Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Transport and Communications
Issue 6 - Evidence for January 31, 2005, Afternoon meeting
VANCOUVER, Monday, January 31, 2005
The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications met this day at 1:06 p.m. to examine the current role of Canadian media industries; emerging trends and developments in these industries; the medias' role, rights and responsibilities in the Canadian society; and current and appropriate future policies relating thereto.
Senator Joan Fraser (Chairman) in the Chair.
[Translation]
The Chairman: Honourable senators and members of the public, we resume today our hearings in Vancouver. This committee examines the Canadian media and the role the government might play in order to help them remain vibrant, independent and diverse in the face of the tremendous changes that occurred over the last several years — including globalization, technological changes, convergence and concentration of ownership. After our meetings in Vancouver today and tomorrow, we will continue with our hearings in Calgary, Regina and Winnipeg over the course of the week.
[English]
We had a fascinating morning and, I expect, we will have an equally fascinating afternoon, starting with a witness from the Ming Pao Daily News. We are joined by Mr. George Ho, who is the deputy editor. We had expected also your news editor but she was delayed.
Mr. George Ho, Deputy Editor, Ming Pao Daily News: She was not feeling well today.
The Chairman: Please give her our warmest regards. We are grateful that you are with us, Mr. Ho. I think you understand the process. We would like a brief opening statement, 10 minutes, after which we will ask you questions.
Mr. Ho: Thank you for inviting Ming Pao Daily News to participate in your research. Canadians live in a democracy where there is an abundance of free-floating information. The Canadian-Chinese community in Vancouver is served by three Chinese dailies, two Chinese radio stations, two Chinese television stations, and several weekly free papers.
Ming Pao Daily News was founded in Hong Kong in 1959 and launched its Toronto and Vancouver editions in 1993. Ming Pao provides local, national and international news, as well as China and Hong Kong news. According to the latest poll findings, both Toronto and Vancouver's Ming Pao readership rating is number one among all Chinese newspapers. We print 365 days a year, an average of 120 pages daily. In Vancouver, we reach 115,000 readers weekly, an average of 60,000 readers daily, 26 per cent more than our major competitor.
Recently, we are facing the challenge of increasing numbers of Mainland Chinese immigrants, whose dialects and reading habits differ from our existing Hong Kong readers. We are still working our way around catering to different groups of Chinese readers, while facing the challenge of numerous Chinese publications.
In terms of sources of information, compared to 10 years ago, Canadians have more choices now. However, according to some studies, the number of visible minorities hired by mainstream media does not reflect their proportion in Canada. The question arises as to whether visible minorities and their social groups are well represented by the mainstream media.
As many U.S. studies have already shown, the issue of whether cross-ownership and concentration lead to poorer quality of news is still undetermined. Cross-ownership may bring with it new management that, in turn, results in expanded diversity by sharing resources and manpower. However, cross-ownership may also impose different ideas, which may affect the existing Canadian value.
We support globalization, a trend that the global village has gradually realized as a result of advanced technology and cross-cultural events. On the other hand, globalization and cross-ownership should be supported only when the Canadian value is maintained. Freedom of speech, diversity of media and the distinguished value of multiculturalism should not be affected by globalization and cross-ownership. We hope Canadian government agencies can well prepare for the trend of globalization, to find a balance between open competition and maintaining Canadian's distinguished value.
I will conclude my presentation with a few suggestions. Firstly, we suggest that Canadian government agencies liaise with Chinese media by forming an organization or committee that allow participants to share ideas on improving diversity of news. Second, we would suggest establishing scholarships for journalism students who are visible minorities. Third, we would suggest funding for Chinese media, not only providing internship for journalism students, but also developing joint projects with mainstream media.
The Chairman: You covered a lot of ground in a lovely, brief statement. Thank you so much. Senator Tkachuk will open the questioning.
Senator Tkachuk: From a number of the ethnic press, we have often heard that visible minorities have to be represented. Could you put that in context for me? What does that really mean? We would like to know exactly what this means to you, rather than what we interpret it to mean. By representing visible minorities, do you mean news from the community itself? Do you mean a cultural context — Asian, African, or Caribbean? By that, do you mean news from the neighbourhood?
Mr. Ho: Cultural contexts. Let me give you an example. How many mainstream media would report Chinese New Year or an Indo-Canadian festival, both of which are an import cultural practice of different minority groups worldwide?
