Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Transport and Communications
Issue 14 - Evidence - October 9, 2003
OTTAWA, Thursday, October 9, 2003
The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications met this day at 10:46 a.m. to examine the current state of Canadian media industries; emerging trends and developments in these industries; the media's role, rights, and responsibilities in Canadian society; and current and appropriate future policies relating thereto.
Senator Joan Fraser (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Honourable senators, it is a great pleasure for me once again to welcome you, our witnesses, members of the public and viewers across Canada to this meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications.
The committee is examining the state of the Canadian news media. The particular question that interests us is the appropriate role of public policy in helping to ensure that the Canadian news media remain healthy, independent, and diverse in light of the tremendous changes that have occurred in recent years, notably globalization, technological call change, convergence and increased concentration of ownership.
[Translation]
Our witnesses today represent the organization Our Public Airwaves. According to the brief submitted to the committee, Our Public Airwaves is the initiative of concerned Canadians who believe a strong public broadcasting system is essential to provide a broad range of innovative programming in the public interest, independent of commercial considerations.
[English]
Today, we are pleased to welcome Mr. Arthur Lewis, Ms. Sheila Petzold and Mr. Doug Willard. Welcome to all of you. We are glad that you were able to join us.
Mr. Arthur Lewis, Executive Director, Our Public Airwaves: Madam Chair, before we start our presentation, if you will indulge me, I would like to introduce more fully my two colleagues.
Mr. Doug Willard, who is from Saskatchewan, has just stepped down as President of the Canadian Teachers' Federation. Teachers are big supporters of our organization because they see public broadcasting as an extension of the education system and an important part of the lifelong learning that is more essential than ever in this ever- changing society of ours. While we will be speaking today primarily about the CBC, the provincial educational broadcasters are also important to us.
Ms. Sheila Petzold, who chairs our coordinating committee, is a former CBC executive producer in charge of independent production for Ontario. She now heads her own production company based here in Ottawa. It is called Telewerx. She produces and sells programming not only to the CBC, but also History Television, APTN, Vision, Saskatchewan's SCN educational network and B.C.'s Knowledge Network. She is currently working for the Library of Parliament, documenting the restoration that is now underway.
As advocates of public broadcasting, we have come today to tell you well you why it is an important part of the solution to the problem that you are studying.
We thank you for this opportunity to participate in your important review of Canadian media.
You have already heard in the course of the hearings from a number of witnesses about the dangers to a democratic society that arise from increased concentration of ownership and the related issue of cross-ownership. There is nothing new that we can add to that. However, we would like to provide you with a couple of pertinent illustrations of those dangers drawn from recent media coverage.
The first is the release last June of the report on Canadian broadcasting prepared by the House Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. As members of this committee will certainly appreciate, this report dealt with the vital area of national public policy. This excellent report, which was two years in the making and was chock full of important recommendations on public policy disappeared almost immediately from public view. News coverage was short and uninformative. Many of the recommendations in the report received no mention at all. In the days following the release of the report, which received very limited news coverage, there was no sign of the informed debate that one hoped would appear on the pages of our leading newspapers.
In that same period, vast forests were decimated to provide Canadians with detailed coverage of the personal tragedy of Dar Heatherington, an unknown municipal counsellor from Lethbridge. I have to wonder whether there is a living, breathing Canadian who is not now familiar with every detail of Ms. Heatherington's strange adventures in Montana and Las Vegas.
It was not for lack of available space that the heritage report was ignored. One might reasonably ask whether this was a question of preference for trivial gossip as opposed to substantive issues of public policy. That may well be the case.
Media columnist for The Toronto Star, Antonia Zerbisias suggests that other darker forces might have been at work. In her column of July 10, 2003, she noted that not only was the report itself ignored, but also when the chair of the Heritage Committee, the Honourable Clifford Lincoln went to Toronto this summer to drum up publicity, he got very little coverage. It was as if the report ``had fallen into a black news hole,'' as Ms. Zerbisias.
She went on to speculate that the lack of news coverage just might be related to the report's recommendations on better funding for the CBC, continued restriction on foreign ownership of ownership of media companies, and a moratorium on new broadcast licenses for companies that also own newspapers.
That is a pertinent current example of what might possibly happen to news coverage when the topic is at odds with the interests of the owners of our giant media conglomerates.
Our second example is media coverage of the CBC itself. We are among those who believe that the CBC receives less than a fair shake from CanWest Global. In an attempt to verify that suspicion, we did a search for the name ``CBC'' on the Web sites operated by both The Globe and Mail and CanWest to ensure that our findings were not an anomaly of some sort. We have done this comparative search a number of times in recent months. The results have been as consistent as they are fascinating.
On September 3, 2003, The Globe and Mail listed 44 citations for CBC in its Web site database, which covered the previous seven days. Twelve citations were substantial references of which seven referred to news items quoting CBC news reports or interviews from CBC ``Newsworld.'' That is as it should be because the CBC is a major source of news coverage in this country.
I would like to contrast that with the two Web sites operated by CanWest Global. The National Post archives material from its Web site for 14 days. It had only two citations for CBC, an average of one a week compared to 44 for The Globe and Mail. Both of the National Post citations were negative. One citation included a letter attacking CBC for alleged anti-Israel bias, which is a favourite CanWest Global topic. The second was an economics topic about possible changes to Quebec's subsidized daycare program and contained two gratuitous swipes at the CBC.
CanWest has the second largest Web site, Canada.com. Some items on their database go back as far as 19 months. On September 3, there were 23 CBC citations.
Two things stood out. First, there was a total absence of quotes from the CBC news reports or interviews. In the CanWest Global universe, it would appear that no original news coverage originates from the CBC, or at least, none for which CanWest is prepared to give the CBC credit. The second notable thing was the large quantity of negative material.
We have done this same Internet search a number of times in recent months, most recently on October 1, 2003. One of the most bizarre aspects is that in every search for CBC on their database the same item always comes up first. The transcript of a Global Sunday program from March 3, 2002 is titled ``Should the CBC Be Privatized,'' is the first item each time. This may be only a quirk in their search engine, but it is a strange coincidence that this same item, 19 months old, always comes up first when you search for CBC on the Canada.com Web white.
