I’VE GOT A BIT OF A SOFT spot for the CBC because when you grew up where I did, the CBC was it.
Apologies to CTV’s Northern Ontario precursor, MCTV, but when I think of old shows from my youth, it’s most often the CBC that springs to mind. Like sooo many of my fellow Canadians, when I think of the Ceeb, I invariably recall many frigid Saturday evenings inside watching Hockey Night in Canada: Me and my father sitting down with a big bowl of warm, greasy, salted popcorn. I usually fell asleep right after Peter Puck during the intermission.
As for news, it was the only TV choice in our home. Hands down.
Decade upon decade of goodwill is the property of CBC. It’s history boasts an awesome legacy, but is it being built upon or squandered?
The struggles with English TV and the consumer media’s obsession with any mistake – real or perceived – has many wondering what the future CBC will look like? If that goodwill is badly damaged, what can be done about it? Can it be fixed? Does it need to be? Is our public broadcaster ready for the new media world?
When I was a kid in the 1970s, our media choices in Timmins were few. A handful radio stations (the majority in French), a few over-the-air TV stations and the local newspaper. My now-late father subscribed to The Toronto Star, but it could only arrive a day late. The Saturday Star came on Monday. We didn’t get cable until the mid-1980s in our home.
To write it’s a different media world now is a hilariously limited sentence. Words can barely convey how changed it truly is. Kids growing up in Timmins now can get the Toronto Star – and any other newspaper from around the globe in seconds. Any radio station? Seconds. Video from anywhere in whatever language? Seconds.
The CBC was built to bring Canada together – a huge network of towers linking Canadians to one another through video. But in 2006, with so many other ways to link to each other – and to anyone else virtually anywhere else, what’s the future for the CBC?
Last week, Cartt.ca editor and publisher asked CBC president and CEO Robert Rabinovitch (pictured) many of these questions. What follows is an edited transcript of the first half of their conversation. Part II will come next Tuesday.
Greg O’Brien: You met with the Heritage Committee a couple of weeks ago – how did that go?
Robert Rabinovitch: Actually it went very well. I think the hardest criticism we got was from CBC – the CBC ‘net that said we were grilled. It wasn’t a grilling. It was a very friendly meeting and a couple of the MPs came up to us individually afterwards and said they found it extremely useful because it was a very open session… The Liberals were most concerned about the CBC mandate review and what role the committee could play in defining that mandate review.
GOB: What else did they want to know?
RR: The mandate review dominated the questioning coming from the Liberal side. The NDP was pretty laid back. There was a one strong intervention on Prairie Giant from one of the Conservatives who wasn’t even a member of the Committee, but came in cause he wanted to make the point of talking about it on behalf of the family – I presume you know the issue.
GOB: Yes, the former Saskatchewan premier’s family is upset the way he (Jimmy Gardiner) was portrayed in the movie (which is a somewhat fictionalized biopic about the late western politician, Tommy Douglas, considered to be the founder of universal health care in Canada. The movie’s rebroadcast was pulled, as were DVDs since the Gardiner family and many others have complained. Loudly.). 
RR: Right. And the Writer’s Guild on the other hand has been quite concerned that we not be a censor. And although we should not be a censor, we’ve got to control what we put on our airwaves. So the NDP’s position was really one of reminding the committee that there was another side to the story, and that was this was legitimate docu-drama as presented by a writer.
They didn’t get into programming to any great extent… but they were really (asking) what want to do in the future and where will we be going, what their role would be in asking us questions and things like that.
GOB: Did you get any sense of when your mandate review might happen? There was quite a bit of talk of it through the summer, and then it went away with (Heritage Minister) Bev Oda’s announcement in Banff that she wanted to look at broadcast technology first.
RR: The answer’s no. I have no idea whatsoever when it will happen. We took the position… that we strongly support the idea of a mandate review. It makes sense, and we got into some discussion at the committee about how often and when and where it should be done, and I made it quite clear that I thought it should be on a regular basis.
