Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Transport and Communications
Issue 5 - Evidence for December 15, 2004
MONTREAL, Wednesday, December 15, 2004
The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications met this day at 9:04 a.m. to examine the current role 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.
[Translation]
The Chairman: Honourable senators, I am delighted to begin these hearings in Montreal, one of the loveliest cities in Canada. We are continuing the work that we began earlier this week in Toronto. It is the first time that our committee has an opportunity to hear Canadians, outside Ottawa, in its very interesting examination of Canada's information media.
We have gathered a great deal of useful information during this trip and we will no doubt hear some very interesting evidence today and tomorrow, here in Montreal. I am particularly delighted that we will have an opportunity to hear members of the public today, as of 3:30 this afternoon.
[English]
This committee is studying the Canadian news media and the appropriate role of public policy in helping to ensure that they remain healthy, independent and diverse in light of the tremendous changes that have occurred in recent years; notably, globalization, technological change, convergence and increased concentration of ownership.
Our first witness this morning is Professor Will Straw from the Department of Art History and Communications at McGill University. Thank you very much for joining us on a chilly morning, Professor Straw, we are very glad to have you with us. I think you know how we do this — we ask you to make a presentation of some 10 minutes, and then we ask you questions.
Mr. Will Straw, Associate Professor, Department of Art History and Communication, McGill University, as an individual: Honourable senators, I just want to begin with two anecdotes that in my opinion point to some of the problems facing Canada insofar as the future of newspapers is concerned. The first grows out of my teaching at McGill University. For the last several years I have asked members of my post-graduate seminars in communications whether or not they read a daily newspaper, and for the last three years, in classes of 15 to 20 people, none of them said that they did. These are students surrounded by information, immersed within it and committed to the idea of being informed, and they are not against newspapers, but they have not acquired the habit of subscribing to newspapers or buying them on a daily basis. I think this question of habit is all important. They browse through online newspapers, of course; they read online blogs and otherwise find lots of ways of being informed, but they do not subscribe to a newspaper or pick one up on a daily basis. I will come back to this later on.
The second example I think is even more ominous for journalists and for those who value the daily community newspaper. Last spring I was in London, England, and I remember taking the tube, the subway, into the city from the airport. I was reading in London's The Times an article about the decline in circulation of the mainstream dailies in the United Kingdom. This article could not figure out why the circulation of newspapers like The Times was going down. I looked around the train and 95 per cent of the people were reading one of those free daily commuter newspapers that have sprung up all over the Western world since the early 1990s. Since, in fact, 1992, when they were introduced in Helsinki by the Metro group that now publishes them all over the world. It seemed quite clear to me then why the circulation of the established daily newspaper was declining.
Now we can speak here, in terms of newspaper circulation, about whether or not established newspapers do their job and the challenge to newspapers that comes from the Internet or from cable television, but I think the most important things are happening just under the radar, and they are coming from these free daily newspapers that are slowly but definitively eroding the circulation of traditional dailies.
In 1992, as I said, a company in Stockholm, Sweden, introduced a free newspaper called Metro for those who commute using public transit. Metro and its various imitators have spread across the globe. I am on sabbatical this year and am doing a lot of travelling — Berlin, Bonn, Cologne and the United States — and you can see everywhere a significant transformation in the way people get their news. It has to do with free daily newspapers of a very standardized form.
The Metro group establishes daily newspapers in cities like Toronto or Montreal, usually through partnerships with a local daily newspaper. Typically, other publishers of mainstream dailies then get into the business by establishing competing free dailies. In Montreal, Quebecor has started Montréal Métropolitain and 24 Hours to compete with the Swedish-based Metro newspaper, which is published here in partnership with Torstar.
Now, there are many who say that the future of the daily newspaper lies with these free dailies, that they have won back younger readers, for example, that they are a kind of starter newspaper that trains people who will then go to The Globe and Mail, The Washington Post or Le Devoir. I am not so convinced. These free newspapers boast that they may be read in 20 minutes, the length of a typical commute — depending on where you live, obviously. Their content is, much of the time, produced out of international news-gathering machines that standardize much of that coverage around the world or wire services; it is not typically written by staff reporters. The people who write for these newspapers typically have not been trained or socialized within journalism as a profession, an ethical kind of stance, and so on.
Now, it is easy to sound snobbish when we talk about these newspapers, but I want to make two points about them. First, the free daily commuter newspapers do not employ local newsroom staffs of any significance. However concentrated mainstream dailies might be, they nevertheless hire journalists who get to know a community and, again, who are trained and socialized in journalism as a profession. Almost all studies of journalism over the last few years have shown that the single greatest influence on journalists is the judgement of their peers rather than the political opinions of their editors or publishers. Journalists work with other journalists to try to meet those peer standards of quality. This presumes that journalists are working together in large organizations, interacting with other journalists at press conferences and so on.
However, the free daily newspapers have, in a sense, removed coverage from this culture of journalism. The news tends to be put together from little pieces supplied by services that are more or less standardized around the world. Most of the time, they publish material that is easily syndicated — movie reviews, celebrity gossip, material produced centrally for an international readership.
The second point is that free daily newspapers have led other mainstream daily newspapers to dumb themselves down — at least, this is what reporters who work for them will say. Over the last decade, the Toronto Star and others have launched their own equivalent of daily free commuter newspapers to compete in that market rather than with it, but there is a real risk that by pandering too quickly to the appetite for 20-minute newspapers, the established daily newspapers will hasten their own demise in what many have called a “race to the bottom.”
I am as concerned about concentration of ownership as any of you, but I do not think we should get stuck on thinking only about multimedia convergence — Bell Canada, The Globe and Mail and so on — or multimedia conglomerates like CanWest. If we do, we will miss the ways in which the very future of the urban newspaper is at stake, and I think the free daily commuter newspapers produced according to a global model are the most striking symptom of this.
Earlier this year, in their annual report, the publishers of the prestigious French daily newspaper Le Monde tried to explain why their own circulation was declining. One of the reasons they gave — and I found this interesting — is that much of their readership consisted of middle class professionals who used to take the train or the metro to work and would read a newspaper along the way. Now it seems middle class professionals drive and listen to the radio, so radio has become their principal source of information. Those who still take the train, the clerks, the secretaries, the manual labourers, all read these free daily commuter newspapers. How will Le Monde build or keep an audience in the face of these changes?
Just to conclude, news now is being pulled by two extremes. One is towards the highly personalized world of blogs, tightly focused news sources and personality-driven cable news. I think this is where most of my students are going. However, the other is in the direction of a depersonalized, anonymous kind of news, the skimpy, short news of the free daily newspaper produced by international corporations and adapted in really minor ways to the local circumstances.
Therefore, the daily newspaper is being eroded from both ends. I think its strength lies in the way it balances personality and the authority of journalism as an institution; the way it balances the local and the international; the way it balances opinion and more or less straight coverage. I think that is disappearing and we are being pulled towards the flat, personality-free world of the free commuter daily and the highly personality-driven partisan news that you find on the Internet and broadcasters like Fox.
The traditional daily newspaper is an institution — Montreal's The Gazette, La Presse, The Toronto Star and so on. Whatever we may think of it, the very diversity of its coverage offers us an image of community. We see in the mainstream daily newspaper things we are not interested in, but we know they are important to other people. The skimpy 20-minute read of the free commuter daily removes a lot of that, and so I think there are implications that are not always clear for the ways in which we live in communities, interact with other people and respect diversity, and that we should be worried about, as these changes are taking place.
The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. That was a very interesting presentation. We will now go to questions.
Senator Tkachuk: Coming from Saskatoon, I am not aware of the Metro.
Mr. Straw: Just wait.
Senator Tkachuk: I am not even sure what it looks like, but my guess, from what you said, is that it is a short tabloid, something you can read in 20 minutes. That is not a bad idea, actually, instead of carrying this newspaper on the metro. That does not concern me very much. Are the newspapers perhaps losing readership because they are out of touch and should look at themselves? Is there anything outside of the fact that there is a free and quicker way to get the news that is causing the demise of the daily paper?
Mr. Straw: It seems like the biggest threat to newspapers is age. Age explains declining newspaper readership more than anything else. It is young people who are not reading. To the extent that the free commuter dailies and the so- called alternative city weeklies that have been around for 20 years are at least keeping people reading, there is possibly some room for hope. However, age seems to be the main variable.
Senator Tkachuk: Is it because maybe they cannot read? I do not know, but I have heard a lot of people at this committee say that — and I have not seen any sort of facts to back it up, except from hearsay evidence, my wife being a teacher — young people do not read very well and do not concentrate over long periods of time. Therefore, reading a long story is a serious problem for them so they just ignore it. Is that a possibility? That could be another reason?
Mr. Straw: I think that is part of it. It would not explain it entirely for my post-graduate students, some of whom did their B.A. at places like Harvard. I think it has a lot to do with habit. Young people do not expect to live long enough in the same place to subscribe to a newspaper and they do not even know what it means to call up and get a newspaper delivered. They do not wander down to newsstands on their way to work. There is partly just a loss of that kind of habit. It is interesting that when I talk to my students they do not think the newspaper is a bargain, which to me is ridiculous; you buy this huge publication for 75 cents. For some reason, they think that is a lot of money. There are a number of things having to do with the perception of the value of the newspaper, and, of course, there is the Internet and everything else.
It is not that the Internet or TV is replacing the function of the newspaper, but they are squeezing out the amount of time you have for other things. Therefore, if you are looking at five different media a day, any one of them is going to get less attention and seem less important. When there was just the newspaper, whether you liked newspapers or not, you spent five times as much time reading it because there were not five other things to do. It is a whole set of issues that I think we do not quite understand at this point.
Senator Tkachuk: Newspapers are adapting. I know that in my city, if you leave for three days or a week or whatever, you phone them. They do not deliver it and do not charge you. They are adapting that way. Before, you could not do that. Do you think it is worthwhile for some studies or some surveys to be done on this to back up in an academic way the strong observations that you made?
Mr. Straw: I do. I do not think we should just ask if people like newspapers, because everybody says they do, whether they read them or not. However, if we looked at the overall media consumption, how it all fits together, I think we might learn a lot that we do not know.
Senator Munson: Good morning. Obviously you are seeing trends, and if it keeps on this way, where do you see it heading if the young people are not reading what you describe as community newspapers that put them in touch with their community? Where do you see it a decade from now? We are trying to figure out where we are going with our report.
Mr. Straw: I think you will see The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail and the other major dailies investing in the free commuter dailies and the cultural and entertainment weeklies. Now, as a defensive measure, they might move more towards that as their main source of business. I think that is very probable. Young people, like many others, are picking up these free newspapers and reading them, so there is something they want from a newspaper. However, they are willing to sacrifice a lot of other things just to get their fast fix, and so I think there will be a race towards these kinds of alternatives.
Senator Munson: What is in these Metro papers that is so attractive — I have not read one — and appeals to people who want to read fast, look fast and be informed?
Mr. Straw: You get the quick sensational stories, the sports scores, the movie box office returns. What you do not get is the long columns of commentary or the kind of thing Pierre Berton did 40 years ago, talking about city life, taking up people's problems and so on. There is not that kind of connection to the community. However, you get a quick fix on what is going on in the world.
Senator Munson: Do you think journalism schools are adapting to the new media?
Mr. Straw: I doubt it, and I think the sad thing is that they are training journalists to believe they will work in a profession that is well paid, is regarded as respectable and has ethical codes and so on. In fact, it is a profession of people working for very low wages, people offering to work for free as interns and with very little future. Most people want to get out of it when they hit middle age and want a better salary. Others can speak better than I about what is going on in journalism schools, but my suspicion is what I have just described.
Senator Munson: When we are talking about Le Monde and other newspapers declining, will there come a day when these prestigious newspapers may no longer exist if this kind of new media, blogging and the Internet and so on keep growing? What is the future?
Mr. Straw: Well, I would like to think that the future is the way The Globe and Mail and the National Post are now, which is a pretty good combination of personality, columns with recognizable people, and a certain kind of commitment to coverage. I worry, though, that their future is not very strong. We will not live in a world without information. We will be surrounded with highly personal information and commentary, but I do not think it will be filtered through the journalistic machine in the way it was in the past; there will be fewer constraints and fewer forms of control. That is slightly worrisome.
Senator Munson: I am curious about Montreal's The Gazette itself, as a newspaper. There was a time when the Star was here, there was big competition and a lot of journalists had all kinds of different beats. It seems to me that The Gazette and other newspapers across the country are suffering; there are not beat reporters and there is not enough competition.
Mr. Straw: I would agree, and a chain says “Why do we need a film reviewer in each city? The films are the same,” so you get a single film reviewer for the chain. Then it starts happening with music, with this and that, and gradually that close connection between reporters and beats and communities is lost. I have seen that in The Gazette, which is a newspaper I like more than most of my friends do.
Senator Merchant: Might it be that newspapers are not the fastest way to get news? By the time I read the newspaper this morning, I have already heard the news on the radio and on television. Young people get it in different ways. Maybe the newspaper is no longer the way to get the news.
Mr. Straw: Yes, I agree, but I am not sure that people read newspapers only to get the news. I think people read newspapers on the subway to pass the time. I read them at breakfast because it is enjoyable; it connects me to the world and to the communities.
Senator Merchant: That is true, but you are saying that the newspaper now has turned into something different, and maybe young people are really not interested in news as such. There seems to be a different attitude toward life in general — they are not interested in going out to vote, they are not interested in the things that we were interested in. Maybe that is why when I go to the grocery store and there are the newspapers and all the tabloids, quite frankly, I do not look at the newspaper. I just quickly glance when I am in line to see what is happening in all those fancy-looking interesting life stories. They are not my own life, so I am more interested. I read all the headlines, and if I have time I open them. I do not want to buy them, but they do interest me, and I know that newspapers have gone to that tabloid format too because they are trying to attract readers.