On September 3, 2003, the third item on the list was a news item headed ``Nova Scotia Party is Critical of CBC.'' The fifth item was a commentary more than a year old entitled ``CBC's Soft Stance on Terrorists.'' The tenth item, another commentary that was nine months old, was entitled ``CBC: A Bastion of Propagandists and Twits.'' The eleventh concerned a poll commissioned by CanWest Global headed was entitled ``CBC: Not Great, Not an Abomination.'' No longer there but present during the search made in July, the fourteenth item was a nasty bit of business entitled ``Why do We Need El Gezira When We Have the CBC.''
Tony Atherton, the long-time and well-respected TV columnist for the Ottawa Citizen was one of the few CanWest writers who treated the CBC column. I say last because his last column appeared yesterday. He has been replaced by a new CanWest national TV columnist. One must suspect there will be even fewer favourable mentions of the CBC appearing in CanWest newspapers.
I hope you will forgive us for dwelling so long on this point, but it is important to demonstrate that concern about abuses resulting from concentration and cross-ownership are not just theoretical.
We have to ask ourselves is beyond the two areas of coverage that I have mentioned how many less obvious issues are there where newspaper content is shaped by the corporate or personal interests of the proprietor?
There is one known anecdote to this problem that most western democracy have utilized with great success for more than seventy years. Public broadcasting plays an important role as an independent voice and a reference point to keep the system balanced. Only public broadcasting can exist independent of commercial considerations providing a service to the community with a broader range of programming content than would otherwise be available from commercial media, organizations that must of necessity reach the largest possible audience in order to maximize profits.
I want to make clear that this is not an attack on public broadcasters. They play an important role in the media. Most countries have found that the ideal system is a balance between commercial broadcasters that deliver eyeballs to advertisers and public broadcasters that provide service to citizens.
In insightful testimony on your first day of hearings last spring, Mark Starowicz dealt quite eloquently with this question. Christopher Dornan from Carleton University touched on this during his presentation on May 6, 2003 when he spoke of the role of the public sector media as a counterweight to the market driven considerations of the private sector. As Professor Dornan noted, for this to work the CBC must be given the necessary resources.
We noted earlier that public broadcasting could exist independent of commercial considerations unfortunately this is not the case in Canada today. The CBC is far too dependent on its commercial revenue and until the federal government provides increased funding, the CBC's public service mandate will continue to be seriously compromised.
You have already heard testimony from other witnesses about the difficulties faced by the CBC in funding certain types of public service programming. As it does not have the money to pay for the programming, the CBC is forced to rely on exactly the same funding mechanisms that finance Canadian programming for the commercial networks.
These funding mechanisms are unreliable, have incredibly complicated rules, favour certain genres of programming, and they require producers to piece together a funding package that includes licence fees from several different broadcasters.
As a result, some public service programming is not made, and the CBC is forced to cobble together a schedule consisting not of the programs it would like to broadcast necessarily but whatever programming it can manage to get funded.
For Canadian media there are additional challenges not faced by media in other western democracies. These are the challenges that come from sleeping next to the elephant. As the Honourable Pierre Pettigrew rephrased it recently: ``dancing with the elephant.''
As Canadians struggle to maintain a distinct cultural and political identity in an increasingly global environment, there is a vital role for our media to play in terms of both encouraging the national debate to define our values and in reflecting those values to Canadians.
Our commercial media often find it difficult to avoid the easy temptation of great profits that flows from wrapping imported American content around Canadian advertising. Our public broadcasters, on the other hand, put a priority on Canadian content.
There has been a great deal of concern expressed over the scarcity of Canadian drama. You looked at this issue a few weeks ago with Charles Dalfen of the CRTC.
Our Public Airwaves believes that the preservation of this country's independent cultural identity depends, to a large extent, on our ability to offer Canadians the opportunity to see our country and our culture reflected back to us on that flickering screen in the family room.
For years, the government and the CRTC have tinkered with various regulations and subsidies to try to find the right way to stimulate drama production, and every year the situation, nevertheless, gets a little bit worse. In our view, that is because there is no right incentive.
With the intense competition for viewers from big budget American shows, Canadians just will not watch drama that is not well produced. The reality of the Canadian market is that it is just too small to recover the enormous cost of this type of programming.
Alliance Atlantis, Canada's largest independent and most successful production house, has in recent years cut back drastically on the number of hours of Canadian drama that it produces. There just is not enough money in it. At the same time, Alliance Atlantis is reaping enormous profits from production for CBS of the very popular American drama series CSI and its spin-off series CSI Miami. These programs are delivered into Canadian homes carrying Canadian advertising by CTV.
Since no one can profit by producing quality Canadian drama, commercial broadcasters just are not interested. They do as little drama as they can get away with, and even that, I underline, is heavily subsidized with public dollars. The CBC, with its limited resources, has almost abandoned series drama and prefers instead to air a few big-ticket items that are easily promotable, such as the two-part Trudeau mini-series that was just repeated just last week.
We believe that the only practical way to increase the quantity and quality of Canadian programming is to pay for it with public dollars by adequately funding our national public broadcaster. There is no question that this will not be cheap, but ultimately we have to ask ourselves what is the value of our country and what are we willing to spend to ensure that we retain this idea of Canada, this cultural identity that defines us?
To properly fulfil its public service mandate, the CBC needs more than just money. It also needs additional resources in the form of broadcasting licences, so that the public broadcasting voice in this country is louder and able to reach more Canadians in more ways.
Should the CBC carry the national news at 11, or should it disappear because there are hockey play-offs? Why should the public broadcaster have to make that choice, and why should Canadians have to make that choice?
If the CBC had several channels, you would have hockey on one channel, the news in its regular place on another, and drama on a third channel.
In recent years, with the addition of multiple tiers of specialty and digital channels, our entire broadcasting system has become badly unbalanced in favour of the private sector. We need to rebalance by adding more public channels. If the CBC is to produce more public service programming, it needs the shelf space to display that programming. To compare Canadian broadcasting to British broadcasting, the BBC now has eight TV channels.
The CBC must also be made stronger and more independent. Its funding must be provided in a way that frees it from the necessity of going cap in hand to the government every year and allows it to do a proper job of long-term planning.
It must also be seen to be truly independent through a change in corporate governance to provide for more open and public process to select the board of directors and its chair. At the same time, the CBC president should be chosen by and accountable to the board rather than the Prime Minister.