Senator Tkachuk: Why would it not be in the self-interest of the two dailies here to report on that? The Asian community in Vancouver is a large market.
Mr. Ho: The proportion of the reporting cannot reflect the proportion of minorities in Vancouver.
Senator Tkachuk: Explain please.
Mr. Ho: I am referring to the coverage. They may report Chinese New Year once a year, but not in-depth. They may have a few hundred words with a picture, but not any in-depth reporting.
Senator Tkachuk: Would that be true of the Aboriginal population here on the West Coast as well?
Mr. Ho: Yes, I suppose so.
The Chairman: It has always seemed to me that one of the problems with the mainstream media was that they covered minorities, all minorities, like tourists. So for Chinese New Year, there is always a wonderful picture, same picture every year, of a dragon and, as you say, a few hundred words, to this effect: "Fireworks sounded in Chinatown yesterday as the Chinese community celebrated its traditional New Year, ushering in the year of" — insert name of animal here — and that is about it.
I would like you to tell me if my impression is right. My impression is that because there is no real understanding in the news rooms of what these festivals mean — the tradition, the history, what it represents to the people who are celebrating it — the only coverage we see, as I say, is tourism kind of coverage, a generic type of wire story out of Hong Kong with a big picture of a dragon and 200 words.
Am I being too simplistic here? Is this still a problem — in other words, that the mainstream media just do not get it?
Mr. Ho: I guess it is still a problem. The reporting of not only Chinese but multicultural events is still only skin deep in mainstream media. There is a lot that could be explored. For example, what does the second generation of Chinese-Canadians think about the Chinese New Year? Are they happy about it, or do they care about it anymore? Is there a difference between how the first generation and the second generation feel towards Chinese New Year and other Chinese festivals?
There is much that the mainstream media could explore. For example, what is the cultural difference between first-generation Chinese-Canadians and second-generation Chinese-Canadians? Is there a cultural difference between how the second generation thinks as compared to immigrants who are from China? There are still many areas that mainstream media can explore.
Senator Carney: Mr. Ho, what is the answer to your question? What is the difference between second-generation and first-generation Chinese-Canadians, in terms of what media they look at? I certainly know that there is a difference between the Chinese who came here three generations ago or so and who read the mainstream media, but do you yourself know the difference between first and second generation?
Mr. Ho: I think second generation Chinese-Canadians, the attitude towards media — it is true that the older Chinese-Canadian may tend to access news and even information from conventional media such as newspapers, radio and television and that the younger generation tend to get their information from the Internet and advanced technology.
Senator Carney: They are like the mainstream society in that regard, the younger generation accesses news through the Internet? That is no different from what we are told about the mainstream younger generation, that younger Canadians from all ethnic groups tend to get their news increasingly through the Internet.
Mr. Ho: Well, the second generation get a variety of information from the Internet, including Chinese and Hong Kong information, which is a totally different cultural practice from the locally born Chinese-Canadian.
Senator Carney: Yes, I can see that.
Both Ming Pao and Sing Tao have roughly the same circulation. Do both newspapers have the same readership? Do most families take both newspapers, or one or the other?
Mr. Ho: According to the 2000 research, Ming Pao has a readership of 115,000 weekly, which is 26 per cent more than our major competitor, Sing Tao.
Senator Carney: Are they the same readers? If I were a member of the Chinese community, would I buy both papers, or do you serve different parts of the community?
Mr. Ho: I think we serve the same group of Chinese-Canadians.
Senator Carney: Would your readers buy The Vancouver Sun or The Province, or are they mainly interested in Chinese-language newspapers and Chinese-language news?
Mr. Ho: They are mainly interested in Chinese news.
Senator Carney: So they would not be interested in reading about Chinese New Years in The Vancouver Sun?
Mr. Ho: The overlapping of Ming Pao and The Vancouver Sun is about — I do not have the exact figures, but I can tell you that it is about 10 per cent.
Senator Carney: Where do you get your journalists? Both newspapers, Sing Tao and Ming Pao, have award-winning journalists. How do you find your journalists and how do you train them? Like your news editor, Susan Ng.
Mr. Ho: We recruit our journalists either from Hong Kong, where they are already a journalist, or from here, trained at Simon Fraser University or —
Senator Carney: BCIT?
Mr. Ho: No, not BCIT. We recruit mainly from Simon Fraser University, as well as people from the journalism graduate school at UBC.