Maybe it is just that newspapers give news, and young people are not interested in the news as such. When I was growing up, CBC Radio was on all the time in my home. Now when you go into people's homes, everybody has their own music. Life has changed, and I do not know what we can do about it.
Mr. Straw: Radio and newspapers depended on putting in front of you issues you did not know you should be interested in, but if you cannot escape it, maybe you will learn something about it. Now people can search out much more easily what they are already interested in, so the problem of the news media is getting them interested in things they do not know they should be interested in. It is one of their advantages as well.
Senator Merchant: Newspapers take a long time to read. I get three newspapers and there is no way I can read them in the morning. By the time I come home, the news in the newspapers is old. I do not know what the solution is.
Senator Eyton: Read faster.
Senator Merchant: Read faster. Well, those little tabloids have read it already and have condensed it into one sentence for me.
[Translation]
Senator Chaput: What you have just told us is quite interesting. Young people are not as interested as their elders in the print media and newspapers. I think that young people prefer more condensed, easily read information. Moreover, for some unknown reason, young people do not seem to subscribe to newspapers, maybe because they have neither the time nor the opportunity to do so. I think this could have serious consequences for the print media.
Should schools be encouraged to cultivate an interest in reading among our youth, or should the press adapt its content to reflect the constantly changing interests of our young people?
Mr. Straw: I don't think the problem is that young people don't read enough. The Internet is extremely popular among our youth and its content is mostly written. I think the problem lies with the way in which the newspapers operate. Why are young people not interested in reading newspapers? It is because the newspapers do not speak to them.
[English]
The problem is they think they are doing it now with these 20-minute newspapers, and maybe that is the answer, but I do not think a 20-minute newspaper has to have 40 stories that take 30 seconds each to read. It could have 10 stories in a certain amount of depth, or there are other ways of doing it. Alternative weekly newspapers like the Montreal Mirror, Voir and Ici, which began in the early 1980s, offered one answer to this; their coverage is often in depth, and it tends to be of culture and entertainment, but at least it gets people reading behind the scenes. I think if the world of politics and social issues was approached in that way, young people would read about it.
We are in a period of a certain amount of experimentation, and the free commuter newspaper is just one experiment — hopefully not the most successful one.
[Translation]
Senator Chaput: If I understand what you are saying, young people are more interested in culture and the arts.
Mr. Straw: Indeed.
[English]
Senator Eyton: Well, thank you, sir, for coming today. You were eloquent and very interesting in the remarks that I heard. I have just a couple of comments.
One, there has been some discussion about radio as opposed to newspapers. The number one station in terms of listeners in Toronto is 680, which is all news, and of course it is encapsulated news in the extreme; but their sales motto, in effect, is, “If you read it, it is history. If you hear it, it is news.” They drive the point home that if you want to be current, you should be listening to them, and to people like them, I suppose.
The second comment I have is that in Toronto, at least, the handouts, the subway newspapers, have not been a success. There are four papers available, and I suppose the Sun is a convenient format in terms of size, but it has not been a great success in Toronto, and people are still reading the four major newspapers.
We have a list here, and you are put down — I hope you knew this — to refer particularly to four of the key questions that are before the committee, and I think I heard enough to try to respond to those. The first one was “Do Canadians have appropriate amounts of quality information about international, national, regional and local issues?” I think the answer I got from you is yes, but you are concerned about, in particular, the newspaper sector.
The second was “Older and younger Canadians access news information in different ways. What are the implications of this trend and what is the current role of media literacy studies in schools?” Now, I did not hear anything about media studies in schools. Did you comment on that?
Mr. Straw: No, not really. I misunderstood. I thought I could pick one of those and go with it. I apologize for that.
The Chairman: You can. However, we can also ask you questions.
Mr. Straw: Sure. Yes.
Senator Eyton: In terms of schools, we are talking about at a lower level and then progressing through high school and, of course, university.
Mr. Straw: I think universities are running after younger people trying to figure out what they are doing rather than getting them to follow us. That is part of the problem. They are actively seeking out information and they have their own ways of doing it. Telling them they have to wake up every morning and read a big fat newspaper will not work, so maybe we have to think about how we can make them wake up in the morning and want to read a big fat newspaper. You will have, I assume, education experts who can perhaps say more about that and with more expertise.
Senator Eyton: Yes. I would have thought, given your remarks and your job, that you would be well qualified.
The third is, “Are communities, minorities and remote centres appropriately served?” I guess the answer is mixed there.
Mr. Straw: It is mixed. There is plenty to be optimistic about. In New York City there are approximately 45 newspapers in the Hindi language and an incredible number of newspapers in each of the immigrant languages. The role of newspapers in orienting immigrants to the city remains incredibly strong, and the ethnic and the non-dominant- language newspapers are going very strong; there are always more of them than you might say we need. I think that sector is vitally important.
It may be that mainstream newspapers, try as they might, are not catering to those readerships as well as they should. I think that when we are shrinking down to the 20-minute newspaper, we will not be able to cater to them because news will simply be too skimpy and too focused to embrace that kind of diversity.
Senator Eyton: The last question, whether you knew it or not, opposite your name was “Have recent innovations in technology affected diversity in the news media?” Of course, the answer is yes, they have.
Mr. Straw: Yes.
Senator Eyton: Now you know, of course, the purpose of this committee, which is quite a wide-ranging study, and you have seen our title. Obviously, we have concerns, or we would not be having committee hearings, both in Ottawa and elsewhere. What can we say? What do you suggest that we say in our report about dealing with some of the concerns that you have? I look to you as an expert in art history and communications.
Mr. Straw: I am more in communications than art.
Senator Eyton: It seems that is a good background to talk to us about it. What do you think a report should contain that would address some of the issues or problems that you have mentioned? Is there some other jurisdiction, country or area that could be a guide for us? Is there somebody who does it well that we could try to emulate?
Mr. Straw: I think a lot of these are municipal issues. For example, to me, it is wrong when the Montreal subway system decides that Metro can have a monopoly to distribute its newspaper once you pass the turnstile. We have to make sure that all the possible sources of news are equally available.
In France, newsstands are required to carry the full range of newspapers, which people say creates a horrible mess, but if everything is equally available, then the chances of different voices at least being heard are better. Again, that is maybe more of a municipal regulation issue than a federal issue.
We cannot, of course, stop these free commuter daily newspapers from publishing, but I think we can make sure that they do not gain an advantage because they can dominate certain markets. Beyond that, I see no problem with the direction of the CRTC's regulation of broadcast news. I think we have to be careful when Fox or Al-Jazeera comes up, but I do not mind the direction those decisions have taken, so I do not think there is anything to fix there.
Senator Eyton: And as to what our report should say?
Mr. Straw: I think the report has to get away from the concern of the Kent commission and earlier commissions, about media concentration. There is much to worry about there. However, sometimes you will need a certain amount of concentration to keep the traditional mainstream dailies alive, whether we are entirely satisfied with that or not. We have to see that the problems are about globalization at a different level, at the level of these little alternative free daily newspapers. The newspapers are changing in all kinds of ways. There are alternative weeklies and so on, as I have said, and I think that is where the changes are. We have to break out of the paradigm that we have been in, which is just worrying about concentration, and look at how the readership is breaking down, look at how other media are competing with the newspaper, decide what we want to do with newspapers and how much we want a certain kind of newspaper to survive. Maybe they are a public good to a much greater extent than has been recognized and require certain kinds of support or protection. It is a tough issue.
Senator Eyton: Yes, we certainly heard that. You did not mention magazines at all while I was here, but I take it that all of your comments about newspapers would apply equally, and perhaps even more so, to Canadian magazines, which are few and struggling.
Mr. Straw: Yes, and the magazines that work best tend to be advertiser supported, whether they come free with newspapers or not. It will be like broadcasting, in that we do not pay for it and we have an abundance of it, but it is paid for by advertisers. Are there enough advertisers in the world to support it all? However, the Canadian magazine is in something of a renaissance right now. There is good writing and so on, but I never have to go to the newsstand to buy one, they all come to me free because of my area code, zip code, postal code or the newspapers I subscribe to. I think that is good.
The Chairman: You live downtown, in a metropolitan area, correct?
Mr. Straw: Yes, true.
The Chairman: I would like to ask you about some of the implications of the fragmentation of news audiences that you are talking about, and, indeed, in some cases the disappearance of audiences for news in the traditional sense. What does that mean for society's sense of community, of cohesion, of common understanding about what is important? After all, a Senate committee is interested in matters of governance, matters of politics in the non-partisan sense, but there is also that other sense of community that is not necessarily political in any way, but can lead to common action or common concerns. Where are we going in that sense?
Mr. Straw: Well, I am not the first to say that we are clearly going into a world where everybody does not gather around the water cooler and talk about the same things, because the previous night, 20 people watched 20 different things on television — unless it was the finale to American Idol or something like that. There is clearly that problem.
As certain Internet blogs or sites win back larger audiences, some of the fragmentation has stopped, although not entirely. We have more and more people who are involved in certain kinds of culture, raves and things like that, who are invisible and want to remain so. It is interesting that the people I know who are involved in culture or other things do not want to necessarily make a big splash; they are happy, they want to be left alone. That is a problem when people do not have to compete for public attention and try to win over larger audiences. In a sense, they have given up a kind of civic engagement, and I think that is unfortunate, except that from one perspective it makes our culture seem richer and more diverse.
It is the big question now, and the days when you could go to work and assume that everybody had read the same newspaper and was talking about the same thing clearly are over.
Senator Tkachuk: Do you feel there is enough ideological competition in Montreal and Quebec amongst the news media?
Mr. Straw: It is interesting, because I would say across the country there is now more than I have seen in my lifetime, with the National Post and so on. Within Quebec, no, except that the range of opinion you hear in the media sort of corresponds to the broad middle of Quebec society, so that range is from slightly left of centre to the centre, and a little bit on the right.
Senator Tkachuk: Is there a debate going on in Montreal or in Quebec about same-sex marriage? Is there a big media debate?
Mr. Straw: No.
Senator Tkachuk: Maybe that is why people do not read the paper, right?
Mr. Straw: Yes.
Senator Tkachuk: Why would you listen to the same voice? Why would you listen to a voice when you know what it will say? Is that possible?
Mr. Straw: Possible, except that I do think talk radio gets people involved in ways that they were not before, and that is an interesting development. However, you may be right, it may be the sense of polemic that was strong in the 1960s, say around the independence issue, is not as strong now, and there is perhaps a certain bland consensus there.
Senator Tkachuk: Yes. I noticed your remarks on Fox News, and I thought, well, why not? Why not Fox News? It might stimulate some discussion in this country about where we are going on a whole range of issues that we do not seem to be having in the media.
Mr. Straw: When I listen to talk radio in Toronto, I hear a wider range of opinions than I will hear in Montreal in a year.
Senator Munson: I just wanted to follow up on your views on the CRTC. We have heard from a lot of people who do not think the CRTC should exist at all, that we should get rid of it. You talked about Fox and Al-Jazeera. However, the CRTC seems to be making rules for individual networks coming here, for example, Fox is here, there are regulations for CTV on what they can report, or when they can report headline news. Do we need a CRTC?
Mr. Straw: I strongly believe we do, even if it is as simple as deciding who is listed in the top 13 channels on a cable system. I do believe that even if stations do not use the airwaves any more, there is a way in which they are a public good, and it is not unreasonable for a government to put certain conditions of entry on stations into Canada. There is the question of advertising, tax, claiming it as a business expense and a whole series of technical issues that ultimately, I think, justifies Canadian governments' continued regulation of broadcasting. I think they could do things differently in lots of ways, but I certainly support the idea of a CRTC.
Senator Munson: For example?
Mr. Straw: Well, if you are worried about American programming — and I said this at another hearing — I think the way to counteract it is to allow a lot more international services in from many different places and create a diversity in which American programming will have to take a reduced, more modest place, and not just build up a lot of Canadian stations as a kind of bulwark against it. I would like us to become the most open market in the world in terms of our access to news from India, from Asia, from Eastern Asia and so on.
[Translation]
Senator Chaput: You made a very interesting comment earlier. You said that there were many small newspapers for different cultural and linguistic communities.
Canada is a culturally diverse country characterized, among other things, by its two official languages. Could high circulation newspapers which, it appears, are not very popular with young people, have something to learn from the more modest newspapers produced by other cultural minorities?
Mr. Straw: Yes, there is something that can be learned.
[English]
The problem is in knowing what it is. If they start out having a column for each minority group, of course then they lose. However, The Toronto Star, for example, almost completely changed the demographic look of its newsroom by hiring a lot more people under 30. Hiring people from a lot of different minorities and integrating them into the regular news coverage will increase the diversity of perspectives without isolating them. I do not believe in isolating them in little ethnic columns, but I think the overall perspective will change if you have these people covering so-called mainstream issues. However, that will take a lot of time. A lot of newspapers are already making that change, but it will take a long time.
Senator Merchant: Do you have a lot of students from minority groups in your classes? Are they the ones writing the stories that might interest the minorities?
Mr. Straw: Ours is not really a journalism school, but we have a lot of students, for example, who are journalists in Egypt, we have a lot of students from the U.S., we have a lot of members of different cultural communities and so on. Although not as many as Concordia, or Ryerson in Toronto, but that may be just McGill's kind of self-defined elitism, I do not know.
Senator Merchant: I am not just talking about McGill, but do you find that journalism schools are graduating X number of students who are non-French, non-English, from the minorities? Are they finding employment? Are the numbers reflected in the people working in the media?
Mr. Straw: I believe my colleague from Concordia, who will be speaking later, could probably say more about that, because again, we are not a journalism school. I think it has certainly improved. I studied journalism 30 years ago and we were a very homogenous group. I have seen a change, but from a distance ever since. Journalism is not an easy profession in which to find jobs these days. As I said, too many people are willing to do it for free; there is more and more reliance on freelancers, on syndicated material. It is too bad that just as these changes are happening and the people being trained are becoming more diverse, the jobs are drying up.
