useful than the CBC decision to only examine an alternative in which the $1 billion in public subsidy was removed altogether.
If we don't examine those alternatives, then we simply come back to arguments about what the CBC should be doing and how much money we should give it. I think we all know that, no matter what the level of funding, the CBC will always say that more funding is a good idea. Let me read part of a statement from a CBC chairman to a parliamentary committee:
Unless further funds come in, it will be impossible to keep the present level of service. It will be impossible to produce as much broadcasting by Canadian artists as is being done at present. And this is apart from the question of needed improvements.
Those words were spoken on Monday, May 19, 1947.
In 1974, CBC/Radio-Canada appeared before the CRTC to seek renewal of its radio and television licences. Then President of CBC/Radio-Canada, Laurent Picard, had this message for the CRTC:
— the times are changing, and so must the network — but the CBC is efficient, up to date, and needs only more money to be great.
This is what this committee was told on February 17 this year, probably in this room, by the current president of the CBC:
To achieve this transformation, significant investments will be needed and, given that our parliamentary appropriations continue to decline… we are forced to eliminate some of our services and to give up our talented artisans…
The real debate going forward is not whether there should be funding for public service broadcasting; there should be. The real debate is whether that funding should be concentrated in a facilities-based public corporation or used in a variety of mechanisms that might be more effective in our future media environment.
To sum it up in one question: Is there an alternative way to use the same funds to achieve better results in pursuit of the same goals?
This analysis was presented by Kenneth J. Goldstein to the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications on March 10, 2015.
Goldstein is president of Communic@tions Management Inc., a Canadian company that provides consulting advice in media economics, media trends, and the impact of new technologies on the media. The company has completed projects for media clients in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Australia and New Zealand.
The full presentation, with appendices, can be found here.
