OTTAWA – Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore on Tuesday delivered a hearty endorsement of the industry his ministry oversees as well as the CBC during his appearance at the International Institute of Communications Canadian conference.
During his breakfast speech, Moore dipped into history to show how far the Canadian cultural sector has come, from a pipsqueak in the 1950s, scrambling for an identity, to a robust $46 billion annual industry now boasting over 630,000 employees, many of whom “do it for the love of the craft.” Those figures are “three times the size of the Canadian insurance industry and twice the size of the forest industry,” he said.
The business of culture, whether television, music, video games, live theatre, museums or anything in between, the Canadian content sector is “a central pillar of maintaining Canada’s identity,” said the minister. “We need to work together and built together to protect Canadian arts, culture and community.”
Later in a scrum with reporters, Moore was asked about the CBC, which has been under attack of late from certain private broadcasters and also from within the Conservative caucus.
“(The CBC) has always has been and always will be a source of pretty heated and intense debate and that’s fine. But there’s a role for a public broadcaster in Canada… certainly with regard to reaching Canadians in both of Canada’s official languages, that’s an essential role,” he said. “If there was a healthy market for Aboriginal broadcasting of Aboriginal languages in the north, there would be all kinds of competition and massive investment, but there’s not.
“There is market failure… particularly in television broadcasting in both of Canada’s official languages and in the eight aboriginal languages that the CBC broadcasts in… CBC has a role because there is indeed market failure in that regard and that’s the role the CBC plays that the private sector does not because if they could, they’d be there.”
But, when asked whether or not the CBC should be competing to purchase expensive programming like professional hockey, Moore defended the Corp. “You ask five people that question, you’ll get five different answers on whether or not CBC should be in sports… Making money on sports allows them to subsidize things like aboriginal broadcasting in the north,” he explained.
“People often have opinions of the public broadcaster within silos of the things that it does. But, you have to look at it from 10,000 feet and look at everything that it does within the context of its mandate in the Broadcasting Act… The money that sports brings in helps pay for itself and then they use the other funds… to subsidize the things that are commercially not successful, like the broadcasting of Canadian news in French to certain parts of the country where there is no other alternative.
“That’s good for Canada.”
– Greg O’Brien