The Chairman: Well, that is a perfect lead-in to our next witness. Professor Straw, thank you so much, it has been really interesting and a great way to get the Montreal session of our hearings off to a good start.
Our next witness, colleagues, will be able to talk to us about journalism schools. He is Professor Enn Raudsepp of Concordia University.
Welcome, Professor Raudsepp. We are very glad to have you with us. You understand that we ask you to make an introductory statement of about 10 minutes, and then we get to ask you questions.
Mr. Enn Raudsepp, Associate Professor and Director, Journalism Department, Concordia University, as an individual: Good morning to everybody, and thank you again for inviting me to speak with you this morning. Just so you know where I am coming from, I will start by telling you that I have been teaching journalism at Concordia University for the past 26 years, and before that, I worked for 10 years for metropolitan daily newspapers in Toronto and Montreal. Over the years I have had quite a lot of opportunity to see our news media from a variety of perspectives, and I will try to share with you this morning some of the things that I have come to believe about our media, particularly our newspapers, which I know probably better than the broadcast forms.
If we look around the world today, I think we can say with some degree of confidence that Canadians are more fortunate that most other peoples. We have a social and political system that, for the most part, cherishes the media and is a cornerstone of democratic society, as well as technological capabilities that I think are the envy of many other nations. From this perspective, if I can use a rather hoary metaphor, our glass is certainly half full.
However, it would be foolhardy for us to overlook the truism that a half-full glass is also half empty. By this I mean that while by and large our news media are doing a serviceable job, they are also showing signs of flabbiness and a bit of weariness, and are not performing at the level of excellence that they could be or should be. The media today are also not what we envisaged only a few decades ago. Up to the Second World War, it was still possible to believe in media that were strongly grounded in their communities, and that related to community issues and spoke up strongly for them. Readers and viewers used to trust their news outlets and expected them to be there for them.
Today, it is the rare media outlet that is locally owned, and the main connection between the media and the public tends to be at the level of commodity exchange between buyer and seller. The trust is not totally gone, but I believe it has weakened considerably. Technology, lowest-common-denominator marketing practices, and the steady drift to mergers, monopolies, chains, conglomerates and convergence have radically altered our media landscape.
Some would have us believe that we are much better off in this new information age, in a digital universe of hundreds of television channels and unlimited websites on the Internet. Now, I am not a Luddite and I certainly believe that the new technology is here to stay. In the long run, it is quite possible — in fact, very possible, maybe — that the technology will solve our current media malaise by creating, for the first time in our history, a truly free marketplace of ideas on a level playing field with universal access and a representative diversity of news and information. However, we are not there yet, particularly in terms of the level playing field and universal access, and it may be some time before we arrive at that happy condition.
Today, we still have to cope with an in-between world where large corporations control access to most of the news and information we receive, and which allow marketing and other commercial considerations to drive many of their decisions. On the whole — there are always a few honourable exceptions — we have what I think is a kind of “dumbing down” of our media, if I could use that term, a drift towards superficiality. Our much-vaunted 24-hour news cycles often turn out to be short bursts of headline news with brief clips of sensational events repeated over and over again, instead of a refreshing variety of meaningful in-depth reports.
Our newspapers simultaneously are also becoming somewhat homogenous, as the centralizing tendencies of chain ownership are given freer reign, and with the recent trend to convergence, this kind of homogeneity is also spreading to the Internet. Now we can get the same news bites in print, on television, radio and the Internet.
I recently underwent back surgery and was laid up for about three months, and at first I thought that this would be a great opportunity to catch up on what is happening in the broadcast media. However, I ended up watching very little because it gets tiresome viewing the same clips over and over again. I now believe people who tell me that they no longer watch television because, despite the 200 channels or so, it is a wasteland out there. In talking to people, I find that even media junkies know immediately who Paris Hilton is, but not very many of them can tell me much about Maher Arar.
In addition to the increasing “infotainment” approach to news, another problem we face is the cutting back of local news. I thought the CBC's decision a while back to eliminate much of local programming was a major mistake. In the written press, the era of centralized templates that permit only limited inserts of local material may not be all that far off, and if it happens, it will not be pretty.
We do altogether too much recycling and repeating of American news and information, we are much too eager to copy their formats and programming instead of devising our own, largely because it is cheaper, not because it is better. The sad thing is, we do have a lot of excellent Canadian journalists, and when they are given the chance to show what they can do, the results are often outstanding. That can be readily ascertained by checking out some of the Canadian newsrooms that make a point of using their own staff and their own copy. The Globe and Mail certainly, the CBC national news, and one or two others, I think stand out from the pack in this respect.
What can we do to instil more excellence in our media? I strongly believe that the media system we have drifted into is what homogenizes and makes bland our media. The cure would be to stop the drift and step back a little to the time when we had more local ownership of the media, when the media were more interested in responding to their community than in squeezing out the last penny of profit from their designated markets. To get to anywhere better we would have to go back to the time when “convergence” was not yet a buzzword and we did not allow cross-media ownership, a practice that benefits only the owners and does not do much for the public. If we want our nation to develop and prosper, we need a strong, intelligent media. I believe we still have the foundations for that kind of media, but we need to preserve and perhaps even strengthen them.
The St-Jean committee in Quebec, of which I was a member, strongly advocated the entrenchment of a public right of access to the media as a necessary antidote to the owners' right to do as they wished with their media properties. Today the scales are still tipped in favour of the owners' property rights, with very little real recognition that the media are also a public trust on which the nation depends in order for the citizenry to be adequately informed in exercising their democratic rights.
Somehow the balance has to be restored, perhaps with more transparency of operation, or by requiring adherence to voluntarily agreed-upon professional and ethical standards; if I can use an oxymoron, voluntary requirement.
The range of corrective measures of course extends much further, to limits placed on chain ownership of media, to disallowing cross-media ownership, to tax incentives to promote excellence, to contracts for editors, to cooperative ownership of media by the journalists themselves, and so on. A lot of these measures have been spelled out by the Davey and Kent reports, your predecessors in this area, and by others, so that we have a fair idea of what can be done to restore the balance between ownership prerogatives and public rights. All we need is the will to act.
I am very glad you are studying this issue and I hope that your report will start the process.
Senator Tkachuk: How has media convergence damaged, or hurt, or improved the Montreal market, for example?
Mr. Raudsepp: I do not think it has improved it. In Montreal, we probably witnessed some of the most dramatic effects of convergence because Quebecor and CanWest, which are both represented here, are among its most advanced practitioners. It seems to me, from looking at their output, that they are using access to the different media forms to promote each rather than to create more interesting and better news. In other words, it is a marketing tool for them, much more than it is a news tool. Just logically, convergence does not make a lot of sense in terms of the public interest, because instead of two or three reporters working for separate news organizations, separate media, producing separate stories, they are producing one story, which is recycled in the different media. There is a cutback in the diversity of the information that we are getting, and I think that is a problem.
Senator Tkachuk: If a newspaper is a business, which it is, are there any impediments imposed by government, provincial or federal, perhaps through regulation or tax policy, or is it because perhaps we do not have a good business climate that we do not have more newspapers or more competition? In the era you are talking about, there was no capital gains tax. Is that maybe why you feel the way you do?
Mr. Raudsepp: I certainly do not think there are impediments to the operation of newspapers. In fact I think that might be the problem, that we do not have any kind of structure within which newspapers are allowed to operate. In most industries there are some forms of structure. I might be wrong, and I am not an expert on business, but certainly in terms of food and drugs and so on, there are laws that provide for minimum standards. We cannot poison the public with the products of these companies.
In the same way, I think it is feasible to create a kind of a structure for the news media that has no impact on the content, but does have an impact on the overall structure within which it operates, such as some degree of limitation on ownership, perhaps on cross-media ownership.
Senator Tkachuk: You would suggest expanding the role of the CRTC to include that, or would you be looking at another regulatory body that would oversee the news media?
Mr. Raudsepp: I do not think we need another regulatory body; the less regulatory bodies we have, perhaps the better.
Senator Tkachuk: I am with you there.
Mr. Raudsepp: The CRTC would be quite capable of doing it. I think the major raison d'être for the CRTC should be to review cross-media ownership issues; it should have nothing to do with content at all. I believe in freedom of content as much as possible.
Senator Munson: I was just thinking, professor, after 35 years in the media, I worked for the Prime Minister for a little while as director of communications, and each morning he would get up and ask me “What is in the National Post?” I would tell him what was in the National Post politically. He would say “What is in the Citizen?” I would say “The same thing. Same writer.” “What is in The Gazette?” “Same thing.” He could not understand why. That is what happened with media convergence; in that sense, it is the same messenger most of the time. You say we have to find some balance. How do we find that balance without having regulation?
Mr. Raudsepp: Well, that is the 64,000-dollar question, and I think that that is the rock on which the Davy committee and the Kent commission foundered in the past, and it is the rock which could foreseeably cause this committee to founder as well.
I think that if there is a strong political will, and if the public is behind proposals of this kind, it could be done. I honestly do not believe that there is any reason why one group or one person should own 30 per cent of our media, for example. What is the point of that? Perhaps it makes sense from the business perspective, but the media are much more than just a business. They do serve a public function, and I think there is public trust and a need for more diversity, more quality in our media that can only be achieved by eliminating large conglomerations of control.
The Kent commission suggested that there should be some degree of divestment. They were immediately slammed as being “pinkos,” “communists,” whatever. This was the road to perdition, giving your little finger to the devil. Any kind of regulation was immediately anathema. However, the market has a tendency to go to monopolization, and if we allow the market to do exactly that, I think eventually we will have a very high degree of concentration, much more than we have now, because there is a momentum that builds. It started off with mergers and purchases of individual media outlets, and now you see chains swallowing other chains, so the process accelerates. That could continue, and I am a little scared of that prospect.
I am not averse to a small degree of regulation —it cannot be excessive, and I think people should be entitled to own a few media outlets, but not —
Senator Munson: You are looking at government stepping in with legislation to stop big guys from swallowing little guys?
Mr. Raudsepp: Yes. I do not see that as a really horrible possibility. It used to be, if you go back 500 years in the history of the media and of journalism, governments were the enemy. There was no doubt about it, governments were the bad guys; they were the people who controlled the media, who insisted on licensing, censorship, and punished transgressors very severely, even including up to the death penalty.
That has changed over the years. I think our system of government has moved from an authoritarian kind of system to a much more libertarian, democratic kind of system, and nowadays my view of government is as a kind of a referee to adjudicate between competing interests within a society. The government has the role, not to necessarily espouse a lot of policies, but to adjudicate, to referee between competing interests and to determine what best serves the public interest. In this particular case, we are not talking about excessive controls, and only of ownership, not content of any kind, and I think that has to be emphatically considered.
Senator Munson: Just a simple question in closing — what is freedom of the press?
Mr. Raudsepp: Well, there are so many answers.
Senator Munson: Is it freedom to own? Is it freedom not to own? Is it freedom to own lots?
Mr. Raudsepp: No, obviously there are two sides to the equation, and certainly freedom to own is one. However, freedom to own how many? That is, I think, another issue.
The other side of the coin is the freedom of access. If we emphasize only ownership rights, then I think we are selling short our citizens who are at the mercy of the media. It used to be that the free market was supposed to be the antidote. If you do not like something, do not buy it; somebody else will provide a different product, a better product that you can buy. However, that is not necessarily happening, certainly not in our print media, because of the economics of the business. It is very difficult to set up competing newspapers in any one-newspaper community.
The hope is there, and I think we all share it, that eventually, the technology, which is becoming more accessible and cheaper, will, down the line perhaps, make it a lot easier for individuals to set up competing papers or competing websites of some kind or other that will provide alternate views. However, we are not there right now. If you look at the most commonly accessed news websites, they are those of our traditional media. That is what people look for. You do not have time to surf the Net and look for all kinds of opinions, some that you cannot really trust because you do not know where they are coming from. We still look to the institutionalized forms of information on websites, and I think it is possible that the technology will allow us at some point to do it.
As I say, we live in this in-between world right now, and I think it is important that we preserve the rights of our citizens even in this kind of condition.
Senator Tkachuk: You mentioned to Senator Munson that perhaps we have a limited amount of or less choice. I am not sure if those were your exact words, but I think that was your intent. In a major market like Toronto you have The Globe and Mail, the National Post, The Toronto Star and the Sun; you have four newspapers.
Mr. Raudsepp: Yes.
Senator Tkachuk: In the city of Saskatoon, where I have lived since college days, we had one. However, through technology, I can now also access The Globe and Mail, and the National Post, I can go to a newsstand and buy any newspaper in the world. I have more choice of newspapers in my city than I have ever had before.
Mr. Raudsepp: Yes.
Senator Tkachuk: So how can you say we have less choice?
Mr. Raudsepp: Well, I think you are very fortunate, living in Toronto, or being able to access these things in Toronto. It is not true everywhere in the country. I think we have pockets where we are much less served — not as well served, certainly.
Senator Tkachuk: For example?
Mr. Raudsepp: Well, in Quebec we have 11 or 12 daily newspapers. In Ontario there are 40-odd daily newspapers, four times as many. It stands to reason that communities in Ontario have more access to daily newspapers than Quebecers do. In the rural areas, not everybody has Internet connections. We are not fully computerized in this country yet, so there are still a lot of places where this kind of information is not available. We do not have the actual physical product, and we do not have Internet access in some communities.
I think that that is part of the issue. It is very important to somehow allow an infrastructure to be built up. Maybe the government has a role to play in this area, and maybe that is a more important role than some of the others, like limits on ownership and so on. If we can create the conditions whereby every citizen can have equal access to the media, I think that we are on our way somewhere.
