OTTAWA — The Forum for Research and Policy in Communications (FRPC) released Tuesday a comprehensive study looking at the history of public funding granted to the CBC. According to its research, parliamentary funding for CBC’s operations has decreased by 36% since 1985.
The FRPC decided in mid-2019 to undertake the research project in preparation for the public broadcaster’s licence renewal proceeding this year. The 248-page study, titled An analysis of CBC’s financial history from 1937 to 2019: We tried to follow the money. Frodo had it easier, is based on financial and other data collected from 80 of the 83 Annual Reports published by CBC since 1937.
Among its findings:
- CBC’s commercial income has decreased by 40% since 2014 (which coincides with it losing the National Hockey League rights to Rogers Media)
- total public and commercial funding of CBC’s operations has decreased by 28% since 1985
- when considered in terms of daily life in Canada, the funding received from Parliament by CBC for its operations has decreased 54%, from 14 cents per person per day in 1985, to 6 cents per person per day in 2019
- funding for CBC’s operations has not kept pace with economic growth: Since 2009 Canada’s Gross Domestic Product has increased by 21% while public funding for CBC’s operations decreased by 11%, and
- CBC first operated at a loss in 1945/46 and has operated at a loss in 35 of the 79 years for which data were available, in more than half the years since 2000, and in each of the seven years since 2013.
The report draws several conclusions from its analysis of the data, including the following:
- the degree to which CBC remains a public service broadcaster is unclear, as its reliance on commercial revenue means by its own word that it is “committed to supporting” advertisers
- it is difficult to determine whether the 36% decrease in public funding for CBC’s operations is affecting CBC’s programming, as its annual reports do not provide the data needed to measure CBC’s expenditures per original hour of produced or purchased programming, or the types of complaints it receives regarding programming quality
- Parliament’s sovereignty over CBC’s funding has been weakening, not merely because CBC’s annual reports now acknowledge “government appropriations” rather than “Parliamentary appropriations”, but also because the process through which CBC’s budget is determined and/or later changed is not transparent
- non-transparent reporting means that CBC’s legislated independence from government is difficult to evaluate; even if CBC’s reporting were transparent, the current Broadcasting Act does not clearly establish where responsibility for identifying and correcting breaches of such legislative requirements lies, and
- CBC’s annual reports provide too little objective information describing how it fulfills its legislative mandate from Parliament to permit its role in the broadcasting system to be understood, and provide so little consistent historical financial information that Parliament’s financial support of Canada’s national broadcasting service cannot easily be assessed.
More information about the study can be found here.