It’s almost like a contract with Canadians and we should formalize it. If you look at the history, there were mandate reviews at the CBC almost every five to eight years in one form or another… and we thought it made a lot of sense to do this on a regular basis. That was Bev Oda’s position when I talked to her about it back in April or May.
So, yes, we think a mandate review is called for… Because what happened (during its last license renewal) in 1999, (the CRTC) made demands upon us, and as one very senior journalist said, "yes, but how’s that going to be paid for?" the answer at the time was "well that’s not our concern." But that’s an irresponsible answer. So if you do a mandate review with the government, the government is implicitly agreeing to either finance it or not finance it.
GOB: And funding has been one of the longstanding issues with the CBC. What did you tell the committee or what does your TV Policy Review submission say about the funding requirements for the CBC?
RR: Well, we don’t go into it in our TV policy paper to any great extent other than the regular request we make for stable, multi-year funding.
The fact of the matter is that we have not had an increase in our funds in 32 years. The last increase was in 1974… I get the $60 million a year, but every year I have to go back and ask for it and I would love to have that made permanent within our budget. The fact of the matter is, as a public broadcasting entity, we are very significantly under-funded as compared to other public broadcasters in the Western world.
I think we rank 22nd out of 24 in terms of our funding, the only two that do worse than us is PBS and New Zealand.
GOB: The $60 million extra a year (over and above the $946 million received the last fiscal year, a year-end of March 31, 2006) is earmarked for?
RR: We get $60 million a year in additional funding and have for the last six years. You know, there’s no guarantee we’ll keep getting it, but basically, we put all of that money into programming.
In our (TV Policy Review submission) we said, like everybody else, "listen, the advertising model is under attack," but we don’t want to be dominated by advertising because it makes us less of a public broadcaster, so we believe very strongly that there should be a fee for carriage. I gave a speech a year ago May to the North American Broadcasting Association, and I said "look, the model’s going to have to change."
There is, I think, a consensus amongst broadcasters – even the cable operators, Videotron and Cogeco, said yes, a fee for carriage makes sense in a world where… 90% of Canadians get their programming via cable or another BDU.
A fee for carriage makes sense. The question is what rate and how and whom? Our argument for the Commission has been that we believe there should be a fee for carriage of our programming and that the amount should be determined at the licensee’s hearing.
That differentiates us from Global. They want a fixed 50 cents right now. We’re saying no, the fee for carriage should not be a gift; it should be for promises of performance and that should be determined as part of the license. So in our case, we would say we want the money for drama. We want to enhance our drama output, and to do that, we need, whatever the amount is.
GOB: Now when you talk about performance, how would you gauge that? When you’re talking about the fee and performance would tie it to ratings or how would it work?
RR: From our point of view, ratings are one element of managing our schedule. It’s not the only thing so we don’t believe it should be ratings driven. I think it should be driven by, for example, the number of hours of drama that one puts on. It’s similar to what the CRTC did with the increase from 12 to 14 minutes (of ad time per hour) if you increase the number of (Cancon) hours. They didn’t get into the game of saying there’s got to be this programming or that programming.
They said, "there has to be more programming, and if you do more Canadian programming, and you promise to do more Canadian programming, then we should fund that." And so in our case, we’ve been trying to increase the number of hours of English drama and we’ve gone from 125 to 150 hours.
Also, when it’s put on the air is very important. It should not just be filler. It should be on… when people are actually watching. So that’s what we mean when we say performance.
GOB: What are you going to say to the people who will see your request for a subscription fees for carriage, and also the request to the government for more government funding, where you’re going at Canadians in two different ways?
RR: First, I would say that I’ve had no success in going at Canadians through the government. That’s why I say it’s been 32 years since we’ve had any increase of any significance. Secondly, I would remind people that… the total amount of money we get from the government that goes to English television is $265 million a year.
Thirdly, I would remind people… over 50% of our funds come from advertising, so we are exactly the same as everybody else. We are as vulnerable as anybody else. And fourthly, I would remind Canadians that all broadcasters get money from the government in different forms.