Senator Carney: Do you have trouble getting journalists who write and speak Chinese?
Mr. Ho: No, not at all.
Senator Carney: Is your newspaper profitable?
Mr. Ho: It is.
Senator Carney: Is your newspaper locally owned or Hong Kong-owned?
Mr. Ho: Our main office is in Hong Kong, but I think we are a 100 per cent Canadian enterprise.
Senator Carney: Did you say 100 per cent Canadian influence, or ownership?
Mr. Ho: Ownership.
Senator Carney: With respect to the Mainland Chinese who are coming here, and I suppose the Taiwanese who are coming here, what kind of news do they want that is different from the Hong Kong-based readership?
Mr. Ho: The people from Mainland China want to read more international news, as well as Chinese news; the Hong Kong people concentrate on local news and Hong Kong news.
Senator Carney: Thank you very much. We are well served by both Chinese papers. We have really good coverage. The Asian community represents one third of the population of Greater Vancouver. We are fortunate to have both your newspapers, as well as the radio stations and the weeklies.
Mr. Ho: The Chinese-Canadians in Vancouver are well served by the Chinese media.
Senator Munson: Sir, in testimony before this committee by the National Ethnic Press and Media Council of Canada, a number of suggestions were raised regarding federal government programs such as the Publications Assistance Program and the editorial assistance program from Heritage Canada and the need to alter these programs to assist ethnic press organizations. What, if any, adjustments do you believe can be made to federal programs to assist Canadian ethnic press?
Mr. Ho: We would suggest the formation of a committee, made up of different ethnic papers, with the purpose of meeting to discuss future directions and to develop a plan to improve the diversity of media and to share ideas — how to explore some future stories to have an in-depth look into minorities' social life and cultural practices.
Senator Munson: We heard from a witness in Toronto that some of the Chinese newspapers in Toronto are really — the cover shows the local news, but the inside, according to this witness, is basically the People's Daily or part of China Daily. That witness said that everything is written from China, that they are basically a front for a news organization in China.
Is that happening in Vancouver? There is international and local news, I suppose, but is it generated by your own journalists?
Mr. Ho: The local news is generated by local journalists.
We subscribe to several newswires, including Canadian Press. We subscribe to several worldwide newswires, including Xinhua from China, so the coverage we have is a variety of newswires as well as the story generated by our own reporters, especially locally news.
Senator Chaput: I believe you have three Chinese-language newspapers in Vancouver?
Mr. Ho: That is right.
Senator Chaput: Each is owned by a different corporation; am I correct?
Mr. Ho: Right.
Senator Chaput: Is it possible that the same businesses could have shares in all three corporations?
Mr. Ho: You mean the market?
Senator Chaput: The owners, if you have three different owners.
Mr. Ho: No.
Senator Chaput: So there are three completely different owners. For example, you would not a particular owner having a share in all three corporations?
Mr. Ho: No. We do not have cross-ownership.
Senator Chaput: Do the three newspapers work together, in the sense of, say, sharing writers? Do you hire sometimes the same reporters, that type of thing, or are the three newspapers independent?
Mr. Ho: It is very independent.
Senator Chaput: You manage to find enough writers for the three newspapers?
Mr. Ho: So far, we have not had any difficulty recruiting people.
Senator Chaput: Do you work with schools? Do you have some kind of a link with young people?
Mr. Ho: Yes. We offer an internship to journalism students when it is appropriate.
Senator Chaput: With respect to revenues, do you have governments who will buy ads in your newspapers?
Mr. Ho: Yes.
Senator Chaput: Do you think you get your share of that?
Mr. Ho: We try our best.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Mr. Ho, it is very interesting to hear from you. I am asking this because I have an exulted view of Chinese youth, that they are striving very hard, are more determined, have more commitment and interest in what is going on around them. Do you have any statistics about readership in the 25-and-under category, Chinese young people?
Mr. Ho: We do have a breakdown of ages. Twenty-three per cent of our readership is between 18 years to 34 years.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: That is high.
Mr. Ho: In terms of older readers, 24 per cent are 35 and 44 years old.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Are you making a concerted effort as a publisher to include material that would be of interest to young people?
Mr. Ho: Yes. That is another challenge for us, to attract our younger readers.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Is the language being learned exclusively in the home, or is it being taught in the education system?
Mr. Ho: I think they are mostly speaking Chinese at home; as well, there is a Chinese program in high school, as well as some private schools, too.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: I see. So you are probably not as pessimistic as some about young people vis-à-vis the printed word?