We would like to draw your attention to a study conducted for the BBC by McKinsey & Company the respected international consulting firm. That study examined the role of most of the world's major public broadcasters in 20 countries on four continents. McKinsey found that there is a strong link between the health and funding of the public broadcaster and the overall quality of that broadcasting market. A strong public service broadcaster like the BBC, which produces a distinctive programming schedule, sets off what McKinsey calls a virtuous circle with its commercial competitors; because the BBC produces better programs, private broadcasters are forced to do the same. Our Public Airwaves believes that a strong, independent, well-financed, national public broadcaster is essential to ensuring that Canadians are provided with media of quality and integrity.
The Chairman: Thank you. Just before we go to questions, I wonder if you have a copy of that McKinsey & Company study that you would be able to give us?
Mr. Lewis: I have a spare one, and I would be happy to give it to you.
The Chairman: Thank you also for your comments on Internet data banks. In the case of CanWest, in particular, I will be interested to hear what will undoubtedly be their other side of the story when they appear before us. We all know that Internet data banks can have various quirks, as you yourself suggested.
Senator Graham: We have seen some of you here before, either as witnesses or in the audience at our committee hearings.
Ms. Petzold, Mr. Lewis said you were involved in documentary work at the Library of Parliament. Could you explain that?
Ms. Sheila Petzold, Chair of the Coordinating Committee, Our Public Airwaves: I am documenting the process of rehabilitation and conservation and upgrade of the project.
Senator Graham: Mr. Lewis, what are the major difference between your organization and the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting? Why is there a need for two similar organizations?
Mr. Lewis: The primary difference is that we are advocates for public broadcasting and they are not. I do not say that in a negative way about Friends of Canadian Broadcasting. Their self-defined mandate is advocacy for Canadian content in the audio-visual system. Public broadcasting is a provider, but you can have Canadian content without having a public broadcaster.
We believe in the essential nature of a public broadcaster in the system and feel that, in terms of Canadian content, the private broadcasters will never be the solution to the problem because they are profit-driven. I think Friends of Canadian Broadcasting does an admirable job of playing watchdog to the private broadcasters. They do a lot of representation to the CRTC and so on, trying to keep the private broadcast community honest, and God bless them for doing that.
Our focus is on advocacy for public broadcasting. We feel that one of the reasons the CBC has suffered so grievously in recent years is that there has been no one out there building a constituency for the idea of public broadcasting. That is our mandate.
Senator Graham: How do you exist? Are there annual membership subscriptions, or where do you get most of your money to carry on your responsibilities?
Mr. Lewis: We are a very new organization. The organization grew out of a public broadcasting conference that was held several years ago at the Chateau Laurier. The Canadian Media Guild, which is one of the CBC unions, and Carleton University sponsored the conference. All of the players in the industry were in attendance and we feel that it was a success.
The feeling at this conference was that there was a need for a public broadcasting advocacy voice. Our organisation began at that conference. Since then, a good deal of time has been spent trying to piece this organization together.
We were only launched as a public organization earlier this year. We are still surviving on seed money provided to us by the Canadian Media Guild. The Canadian Teachers' Federation and a number of other teachers' unions and public service unions have put up funding for us, as well. We do not want to be beholden only to unions, so we are struggling to establish the organization and it is our intention to raise money from the public in the future. We are not quite there but we are getting very close to it.
Senator Graham: Do you think that in order for the CBC to be commercial free it should be totally funded by the Canadian taxpayer? The CBC government subsidy is $1 billion a year. Is it correct that it used to be $1.2 billion?
If your dreams and expectations were lived up to, what would be the total cost to the taxpayers of this country?
Mr. Lewis: Let me try to answer the last question first.
You can do broadcasting for $1 million, for $1 billion or $100 billion. Ultimately, you can ``cut the suit to fit the cloth,'' which is the cliché. The BBC has an annual budget in the neighbourhood of CAN. $8 billion. In our dreams, we would certainly like to see the CBC funded to that extent. I do not think I will see that in my lifetime.
The BBC broadcasts in one language as opposed to two, and broadcasts in a small country that we could fit into a small corner of northern Ontario, as opposed to the second largest landmass in the word. Distributions cost are an important factor in broadcasting, such as the number of transmitters the CBC has to maintain.
You can pick a figure out of the air. After Mark Starowicz testified here he suggested the figure of a couple of billion dollars; another billion would be a good start. We are both in absolute terms and per capita one of the stingiest countries in the world in terms of the dollars we provide to our public broadcaster. The Netherlands provides more money to its public broadcaster. The BBC has about eight times the budget of the CBC. German public broadcasting is even better financed than the BBC. Most of the European public broadcasters are rolling in money compared to the CBC.
Senator Graham: Would you like to see the CBC totally commercial-free?
Mr. Lewis: We would like to see, and we say in our platform, the CBC not dependent on commercial revenue. There are certain types of programming, such as hockey, where advertising is benign. There may be people out there, but I do not know of anyone, who would be upset about seeing commercials continuing during the time-outs or when there is an injured player lying on the field during a football game. What is the harm of commercials in that kind of scenario?
Senator Graham: That is the big money-winner for the CBC, is it not?
Mr. Lewis: I am not sure sports are big money-winners. They pay for themselves, and that is an important consideration for the CBC.
Senator Graham: Do they not pay to help other operations within the CBC?
Mr. Lewis: That is a question best put to the president of the CBC. I do not have access to its books.
That is certainly what one would suspect. I have heard it said by the CBC people that profits made on hockey and other professional sports help to finance the CBC's coverage of amateur sports.
We would like to see the CBC not dependent on commercial revenue so that it can produce whatever programming it feels would best fulfil its public service mandate and not have to, as it is doing now, run blockbuster American movies in prime time because it needs the commercial revenue. This, and other commercial initiatives by the CBC, distorts the public service mandate.
Senator Graham: You referred to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage and the release of its news report. You said that the ``news coverage of the report's release was almost uniformly short and uninformative.''
Is that the fault of the newspapers or is it partly the fault of those organizing the release of the report?
You mentioned that Clifford Lincoln, the chair of the committee, had gone to Toronto to drum up publicity and was unsuccessful in doing so.
What kind of coverage did the CBC itself give to the release of that report?
Mr. Lewis: In terms of fault, the committee did everything that one might reasonably do to publicize its report. The chair held a news conference; there were copies of the report in news releases; summaries were made available; and there were advance briefings for those who need them.
I was in a lock-up with the report before it was released so that I could read it, along with several of my colleagues. I think the committee did everything that one reasonably does in that circumstance.
