A guest posting by Richard Nielsen, President of Norflicks Productions
Let’s clear up one misconception about Canadian broadcasting. It is not short of money.
The cable companies (or BDUs as they are bureaucratically referred to) have revenues of approximately $14 billion a year. $8 billion of that comes from broadcasting.
Of this $8 billion, approximately $3.5 billion comes from advertising; pass-through payments from subscribers to specialty channels provides approximately $1.2 billion; federal subsidies of one kind or another contribute approximately $2 billion while another half billion or so comes from special arrangements, such as the Media Fund and provisions to encourage Simulcasting, et cetera. Lastly, there are provincial subsidies of one form or another.
But the largest subsidy, not included in these calculations, is the importation of U.S. shows at less than 5% of their production costs. Last year, our private networks and specialty channels spent roughly $700 million on U.S. programs with a production value of $14 billion. These were all entertainment shows and they competed with the $350 million that goes into the production of comparable Canadian programs.
We can never have a broadcasting system of our own if we continue to import American programming in such quantities. Rather than prohibit them I think we should charge a fee for any American channels imported into Canada and that at least 50% of such a fee should go to support public broadcasting, i.e., the CBC. This could eliminate the need for a parliamentary grant but its real purpose is to reduce the competition from U.S. television, which every other developed country in the world has already done.
And the CBC should be substantially restructured.
The CBC should get out of sports, out of news and out of advertising. This would save money but it would also reduce revenues, so the revenue losses should be recovered from subsidies that now go to private television; after all, if the CBC gets out of advertising and sports, private networks will be the main beneficiaries. This transfer of resources would enable the CBC to do what it is supposed to do, promote Canadian culture. It will also strengthen news on private networks since they would benefit from a wider use of the material they produce and would have available more news from distant and foreign locations.
More savings will come from reducing CBC facilities across Canada. They are no longer up to date and are expensive to maintain. If the CBC got out of news, it would have no excuse for retaining them. Their sale would significantly reduce costs, including labour costs. We would better accommodate regional concerns by having five Commissioning Editors located across the country but able to call on the national talent pool as required.
A stripped-down CBC devoted to the production of drama, variety, comedy and documentary, and dedicated to finding and developing Canadian talent should have restored all the budget cuts it has experienced since 1979. But that need not mean more government money. As I’ve indicated, there are other places for the money to come from.
Many CBC News personnel should be transferred to a Cooperative News Service, which all Canadian television networks and stations would own, supplying material, personnel and facilities. If the new revamped CBC wanted a newscast, it could buy one from the Cooperative News Service, but it should have nothing to do with producing it.
The reason successive Liberal and Conservative governments have treated the CBC so badly is that they hate the News department. Government is inevitably in the business of persuading the public to support the measures it advocates and it’s not surprising they believe that any broadcaster funded by them should get in line. The private sector, where almost all news is advertiser driven, has established rules and practices that keep advertisers out of the newsroom, but no public network is free of government pressure. It follows that it shouldn’t be doing news. This news service would be funded by advertising, by pass-through payments and by the fees paid (and received) by member stations.
I’ve said nothing about educational television but it provides a much better basis for a Canadian PBS than does the CBC. We should add another channel that would be controlled by our various provincial educational broadcasters. It should specialize in public affairs, presently neglected by both public and private broadcasters but flourishing on TVO with The Agenda.
I also think that a beefed-up Cooperative News should operate four distinctive news channels, two in French and two in English, one for international consumption and one for Canada. But all four should be available for Canadians to watch.
Essentially these reforms are designed to use advertising dollars, government grants and public support to perform functions for which each distinctive form of funding is most appropriate. Thus the new National Educational channel would attract foundation support and support from subscribers as does PBS. CBC would depend on money supplied by or mandated (pass-through payments are one example) by the federal government while private, advertiser-driven television would provide information and entertainment, but would have no specific cultural mandate apart from certain requirements for Canadian content.
Other postings about the CBC and public broadcasting:
Interesting take on what Canada’s broadcasting/communications future could be and how we might get there.
