This Will Be the CBC: The Liberal Vision, (Stephane Dion) Dear all, On November 15, 2014, I was invited to the annual convention of the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec to present Justin Trudeau’s and the Liberal Party’s vision regarding the CBC. I noted that our national public broadcaster has always played an essential role for our country and that it must continue to do so in the future. Below, you will find the text of the address. As always, I will be very pleased to read any comments you might have. Enjoy your read! Stéphane Dion * * * This Will Be the CBC: The Liberal Vision Notes for an address delivered at a workshop entitled: “The Future of the CBC: The Federal Parties’ Vision”, at the annual convention of the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec. Manoir Saint-Sauveur, Saint-Sauveur, Quebec November 15, 2014 The Honourable Stéphane Dion, P.C., M.P. Member of Parliament for Saint-Laurent – Cartierville Liberal Critic for Canadian Heritage, Official Languages and Intergovernmental Relations House of Commons, Ottawa Email : [email protected] * * * Many thanks to the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec for inviting me to talk about the CBC’s future. It is with great pleasure and a keen interest that I join you today to discuss this issue, as Liberal Critic for Canadian Heritage and on behalf of my Leader, Justin Trudeau. That being said, I am well aware that many of the challenges facing the CBC, which I will discuss today, also apply to private broadcasters and the written media. To begin, let me share two quotes with you. The first one (translated from French) comes from Fernand Séguin. It goes as follows: “Radio-Canada is the most remarkable thing to happen in French Canada since Jacques Cartier”.1 That’s well before Maurice Richard and even before Samuel de Champlain! The second quote goes as follows: “We have said that we will maintain or increase support for the CBC. That is our platform and we have said that before and we will commit to that.” Who said that? James Moore, the Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages of the time. Where and when? In Vancouver, on CBC News, on May 3rd, 2011, the day after the Conservative Party got re-elected. Now let us examine these quotes. The first one, Fernand Séguin’s, could be a good start of an answer to the clear question that you asked me: What is Justin Trudeau’s and the Liberal Party of Canada’s vision for the CBC, going forward ? This vision is based on the well-entrenched conviction, among federal Liberals, that few countries need the presence of a public broadcaster more than Canada. Admittedly, our country is not the only one to consider that the presence of a public broadcaster is necessary to – as we have been saying here for 75 years – “inform, enlighten and entertain”. But in Canada, the public broadcaster produces more national content than all the private broadcasters combined. It offers our local talents an irreplaceable springboard. On the Canadian airwaves, the CBC’s voice and images provide most of our international information. In this continent-sized country of ours, the CBC is the only broadcaster with the mandated obligation to offer programming that reflects the country’s diversity and two official languages. In Quebec and elsewhere in Canada, our public broadcaster serves the French cause admirably. In English Canada, it projects a voice, a vision and a culture that are different from those of our very present neighbours to the south. And throughout the country, it offers an invaluable support to Aboriginal languages and cultures. Two things are obvious for my Liberal colleagues and myself: the first one is that now as always, Canada needs an alert, objective, creative and free public broadcaster; the second one is that to fulfill that need, adequate resources and the right conditions are needed. Resources and conditions that the CBC, as it stands, does not have. This brings me to the second quote. After Conservative Minister James Moore swore up and down that his government would maintain or increase support for the CBC, the Conservative government’s Budget 2012 took a hatchet to Canada’s national broadcaster, slashing $115 million from the Corporation’s budget. Another broken promise! In fact, since the Conservatives came to power in 2006, the CBC has lost $227 million in parliamentary appropriations (in 2014 dollars), which is equivalent to a cut of 18% – nearly one-fifth – of its budget. In an attempt to justify these drastic cutbacks, the Conservatives invoke those that were made by the Liberals in the past. That argument fails on two counts. First count: the Harper government cut the CBC’s resources with no proper evaluation of the impact of previous governments cutbacks. When you have lost all your fat through a slimming diet, subjecting you to another, more severe diet will reduce you to skin and bones and even affect your vital organs. With the CBC’s costume shop being shut down, we can rightly say that Stephen Harper has stripped the CBC naked! Second count: the fiscal and financial context of the conservative cutbacks is fundamentally different from the one that forced the Liberal cuts to the CBC’s budget: the Liberal government had to reduce public spending to fix the huge structural deficit left by the previous Conservative government. But even then, we never forgot the importance of the role of federal agencies – including the CBC – and never stopped believing in the merits of their mission. This is why we carefully strengthened our support for the CBC and other vital federal institutions as soon as the fiscal balance was restored. What a difference from today’s situation, with the Conservative government imposing repeated drastic cutbacks on the CBC motivated not so much by financial necessity as by the ideologically motivated desire of a large part of the Conservative caucus to dismantle this public institution. Faced with the constant drain on parliamentary appropriations, the CBC has no choice but to increase its dependence on advertising revenues. But it is not alone in coveting this manna: with some 742 competing channels, the advertising market is more fractioned than ever; and the buyers and designers of advertising are increasingly migrating to the Internet and digital services. Within the last decade, the income from digital media has caught up with the advertising revenues of traditional television, and it is overtaking them. The vertical integration of enterprises, which is highly developed in Canada, allows private conglomerates to engage in