We get it as a grant while the private broadcasters get it as simultaneous substitution, Section 19.1 of the Income Tax Act, tax credits… This is an industry where Canadian programming does not and can not survive without government help.
GOB: Let’s talk a little bit more about ratings and simultaneous substitution, specifically The One, which you simulcast. Personally, I’ve never seen so much ink spilled over the cancellation of one American program in my life and that the reaction to it here was overblown, but what is your take on all of that?
RR: Everybody takes hits at the CBC, so we’re used to that. We have done simultaneous substitution in the past but there were four programs that ABC put on the air (in the summer), and three of them that we didn’t have that other networks in Canada had, failed.
It’s no question (The One) failed, but we have to broaden the bases of our programming and we have to do more light entertainment like that.
We thought there were distinctive features about The One that made it a program that should be on the public broadcaster, it’s very similar to a program that’s run on TVA called Star Academie.
The Spanish developed the program. We thought it had redeeming graces that made sense for us because it showed the development of talent. Did we make a mistake with respect to bumping The National? In retrospect, the answer’s obviously yes, but let’s not kid ourselves:
Number one, The National is available at the same time to 85% of Canadians on Newsworld. And we had crawlers coming across telling people they’re not going to be ripped off their National. Unlike a private network, we can put the same program on a few times. So The National’s on at 9, 10, 11, 12 and we have crawlers to send people where it is – so I think it was a lot of noise, people just taking a chance to take pot shots and one particular newspaper decided to do it more than any other.
But the reality is that’s part of living with the CBC. You live in a glass house, and what did we learn from it? You know, The National will be moved, and one of the things about putting The National on at 10 p.m. is that it will be moved for sports and has been. I remind people it used to be moved much more when we used to do Blue Jays baseball during the summertime.
So you put it all together, and it was a learning experience, and the nice thing is that, believe it or not, the ratings for The National went up those two days. So we’re thankful for the publicity.
GOB: As for the Canadian version of The One, is that officially gone?
RR: It’s in development hell… We’re looking at it. We’ve got the rights to it but we have not made a decision.
GOB: The Star Academie franchise in Quebec was enormously successful for Quebecor.
RR: It still is.
GOB: Exactly.
RR: But we have to be practical and ask ourselves a couple of questions. Number one, it’s cross-promoted there to a tremendous extent with their newspapers and other publications and to what extent does one create the buzz for the other is something that has to be asked.
Number two, is the franchise for this type of program in English Canada controlled by the combination of the American Idol and Canadian Idol? We have to do some rethinking.
We are going to do programming of that nature, but we have to think about what should we be doing with respect to this type of program.
GOB: We’ve talked a lot about English TV so let’s maybe switch, before we go on to do more about English TV, and talk a little bit about CBC Radio and the French CBC as well, cause both of those, from my outsider’s perspective, seem to be clipping along rather well.
RR: If you looked at it in terms of the four main services… I would say three out of the four have never been as successful as they are right now.
English radio’s numbers are just fabulous and French radio numbers are even better. We are, I think, first or second in morning programming in nine out of 12 major markets in Canada in English radio. It’s a quality, distinctive service that Canadians are signing up for.
Just to throw in a plug, we experiment a lot with new technology, like podcasts, with a lot of what I’ll call our more intellectual, more challenging programs. Like Ideas, Quirks and Quarks, and As it Happens: These are the programs that are being downloaded, and we have over 250,000 downloads a week now. Who’s downloading it? It’s 18 to 35 year olds. So, because of iPods and such, we’re discovering a whole new audience that can’t listen to Quirks and Quarks at noon on a Saturday, but are interested in it – or those who don’t want to listen to Ideas during the week at nine at night.
We’re discovering a whole new audience as a result of the new technologies, and that’s where radio is really doing extremely well, both French and English by the way.
Part two, to come next week, will cover high definition television, the future of CBC Sports, mobile and on demand strategies, among other topics. Only on Cartt.ca