In the 1991 Broadcasting Act there is allowance for creation of Programming Services (French and English) - never acted upon.
Legislation rarely makes an exciting read but there are possibilities here:
Section 3(q): without limiting any obligation of a broadcasting undertaking to provide the programming contemplated by paragraph (i), alternative television programming services in English and in French should be provided where necessary to ensure that the full range of programming contemplated by that paragraph is made available through the Canadian broadcasting system;
Section 3(r): the programming provided by alternative television programming services should
(i) be innovative and be complementary to the programming provided for mass audiences,
(ii) cater to tastes and interests not adequately provided for by the programming provided for mass audiences, and include programming devoted to culture and the arts,
(iii) reflect Canada’s regions and multicultural nature,
(iv) as far as possible, be acquired rather than produced by those services, and
(v) be made available throughout Canada by the most cost-efficient means;
No news. And it was drafted this way for a reason.
Here are my short responses to the same old Nielson solutions.
1. U.S. shows are dumped at 5% of cost of production. This is old-fashioned dumping, which should be dealt with under NAFTA.
2. Charge fee for U.S. imports with 50% to go to CBC. I think this would be a violation of NAFTA, and good luck trying to get savings (profit) to go to CBC.
3. CBC get out of news and set up a Coop News Service for all b’casters. Sounds like Russian monopoly to me. What happened to competitive news gathering?
4. Reduce regional facilities. Trina McQueen tried that one in the early 70s. Anyway, CBC would be accused of eastern centricism, and people like their local news/gossip/gruesome traffic and cop accidents.
5. Restore to 1979 budget levels. That too is an old old song, and will not fly.
6. Why do we not do more Agenda-type programs as on TVO. One Agenda is more than enough for me. It is often too long, needs clearer focus, and too many specialists talking to each other over everyone’s head. I wonder if people who profess to love it ever watch it on a regular basis.
I think that I would like to go back to the original thought before Spry & Co. got cold feet, and go for license, and import another British model of IBA make the CAB members accept some public service programming about national and local culture, as a condition of license. If condo developers are obliged to contribute to local space and service, why not b’casters whose license is one to print money in perpetuity?
As soon as I have sufficient time, I will try to frame questions and an initial response.
For example:
• Where would Public Affairs (defined as we understood it in the ‘60s) fit in Dick’s proposed areas of concentration for a reconfigured CBC?
• Is the present system of US programming importation not akin to “dumping”, which is illegal, or is it simply clever bargain-hunting? And who would levy the “import tax”?
• Why would private broadcasters buy into the Co-operative News Service when the Canadian Press is on its knees – if, indeed, it still exists (I don’t know)?
• Who would compel (and how) the private sector to accept these changes?
Also: Having lived in small urban places in Canada (St. Lambert, Knowlton and Stanstead, Quebec; Owen Sound, Ontario; SaltSpring Island, B.C. and Banff, Alberta) in Canada, I know that local (print) news coverage is often pretty spotty, if not downright bad. And private radio and TV are typically not much better, if at all. They conform to the norms of “big” broadcasters – many of which are stultifyingly banal. Just one of the reasons I left CITY-TV (after being part of the team that put it on the air at the beginning). Also because it was not the unorthodox and anti-establishment channel I thought it was going to be. It still isn’t.
So the introspective needs of smaller communities, if they are to be addressed, requires a powerful organizational ethic such as, for instance, many of us subscribed to at the CBC in the ‘60s. How can that be planted in the private sector to which all news responsibilities would be consigned according to Dick’s ideas? Or will Rotary or the Chamber of Commerce/BIA run the local news operations?
Just asking – first impressions only…
None of the above should be taken as issues that cannot be overcome, but where is the will to do so in a society that rarely debates any of the major issues of our time? Neither to suggest that there are not lots of Canadians who ARE willing to be involved, but they are generally frustrated and turned off by the hypocrisies of official (so-called) participatory democracy. (Note the last four letters of participaTORY!)
Thank you! A fascinating and elegant construct. A Miltonesque Paradise Regained. Will avidly watch the ensuing discussion.