Senator Merchant: I am still a little confused after the previous question. We talk about the government coming in. I live in Saskatchewan too, and I go to Estevan and to smaller places, and when I wake up in the morning, there are newspapers at the hotel. The Globe and Mail is there in the morning and the National Post is there. I do not see any problem with getting more information than we have had in the past, as Senator Tkachuk has said.
I do not want the government involved in too many aspects of life, because I think that newspapers will survive or not, depending on whether people buy them or not, read them or not, and depending on whether advertisers advertise in them. If there is no readership, there will be no advertising.
The marketplace will level that playing field. Maybe there are too many newspapers. Maybe they will not be able to survive because people are not getting their news through this medium any more. People are not reading newspapers, so we are trying maybe to resuscitate a body that is dying, and we will not be able to rescue it. I do not know. However, I cannot see what, exactly, you mean when you are talking about government. We Westerners do not want too much government, because government is far away. Ottawa is far away from North Battleford and we do not connect to it that well. It no longer really reflects, quite frankly, what we believe in.
Senator Tkachuk: And she is a Liberal.
Senator Merchant: And I am a Liberal.
When I wake up in the morning, there is actually the National Post outside my room, not The Globe and Mail. Here, I cannot get the National Post in the morning, so we are different. This country is very diverse, we are far away from one another and maybe the news should be a force that unites us. We do not like government too much.
Mr. Raudsepp: Well, there is a little irony in your statement, perhaps, because you are the government to a great extent. You are representing citizens, you are representing a province, and you are in a position to make decisions about things such as this. The other thing I would say is that I do not think it is a dying industry — not at all. I said it was a little flabby, and there is some degree of deterioration, perhaps because of the marketing approaches that are being taken. That is the problem, to my mind. Diversity enters into it too, because the ownership all comes from a particular segment of society. There is not a lot of representation.
If you go back to the previous century in Montreal, we had quite a number of newspapers in this city; they represented different parties or they were identified with particular religions. The True Witness, the Protestant paper, was evangelical in its tone and approach. We had a Catholic newspaper that was ultramontane and very conservative. There was a perspective from many different angles, and that is gone. Now we have one class that does not really stand for anything much, except perhaps making money.
There is sometimes a limitation on what gets into papers. The case of Adbusters intrigues me a lot. This is a group that has been trying to get its advertisements on national television and into various newspapers, and has been turned down. Why? Because they are producing ads or messages that try to tell Canadians to think about obesity, and think about violence in society and in the media, and they identify McDonald's as being indirectly one of the causes of obesity in society.
However, various media outlets have refused these ads, saying that this goes against their ethos: “We depend entirely on advertising for our revenue and we will not bite the hand that feeds us, so we are not running your ads.” That means that Canadians are not getting access to a certain perspective there, not in the same way they would if it were broadcast on national television, for example.
There are elements like this, and there are more examples of why we sometimes feel there is homogeneity of views and news. It is the blandness and the homogeneity that I am mostly opposed to. I think that is what we want to somehow overcome, if we can.
Senator Merchant: Are we to blame the newspaper owners for that? When I turn on American television I do see the right represented, and I do see the left. I do not see that so much on Canadian television. People there are not afraid to speak out about what they feel. People here sometimes feel that they do not have a voice. We had somebody appear before us a couple of days ago who is a small “c” conservative thinker, and she told us that she cannot get her opinion heard. She tries, but the media do not seem to want to speak about that. Why are we blaming the owners? Does it maybe have something to do with the journalists you are graduating? I do not know. That is also an ingredient in the mix. Are your students different now from what they were in the past?
Mr. Raudsepp: They are better than they have ever been. Our graduates are terrific; they have more skills, more capabilities than previous generations of graduates. As I say, I have been teaching journalists for 26 years, and they know how to operate in a much more complicated world, they are much more conversant with the technology, the use of computers. They can go out and handle this convergence issue.
Senator Merchant: I am not talking about that, though. Are they afraid to speak out? I am not talking about technology.
Mr. Raudsepp: Well, no. For example, the students that we take into the program are selected on a competitive basis. We do not take everybody who applies. We take roughly one out of three, one out of four students, and they are all topnotch; they could get into any program anywhere in the country. Typically, they come out of high school or CEGEP with 85-plus averages, so they are intelligent people.
However, they tell me frequently that if they are lucky enough to get a job — because getting a job in the media is not that easy these days, I think you have been told that — they are not given the opportunity to practise what they have learned at journalism schools. We try to teach them an idealistic view of journalism; that if you plan to write a story, you have to do a certain amount of research, verify the information, and talk to a variety of sources and so on.
This is not what most journalists do nowadays. They are sent out to cover press conferences; they cover speeches, meetings. At least three-quarters of the news that you find in papers is not generated or initiated by journalists, but is handed to them on a platter. The journalists do not have time to sit back and reflect on where our society is going, what kind of society we want, what kinds of stories we can go out there to find that will help our citizens, our readers, viewers, understand our society. That happens. It is not non-existent; it does happen, but not as often as it should. I think that is the problem — the quality is diminishing.
The owners set the tone for this. We asked, “Is it a function of what the owners do?” Yes, it is, because the owners can determine that they will give their journalists a day, two days, a week or two weeks to investigate a story and write it up properly researched. However, they do not give them that kind of time. Are there enough journalists working? I think we should have larger staffs of journalists, because we are using too much wire copy, too much canned copy of all kinds, and this is a function of the owners, who do it because it is cheaper. They make bigger profits that way.
There is a fine line between diminishing the quality and trying to reach a point where the public is still somewhat satisfied and will not turn their backs on the media, and crossing that line and killing the goose that lays the golden egg. We might be near that line.
Senator Eyton: Thank you, sir, for appearing this morning. You made some positive references to the Kent commission and to the government acting as a referee, but happily, that line of questioning, at least, was addressed by the Liberal cohort to my right, so I feel I can leave it well enough alone, other than to say I feel strongly that in almost all matters, the best governance I know is within my household; and beyond that it is my riding, or my block, and beyond that it is the municipality, and beyond that it is provincial, and the last choice would be federal, because it is simply removed.
I think there is a history of federal intervention that has proved unfortunate. The Kent commission, for instance, just kind of disappeared. It made its report, it made some noise; happily, it was not acted on, and it is largely ignored today. All that makes me happy, and I am happy that my Liberal friend feels much the same way.
The Chairman: This is a non-partisan inquiry.
Senator Eyton: I see that, yes.
Senator Eyton: Second, we have had some wonderful interviews with a great variety of people representing all different sectors of the media. I am on the committee, and my approach essentially is that I feel we are blessed with the media we have here in Canada; there are very few places where I would say it is better. I think we have better choice, more diversity, more responsible media and more information available to Canadians than, for example, to our American friends down south.
I travel a great deal, frequently in the U.S. I have great difficulty keeping up there, and I am always very happy to get back to Toronto, or, in this case, Montreal, and get my local fix; and it is not just a local fix, it is a fix that tells me something about what is happening in the world, what is happening in Africa and the Middle East, and in a rational, intelligent way.
I have taken the approach in this committee that the media in Canada are not in a state, with terrible problems that need to be fixed, but rather, we are blessed with good media doing a good job, and how can it be made better. I take a positive attitude to it.
Those are just a couple of personal comments. I would like to ask a little more about your school of journalism.
You said that the students are better than they ever were. However, I wonder if you could tell me a little more of the history and experience of your school, when was it started, what number of students do you deal with, where they come from, the sort of training that you try to give them and where they go once they have graduated.
Mr. Raudsepp: Sure. The journalism department at Concordia was founded 30 years ago; we are coming up to our 30th anniversary now. It started off as a relatively small school, offering only a minor in print, and then we expanded gradually. We moved into broadcasting, and now we offer a full range of programs in print, radio, television and Internet online journalism. We take in 86 students every year. It is a three year program, so we have 250 students, roughly, or a little fewer, at any given time.
We also have what we call a graduate diploma, which is for students who already have an undergraduate degree of any kind. They can do a one-year, three-term, very intensive program of full-time studies that essentially duplicates, but perhaps at a somewhat more sophisticated level, what the undergraduates do in three years, because they already are older, they are more mature. Many of them have a variety of degrees. They do not have to have studied journalism previously. We have had people with PhDs take that program, we have had veterinary surgeons, we have had engineers, business people, music grads — you name it — a lot of people with MAs. Recently, we have had quite a few lawyers coming into the program.
This is the kind of quality that I think you find in journalism schools nowadays. The idea is that we will take these students, who typically have very little media background, and, in either three years at the undergraduate level, or one year at the graduate level, turn them into capable journalists who can go out to work in any newsroom, whether print, broadcast or online. Generally speaking, it works. We have had a fair amount of success; we have graduates all over the country, all over the world. We get international students too.
It is becoming a little more difficult for some of them to find jobs now because the number of outlets has decreased, but still, there is no lack of interest in journalism. We are turning away students. As I say, we take one out of every three or four applicants. A lot of our students, if they stick with it, eventually can make a go of it in the media in some way or other, perhaps as freelancers. There is a lot more freelance work on the part of our graduates than used to be the case, and in some instances now, the graduates are saying that is what they are aiming for, a freelance career, because they want to be able to write about the things that they care about and are interested in. Sometimes, that is a bit of a pipe dream, because they find that as a freelancer you have to go where the market is, and you cannot always write what you want to write.
Senator Eyton: What are the backgrounds of the students? Do they come from all levels of society?
Mr. Raudsepp: Yes. Now, Concordia is not an elite school. We have a lot of students who are the first people in their families to go to university. Typically, it is more of an ethnic grounded clientele than McGill or some of the other universities. In the 26 years I have been there, the numbers have been fairly consistent in terms of male/female ratios — two-thirds women, one-third men. That is still the case. I do not think we see it yet being translated into newsrooms, where certainly the ratio is not two-thirds women. Very few newsrooms, if any, would have those kinds of numbers.
We get people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds and visible minorities, as well as not-so-visible minorities. It is a very healthy kind of mix for us. I think that the students cross-fertilize their different experiences, values and ideas. Concordia, as you know, has gone through some public disturbances over the last while.
Senator Eyton: It made news of its own.
Mr. Raudsepp: It made news of its own. However, these have generally been, I think, part of a process of readjustment, as people who come from other places are trying to settle into Canada and our way of life here, and it is not always an easy transition to make.
Senator Eyton: We are dealing with two issues that are important and I have distinguished between them. One is convergence, that is, the technology and what comes from that, and the second is concentration and common ownership.
You have really spoken against convergence and talked about the need to separate more than bring together. However, I would have thought that, from at least a purely business point of view, that convergence should provide me with the opportunity to do better, have a better balance sheet, make more money and be able to support more efforts, for example, international bureaus, better writers, better materials or better printed formats.
Is there not a case for what we call “intelligent convergence” that provides a better business model, so in fact you can do a better job of telling your story?
Mr. Raudsepp: Theoretically, that might be possible. I do not see it actually happening. I think a lot of the owners have taken the savings, the money, and run with it. They are not putting it back into the business to improve it in a substantial way, certainly not the news side of it. As I said earlier, in promoting their other programming and their other products, they are certainly spending more time and effort on that kind of cross-media advertising of each other's programming.
At the moment, I strongly believe that the drawbacks of convergence are much greater than any of the advantages, and will be perhaps for the foreseeable future, unless there is a dramatic change.
[Translation]
Senator Chaput: I am a francophone from Manitoba. My viewpoint is often that of the franco-Manitoban minority to which I belong. I do, however, like to examine the global aspect of a situation before making any suggestions. In this situation involving the media, I feel that the government has a comprehensive role to play. Without exercising any control, the government should, as you mentioned, play a more structured role, with a few criteria.
As we know, the print media exercise a real influence and have a serious impact. The media must respect certain fundamental values when they speak to Canadians. Therefore, the government has at least some responsibility in this area.
The media also have certain roles and responsibilities. There is no doubt that they are free to act as owners. After all, business is business. They also have the freedom of expression. This freedom of expression is very important and must remain, since it ensures that the newspapers truly reflect reality. But the media also have a social responsibility. They must inform, and do it fairly, because information can serve to influence.
The media also have a responsibility to meet the needs of Canadians. The Canadians of the future are the youth, but new Canadians are also the immigrants who have been coming to Canada for years and who are now finding their place within our country.
We must meet the needs of our youth and of this new minority, the new immigrants. In light of what you and Mr. Straw have said, young people identify with the Internet and are attracted by short articles that they can read through quickly. They do not buy newspapers, but they are ready to pay dearly for a ticket to see a live performance that interests them. The youth have needs that are not being met.
For immigrants, there are a number of newspapers published in the respective language of these cultural minorities. These newspapers are widely read. There is a need in this area, but there is also a requirement for international news. The growing number of immigrants want to know what is happening back home.
That said, what suggestions do you have for the future of our media?
Mr. Raudsepp: If I may, I would prefer to answer in English.
[English]
First of all, I agree with most of what you have said — in fact, pretty well all of it. I appreciate your concern for the youth and for new Canadians, and whether they are being properly served. That is a very difficult question, because I sometimes find, even amongst our own students, that they do not access the media as much as they should. Some of them are true media junkies, and they read, watch and listen to everything. However, there are also several who profess a desire to become journalists, but do not read the newspapers regularly. They will do it if they are asked to do so, or given an assignment to do so. If they are having that kind of a difficulty, what would it be like outside the confines of a journalism school?
I have three grown children of my own who do not live at home any more, but I have watched their media consumption patterns, and those of their friends who have nothing to do with journalism, and I think that it is absolutely true, as you say — and studies bear this out — that the youth are turning away from the media, certainly from the news media, to a great extent.
