TIMMINS-JAMES BAY MP Charlie Angus didn’t even flinch when I said he seemed to be the self-appointed rabble-rouser on the Standing Committee for Canadian Heritage.
Reading through the transcripts of some of the meetings reveals Mr. Angus as one of the committee members who consistently pushes his fellow members – or whomever appears in front of the committee. Seems he likes that role.
Then last week, just before Christmas, his office released a missive where Angus critiqued the three "worst performing ministers" in the Conservative cabinet: Environment Minister Rona Ambrose, Defense Minister Gordon O’Connor and Heritage and Status of Women Minister Bev Oda.
Calling the cabinet Harper High, the grades he assigned were meant as mid-term report cards (which makes one think an election is coming soon, if this is already the mid-term report). "When you look at the mistakes, missteps and misguided policies it all adds up to one grade for these three: an F,” said Angus in the release.
“Bev Oda has skipped class repeatedly. She’s been completely absent as a champion of key cultural issues. She relies on other ministers to do her work, allowing (Finance Minister) Jim Flaherty and Jim Baird (Treasury Board president) to set cultural policies by cutting and slashing programs for museums, women and Aboriginal Languages. She gets an A from the lobbyists but an F from every cultural sector under her watch," it continues.
Angus’ list of other failures by the Canadian Heritage Minister included: no mandated review of the CBC and forgetting to table copyright legislation, each of which is covered in his chat with Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien below.
Angus (pictured) pushed the Heritage Committee to its announced review of the CBC, which will likely begin in February – and kept an ear on the CRTC TV Policy Review Hearings, where he thinks a broadcast fee for carriage is an unwanted TV tax. What follows is an edited transcript.
Greg O’Brien: Let’s talk about the Heritage Committee. I don’t know if you’ll agree with my assessment on this but it seems to me you’re the committee’s chief agitator? Would that be an apt description or no?
Charlie Angus: Well, agitating to get something done. Personally, I don’t care what party politics are, I can’t stand not having a goal and working towards something. So, it’s been frustrating in the first session because we’re very directionless.
GOB: Frustrating in what way? And I’m talking specifically about broadcasting, TV and radio, that type of thing. Is it specifically directed toward the CBC or television or toward the minister in general?
CA: I’m frustrated in the sense that I think there are a lot of issues that the Heritage Committee needs to look at. There are a lot of issues coming forward right now in broadcast and television I’ve been feeling since this session began that there is a role for the committee to look at them, to bring them forward, to hear the different points of view, to get a more coherent sense of what’s happening.
You know, we’ll get part of that now that we’ve got a CBC review that we’re going to undertake. I think CBC, at the end of the day is all part of the big picture. Where are we going with media in the 21st century? How does Canadian content fit in to, not just the multi-channel universe, but the multiplatform universe?
GOB: What would you like to see done with the CBC, considering the review the committee has planned?
CA: I definitely think a review is needed. The CBC has done some things very well but where are we challenged today? English television.
It costs a lot of money to put on good domestic content and we have a situation where we are beside the biggest cultural industry in the world, and we don’t even have a full market because out of the 30-some million Canadians, nine million (in Quebec) are watching a completely separate market. So about a third of our market is watching their own programs, which is great for the Quebec market but it puts further challenges on English television.
GOB: And you’ve been on record asking for more or stable funding for the CBC.
CA: Since the cuts in the mid-’90s, the CBC just can’t fulfill the job it has to do. We wanted to set a standard for domestic drama, but how is it going to do that when we also want it to be a voice in the regions, where it does play a very vital role.
We’ve talked about the need to return to CBC television’s roots – the supper hour shows have basically disappeared – and to compete in the multi-channel universe as well and get ready for high def.
It simply doesn’t have the money to do that, so I believe we have to increase the funding. Next to the United States we provide about the lowest level of support of any of the western nations for (public) broadcasting.
GOB: From bottom up I think goes to U.S., New Zealand and then Canada, per capita.
CA: So it’s an issue, because when CBC-TV does well it’s like CBC radio, where everybody listens to it.
GOB: And then you’ve seen the loss of local programming in your own riding firsthand. When I was growing up there, we had a separate hour newscast based out of Timmins. It was done around the corner from my house, actually, because I lived in the shadow of the old CFCL towers, but as you know that’s all gone now. There’s a reporter there still for CTV but I’m not sure there’s a CBC reporter based there anymore.
CA: Radio-Canada has one there but they don’t even have an English CBC radio reporter in the region. So, it’s a challenge, especially in terms of regional programming, I’ll tell you. A couple weeks ago one of the transmitters went down and so they were feeding my part of the region the morning show out of Toronto. I don’t know what else you can do quicker to get an audience to turn off but waking up in the snow and hearing about the Don Valley parking lot – people won’t listen.
At the end of the day, viewers at some level want to see themselves reflected – whether it’s domestic drama or whether it’s regional news programming.
GOB: Did you follow the CRTC TV Policy Review hearings?
CA: Yes.
GOB: What do you think of the broadcasters, CBC included, who have been asking for a fee for carriage from the cable companies? It would bring more money in for the system but…
CA: Put simply: It’s a TV tax. And I question the need for a TV tax right now.
I can see where CBC is hurting, but I think the private broadcasters are doing fairly well. It’s interesting that the fee for carriage proposal comes at the same time when people are floating trial balloons about whether or not we really need to be worried about the domestic content standards and quotas.
Our argument has always been that the regulatory framework in Canada sets up a situation where if you have a license you get a fair amount of protection from competition, other than the few others who manage to hold a license. So there is some obligation for a quid pro quo.
And that quid pro quo is a commitment to put on some good Canadian programming.
GOB: Are you hopeful that the Commission will change its 1999 TV policies so that there’s more mandated drama – either expenditures or hours broadcast?