It would not be wrong to say that I was appalled by what I saw in the newspapers the next day. I would invite your researchers to have a serious look at that situation. Call up the clippings; they were tiny.
There were 90 recommendations. There were entire chapters that did not even get a mention, which is expected, but the coverage was slight.
As to the CBC, that is a touchy issue. We do not have an official organizational position. My feeling is that the CBC tends to not want to be seen to be promoting its own self-interest. Therefore, if everyone is doing a big spread and running stories, the CBC will do it as well, but when no one else is giving it very much coverage then the CBC tends to hunker down in the crowd and play down the coverage. Certainly, the CBC did not give any great prominence to this report. I think they should have, but my sense is they do not want to appear to be self-promoting.
Senator Graham: There are those who suggest that the CBC should concentrate on news coverage, sports coverage, and information programs, such as the kinds that our colleague Senator LaPierre used to be involved with 100 years ago, as he likes to say.
What would you think if the CBC's mandate was changed to commercial-free news and news information programs?
Mr. Lewis: I would be appalled. As I said earlier, I do not want to beat the issue to death. We will not get Canadian drama if we do not get it from the public broadcaster.
Senator Graham: We will also miss out on our Canadian talent.
Mr. Lewis: Yes. We are talking about the telling of Canadian stories. We want our children to grow up with a sense of this country. We want Canadians to know their country.
This is a problem that exists in other countries as well, but it is worse here because we import the entire output of the American broadcasting system.
At the Château Laurier conference we had a guest from German broadcasting who pointed out that the Germans had to do a series of programs on the German justice system. They had to produce the programs because Germans watching American programs thought that the American justice system was similar to their own.
I would like to cite a simple example. We often hear Canadians say that someone is going to press charges against someone else. That does not happen in this country. In Canada, the police bring the charges against the person.
In the American system, with which I am not familiar, there seems to be some concept where the individual has a say in whether a charge is ``pressed'' or not. Canadians have adopted that term and way of thinking. If you were to ask the average Canadian, you would find that they think that is the way our system works because that is what they see on TV every night.
Ms. Petzold: It would be remiss not to note that some of the best children's programming in the country has been produced and developed by the CBC. I wonder if the same quality of production would have been developed by commercial enterprises.
Senator Graham: That is a very good point.
Ms. Petzold: The CBC's ``A People's History of Canada'' is a huge undertaking that, I dare say, would never have been engaged in with a commercial broadcaster.
Senator Gustafson: It seems your presentation comes down to private broadcasting versus public broadcasting. What is the number of people who watch CTV news compared with the CBC news?
Mr. Lewis: First, senator, I would like to differ with your premise: I do not agree that the issue comes down to public versus private. We would like to see a system in which both exist. We feel that the public part of the system has been diminished in recent years. It should not be one versus the other. We need both in order to provide adequate service to Canadians. The problem is that we are not adequately funding the public part of programming. Obviously, the private part is funded through commercial revenue.
In terms of numbers, that is a question that should be put to the CBC. You will have the president of the CBC here in about 10 days. I do not have the latest numbers, but I am not sure that the numbers are all that important.
I want to go back to the McKinsey & Company concept of the ``virtuous circle.'' If the public broadcaster is not doing a quality job, then there is less incentive for the private broadcaster to do the job. The CBC has an important influence on the marketplace and forces, I would suggest, CTV, Global and the others to do an adequate job.
Senator Gustafson: The problem really comes down to dollars and cents. The international situation is also a challenge. What percentage of people watches CNN? Have you numbers on that?
Mr. Lewis: Those numbers go up and down, as they did, for example, during the Gulf War. A lot was made of the fact that CNN drew enormous numbers during the Gulf War. I am neither surprised nor bothered by that. One would expect CNN to have a larger audience for that type of coverage. It was an American war, essentially, and CNN had probably greater resources in the field. I could turn that around and say that, in our view, the CBC did a marvellous job of covering that war.
Senator Graham: I agree with you.
Mr. Lewis: In fact, it was far better than the private networks, such as CTV or Global in terms of the resources that the CBC put into the field in both Afghanistan several years ago, and more recently in Iraq. Their coverage was very impressive. The quality and quantity of the coverage was unparalleled in this country.
Today, the CBC's coverage of what is happening today in Iraq is less than satisfactory, and that is a reflection of the limited resources at their disposal. CBC spent a lot of money covering the earlier exercise in Iraq, and they now have to make that cost up. As you are probably aware, the government has just taken money another $10 million away from them. Thus, budgets are tight. We now have one correspondent in Iraq; he is Don Murray. One person cannot adequately cover all of Iraq. However, that is the situation of a public broadcaster that is starved for funds.
Senator Gustafson: It seems to me that the minute government gets involved in financing something people lose the incentive to do things well. I will give you an example. SaskPower hooked up a light right near my door so that we were plugged into a homecoming in the little town of Macoun. SaskPower sent four trucks and two with cranes to do the job. If that were a private enterprise one guy would have been there with a ladder, a truck and a spade, and he would have hooked that light up in no time at all.
They were there for two hours. My wife said, ``Look at that.'' ``Here is why our power bill is getting so high.''
If I turn on CBC at channel 200, I can go through four transmitting stations and they are all CBC. Why are there so many?
The Chairman: That is a question for the CBC. An explanation of the policy for re-transmitter networks should come from the CBC.
Senator Gustafson: There is strong advocating by the witness for the CBC and for public broadcasting. Therefore, I ask the question. The witnesses can decide if it is a fair or unfair question.
The Chairman: If the witnesses want to take a crack at answering it, they may.
Mr. Lewis: First, I am not here as an advocate for SaskPower, so I will not respond to that part.
Senator LaPierre: It is a good company.
Mr. Lewis: With regard to the transmitter policy, the chair is absolutely correct that this is a good question to put to the CBC, but surely you cannot fault the CBC as a public broadcaster, with trying to reach every citizen of Saskatchewan. The CBC is pretty tight with its money these days. If they have a raft of transmitters, it is to reach different pockets of the community. You could should consider yourself fortunate that you are able to receive so many of them.
Senator Gustafson: Saskatchewan CBC radio is very good. I only have one complaint. If I want to get the markets in the morning —
The Chairman: Stock markets or agriculture markets?