I am not really surprised by that, because if you look at the situation in Montreal, for example, at the English market, The Gazette has made efforts to access the youth market. They have had special pages that deal with youth music, culture and so on. They have had promotions that involve newspapers in the classroom. This is something that goes beyond Montreal, obviously. However, none of it has worked very well.
One of the reasons for that is that we have quite a number of free newspapers available. Our youth, if they want to know what is going on in the areas that interest them, pick up the Mirror or an Hour or a Voir or an Ici, which are the weekly tabloids that respond to their interests and talk about entertainment issues — not very much politics in there. Although there is a kind of a counter-culture mentality in there that frequently questions establishment policies and issues.
They are getting what they want. If something exciting happens, a major news event, they will turn to the Internet rather than to other sources. That is where they would get news about 9-11, for example, or things of that nature.
They have evolved a kind of culture and a lifestyle that do not involve constant use of the media. It is sporadic; it is on a need-to know-basis rather than a habit. I think most people of our generation do not feel the day is complete unless they have read the newspaper and watched the evening news so we know that all is right with the world and we can carry on with our lives. The youth do not feel that.
I am not sure what the answer is; it is a very difficult question. I think it bodes ill for our media, to some extent certainly. It means declining audiences, declining readerships, and that makes it more difficult to produce a product.
As far as new Canadians are concerned, I think that broadcasting becomes the major point of access. Again, talking about our local situation here, The Gazette has a column weekly whereby they introduce someone writing in a language other than English. However, I am not sure if that evokes more than a very limited response.
Broadcasting is the way to reach these people, through radio stations and television. I think that the CRTC should simply allow all that kind of programming. The CRTC made a big song and dance about Al-Jazeera and about the Italian satellite channel, tries to impose various kinds of conditions, and tries to suggest that the Italian market is already served by another station, so you cannot have this kind of competition. I think that is farcical. The CRTC should simply allow these radio stations, television stations, to broadcast, and if somebody crosses a line, there are other legal ways to deal with that. It should not be a pre-emptive censorship.
The Chairman: Thank you so much. We are out of time, so I will do something we do on occasion. I will ask my question and ask you to send us your answer in writing.
I am going back to your suggestion that we should recommend some form of controls on media ownership. If we plan to say something should be done, we have to be a little more specific about what that something might be. I would like to know in more detail what you think would be appropriate, because every silver lining has its cloud and every solution brings its own disadvantages. What are you talking about? Are you talking about banning all cross-media ownership? Are you talking about controlling cross-media ownership in certain markets, and if so, on what criteria — by audience size? By geography? Bearing in mind that in a free market you have to have willing buyers as well as willing sellers, who, in your view, would be more acceptable buyers if media properties come up for sale, companies that are focused entirely on the media, even if that includes cross-media, or conglomerates that maybe are interested in only one branch of the media, but have many other business interests? You see the complexities?
Mr. Raudsepp: Sure.
The Chairman: Could you address them for us, please?
Mr. Raudsepp: I will try.
The Chairman: We will circulate your answer.
Mr. Raudsepp: I do not guarantee that the answer will solve the problem, but I will do my best.
The Chairman: No, but you make a suggestion, and I would just like to be a little more clear in my mind about the precise nature of that suggestion.
Mr. Raudsepp: Sure, that is fair enough.
The Chairman: We thank you very much for being with us. It has been interesting and I am sorry to cut things off. It is the unhappy duty of any chair to have to cut things off.
Mr. Raudsepp: Of course. Thank you for hearing me out, and I wish you good deliberations.
[Translation]
The Chairman: We will now welcome the representatives of the Syndicat des travailleurs de l'information from the Journal de Montréal. Mr. Martin Leclerc is president of the union and Mr. Jérôme Dussault is vice-president.
Welcome to the committee. I see that you have a rather thick brief, and I fear that you will not have enough time to read through it.
Mr. Martin Leclerc, President of the Syndicat des travailleurs de l'information du Journal de Montréal: In order to guide the committee's work, we thought it would be a good idea to collate all of the public positions on cross-media ownership and the concentration of the press that we have taken over the years.
The Chairman: We are delighted. I would like to ask you to limit your presentation to 10 minutes so that we might have time to ask some questions.
Mr. Leclerc: Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished committee members, on behalf of the 300 or so members of the Syndicat des travailleurs de l'information du Journal de Montréal, thank you for inviting us to contribute to the work of your committee.
By being here, we hope to help you better understand or identify the negative impact of the recent and major changes in media ownership in Canada on the quality and diversity of information that our fellow citizens receive every day.
This topic is as vast as the Quebecor empire has become. I will therefore limit my comments to the effects felt at a practical level in our newsrooms since Quebecor acquired the TVA television network. As part of the Quebecor Media family, we are certainly in a better position to comment on the effects of cross-ownership and concentration of the press as seen from the inside.
In 1997, when Quebecor came forward to purchase Télévision Quatre Saisons, our union appeared before the CRTC, stating we were in favour of the transaction on the condition that the television network establish a monitoring committee to ensure the independence of the TQS newsroom and the Journal de Montréal newsroom, as regards both information and promotion. The CRTC finally created a committee with limited powers that has ultimately not lived up to expectations for it.
In 1999, our union filed a complaint about two actions by TQS senior management regarding the content of the Journal de Montréal to influence the information printed about this network. This complaint — a copy of which you will find attached to the document that we submitted this morning — to the TQS monitoring committee could not be investigated because Journal de Montréal senior management refused to meet members of the monitoring committee. It was stated at the time that the jurisdiction of the CRTC did not extend to the Quebecor empire's newspapers.
In concluding its work, the monitoring committee, of which Mr. Pierre Trudel was a member, nevertheless presented two important findings. The first conclusion was the following quote:
The independence of the newsrooms of media outlets belonging to as large a group as Quebecor is of concern to the public... All partners in this family of businesses should strive to effectively guarantee the real and perceived independence of newsrooms of the various media outlets belonging to CQI (Quebecor).
The monitoring committee's second conclusion was as follows:
Distinctions must be made between pressures jeopardizing editorial freedom and marketing alliances deriving from standard industry practices. The activities of TQS and CQI (Quebecor) make sense from a business point of view... But this phenomenon, which is entirely legitimate in a market economy, must not jeopardize media workers' editorial independence.
Since the experience of TQS was neither conclusive nor satisfactory as regards guarantees to the public of the quality and diversity of information, the union I represent decided in 2001 to appear before the Quebec Commission on Culture and at CRTC hearings to speak out against Quebecor's acquisition of the TVA network. Attached are copies of the documents filed at that time.
The following excerpt from our presentation best summarizes our concerns from three years ago. This quote is taken from the brief that we tabled with the CRTC in 2001.
If this acquisition is approved, Quebecor would gain tremendous media control. A singer could be featured on the front page of a Quebecor magazine and then appear on a Quebecor television program; her performance could be produced by a Quebecor subsidiary and then be critiqued by the Journal de Montréal or the Journal de Québec (Quebecor); she could see excerpts of the performance on a Quebecor Internet site, have her life profiled in a biography authorized by Quebecor, her picture printed on Quebecor T-shirts and her career revived by a new Quebecor record. Such influence over thought approaches totalitarianism. And just because this example is drawn from popular culture, that does not mean we should take it lightly.
As surprising as this might seem, this very closely approximates what is currently happening in the Quebecor empire.
The young singers of Star Académie have become megastars thanks to the Journal de Montréal, the Journal de Québec and various Quebecor magazines; they can also be viewed live on-line on a site for the exclusive use of Vidéotron clients; they launch records that are produced by Quebecor and sold at Archambault Musique, owned by Quebecor, and then give live performances that once again make the front pages of newspapers and magazines, in turn stimulating the sales of tickets, records and T-shirts.
A few months ago, our union filed a complaint with the Quebec press council denouncing these practices. The annoying tendency of Quebecor to integrate the promotion of its commercial activities into its newspapers' editorial content is no doubt logical and might seem like a success from a business perspective. It is nevertheless unacceptable in view of the tremendous responsibility incumbent on media owners and managers.
On a practical level, the advent of reality television shows such as Star Académie and Occupation Double on the TVA network has led to unprecedented measures by the managing editors of the Journal de Montréal. The first year, instead of relying on the services of reporters assigned to cover television, the Journal de Montréal hired two temporary journalists “in violation the collective agreement” to give full-time coverage for these two programs, guaranteeing them at least two pages every day! And just to be on the safe side, the managing editors also created a column whose author would keep an eye on the participants in these programs, seven days a week, through an Internet site.
In two years, Star Académie and Occupation Double have made front page headlines in the Journal de Montréal nearly 200 times, as if they were more important or influential news than municipal, provincial, national or international events.
The experience of recent years has clearly shown that Quebecor's commercial activities can exert a great influence over the editorial content of the empire's dailies; this is directly opposed to the public's right to fair and unbiased information. These practices, as we argued to the Quebec Press Council, not only undermine the credibility of our newspaper and its journalists, but also the confidence that many members of the public have in the information we publish every day.
It is no longer unusual to hear a radio host or newscaster ridicule a Quebecor headline that betrays this convergence in ownership. Mocking references to the Journal de Montréal have also become common currency during major televised galas featuring singers and television celebrities. Even the year-end comedy programs take shots at the newspaper.
This is what happened on the television show Ceci n'est pas un Bye Bye, broadcast on Radio-Canada at the end of 2003. The comedian Louis Morissette, appearing in sketches denouncing Quebecor's convergence, learned a few days later that he had just lost his new television show on TVA. It was out of fear of this kind of situation that we said in 2001 that such influence approximates totalitarianism.
A media empire that owns the largest French-language television network and accounts for nearly half the market of French-language dailies, not to mention interests in publishing, production and sales of arts magazines, books and records, clearly has the power to make or break careers.
During his recent appearance before you, Quebecor's spokesperson Luc Lavoie stressed that Quebecor managing editors and newsroom journalists have complete freedom to cover the news as they see fit. We have great respect for Mr. Lavoie's talents as a communicator, as he was one of the fine spin doctors of his generation when he worked on Parliament hill, but we absolutely do not share his point of view.
Mr. Lavoie spoke of the independence of newsrooms and of the mutual promotion of various media outlets in the empire. Ultimately, he fools no one. In other words, there is a phantom of the opera orchestrating this cross- promotion, and the Journal de Montréal is therefore not completely independent from TVA.
The cross-promotion strategy of Quebecor companies is encouraged and emphasized so much that the group recently launched an internal publication entitled Convergence, which seeks to highlight the benefits of this promotional strategy. In the first issue, the publication's editor wrote:
Therefore, in the first issue of Convergence, you will read how the businesses of Quebecor Media have passed the convergence test by making Star Académie a resounding success on Quebec television.
In addition, Ms. Marie-Claude Fichault, director of communications and promotion at the Journal de Montréal, highlighted the contribution of the editorial room by saying:
Our support was mostly editorial. Each day, we found information on Star Académie, from either the arts and entertainment sections of the newspapers or in Internet columns.
The journalists, photographers, and bureau chiefs of the Journal de Montréal are rigorous and meticulous media professionals, but Ms. Fichault's statements demonstrate perfectly that these salaried employees are not the ones deciding which subjects will make the front page of tomorrow's edition. These editorial choices are made exclusively by newsroom executives.
When assignments are distributed to journalists and photographers, each subject is treated according to journalistic best practices. But if everyone is called upon to cover events which serve the economic interests of Quebecor, we find ourselves surrounded by information that is biased right at the source, therefore undermining the interests of citizens.
At the end of the 1990s, Pierre-Karl Péladeau took over the company that his father founded and, it seems, inherited his father's talent for recruiting loyal managers. Even if Quebecor does not dictate policy to the heads of the editorial room, as Mr. Lavoie claimed during his appearance, this does not change the actual situation on the ground. As the old Quebecois expression goes, the heads of the editorial room know exactly which side their bread is buttered on.
In summary, the experience of the last three years has led us to believe that the CRTC's laissez-faire attitude and its decision to approve the merger of Quebecor and TVA has been profitable for Quebecor but detrimental for the diversity and quality of information in Canada.
Our conclusion therefore remains the same: In the name of public interest and out of respect for who we are, that is media professionals, cross-ownership of information media within the same market should be forbidden in Canada.
[English]
Senator Tkachuk: Just to clarify something I think you said — and I just want to make sure I was right — Quebecor owns 50 per cent of the news media, radio, television, and newspapers, in Montreal?
[Translation]
Mr. Leclerc: Yes. In Quebec, Quebecor owns half of all major dailies and also owns the most popular television network. This is true for Quebec, but Quebecor also owns nearly all of the magazines on the market.
[English]
Senator Tkachuk: Has there been criticism of the strong position of Quebecor in the news media in Quebec from the other newspapers or radio or television stations that do exist?
[Translation]
Mr. Leclerc: In 2001, following this transaction, there were a lot of protests from representatives of a variety of journalists' associations. The journalists of the television network TVA, different unions and union groups such as the Fédération nationale des communications held demonstrations and indicated that this transaction would be bad for the quality of information in Canada, particularly in Quebec where the market is not as broadly based.
With respect to the dominant position held by Quebecor in the market since that time, the media make constant reference to the treatment afforded Quebecor shows or economic interests in the newspapers.
[English]
Senator Tkachuk: This Star Académie, what is that? I am not from Quebec.
The Chairman: Canadian Idol.
Senator Tkachuk: Is that Canadian Idol in Quebec?
The Chairman: It is like Canadian Idol.
Senator Tkachuk: I thought that is what it was. I wanted to be sure because I thought it was quite funny. Are the journalists working on the newspapers and on television intimidated to ensure they follow the party line, or how does this all work?
[Translation]
Mr. Leclerc: Pressure is brought to bear much more subtly than through mere intimidation. They simply have to put the right people in the right places and the work is done without any problem.