CA: We’ve been pushing for it for some time. (But) I’m not sure in this climate that that’s going to happen.
You know, (Industry Minister) Maxime Bernier has definitely sent a message what he wants to see from the CRTC on the telecom front and I think it would be the same with broadcasting – as little interference as possible from the Commission.
But that 1999 decision was a bad decision and I think it put us back. There’s a false argument out there that says "you have to mandate it because we create crappy shows." I will not watch crappy television, whether it’s American of Canadian, but the fact is, just as in radio, we have to mandate a certain percentage (of Cancon) because we’re, we’re going up against competition that’s already made the product.
GOB: And what is crappy television? I mean your, your idea of it might be somebody else’s idea of great TV. There’s a reason why World’s Scariest Police Chases has a large audience. People like it.
CA: Look at the incredible success of the Trailer Park Boys – which I personally don’t think is crappy television – but I know many people would.
GOB: There was a trailer park beside the Hollinger Golf Course in Timmins that I think Ricky and Julian grew up in…
CA: Oh indeed. But if you look at (TPB), it’s fairly cheap television and I’m sure nobody thought it would be the runaway success it has been, but again at the end of the day, people like to laugh at themselves more than anybody else – and everybody knows a Ricky and Julian.
GOB: Exactly. As always, success is due to an interesting story made into good TV regardless of where it comes from. If you look at Internet usage, I would venture to guess that most times people either aren’t aware or don’t care about what particular country they’re getting their entertainment from on the web.
CA: That’s something I feel very strongly about. There’s a cultural argument, which of course I always make, but it also an industry argument. We should have a strong television industry and the television industry should be able to export its shows.
I’ve watched Hamish Macbeth. They all have Scottish accents, but that could’ve been a little village in northern Ontario.
GOB: What was that?
CA: It’s a Scottish series. And it was like watching northern Ontario with Scottish accents and it was a great show to watch.
I really feel the argument needs to be made – definitely with this new Conservative government – that we’re not saying we want to force our way in, that we want mandated percentages because nobody will watch us otherwise. That’s not really what we want.
What we’re saying is this is a vital industry. And if the television industry is healthier, then the film industry is going to be healthy. I make the argument in committee all the time nobody’s going to watch a Canadian film because it’s a Canadian film. They’re only going to watch it if they know who’s in it. How are they going to know who’s in it if they’re not seeing them on television?
Look at John Candy and Eugene Levy and all the people who came out of Second City. Second City was fairly cheap television to make, but it created a whole star system that actually became international.
GOB: That star system is something people have long said needs to be created here. But that gets into the question of proper promotion and all the rest of it, because there were not a lot of pre-existing stars in some of the recent U.S. hit shows like House or Prison Break, but thanks to the U.S. promotional machine, those people have become stars. Do you think we can do that in Canada?
CA: Television creates the stars, who then go on to the movies, and again a great example is the Trailer Park Boys. We were at the Junos in Halifax and my daughter saw Ricky and Julian and Bubbles, and I mean everybody was talking about them. And these boys are local Halifax boys but wherever they go people come up to them.
All night people were coming up to them – they were bigger stars than a lot of the bands. So when they make a movie, it’s going to open in every small town across the country because people know them. And where the argument is. Television is the ground that creates everything else in terms of you know film and definitely promotion and music.
GOB: Getting back to the CBC a little bit, when is that that review going to begin?
CA: Probably in February. That would be the goal. We haven’t laid out a timeline yet, but Gary Schellenberger, the chair… will want to make sure that it’s as full as it needs to be.
We’ll be looking for witnesses. I do believe we need to travel – we need to get out to the region and hear people’s perspectives on CBC and I think it should be a good honest and blunt discussion.
What do we need from a the nation’s broadcaster in the 21st century? What do we want it to do? Is the funding adequate and should it be doing something different? I think it’s time to have the discussion and lay out the issues because the CBC needs to know as well.
GOB: (English TV head) Richard Stursberg and (CBC CEO) Robert Rabinovitch have both said they would like new rules that would mandate a review of the CBC every 10 years. So perhaps they’re reaching a little bit as well for, for what we would all like from the CBC.
CA: Yes I think so.
GOB: And I gather that the review will be look at everything, technology, editorial, drama?
CA: Definitely. What we’re going to do in the digital age, different platforms? How do we see the domestic content? I know one of the big arguments from the Conservatives will definitely be the CBC’s involvement in sports, and advertising. I mean that’s fair – get all that on the table.
GOB: Do you see an ad-free CBC?
CA: I haven’t been in favor of it because I don’t see how they’re going to make up the funding, and I don’t see any government willing to make up for that drop in funding. I’ve always been a big supporter of having Hockey Night In Canada on there, but I’m sure the fees from running that are getting higher and higher.
That challenge, you know, is that CTV is a broadcast heavyweight – it’s a super heavyweight… so when they start bidding for Olympics or any other major programming that used to be CBC’s domain, the cost of playing the game reaches a point where it’s not all that beneficial to pay out, from CBC’s point of view.
By the time a bidding war was over, even if the CBC had won they’d probably have lost.
GOB: When you’re looking at the CBC, how much weight will you be giving to Minister Oda’s report from the CRTC on broadcast technology?
CA: I definitely will be studying that. We could be at another major crossroads in broadcasting coming up… There have been occasions, in terms of even the copyright bills, when you’re talking about cutting-edge technology and making decisions about it – almost the last people who should be making those decisions are politicians, because we tend to be the furthest away from the cutting edge.
GOB: What is the status of any copyright legislation?
CA: I don’t know. We were promised it was going to be ordered, well there were two orders within this group, one was the CBC mandate review and that had been a nonstarter, and the other was the copyright bill and we’re still waiting.