Senator Gustafson: The markets on beef, grain, and so on. If I want information on those stock I have to tune into Williston, North Dakota.
We are an agricultural area. The CBC should have the markets on every morning at six o'clock.
Mr. Lewis: I will pass on that one, senator. Ask the president of the CBC.
Senator Gustafson: I am accused that no matter what subject we discuss I move on to agriculture. I do not apologize for that.
The Chairman: Senator Gustafson, we will have an impressive panel of witnesses from the CBC in several weeks, and look forward to your questions at that time.
Senator Corbin: I have some sympathy for Senator Gustafson having to get his commodity news from a station across the border. In New Brunswick, we have to get our potato blight index information from a radio station in Caribou, Maine. The CBC does not deal with that sort of thing neither does the local private stations.
In broadcasting, as in any other media that wants to make money, news is money, and it is all about gain and profit. Therefore, there is little objective news available.
I worked for the CBC, and I worked for a number of newspapers. I can sniff the money behind the news that is broadcast and the news that is not broadcast, and that is where the most grievous sin is in terms of quality news availability in this country.
The CBC is important because money is not the factor behind their coverage. In my opinion, it certainly is the jewel of Canadian reporting. Some other media may share in that, but not to the same extent.
I would like to go back to comments you made regarding the National Post, and my perceived notion that they have a news monopoly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They treat Canadians as children who do not have the ability to understand, regional, local or international situations. Moreover, I think they mix two matters. There are Canadians of all origins and all faiths who have definite views on the State of Israel policy and others who opposes that policy. However, that does not mean that the people who oppose Israeli policy are anti-Semitic.
The owners of the National Post have made a big mistake in taking such an antidemocratic stance.
The Chairman: Senator Corbin, I do not think that these witnesses are competent to talk discuss the editorial policy of the National Post. We will be hearing from CanWest Global.
If you want to ask them about public broadcasters, which I gather is their mandate, please do so. Do you really think it is fair to ask them to speak on the National Post?
Senator Corbin: I am only commenting on comments that they made in their paper.
Senator Graham: They invited the comment.
Senator Corbin: The first three pages of their paper deal with the National Post.
Mr. Lewis: I certainly do not mind. We have not yet had a question from the senator.
Senator Corbin: I am neither pro nor con on this mid-East debate. I sincerely attempt to take a very objective view of things. I am insulted when a chain of newspapers deprives us of a lively and open democratic debate on the issues.
I do not know how the Government of Canada policy is formulated, but I aim to find out. I have given notice to the Senate that the Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs should study that issue. I want to pursue that subject objectively.
I found it highly offensive that career journalists were put aside by that newspaper chain because of a narrower view of the way democracy operates in Canada. I find that to be highly offensive. Their attack on the CBC is absolutely childish.
I find it to be insulting for the vast majority of Canada to have to live with such a situation. We are out of the Middle Ages. This is a free and open society. We are entitled to see all points of view. In my opinion, we are not well served by that chain of papers.
We will come back to that. I am for the truth.
You talked about improved management. You make the surprising statement that the Prime Minister would be the ultimate and supreme arbiter of the CBC. I think that is not all of the truth. Parliament has frequently called the CBC to its table for hearings and examinations.
Parliament certainly is one of the shakers and movers of the CBC. Parliament has to approve the Estimates and has an overview on policy. It does not start or end with the Prime Minister. I think that is not a proper view of how the system actually works.
I do not agree that the board of directors should elect or choose its chair. If there are public funds involved, surely the government and Parliament have a say in that position. It is healthier to have it that way. Cliques develop quite easily, even within the CBC. We know that. I worked for the CBC.
I would rather see the system we have now with accountability at the top, accountability from the Prime Minister, from cabinet, from parliamentarians, than a situation where just a little group would make its own determinations.
The country has been well served by the choices that CBC presidents have made over the years. Some have been stronger; some have not been so strong; some have been quite aggressive in defending the CBC; some were rather mollified. Overall, this is a human exercise, and I think we have done pretty well.
The Chairman: Perhaps the witnesses would like to comment.
Mr. Lewis: I certainly would.
Mr. Lewis: I do not have the French translation in front of me, and I do not want to blame the translators, but I think that you are working under a misunderstanding of what we are advocating, so let me clarify.
First, we are looking for more accountability. I want to separate the question of the board from the president. The board, the chair, and the president are all Order in Council appointments.
In the Paul Martin spirit that is much under discussion these days, we believe that members of Parliament, perhaps through the committee structure, should play a greater role in vetting and approving the appointment of the chair and members of the board. At the moment, this is essentially a discretionary appointment. It is Order in Council, which for practical purposes means the Prime Minister.
We think that a more open process, similar to the British model, is the model we should study. The government, through Order in Council, makes the appointment, but there is a public nomination process as well. A committee of distinguished citizens reviews the appointments and make recommendations, and then the government still gets to appoint who they want, but they do it in a public way so that the public sees who is appointed in the context of the recommendations that come from these prominent citizens, as opposed to, dare I say, the patronage appointments that are all too common today to boards like the CBC. I do not think that anything that we are advocating is at odds with what you are saying, senator.
With regard to the president, there is a situation today, which I feel is dysfunctional. The president of the CBC is appointed by the Prime Minister as an Order in Council appointment and therefore has no real accountability to his or her own board. We suggest that the board and the chair be appointed through a more open process, and as with every private sector corporation the board hires and fires the president. If they think he is not doing a good job, he is gone. The CBC board has no control over its president. They may not like what he is doing, but they do not have the authority to hire and fire him. We feel that a more functional system exists when the president is accountable to the board. The role of a board in a corporate environment is to control the executives and to set policy and to supervise the execution of that policy by the president and the executive of the corporation. That cannot happen when the board does not have any say in the appointment and cannot fire the president.
Senator Corbin: I still disagree with your suggestion. You cannot make a straight comparison between private enterprise and a state-owned institution like the CBC. We are debating here, hoping that another vision will eventually be obtained from this discussion.
You seem to attach the independence to the financing of the CBC. Yes, there is some merit to that statement, but I think that its independence is not something that can be quantified solely in terms money. Independence is reflected in its news programs, in terms of quality, in terms of covering all of the country, and in terms of doing a fairly decent job. The CBC has been at odds with the officer of the Prime Minister, and it has been at odds with Parliament, and yet it has forged ahead in its views of the world and of Canada because it is independent.