A journalist working in the arts and entertainment section of the Journal de Montréal, for example, receives specific, daily instructions from his supervisor with respect to the topics to be dealt with in the next day's edition. If the journalist is told to fill two pages every day with news on Star Académie, the journalist is going to do his or her job, in a professional manner, and try to extract news related to this item, even if there is very little. In the final analysis, there is incredible coverage.
To give you some idea, at a certain time three or four journalists would be assigned to cover Star Académie at the Journal de Montréal. During this time, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, one lone parliamentary correspondent would cover all of the current events on the federal scene, even though these topics are of much greater importance for Canadians.
In our opinion, there is a certain social responsibility that is not being assumed by Quebecor, owner of important media, the most widely read daily in Quebec and the most widely read daily in Montreal. It is simply a matter of putting the right people in the right places so that clear messages are conveyed.
In 2003, our previous editor in chief, Mr. Bernard Brisset, presented certain arguments to senior management on the extent of the coverage the Journal de Montréal should give to television shows. Mr. Brisset was not at all in agreement with the extensive coverage of these items in the pages of the daily. A few weeks later, Mr. Brisset was dismissed.
I have worked for the Journal de Montréal for 14 years. During this time, we have had eight editors in chief, eight editors of the sports pages, and if my memory serves me correctly, four or five editors of the arts and entertainment section. The turnover at the managerial level is therefore very high. The people who are still in their jobs know perfectly well what they have to do in order to keep them for as long as possible: obey the instructions which come from above.
[English]
Senator Tkachuk: Would you support the concept, at least on the television side — not the newspaper side, because the CRTC does not really have much to do with it — of lifting the restrictions in Quebec and in Canada imposed by the CRTC, so that it would be easier for competitors to Quebecor to get into the marketplace?
[Translation]
Mr. Leclerc: From the journalists' point of view, any initiative which would increase the number of sources the public would have access to would be beneficial and something worth applauding.
You asked several questions of the previous witness on access to different media sources through the Internet. This access is indeed desirable. However, when media sources come from abroad, they're not always very accessible to the public. People have a hard time navigating and are less prone to consulting these sources.
It would be preferable to have a greater number of local and more diversified sources of information. Access for new players on the market must also be facilitated.
Senator Chaput: Mr. Leclerc, in 1997, when the transaction was being discussed, according to your document, the organization that you represent came out in favour of the transaction. What were the positive elements of the transaction that led you to take a favourable position? And had you been against this transaction, would that have affected the final decision?
Mr. Leclerc: In 1997, we were in favour of cross-ownership, Quebecor's purchase of the TQS network, for two reasons. Firstly, TQS was a small, fledging network up against some serious economic problems. Quebecor was the only organization that came forward and offered to acquire this television network and save it.
In our opinion, it seemed preferable to authorize cross-ownership rather than witness the disappearance of a French-language television network. However, our approval of this transaction was given on one condition: that a monitoring committee entrusted with real powers be established. This committee's mandate would be to ensure the mutual independence of the two media.
The CRTC therefore created a committee which had the mandate of ensuring watertight independence between newsrooms, so that for example, a journalist could not draft an article for the Journal de Montréal which could then be broadcast simultaneously on the TQS network. The goal was to prevent the work of journalists from one information medium from fuelling the work in another. However, in practice, the committee did not hold any power over the independence of promotional interventions between one media and another, or over the discussions that might take place between the upper management of one medium and another.
Pressure was put on columnists assigned to the television station. The newspaper editor demanded that he be allowed to read everything the columnists working at TQS wrote. When the committee was asked to investigate this situation, questions were put to the managers of Télévision Quatre Saisons. When the same questions were put to the managers of the Journal de Montréal, the answer was that the committee struck by the CRTC had absolutely no jurisdiction. Consequently, they refused to answer these questions.
The investigation therefore hit this road block and there was never any follow-up on the matter. We realized that the committee did not have any power and that in practice, the independence of the two media was not protected.
Senator Chaput: When you demanded that this committee be created and when that proposal was accepted, was the committee's mandate and its implementation put in writing?
Mr. Leclerc: No, no document was produced as such. However, we insisted on two specific points. We wanted to make sure that the committee had the mandate of monitoring the independence of the two media, where both information and promotion was concerned.
You will notice in the first index tabs following the speech and the organizational chart in the document we read to you, examples of Star Académie coverage on the first page of the Journal de Montréal. The exact same thing occurred when TQS, at a certain point, launched its new autumn programming and it made the front page of the Journal de Montréal. The entire front page of the newspaper announces TQS's new programming, a headline that in no way serves the public interest, nor does it discharge the newspaper's mandate to inform people properly.
Senator Chaput: In retrospect, if you could start all over, what would you change in the process, other than being against the transaction? Because ultimately it was the survival of TQS which motivated your support of this transaction, correct?
Mr. Leclerc: Yes, we supported it because the survival of a network was at stake. If we had to do it all over again, without knowing what has happened since, I believe we would ask other journalists' groups to join with us and support this initiative. We would have proposed that a clear, specific document be produced to illustrate all the ways that information at the Journal de Montréal can influence the commercial interests of Quebecor. We would also have asked that a truly effective monitoring committee be established to oversee the entire matter.
[English]
Senator Munson: Should the government now step in and break up this monopoly?
[Translation]
Mr. Leclerc: In certain European countries, when a percentage of media ownership has been reached, media empires can be forced to sell certain assets in order to return to the permitted level of ownership.
One can always dream, but I believe that in practice, for now, the current mechanism would be very difficult to dismantle. A clause would have to be added providing that when these empires are dismantled or whittled down, their rebuilding is forbidden; or that when they are sold or transferred, they cannot be sold or transferred in their entirety, but must be transferred piecemeal in order to avoid the resurgence of the same problem.
For now, we could at most create a serious body in charge of monitoring what is actually going on at Quebecor.
[English]
Senator Munson: I was curious about the intimidation. Could you be more specific about how journalists were intimidated at Journal de Montréal or at TVA?
[Translation]
Mr. Leclerc: As I said earlier, I don't think we can talk about intimidation. These are much more subtle practices.
I gave the example of a young columnist, named Patrick Lagacé, who was working at the television station and covering the events on certain shows including Star Académie and Occupation Double. He took the liberty of criticizing these shows or of expressing a critical perspective on what he saw on television. Then, all of a sudden, he was transferred to another position, in the general news section, because what he wrote, I presume, did not please upper management. He was therefore replaced by journalists who favoured more factual coverage, coverage that was also perhaps less critical.
This is the type of incident that occurs. One need not stand over the shoulder of a journalist, give him a slap on the wrist and recite the words he must write in order to orient information. He simply must be told to cover such and such a specific angle of a news story or of activities going on in Montreal.
The document that I gave you includes several examples, particularly on the activities of Vidéotron. When Vidéotron introduces new free channels on cable television, this piece of news automatically becomes an article that appears in the Journal de Montréal, stating that it is from now on possible to enjoy 12 new free television channels.
The same thing can happen for Archambault Musique, which is the music retail chain of Quebecor. If Archambault Musique decides to penetrate the French market, that becomes the subject of a series of articles. If it starts selling Star Académie T-shirts, that becomes the subject of an article in the newspaper.
It is simply a matter of handing down an order to a journalist and telling him to write an article on a given subject, and the journalist has no other choice than to do what he is told. Even if he is not told what precise words to write, if he writes about subjects which constantly promote the interests of Quebecor, the information is therefore biased and manipulated at the source, without journalists being intimidated.
[English]
Senator Munson: I do not know if this is important or not, but I was looking at the breakdown of Quebecor — and I always get curious, I used to be a reporter — it says “mystery partnership.” We had a witness in Toronto last week who was fighting Mr. Black and Mr. Radler, and he had a hard time in his case because he did not know who owned what.
In your opinion, in this day and age, should that partnership be public, in the free and democratic environment that we live in?
[Translation]
Mr. Leclerc: That's a good question. I have no idea. I was not expecting this question and I've never investigated it. But given the importance of media in our society, I presume that it is preferable that the identity of all the people who own interests in these media be publicly known. In our opinion, the greater the transparency, the better the public interest is served.
The Chairman: Quebecor also owns the Sun Media chain.
Mr. Leclerc: Yes.
The Chairman: It has just gotten into television in Toronto.
Mr. Leclerc: Yes.
The Chairman: Have you had any contact with anglophone journalists, from Toronto or elsewhere, from the Quebecor empire? Do they share these concerns?
Mr. Leclerc: Your question is very interesting. When the transaction was made, a few years ago, when Quebecor was trying to acquire Sun Media, we immediately began establishing contacts with our colleagues. It is a non-unionized newspaper chain. They had quite a few layoffs, because they were not really protected. We then had our collective agreement translated into English and travelled to meet them to explain how things worked in Quebec. Since then, our exchanges have been very good and communication is adequate.
The Toronto Sun negotiated its first collective agreement last spring. Today, the London Free Press is unionized and we are in contact with them as well as with the Winnipeg Sun.
We had a meeting, about two months ago, with people from the Toronto Sun in order to let them know what they should expect following the acquisition of Television 1 in Toronto. We told them that it was possible that what happened with Star Académie and Occupation Double would occur with this television station. They were simply appalled to hear our stories. Do they have the means to defend themselves? I don't think so — nor do we.
In Quebec, in Montreal, the Journal de Montréal has one of the best collective agreements of all daily newspapers in North America. Our collective agreement covers almost all aspects of professional clauses. Almost all imaginable protections are included in our collective agreement. However, there was nothing we could do to defend ourselves. We spoke out to this end, specifically before the Quebec Press Council, which is an honour-system tribunal. These representations were not binding on Quebecor, but at least, this honour-system tribunal sketches out the path to follow for Quebec media.
Therefore, that is where we are at. We must turn to entities such as this one in order to put forward our grave concerns with respect to quality of information.
Earlier, I believe I noticed some smiles around the table when I was describing what is done to promote the singers of Star Académie. Imagine the impact this kind of media attention could have on an idea in the political sphere or the business world. Out of seven million Quebeckers, more than half, that is 4.2 million per week, consume one Quebecor information product. If this trend to monopolize information in this manner becomes widespread, there could be detrimental consequences for society.
Your committee is well positioned to assess the situation. For our part, we are trying to multiply our public interventions in order to make our concerns known, because on the ground, we have no defence against this scourge.
The Chairman: You are undoubtedly aware that representatives of the CRTC appeared before our committee. Questions were put to them with respect to monitoring committees, that is do they exist only to receive complaints rather than to exercise active surveillance? We also asked some questions on the issue of Star Académie.
With respect to the committees, we were told that a follow-up to the committee was not done, as promised. Quebecor was not the only example where the CRTC had imposed such a committee.
With respect to Star Académie, the head of the CRTC stated that he felt that the idea of convergence or cross promotion was excellent. He added that he would like to see this concept applied in English Canada, because it is a good way to promote artists within Canadian society. I am under the impression that you do not share this point of view.
Mr. Leclerc: Indeed.
The Chairman: How can we change the CRTC's mandate in order to better deal with this problem? Do you have any concrete proposals to this end? I made note of your recommendation with respect to cross ownership. However, here I am talking about the mandate, the vision imposed by the CRTC. Do you foresee any changes on this front?
Mr. Leclerc: I would like to raise two points with respect to the CRTC. The first difficulty is that the CRTC has no jurisdiction over the print media. The CRTC must focus on the impact of transactions on electronic medias. Its mandate therefore must be broadened. But should it be broadened in order to consider additional factors and impose more stringent rules with respect to percentages when the buyout of a television station or radio station will mean that the one taking over will become a player in the world of cross-media ownership? For now, our practical experience has shown that cross-media ownership is a failure when it comes to the quality of information. It is fine if the president of the CRTC believes that it is beneficial for the Canadian public to enhance the Canadian “star system.” We claim that if Star Académie is a good television show, and if it is watched by three million viewers in Quebec, it will be covered in any case by journalists, but in a much more random manner, according to the level of interest at the time. As a consequence, there is no need to turn journalists into marketing agents, nor to publish two or three pages on a daily basis in the newspaper in order to systematically promote these shows. In our opinion, this practice violates the social responsibility that media heads must display towards the public.
[English]
Senator Eyton: You are obviously concerned about concentration. I happen to believe that most of the issues you talk about can be solved by the marketplace. There is a marketplace there, and as long as it is vital and working it will bring its own solutions. That notion stems from a belief that you must offer satisfactory goods and services, at satisfactory prices to consumers, and the consumers will make those choices. That applies to both small and large companies.
You have talked particularly about Quebecor. I just want to remind you of concerns that Canadians have had from time to time about concentration. Going back not so many years — and this is off the cuff; I am sure there are many more examples — there was a great concern about the Reitman family, that they were too big and were getting bigger and that, therefore, there was a pricing problem and the government should intervene.
In the liquor business, there was a concern for a long time that the Bronfman family was too dominant and that, therefore, somehow they had to be controlled one way or another.
In transportation, Canadian Pacific was considered far too big and far too influential and that something had to be done about it.
With respect to each of those examples, they have gone, and that is all within the last 15 or 20 years, I suspect the same thing will apply to the media. There are some hard examples there.
In terms of families, just going back a few years, the Sifton family was a pre-eminent family in publishing, and that is gone now. There is apparently a young relative that has put together some community newspapers, but in terms of big city journalism the Sifton family is no longer in the business. The Thomson family have exited publishing entirely, and there was a great concern about them for a while. Conrad Black was a pre-eminent figure in publishing, and there was a great concern about him, but he is now gone.
Hence, in a vital marketplace where consumers have choices, they will in fact dictate or mandate whether big enterprises should survive or whether they somehow should end up in some other form, and perhaps in some other hands. Do you not agree with that general thesis, that the marketplace is the best means of monitoring and causing evolution in concentration?
Let me put a subnote to that — that is, that my own belief is that the government is the worst authority to involve in that process.
