TORONTO – A cut in funding to the CBC could have a significant impact on its five-year plan and damage the economic spinoffs that the national broadcaster provides, according to the Canadian Media Guild (CMG).
The CMG, which represents about 6,000 media workers including 4,500 at the CBC, was responding to comments made by Heritage Minister James Moore on the CBC radio show Q earlier this month. Minister Moore said that CBC must be “part of the strategic review and find 5%” of its funding to offer up as a cut in 2012. He also said that the government is asking the same thing of all departments and agencies in effort to “look at the macro framework of the Canadian economy.”
While saying that seems fair, the Guild said in a post on its website that it hopes that any review of the CBC and other public services is, in fact, “truly strategic”.
“You can’t starve a public service into a strategic asset”, it reads. “Public broadcasting requires public investment.”
It noted that Canada is still ranked near the bottom of the list of industrialized countries in support for national public broadcasting, ahead of only the U.S. and New Zealand. In 2010, it said that the CBC’s parliamentary appropriation was the equivalent of $34 per Canadian, much lower than the $43 in Australia, $78 in France and $111 in the UK.
“And what about the strategic imperative of serving the public interest?”, the post continues. “We expect our public broadcaster to offer programming in minority languages, tell Canadian stories that reflect our country’s regions to each other, tell Canadian stories when others won’t, and run a leading broadcast and on-line news service to ensure a diversity of quality news.
“We won’t all agree on a daily basis about CBC’s programming decisions and news coverage, but the debate itself demonstrates that the services themselves are essential to nourishing our country’s distinct cultures and democratic practices.”