I think the CBC is independent. I do not know of another newsgathering organization in Canada that is more independent than the CBC.
Mr. Lewis: There are realities, and there are perceptions. I am a former CBC journalist.
Senator Corbin: Think of how often the CBC knocks down parliamentarians. If it were not independent, that would not be possible.
Mr. Lewis: I agree with you. At a working level, I think that the people at the CBC do an admirable job of maintaining their independence. Certainly on the journalistic side there have been some unfortunate incidents where the government has perhaps had too much influence, but those incidents are primarily in the distant past. People at the journalistic and operational levels do their very best to maintain an independence, and I think they do an excellent job.
There is, however, the issue of perception. I can tell you, having worked as a CBC journalist for many years, that one frequently gets calls in the newsrooms from people who perceive the CBC to be a tool of the government. Even if the CBC is functioning independently, I think it is dangerous for people to think that way. That perception, I believe, is enhanced by the fact that the president is an Order in Council appointee. There would be a greater perception of independence if he or she were not an Order in Council appointee. We are concerned with the issue of perception.
Senator Corbin: Do your criticisms and comments about the CBC also apply to Radio-Canada, or are you an English-based group?
Mr. Lewis: There is one board and one president. It depends on the area to which to refer.
Senator Corbin: Do you represent both the French and the English areas in your comments?
Mr. Lewis: They are certainly different situations in terms of drama and so on. As to the issue of governance, it is one issue for one corporation that happens to have operational arms in both languages. I am sure that the perceptions are the same.
Senator Day: Mr. Lewis, you made the comment that the CBC should have more channels. In this digital world, it could have many more channels.
Mr. Lewis, please tell me why the CBC does not have more channels. Is it because of money or something that the CRTC has done?
Mr. Lewis: I draw your attention to the Heritage Committee report, which deals with this issue. Historically, it has been a problem with the CRTC. The heritage report documents the numerous applications for additional channels that have been turned down by the CRTC. The CBC has applied to the CRTC many times.
Depending on how the additional channels are configured, you may get into issues of additional funding. Certainly, if you want to program those channels adequately, you do have the model of ``Newsworld,'' which is, in effect, financially neutral because it collects a subscription fee from cable subscribers. It was set up specifically and deliberately to be self-financing so that it would not drain funds from the main network. There are many areas where the programming is more expensive and where it would be more difficult to totally fund.
We would like to see both an increase in the number of channels and an increase in the financing to allow the CBC to adequately produce an appropriate supply of programming.
The news issue is an irritation that comes up every spring with the Canadian public, because the CBC essentially abandons the national news. I find myself, dare I confess, watching the CTV news because I cannot find the CBC news unless I am watching that particular hockey game, and when the game finishes and the news comes on. Unless you are watching the game, you do not know when the news will be on. If I tune in at eleven o'clock, I might get the middle of the newscast or I might have missed it.
There is it no reason why the CBC should be in that situation. There is no reason why it cannot have a channel that televises the games, and another channel that televises the national news, and a third drama channel for those who do not like or care about hockey the news.
You could have six other choices if the number of channels and the funding were available. Again, I point you to the BBC model, where there is a multiplicity of channels and choices. That has a salutary effect on the entire marketplace in terms of the variety and quality of programming that the BBC produces and the influence that it has on what the private channels produce as well.
Senator Graham: On this question of sports, the same news is carried on ``Newsworld'' at nine o'clock as is carried on the main channel of the CBC at ten o'clock. All you have to do is tune in to ``Newsworld'' if the hockey is on and watch Peter Mansbridge at 9 o'clock rather than at ten o'clock, if the hockey game happens to be on. It is the same news.
Senator Day: I will give you the example of the recent elections. I was trying to watch the New Brunswick election. They decided to run it only for a certain period of time and then something else had to come on. There are problems because of different programs running on the same channel.
Maybe they felt that the rest of Canada would be tired of the New Brunswick election after ten o'clock, when it was still undetermined who would be the winner. I had to use the telephone to find out what was happening. If there were a specialty channel for this kind of thing or another news channel that would carry it, then the problem would be solved.
It may be that your problem and everyone's problems will be solved, as there are many more channels available with the new technology.
Mr. Lewis: I agree with you. It is unfortunate when a public broadcaster has to make those kinds of choices. To what extent do they serve the people in New Brunswick and turn off the people in the rest of the country, who do not care about what is happening in that particular election?
Senator Day: I find it hard to believe that they could not care.
Mr. Lewis: There are people who do not subscribe to cable; they have rabbit ears or an antenna on the roof. The public broadcaster has an obligation to serve those people as well as the people who subscribe to cable. That is a consideration when something is available on ``Newsworld.'' It is available on ``Newsworld'' on cable, but that does not necessarily get to all Canadians. It gets to affluent Canadians, but it disenfranchises a large number of other Canadians who may not be able to watch that cable channel.
Senator Day: Some people think a public broadcaster should only carry news and that the commercial channels should look after other things. The CBC seems to be commercially oriented from a sports channel point of view.
Is there a role for a public broadcaster in sports, somewhere between community broadcasting, which shows the high school soccer or basketball game, and the professional game?
Is there a role in the middle for a public broadcaster that does not look at numbers of viewers but serves a public interest? Who should set the public service mandate? How is that determined? Should politicians be responsible for it or should your suggested board of directors be responsible? If it is not commercial, how do we test that the objectives are being met? If we are not looking at it from a commercial point of view, it is not fair to test the outcomes and the success of the set mandate by looking at viewership.
Mr. Lewis: First, senator, we do not want to attempt to take on the role of programming the CBC. That is ultimately a decision for the board.
To go back to Senator Corbin's point earlier, the board of the CBC needs to be accountable to Parliament and you as parliamentarians should vigorously exercise the right to have the president of the CBC before you each year. In fact, bring him back every six months, if you like, and call him to account for whether the corporation is fulfilling its public service mandate. At that meeting you will be able to ask him to respond to the point about sports and so on.
With a limited number of channels, the CBC is constantly forced to make choices, so it does the best it can with amateur athletics and in other areas as well. However, going back to the reference about the New Brunswick election, the CBC has to constantly make choices that it would not have to make if it had more channels available for it to use.
We had a situation during the last few weeks whereby some women's soccer games were not carried because the game time changed. It became a question of what would be replaced and at what time of day. The decision was: which programming was more important?