Mr. Ho: This is still one of our concerns — that is, that the younger Chinese generation do not read Chinese anymore. They tend to surf the net; they tend not to buy newspapers. Since the ability to speak Chinese is a bit lower than before, that is our concern.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Is there a passionate interest here in British Columbia in preserving the written and spoken language of China, Hong Kong?
Mr. Ho: We have different dialects. Mainland Chinese has a Beijing dialect, and Cantonese readers from Hong Kong have a Cantonese dialect.
Senator Carney: I wish to ask two follow-up questions, please. First, Mr. Ho, are there corporate links between the Chinese-language newspapers and the television and radio stations? For instance, your name is the same as James Ho, who is an television-station owner. Are there corporate links between the newspapers and the television stations?
Mr. Ho: Not for Ming Pao but for Fairchild T.V., as well as —
Senator Carney: Sing Tao?
Mr. Ho: No, not Sing Tao, but several Chinese radio and television stations. The owners of Channel M are also one of the owners of AM1320 CHMB.
Senator Carney: So there are corporate links.
Who are your advertisers? Are the advertisers in your newspaper Chinese merchants, aimed at Chinese audiences, or Sears, Ikea, Wal-Mart?
Mr. Ho: We have a wide variety of advertisers. For the most part, we have Chinese merchandise, but, as you mentioned, Sears, The Bay and Ikea also advertise with us, as well as some governments, public notices, et cetera.
Senator Tkachuk: Can I have a follow-up?
The Chairman: Have you concluded your follow-up, Senator Carney?
Senator Carney: He had followed it up. There are common advertisers, mainstream and Chinese, and there are also Chinese businesses who are interested in the Chinese market, so there are links and there is a corporate link sometimes.
The Chairman: I am following up your follow-up. When Sears advertises in Ming Pao, does it have fliers and are the fliers translated into Chinese?
Mr. Ho: Yes.
Senator Tkachuk: You said that you are a wholly owned Canadian company but that your headquarters are in Hong Kong. Why is that?
Mr. Ho: Let me get some information from my file. Our mother company is in Hong Kong, and we are Canadian-registered.
Senator Tkachuk: You are a subsidiary of a Hong Kong company?
Mr. Ho: Yes.
Senator Tkachuk: Is the Hong Kong mother company owned by Canadians, or is it owned by Chinese nationals?
Mr. Ho: I guess it is owned by Chinese nationals.
Senator Tkachuk: Chinese nationals. So really, you are not owned by Canadians, you are owned by Chinese nationals, right? Is that correct? Wholly owned?
Senator Carney: A lot of Hong Kongese have Canadian citizenship.
Senator Tkachuk: I understand that. Mr. Ho just told me that they were owned by Chinese nationals, but before that he said it was a wholly owned Canadian company. I am trying to find out what it is.
Mr. Ho: I do not want to give you a wrong answer; I will have to look it up.
Senator Tkachuk: That is not a problem. If you could get that information to us, I would appreciate it.
Mr. Ho: Sure.
Senator Tkachuk: When you say that you get some of your news or a portion of your news from other news agencies, you mentioned Mainland China, who would that be from? What would be the news agency?
Mr. Ho: The newswire that we subscribe to, Chinese newswire.
Senator Tkachuk: Is that owned by the Chinese government, or is it privately owned?
Mr. Ho: No, no, it is owned by the Chinese government.
Senator Tkachuk: Do you analyze that news, or just print it like you would any other wire story?
Mr. Ho: We use it as information, accompanied with other newswires, like the Canadian Press. We have an article from Canadian Press, say, and then we take another line from, for example, the Xinhua newswire agency from China, and we put them side by side.
Senator Tkachuk: So outside of the local Vancouver news, the majority of the news would be from Mainland China?
Mr. Ho: The majority of the news — no, not really. Our Chinese news is only one of five sections.
The Chairman: Senator Tkachuk asked one of the questions that interested me, Mr. Ho, which was the question of the head office in Hong Kong yet you are a Canadian-registered company. So if you could get for us a description of the ownership structure, the proportion that is actually held by non-Canadians versus the proportion that is held by Canadians, that would be very useful for us.
I apologize, I am not familiar with your paper, but I will make sure to lay my hands on a copy before I leave Vancouver. Did you say 120 pages daily?
Mr. Ho: Yes.