[Translation]
Mr. Leclerc: Your statement holds true to the extent that there is a large number of players in the field. The previous witness told us that there are approximately 40 daily newspapers in Ontario. I understand then that a newspaper editor who compromises his responsibilities towards readers may suffer more considerable damage to his competition's benefit.
In Quebec, the situation is different because the number of players has now been very much reduced. We now find ourselves in the presence of a duopoly, or something of the kind. Power Corporation owns five to seven daily newspapers, and half of the francophone press, and Quebecor owns the other half.
Does the fact that the quality of information is dropping at the Journal de Montréal mean that it may disappear? That is very unlikely. Given cross-media ownership and the large number of publications it owns, it becomes very appealing for advertisers, who support the media, to buy advertising space in order to reach an ever-growing public. As a consequence, since there are fewer players, the public has a dwindling range of choices.
There is a lot of talk about Quebecor, but we also have to look into alliances which could be created between Power Corporation and Radio-Canada. Such commercial alliances between a Crown corporation such as Radio-Canada and Power Corporation or La Presse raise new concerns.
The president of the Syndicat des communications de Radio-Canada, during a meeting two weeks ago, told me that the day Dr. Hans Blix tabled his report on the existence of arms of mass destruction in Iraq, this news clip had to be interrupted because, under an agreement signed with Power Corporation, the show La Cuisine de Ricardo had to be aired. This news clip broadcast live from New York was cut off in order to broadcast La Cuisine de Ricardo!
We have also noticed such systematic practices on the radio. Monday morning, on Radio-Canada, La Presse's personality of the week is interviewed. We are in the presence of two currents. Never, on public affairs shows broadcast on the TVA network is a journalist from La Presse invited to share his opinion. Systematically, a journalist from the Journal de Montréal is always called upon.
At Radio-Canada, we have noticed the opposite. Radio-Canada receives 95 per cent of its journalists from La Presse and not the Journal de Montréal or any other subsidiaries of Quebecor, because there are commercial agreements to this effect.
I therefore agree with your comment. When there is a large number of players, the one who does not provide quality to the public would tend to disappear from the market. However, when there are no more than two big players left, we find ourselves in the presence of two major poles. What will happen if one of these two players disappears? Into whose hands will he fall and what will his intentions be? These are significant societal concerns which worry us.
[English]
Senator Tkachuk: So how much play did the Journal de Montréal — and I am not sure if the union had a position — how much play would there have been on, for example, what happened at Concordia University with the former Prime Minister of Israel not being allowed to speak at that university?
[Translation]
Mr. Leclerc: You would like to know the importance of the media coverage given these events?
Senator Tkachuk: Yes.
Mr. Leclerc: I recall that media coverage was totally adequate. We placed great importance on these events in our pages. These articles perhaps did not appear on the front page, but on pages 5 or 6 of the newspaper. It would have been a lead article with a large photo to illustrate the situation.
[English]
Senator Tkachuk: Was there an editorial position?
[Translation]
Mr. Leclerc: There is no editorial position at the Journal de Montréal. We have opinion columnists who are free to write what they wish on the subject of current political events or anything else. For example, Michel C. Auger is an opinion columnist at the Journal de Montréal. He is renowned as neither a sovereignist nor a federalist, nor a Liberal nor a Conservative. However, we have a columnist who was the former P.Q. minister, Ms. Lise Payette, and a former liberal minister, Mr. Jean Cournoyer.
From its inception, with Mr. Pierre Péladeau, the policy of editorial neutrality has been in place at the Journal de Montréal. I presume that it is there in order to not alienate a segment of the electorate. We allow columnists to write as they wish on their subject.
I was a parliamentary reporter with the Journal de Montréal in Ottawa for three years, including the referendum period, and I was never given an assignment with instructions intended to have an influence on my writing. I wrote articles that may have caused problems for Premier Lucien Bouchard, I wrote others that may have been detrimental to the image of the Bloc Québécois, the official opposition at the time, and I criticized certain government activities. But no one ever interfered to criticize me or to dictate the positions I should take.
[English]
Senator Merchant: You wanted the CRTC to act as the referee. Let me just paint a scenario here for a moment. I sometimes have trouble figuring out how the CRTC works because, first of all, the CRTC commissioners are appointed to their position. Very frequently, they come from the media itself. As such, as commissioners, they sit in judgement of the media. Also, frequently, once a commissioner's term has ended, he or she returns to the industry and works as a consultant to media companies or, in some fashion or another, for the same company they sat in judgment of as a commissioner. There is this very familial kind of relationship.
I do not know what the answer is. Perhaps there should be an arrangement whereby, once the individual's term as commissioner to the CRTC expires, he or she becomes eligible for a good pension or looks for a job outside the industry. I find this kind of very close relationship a little bothersome. What are you feelings on this matter?
[Translation]
Mr. Leclerc: Allow me to tell you about an experience we had with the CRTC that was not at all appreciated.
We had tabled two complaints with the CRTC concerning Quebecor's behaviour. One of these complaints concerned Télévision Quatre Saisons and the other the TVA network. I do not remember to whom the complaints were addressed, but these persons were to convey the complaints to the review committee to have them investigated.
Surprisingly, looking at the Journal de Montréal we saw the people we were dealing with at the CRTC concerning these complaints seated at Pierre-Karl Péladeau's table during a Star Académie show in Montreal. I do not know if this event appeared in several other publications, but it certainly showed a blatant lack of judgment on the part of people who are supposedly neutral and whose mandate is to make decisions as arbiters. We saw these people as a last line of defence, as they were the final players we would have to deal with before the transaction went through. And there were these people, responsible for enforcing the rules, at the first opportunity in our daily, in our paper, sitting around a table with the president of the company, a glass of wine in hand, enjoying Star Académie. What nerve!
That these people responsible for rendering decisions and upon whom the fate of these transactions depended should afterwards find employment within the media; that the people who negotiated these transactions should hire them after the fact poses real problems. We should have certain hiring or appointment rules under which a CRTC employee could not work in the media sector for a four or five-year period following a CRTC examination of the media in question.
Our collective agreement at the Journal de Montréal states that if a journalist wishes to go into politics and run in an election, he will not be allowed to write on subjects dealing with municipal, provincial or federal politics, as the case may be, for a period of five years following these activities.
We clearly have to have certain limits. The fact that such a relationship was observed between members of a federal body such as the CRTC and media management was an embarrassing situation.
[English]
The Chairman: Senator Merchant, I am sorry, but we are fresh out of time. In fact, we may have run over, because this has been such an interesting session.
[Translation]
Mr. Leclerc, Mr. Dussault, we thank you for your testimony as well as for the documentation that you have provided to us. The issues you have addressed are not only interesting but important.
Mr. Leclerc: Thank you for your invitation.
The Chairman: Honourable senators, I am very sorry to have to leave you now. The Senate Chamber is to decide on our committee's budget and I must be present for the vote. This inconvenience was unforeseen, but such is life.
I also present my apologies to the members of the public. I can assure you that I will read the transcript of the testimony that will be given in my absence most attentively. Honourable Senator Tkachuk will preside as competently, if not more so, than myself, and I thank him for his willingness to take on the job.
We will take a short break in order to allow Senator Tkachuk to take the chair. We will then invite the next witnesses to come forward. I will return in time for tomorrow's hearing.
[English]
Senator David Tkachuk (Deputy Chairman) in the chair.
The Deputy Chairman: We now welcome representatives of the Quebec Association of Community Radio Broadcasters. We have with us Ms. Gagnon, the Secretary-General, and Ms. Magalie Paré, a member of the Board of Directors.
You know the drill. You can make a 10-minute presentation, and then we will proceed to questions.
[Translation]
Ms. Magalie Paré, Director General of CINQ FM Radio Centre-Ville and Member of the Board of Directors of ARCQ: Honourable senators, I am Director General of CINQ FM Radio Centre-Ville and Secretary Treasurer to the Association des radiodiffuseurs communautaires du Québec. With me today is Lucie Gagnon, Executive Secretary of the Association des radiodiffuseurs communautaires du Québec.
The Association des radiodiffuseurs communautaires du Québec (ARCQ) is pleased to testify before the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications today in order to express the concerns of its members regarding media concentration and the phenomenon of media content standardization that results from it.
Relying on our experience with community media, we will emphasize the importance of maintaining diversity of media information in Quebec and in Canada during our presentation today. We believe that citizens are currently demonstrating a desire and even a need to have access to airwaves that belong to them and in which they can see themselves, and that we must support this movement.
ARCQ represents 26 community radio stations in Quebec that broadcast more than 3,000 hours of original programming per week, thanks to the contribution of 1,500 volunteers and 230 employees. These radio stations include approximately 18,000 members and reach more than 650,000 listeners in 16 regions of Quebec every week.
Community radio responds to the population's wish to have radio service that talks to it about its own environment and in which it sees itself. For example, we at CINQ FM broadcast programming in seven languages in the heart of Montreal. Radio Centre-Ville is on the lookout for new trends as well as being culturally and socially involved. It offers a range of programs that represent a resource for new immigrants as well as a forum for expression for all the voices of our society, thereby helping each one to feel a little bit more of a citizen day by day.
Ms. Lucie Gagnon, Executive Secretary of the Association des radiodiffuseurs communautaires du Québec: For other regions, such as the Magdalen Islands, the community radio station is the only local radio service in the area. The people count on this “front-line” service to inform them, to support local discussions, to give a voice to their citizens and to acknowledge and recognize their culture. Local businesses also benefit from the presence of this community radio station which broadcasts their publicity at an affordable price and encourages local economic development. It serves as the station for local emergencies as well as for local events and celebrations. It is the Island people's radio.
In every case, community radio stations are born of citizens' initiatives and commitment. They all seek to have better local and regional media representation. The emergence of new community radio stations — there are currently some 15 in Quebec — leads us to believe that commercial and public radio stations are no longer sufficiently concerned with people's immediate environments. People thus find themselves obliged to appropriate this mission of media diversity and local news.
Community radio stations are taking on an increasingly burdensome and costly mission involving diversity, access to the airwaves and the relevance of content for their area. And yet they have dwindling resources with which to do so. We believe that the major networks are taking advantage of the media grid they have created in order to monopolize an excessive market share of radio advertising, given the number of listeners. Small stations, such as community stations, lose a growing part of their operating funds in this way.
Ms. Paré: In its reports, the CRTC paints a positive picture of the radio industry by generalizing the data on the profitability of stations. The monitoring report on broadcast policy published by the CRTC in 2003 shows the financial situation of commercial radio stations by comparing stations according to their broadcast technologies (AM or FM). This does not illustrate the precarious financial situation of independent or community radio stations.
Our theory is simple: things are going well for the networks, and things are not going well for the stations outside the networks. The last independent commercial radio stations will end up being absorbed by the networks, and community radio stations will suffer death by a thousand cuts. Local content will disappear. Who will dare to examine and assess this reality?
According to our data, one third of Quebec's community radio stations are experiencing financial crises that threaten their survival, and another third have had to reduce their services significantly in order to maintain their financial integrity.
As an example, we would like to remind you that private radio has, on average, $221 at its disposal to produce one hour of programming and that community radio has only $43 with which to do the same job. Private radio has 17 employees on average whereas community radio has only nine.
Ms. Gagnon: Community radio is not, as many would believe, a rather amateur organization that costs less because it relies in part on the work of volunteers. Many community stations operate in areas where no volunteers are available. To produce and present four hours of daily programming from Monday to Friday requires approximately one paid employee. In an urban setting, between 20 and 30 volunteers will take on that same programming. But the station has to hire a person to take on the coordination and support of this team. Production costs for a community radio station are not reduced by the contribution of volunteers. In fact, what limits a community radio station's budget is the advertising market in which it operates, the donation and fundraising activities market, or the perceived value of these, as well as the size of the population it is serving.
People want local news and content. Radio is the perfect medium to offer this, but too often it has simply become a music box. Speaking of commercial stations, in the regions, people have criticized businesses that just “plunk down a station,” to illustrate certain broadcast services that they are being offered. In a typical situation, people have to be content with the few hours of programming per week that are produced locally where they are given the weather. Then, programs that come from regional or national networks are rebroadcast. Advertising revenues are drained from the station and are in this way “exported” from the region to the benefit of the network.
Ms. Paré: The Government of Canada, in its role as regulator, must recognize the heritage work of community broadcasters. They must recognize the alternative that is the standardized media content that is completely detached from local reality that results from media concentration and cross-media ownership. From that perspective, the government must recognize the threat, particularly on the economic front, that the phenomenon of concentration represents for the survival of community radio stations. Community radio stations represent one of the last bastions in the face of absorption of media content by the major networks. We feel the government must act in order to preserve people's commitment. It must act in order to save our contribution to diversity and to encourage the search for media productions that are concerned with their environment.
One strategy focused on reaching this goal would be to ensure that the community sector always has a place reserved for it by the Canadian broadcast system, in whatever technological format it might use, both today and in the future. Moreover, frequencies must be set aside in anticipation of the emergence of community radio stations, so that communities can express their local interests. Also, cable operators must provide the people with a channel reserved for local community television. We want to strongly emphasize the following: the regulation of the Canadian system is more than necessary, it is vital for the survival of the Canadian identity in all of its wealth and diversity, at the national, regional and local levels.
Ms. Gagnon: Furthermore, measuring diversity in terms of available musical formulas, as the CRTC currently does, teaches us little about the real verbal content of radio programming, about the production of local news and about the access that people have to sources of diversified information. The CRTC must better fulfill its monitoring role as concerns the verbal content of radio programming and the financial health of stations that are not part of networks. Our intention here is not to create surveillance of the editorial independence of media, but rather to ensure enforcement of the Broadcasting Act as regards diversity.