The CBC should not be forced to make those kinds of decisions. Provide the CBC with the resources and with the channels and it will provide a better public service to more constituents, whether they want amateur sports, elections in New Brunswick or local programming from Saskatchewan. The CBC can only do what is possible with the resources provided.
Senator Day: Let us assume that the CBC has the necessary resources. How do we ensure that the output is meeting the mandate? Would bringing the president of the CBC before Parliament every six months solve the problem? Would that put parliamentarians in the role of testing the output?
Mr. Lewis: I am not in a position to know the kind of feedback that senators receive. Certainly, MPs receive a substantial amount of input from their constituents. I would assume that senators are involved in your communities and that you return regularly to your communities and hear about what people want. That provides you with the valuable input that would allow you to test the output and discuss that with the CBC management. That is the way it should work.
Senator Day: There would be many people quite concerned about parliamentarians having that kind of role to play with the management and direction of the CBC. That tends to go against your point on independence.
Mr. Lewis: I do not think you should be directing the CBC in its news coverage, but I think it is legitimate for parliamentarians, providing you put up the resources, to ask the president of the CBC to appear before them on the matter of its mandate, coverage and service to the public. That is a legitimate role for you. I do not think that compromises the independence of the CBC. The CBC has to be accountable for what it does. If you want to discuss the minutia of news coverage or whether the CBC should give six hours to one sport and nine hours to another sport, that would be a dangerous area to approach. In general terms, the president of the CBC has to be accountable to the Canadian public and to this committee and to the House.
Senator Day: What about the issue of embedded reporters in places such as Afghanistan or Iraq versus non- embedded reporters?
Mr. Lewis: As you probably know, the CBC did not have embedded reporters for policy reasons. I do not think there is anything inappropriate with asking the president of the CBC to seek information about why the corporation made that decision.
Senator Day: Do you think that parliamentarians could direct CBC management to do so or not to do so?
Mr. Lewis: No, because you would then be getting into a difficult area. The CBC is not a state broadcaster but a public broadcaster. The president and the management of the CBC have to program according to what they believe are the service needs of the Canadian public. There is a line to be walked and it may be difficult to define. Generally, there is nothing wrong with your seeking information and with saying that you think there should be more news or more amateur sports on the CBC, providing you are not trying to set the editorial tone or micromanage the corporation.
Senator LaPierre: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is a Crown corporation that belongs to the Canadian people and was created by an act of Parliament, with all the rights and duties and responsibilities that are accorded to it by the act. It is an arm's-length institution and must remains an arm's-length institution under the law. Consequently, it is important not to cloud the issue on that matter.
It is also important to clearly remember that the naming of the president of the board is essentially an act of patronage. The degeneration of the Canadian system into an American system would be an aberration. It would be a platitude and stupidity of colossal degradation. A tremendous process of consultation takes place with many Canadians before the president of the CBC is appointed. The last time, it took some time to appoint Mr. Rabinovitch. The Prime Minister did not simply get up one morning and decide that it would be Mr. Rabinovitch. No. An entire process determined that appointment. I would not like anyone to denigrate this process.
I was the Chair of Telefilm Canada, a Crown corporation, and I know the power of the board, even though we did not appoint the executive director. The power remains because the power is invested in the act. As the chair, I could have picked up the phone to speak to the Minister of Canadian Heritage at any time, with the consent and advice of the board, to say that the executive director was not capable of fulfilling his duties.
Furthermore, the president of the CBC receives a review from the board every year and a bonus in accordance with the assessment of the board. I want to make that information clear to all because I do not want the system to be denigrated. I have no problem with your comments, Mr. Lewis, except on that point.
When I was your age, I thought it would be a good idea to break up the CBC into various channels.
Later, I came to the conclusion that I wanted one institution that spoke to the totality of me as a person. I wanted reunited ....
[Translation]
I wanted all elements of my personality, all elements of Canadian reality to be represented in a single institution.
[English]
Therefore I stopped thinking seriously about breaking it up. I think your suggestion is the easy way out.
Let the CBC do its work as a national institution. The end result will be of much greater force. Is that possible?
Mr. Lewis: I do not want to be flippant, but I am sure that you are aware that the CBC speaks to your French soul with two networks.
On the English side, there are about three and half channels now. There is the main CBC channel, Newsworld, and the relatively new Country Canada channel. Unfortunately you have to be a subscriber to cable and it is way up there in the ozone. Most people do not know it even exists. Then there is the Internet, which is an important growing service.
CBC today is not one service to your soul; it is radio and it is television. I do not want to trivialize your point but we have gone past the point where the CBC is the central service that you picture.
Senator LaPierre: I have this feeling that TV is the instrument of the past. Television is finished. Now we must turn to the instrument of the future, which is the Internet.
What do you think about that in relation to the duties and responsibilities of a public broadcaster?
In less than a generation, people will all use the Internet and very few people will use cable and all these antiquated, medieval institutions.
Mr. Lewis: You may well be right, but there are early adapters. I spend a lot of time on the Internet but there are many Canadians who do not go anywhere near it and many who only visit it briefly.
I can point you to about 10 different technologies that when they were introduced, were considered the best. Do you remember eight-track tapes and all the various video formats and CDs and DVDs? Do you remember Teledon, the technology of the future? The government put money into Teledon.
I do not mean to denigrate your point but we cannot know the extent to which the Internet will go, although you may well be right.
Ms. Petzold: When television came in the 1950s everyone said radio was dead and that never happened. I really think we have a multiplicity of places to get our information, and I think that this will continue, and they will become complimentary in many ways. As we become a more complex society and democracy, we have to incorporate these complexities into our public life.
Senator LaPierre: I will not argue with these things but my business is to ask questions and hope that the witnesses will elucidate, and you have and I thank you.
We spend an enormous amount of public money on the development of Canadian content, and on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, et cetera. We must spend to close to $2.5 billion a year, if not more.
I am told that not more than 10 per cent of Canadians watch our programs. What makes you think that even if we spend an enormous amount of money in order to create Canadian drama that Canadians would watch it?
When we had two channels, we were able to do This Hour Has Seven Days and we were able to get away with it. It seems to me that Canadians are not interested in Canadian content. I understand that 10 per cent of Canadian watch Canadian content television. Canadians are watching American channels. They are watching simulcast American shows on Canadian channels with $250 million going to private enterprise.