mergers and acquire companies that are directly involved in the digital economy. But such acquisition schemes do not fall within the mandate of our public broadcaster. The CBC must stop being haunted by budget cuts that, year after year, are forcing the broadcaster to take a short-term patchwork approach. It goes without saying that if Canadians elect a Liberal government in 2015, that government’s hallmark will be an ironclad fiscal discipline. However, that discipline will be based on proven and impartial data rather than the ideological, obsessive hostility that the Conservative government harbours against the CBC. Among the objective data we will consider, is the severe undermining, by the Harper government cutbacks, of the CBC’s ability to fulfill its mandate, especially as the Corporation studies ways to realign its business models to fit the programming and consumer requirements of the 21st century. For our vision to become reality, the vision of a CBC endowed with the means to play its vital role, the Liberal Party of Canada proposes the following seven approaches: 1. Independence. It must be made unequivocally clear that the public broadcaster must be able to fulfill its mandate independently of the government of the day. Now that the Harper government has populated the Board of Directors of CBC with Conservative donors whose knowledge of broadcasting is at times questionable, it is crucial to reaffirm the independence of the public broadcaster. You saw Justin Trudeau commit to establishing an independent and non-partisan nomination process for Senators: this same will to reform will apply to other federal agencies, including the CBC. The appointment procedure for directors and the CEO must be reviewed, to ensure their independence and competence. In addition, the CBC’s labour relations administrative autonomy, which was undermined by the Conservative government, must be restored. 2. Mandate. A Protocol with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation will clearly establish the objectives that the public broadcaster is expected to achieve with its funding. We will build on the model of the BBC to ensure an airtight distinction between the determination of objectives – a policy issue – and their implementation – which comes under the Crown Corporation’s independence. It goes without saying that this Protocol will ensure the plurality of views and the highest standards of rigour and journalistic impartiality. The Protocol will take into account the specificity of the French and English markets, which have their own specific contexts, dynamics and achievements. 3. Planning. This Protocol will give the CBC the means to do proper planning, with stable and predictable multi-year funding, probably over a five-year horizon. 4. Funding. We need to reinvest in the CBC. How much? It is too early to give an exact number because we do not yet know in what state the Conservatives will leave the public finances: they are on a self-appointed mission to engage any budget surpluses before the election. However, let me quote Justin Trudeau’s words, which he pronounced at Quebec City’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry on October 15 regarding the funding of the CBC: “Rather than cut services, we should invest and make this an even stronger institution.” Furthermore, we are well aware that the public broadcaster should not depend excessively on advertising revenues to fulfill its mission. The frantic quest for advertising revenue by the so-called “basic channels” has a perverse and debilitating effect on programming decisions. 5. Canadian content. It must be predominant. It must be varied to meet the needs of the various Canadian publics. We will not forget how important the public broadcaster is for official language communities in rural and urban areas, for which the CBC is often the only source of local information in their language. 6. Accountability. We need a credible, transparent and efficient accountability system to be able to verify whether taxpayers’ money was well spent and whether the objectives of the MOU have been met. The CRTC and the Auditor General will be involved to ensure the rigour and independence of this accountability system. 7. Legislation. The Broadcasting Act must be reexamined. It has not changed since 1991 and no longer reflects the reality of twenty-first century media: it does not even mention digital! Here is a complex and fascinating subject, worthy of another conference. So those are the seven approaches proposed by Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party of Canada for the CBC. They are based on a vision that sees Canada as a country that cannot do without a high-quality, vibrant, alert, objective, creative and independent public broadcaster. It is a vision of the future based on a true understanding of the past, on a sense of history. To conclude my remarks, I will say this, as a Quebecer speaking to Quebecers: Fernand Dumont wrote: “The Quiet Revolution was initially a cultural revolution”.2 And for Louis Balthazar, the CBC “paved the way for the Quiet Revolution”,3 as much as the National Film Board and the Canada Council for the Arts did. We should never forget that Radio-Canada, “the first cultural organization in Quebec not to be controlled by the clergy”,4 was, as noted by Marcel Dubé, the source of intellectual rejuvenation and of the development of arts and culture seen in Quebec.5 Admittedly, Quebec has much evolved. We have become a much more pluralistic society, one that is open to the world and draws from a multitude of information and entertainment sources. But as it was yesterday, today the CBC is for us a beacon, an anchor, a springboard. This is why, among other reasons, we love the CBC. This is why we believe in its future, a future we want bright and durable. _________ 1 Fernand Séguin, quoted in: Ignace Cau, L’édition au Québec de 1960 à 1977, Québec, Ministère des Affaires culturelles, 1981, p. 98. 2 Fernand Dumont, Le sort de la culture, Montréal, l’Hexagone, 1987, p. 305. 3 “Quebec and the Ideal of Federalism», in: M. Fournier, M. Rosemberg et D. Whyte (eds.), Quebec Society, Critical Issues, Scarborough, Prentice Hall, 1997, p. 46-47. 4 Louis Balthazar, “Aux sources de la Révolution tranquille : continuité rupture, nécessité”, in: M. R. Lafond (under the dir. of) La Révolution tranquille 30 ans après, qu’en reste-t-il ? Hull (Québec), Éditions de Lorraine, 1992, p. 94. 5 Marcel Dubé, “Dix ans de télévision”, Cité libre, 48, (June-July) 1962, p. 24-25.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 00:31:37 +0000