On the economic front, we are currently working with the National Campus and Community Radio Association (NCRA) on the creation of a support fund for campus and community radio stations. This fund could prove to be a decisive initiative in order to assure the presence and durability of community radio stations' activities. In fact, it aims at supporting local production by compensating for the losses of revenue caused by the impact of concentration on our market share of advertising. We recommend that governments at all levels support this initiative, for the health of local, provincial and Canadian differences.
Ms. Paré: We feel it would be appropriate here to quote an excerpt from the Heritage Committee's report on cultural diversity produced in June 2003:
The Committee is concerned that community, local and regional broadcasting services have become endangered species, and that many parts of Canada are being underserved... The harsh reality...is that local non- news programming seems to be almost non-existent.
Finally, honourable senators, we must remember that over the last few years there have been several commissions and committees who have studied the phenomenon of media concentration and cross-media ownership. The reports they published have all emphasized, in one way or another, the importance and the urgency of acting in order to maintain local and alternative content in broadcasting. None of their proposals or recommendations have brought about any concrete action. Despite everything, we have rallied our meagre resources in order to produce a brief and participate in this new consultation. We continue to believe in the importance of acting so that people in every region can know and acknowledge each other, and be acknowledged. We hope that our efforts, as well as those of your committee, will bring about the success we all expect.
Senator Chaput: My question concerns the other community radio stations across Canada. You represent the Association des radios communautaires du Québec. As you know, minority francophone communities have community radio stations in several other Canadian provinces. There is one in Manitoba. The station serving Saskatchewan francophones has experienced certain difficulties. These community radio stations are having the same problems as yours but their problems are even worse because of the fact that they are in a minority situation. Is there some connection between your association and the one that represents them? Do you sometimes discuss strategies or other subjects with these associations?
Ms. Gagnon: Historically, francophone community radio stations outside of Quebec were created later on. Quebec's community radio stations have existed for 30 years. This in part explains the fact that a different association exists.
There are 18 francophone community radio stations outside of Quebec. The Alliance des radios communautaires du Canada is one of the partners with whom we work in terms of representation in the regulated areas. For example, when we are talking about copyright, the Alliance des radios communautaires du Canada, the National Campus and Community Radio Association and l'Association des radios communautaires du Québec act as a coalition to defend our points of view.
There is therefore collaboration in practice, but this happens mostly as regards public representation rather than at the level of production.
[English]
Senator Merchant: I am an immigrant myself, having been born in Greece. You said that you broadcast in several languages. We live in a very polyglot society, and as such I think people look to their own roots. Even though I have lived in Canada for more than 40 years, I still have a very strong connection to Greek things and what is happening in my community.
We have heard from the ethnic press — I am trying to draw a parallel with radio — and they are struggling. When the ethnic press presented to us, they said that a certain amount of government advertising should go to them because they represent a certain percentage of the population. They said that the dollars amount of advertising dollars that should go to the ethnic press should correlate with the number of people they were serving.
You talked about having financial restraints and problems. What do you want of the government? What is it you looking at, other than the frequency on the radio? How do you survive? Where does your funding come from?
I am interested to know whether you see a correlation between the press and the radio.
[Translation]
Ms. Gagnon: In the brief we presented this morning, we requested, amongst other things of course, that frequencies be reserved, but we also asked for support for the creation of a fund which would in effect be an economic support. We are currently trying to convince the CRTC to support this fund and to ensure that a portion of the network commercial broadcasters' revenues be allocated to this fund, somewhat like the fund for cultural or musical productions.
As far as advertising is concerned, a standard already exists in Quebec which was adopted by the provincial government in 1995, if memory serves me well, aimed at ensuring that 4 per cent of government advertising dollars would be spent on community media. This includes radio stations, television stations and print media as well as a certain number of media broadcasts in different languages. However, this measure has not been respected. The government spends about 2.8 per cent on community media in Quebec each and every year. We feel that this proportion is less than what we represent as an audience, as a public and as a market. But these media purchases are made through advertising agencies and they are based on tools like BBM polls which are controlled by the major networks. These measures have had little success for the moment, even though we continue to work very hard to make sure they are complied with.
The Alliance des radios communautaires du Canada has worked with the Secretary of State for Official Languages in order to get a similar standard enforced for francophone community radio stations outside Quebec. The results are not yet conclusive, but the work is moving forward at a moderate pace. These measures aim, to some extent, to offset market shortcomings and the imbalance that open competition cannot redress. And yet we still have not managed to have this measure enforced. It is an interesting concept, but it would take more than political will to ensure that this measure is respected.
As far as the other financial support measures for community media are concerned, we are asking to be recognized. This may seem like an obvious request, but it is not. We are asking to be recognized as broadcasters. We are asking to be recognized as a heritage business in Canada — which is not currently the case. None of the financial measures and programs that are currently in place in Canada to support cultural broadcasters are available to community radio stations. By requesting the recognition of our organizations as businesses that disseminate Canadian heritage, we are asking for access to the existing grant programs, that already have budgets, to which we still have no access because we are not recognized as broadcasters. Those are essentially the steps that we are asking for now.
Community radio stations in Canada are the media that receive the least government support. It may seem a surprising fact. However, the measures that exist to support magazines and television production in Canada are far more significant than those for community media.
As an example, Quebec has a support program for community radio stations that does not exist in the other provinces in this country. This government funding represents approximately 20 per cent of the total budget of community stations, that is barely two million dollars. A significant portion of this amount is given in the form of exchanges. It takes the form of production contracts with the government by which the latter asks certain stations to produce a series of programs with clearly defined goals. This does not represent direct support for these media's operations, but rather an exchange of services.
Have I answered your question?
[English]
Senator Merchant: Yes, and are you talking federal government? Are you talking provincial government? You crossed lines there, and I am unclear as to what you were talking about.
[Translation]
Ms. Gagnon: The federal government does not support community radio stations except for francophone stations outside Quebec. The federal government has no support program. The programs to support the development of culture and Canadian heritage are not accessible to community radio stations.
Quebec has a program called the Programme de soutien aux médias communautaires. This program pays out between $10,000 and $40,000 annually to each community radio station.
[English]
Senator Merchant: From the Quebec government?
Ms. Gagnon: Yes.
Senator Eyton: Perhaps it is my ignorance, but I was not aware of the importance of community radio and your association here in Quebec. On the face of it, the numbers are impressive: You talk about 1,500 volunteers, 230 employees, 18,000 members — and I will come back to that in a minute — and 650,000 listeners in this province, servicing, as I understand it, 18 regions here in the province, particularly. Those numbers are impressive. It appears to be a worthwhile initiative, one that could be strengthened here in Quebec and emulated with greater success outside of Quebec.
I want to get a better idea of your budget — that is, your revenues and their source, your expenses, and essentially what it is you would do with more money. I understood that you talked about a requirement for governments to devote some percentage of their advertising to community radio, and that is fine. You talked about a fund, and you said that the Quebec government providing $2 million annually in subsidy now. I am trying to understand that in the context of your overall budgetary numbers. Could you do that, please?
[Translation]
Ms. Gagnon: I will use averages to allow you to get an overall picture and to give you an idea of the relative importance of community radio stations within the industry. Within the total radio industry, community radio stations, in 2002-2003, had a total budget of $8.5 million at their disposal. The average budget of a community station was approximately $350,000 per year, of which 51 per cent came from advertising revenues, both local and national, and a little less than 20 per cent came from government subsidies. The rest came from different kinds of funding activities, whether it be fundraisers, radiothons or radio bingo. In fact, it is sometimes amusing to realize that radio bingo is more important for the community radio stations than government funding.
As far as our expenses are concerned, about 56 per cent are dedicated to human resources — and that figure is decreasing. Three years ago, the expenses devoted to human resources represented 62 per cent of the annual budget. However, we had to reduce our efforts in the area of human resources, because technological costs, capital costs and equipment replacement costs are very high.
Let us not forget that community radio has existed in Quebec for 30 years and that many of these radio stations need to update their equipment. This is also a period where there are major changes occurring in the field of broadcasting and production technology. All of these changes, of course, cost a lot of money. This has led to a downsizing of human resources departments across the board in Quebec's community radio stations.
Furthermore, a decrease in advertising revenue coupled with an increase in sales costs has further exacerbated the problem. Budget cuts, over the past five years, have primarily focused on the information sector. Journalists' jobs are often the first to go. The situation is precarious. Many radio stations are making do by allowing non-specialized staff to produce news broadcasts.
[English]
Senator Eyton: Just so I have the dimensions, I have $8.5 million as a number and then I have 51 per cent in advertising. Of course, if you take a dollar it is apt to come out of some other pocket, out of commercial radio in particular. You then add 20 per cent from the government subsidy.
You were essentially talking about that 20 per cent, and you want that 20 per cent to increase. The sources that I see are advertising — and perhaps I would be personally less excited by that. However, I could see that 20 per cent of your funding coming from the government subsidy, and largely that is, I suppose, Quebec. I then heard that 20 per cent or a little better comes out of bingo, and I think I could support that, and the rest I suppose is membership fees of one kind or another — individual contributions.
Where do you see the additional revenue coming from, and how would you apply it? There are only four or five sources here, so it is easy to identify.
[Translation]
Ms. Gagnon: The additional funding that we are trying to get by establishing a community media assistance fund will enable us to get back some of the jobs lost over the past couple of years: jobs lost as a result of the economic problems that we have faced, especially due to the concentration of the press. We are trying to recover information and news jobs. We want to provide more services in areas where there is little or no service.
The fact that a resident of Longueuil or the Montreal South Shore is not able to get information about what is going on in his or her own backyard is unacceptable. This is probably why community radio exists. However, a community radio station in Longueuil is unable to sell advertising due to the commercial practices of the major networks and the big media houses. The station cannot even get space in the local newspaper. This resource simply is not available to it. We are not talking about a lack of money here but a lack of will. The local newspaper will simply refuse to advertise on the station's behalf. Many of our media operations are losing a lot of money because of this problem.
The fact that the Astral company scoops up 60% of the advertising market for 40 per cent of listeners creates a problem and casts doubt on the principle of free competition. Free competition is not playing its role here. What is more, free competition just does not work in areas where there is a gap in a market, in other words where there are not enough people to attract the interest of a commercial enterprise.
It was community radio and not commercial radio that was the first to set up FM frequency stations in Quebec. Commercial radio did not see the economic potential of such a venture. Granted, this potential is not great in many regions.
In the Magdalen Islands, in Gaspé and the North Shore, community radio quite simply would not exist without the sizable financial support of those regions' residents. So it goes without saying that these residents would expect to have access to media that will inform them, for instance, of any disaster that occurs in their community.
[English]
Senator Munson: I have two questions. Are there lessons to be learned about community radio from other countries; are there successes in other countries that we can apply here?
[Translation]
Ms. Gagnon: In fact, Canada is a success story. For example, Canada has been the model on which broadcasting has been developed in Latin America, and I am not only talking about community radio but also radio broadcasting in general. What distinguishes Canada's community radio is that it benefits from blended or mixed financing. This is partly why we have been an example for Latin America. By mixed financing I mean that funding comes in part through advertising: The State makes up for any market-based funding shortfall. All this means that citizens and listeners enjoy a service. This particular characteristic has meant that community radio has been established in regions where one would never believe media would be able to take root. This concept has been exported to Latin America and to Africa. Today, the Canadian model has spread throughout the entire world and is very much admired.
[English]
Senator Munson: However, at the same time, you have painted a rather bleak picture — for example, I was reading in the documents that there are no community voices in Laval. If there is no intervention, what do you think will happen to community radio in Quebec, and other community radio? Is it just a matter of time before community radio becomes like the dinosaur, or is there some way that community radio can be saved?
[Translation]
Ms. Gagnon: Indeed, if nothing is done community radio will disappear from many regions in Quebec. In urban regions radio stations that broadcast in French will have a great deal of trouble surviving the next couple of years. Radio stations in remote areas where commerce is scarce or where the economic base is not sufficient to support them may fail.
This year we have already started to observe a substantial drop in revenue for radio stations in the wealthiest markets. Some regional radio stations are behind by 40 per cent in advertising revenue for the first quarter. This is a huge deficit. Clearly something must be done. One initiative was the establishment of a community media assistance fund. If the CRTC agrees to support this fund, the next step will be to ensure that radio stations and networks provide adequate funding to suitably support community and campus radio stations. This is one thing that can be done.
We must also ensure that the Canadian government supports local production. The Lincoln committee had suggested that a local radio aid program be set up. This proposal was however left by the wayside.
New programs do not necessarily need to be created, it would be enough to make existing programs available to community media operations. This would ensure that local production was adequately funded without the need for new funding or new programs. So clearly there are steps that could be taken right away.
The federal government could envisage earmarking some of its advertising expenses for community and ethnic media operations. In order to do this the government would have to start buying advertising space again. We are currently facing a major financial crisis. This is due to the fact that in the wake of the sponsorship scandal, the government stopped buying advertising.
What needs to be done is by no means complicated. It is however most urgent.
[English]
Senator Munson: I want to wish you well, because my heart is in radio. I began my career in a little radio station. I almost had a job at The Gazette in 1965 as a copy boy, but I got a call from a small radio station first, so I started in radio. I still love The Gazette, mind you. Community radio is a good thing, and I hope we can help out in a small way.
[Translation]
Senator Chaput: So what you are basically asking for, in light of the excellent work you have done, is to be recognized as broadcasters who disseminate Canadian heritage, in order to get access to existing programs? Is that correct?
Ms. Gagnon: Yes.
Senator Chaput: So you just want to get your fair share of the advertising, whether it be at the federal or provincial level?
Ms. Gagnon: Yes.
Senator Chaput: And you want a fund to be established that may help community radio stations Canada-wide over the long term?
Ms. Gagnon: Yes.
Senator Chaput: Is that all?
Ms. Gagnon: The frequencies are missing.
Senator Chaput: The reserved frequencies.
[English]
The Deputy Chairman: Thank you very much for your presentation.
The committee adjourned.