Mr. Lewis: I think there is a misunderstanding with the figure of 10 per cent. This does not mean that only 10 per cent of Canadians watch Canadian programming. Canadians spend 10 per cent of their viewing time watching Canadian drama and 90 per cent watching American drama. That does mean that only 10 per cent of Canadian watch Canadian drama. When the marketplace is flooded with American drama and there is so little Canadian drama; then obviously you will only get a cumulative audience of 10 per cent for the Canadian drama and 90 per cent for the American drama.
Senator LaPierre: Should I not pay attention?
Mr. Lewis: Yes, you should, and provide the resources to help bring that figure up. If I could sit down in my living- room in the evening and had the East Block or the Centre Block instead of the West Wing it would not mean we would put the Americans out of business but our business might grow stronger.
Senator LaPierre: There is no story there.
Mr. Lewis: If I had the choice to watch Scandal in the Senate instead of the West Wing, which is a great show, maybe I would watch the Canadian program.
The Chairman: My question is in a way a follow on from that, bearing in mind that the particular focus of our study is news and information and public policy. I am interested in the degree to which public policy is affected by the quest for ratings. Clearly, we do not want to spend $1 billion on a broadcasting system that Canadians neither watch nor listen to. That would not be productive.
One frequently hears critics of the CBC say that it is not worth subsidizing because not enough people watch it. One hears criticisms that the CBC's news programming has been ``dumbed-down'' a bit in the great ratings chase.
To what extent should legislators and the policy setters demand ratings? Have we got the balance right, or is there more work to be done?
Mr. Lewis: I do not think anyone can say that ratings are unimportant. Clearly, spending $1 billion, or several billion on programming that no one watches is not politically acceptable.
It is instructive to look at the British, German, Danish and Swedish experience. We would see that much larger sums are being spent on domestic programming, and there is a substantial pay back as a result of that spending. You cannot get people to watch programming that is not there.
I probably watch too much television. When I sit down in my living room in the evening I am not offered many compelling Canadian choices. Given the budget it has, the CBC does an outstanding job in providing current affairs and information programming. It could tell Canadian stories much better with more money. It could produce sitcoms, which the average Canadian watches.
Entertainment programming in the broader sense is a very important transmitter of culture. People absorb culture from televisions, and Canadians are absorbing American culture. I fear for the future of my country if Canadians watch only American programming.
I would like to see a CBC where there is a much greater choice of programming. CBC needs to do a number of drama series as well as these one-shot specials. Ratings will increase if the programming and the budget are there. The more you spend on a program, the better quality the more likely it will be watched. The CBC and the private broadcaster compete with enormous American program budgets.
You must consider the virtuous circle argument from McKinsey. If the CBC is doing a better job of Canadian history programming and whatever else, it encourages the private broadcasters to follow suit. Rising tides raise all ships. This has been the experience in Britain.
McKinsey points to a natural history series that the BBC did. It was enormously expensive. A private broadcaster would never do such a thing. BBC has done some period dramas. The experience in Britain has been that once the BBC showed there was an audience for this type of programming, the private broadcasters started doing natural history and period dramas.
People point to PBS as another example. Most of what is on PBS comes from the BBC or from the private channels in Britain that do these marvellous series. Many of the private shows done in Britain would not be done if not for that virtuous circle.
Ms. Petzold: There is a difference between ``ratings'' and ``reach.'' That is something that has to be counted into the equation.
There are many times when we have to make qualitative rather than quantitative decisions. We believe this is one of those situations.
Maybe not every Canadian watches programs like This Hour Has 22 Minutes or the Canadian history series, but most of us know about it and maybe watched part of it. It gets to us in other ways. It becomes part of the cultural sphere that is part of who we are and reflects us back to each other. That is what we want to protect.
Senator Corbin: Do they talk about CBC in the study by McKinsey & Company?
Mr. Lewis: The CBC is one of 20 broadcasters that they examined.
Senator Corbin: Do they have anything special to say about the CBC?
Mr. Lewis: McKinsey looks at the various funding models, and they do note that those public broadcasters that are overly dependent on advertising are forced to dilute their public service mandate and have less distinctive programming.
CBC television is looking more and more like their commercial competitors. Therefore, it is losing its ability to influence the marketplace because the private broadcasters are not imitating CBC. It is overly concerned with ratings and generating commercial revenue. Therefore, CBC runs American movies and so on. McKinsey does touch on that, yes.
Senator Graham: I do not think that we should have the past president of the Canadian Teachers Federation arriving from somewhere to appear before the committee as a witness and not be heard.
Are you here as an individual or do you represent the Canadian Teachers' Federation. Does the Canadian Teachers' Federation financially support OPA?
Mr. Doug Willard, Past President of the Canadian Teachers' Federation, Our Public Airwaves: Am I here as an individual or as a representative of the Canadian Teachers' Federation? I have been involved with Our Public Airwaves a representative of the Canadian Teachers' Federation. There was a presentation made to our board of directors from Our Public Airwaves and they asked for financial support, which was given at the national level. Some of our member organizations also gave financial support and support by being a part of their board and their advisory groups. The Canadian Teachers' Federation supports type of organization.
I have been a teacher for 31 years and for 27 of those years I was a full-time classroom teacher and I taught physics, chemistry and math. I had thousands of kids who came through my physics class and they would ask me why they should learn physics? I would say, ``Learning the way that scientists look at the world will enrich your life.'' ``You will see the world a little differently after you have taken my class.''
I followed the television coverage of the latest Gulf War. I watched CNN and all the other channels including the American ones.
At one point I stopped on ``Newsworld.'' Peter Mansbridge was hosting a phone-in program. Mr. Mansbridge demonstrated such balance, answered all of the questions with class, led the viewer to an independent discussion, and kept me watching for the rest of the evening. I thought that the program was excellent and the best that television had to offer. I thought that if the people of this country ever lose something as valuable as that program it would be a tremendous loss in terms of our ability to identify ourselves as Canadians. It was so powerful to see the stark contrast with the quality that CBC generated compared to the pablum I was watching on CNN and Fox and others. The loss of such sophisticated programming would be a great loss to the cultural structure of our country. We should never let that happen.
I agree with Mr. Lewis's arguments that the more we put on and the better quality we have, the more people will watch and have a better understanding of who we are as Canadians. That is what keeps me coming to meetings like this.
The Chairman: That was a most eloquent statement and we thank you for making it.
The committee continued in camera.