The Chairman: Is your paper in tabloid format or broadsheet?
Mr. Ho: Broadsheet. Our paper consists of five sections, each section having about 20 pages.
The Chairman: That is a significant paper. How many journalists do you have, in total?
Mr. Ho: We have approximately 30 journalists.
The Chairman: In order to fill 120 pages a day, you must carry quite a lot of wire copy. Am I correct?
Mr. Ho: Can you let me explain a little bit?
The Chairman: Yes.
Mr. Ho: Our local section is around 20 pages, which is run generally by our local journalists. With respect to the other four sections, about 80 to 90 are transported from our main office in Hong Kong.
The Chairman: I see.
Mr. Ho: We do not generate all the pages, only the local section.
The Chairman: Do you have an editorial page?
Mr. Ho: Yes. It is from Hong Kong.
The Chairman: It is from Hong Kong, so it is transported direct?
Mr. Ho: Yes.
The Chairman: Do you have any local columnists?
Mr. Ho: No, but we do have bilingual pages weekly, allowing the writers to give us an article or their opinion towards local issues or national issues.
The Chairman: However, you do not have any columnists writing in your Chinese local pages; is that correct?
Mr. Ho: No, not from local.
The Chairman: So all that would come from Hong Kong?
Mr. Ho: Yes.
The Chairman: Just to be clear, you would not have editorials or columns about what the B.C. government is doing, for example?
Mr. Ho: No, not really.
The Chairman: Let me go back to the question about your readers, which is coming again at some of what Senator Trenholme Counsell was getting at. You are basically a Chinese-language paper. You have a little bit of bilingual on the weekend, but you are a Chinese-language paper. Does your readership consist basically of first-generation Chinese-Canadians, or do they go on reading you into the second and third generations?
Mr. Ho: Since the first wave of immigration during the mid-1980s — and it forms a big Chinese community in Vancouver — that is our so-called first generation of Chinese readers. They come mostly from Hong Kong. They are new immigrants, arriving during the 1980s.
The Chairman: Yes, but do their children read you — that is, the children who presumably were born here or who came here when they were very small and have grown up speaking Chinese and English? Do they read you?
Mr. Ho: Yes.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, indeed. It has been extremely interesting. We will await with interest the information we asked for from you, and if there is anything else that you think would be useful for us to know, please send that along at the same time.
Senator Eyton has a question.
Senator Eyton: Mr. Ho, while you are doing that, if you could elaborate on the three recommendations you made to the committee. You really just said 10 words about each. You talked an agency or an organization that would link with the Chinese media, and somehow work together in some way. What did you have in mind? You talked about scholarships for visible minorities. Again, what kind of people, what kind of qualifications, who are you trying to train? Finally, you talked about funding joint programs between the Chinese press and the mainstream media. Again, what do you have in mind?
It would be useful to have something a little more elaborate than the few words you said here.
Mr. Ho: Sure.
The Chairman: Mr. Ho, thank you very much indeed. We are very grateful for your time and your information. It has been very instructive.
Mr. Ho: Thank you for inviting us.
The Chairman: Senators, our next witnesses are from the Knowledge Network. We are being joined by Mr. Wayne Robert, the general manager at the Knowledge Network, which is the provincial public broadcaster. Mr. Robert is being joined by Ms. Sarah MacDonald, the director of programming, television and new media.
Mr. Robert, the floor is yours.
Mr. Wayne Robert, General Manager, The Knowledge Network: Thank you for having us here this afternoon. We appreciate the opportunity.
For 24 years, Knowledge Network has provided high-quality experiences designed to engage and inform British Columbians with relevant, credible and compelling content. We broadcast educational television content aimed at changing behaviour, not consumer behaviour as advertisers do, but behaviours that improve the quality of life through to the development of the person as a whole. We are able to develop, foster and produce material for highly targeted audiences whose education in turn creates a greater effect on the economy and community through informed decision making.
To this end, the current Broadcasting Act differentiates educational programming, with the understanding that it will "be aimed at the acquisition or improvement of knowledge or the enlargement of understanding of members of the audience" and "taken as a whole shall be designed to furnish educational opportunities and shall be distinctly different from general broadcasting." Further to that, the act states that "educational programming, particularly where provided through the facilities of an independent educational authority, is an integral part of the Canadian broadcasting system."
Equally important, at Knowledge Network, we afford access to audiences for educators, institutions, non-government organizations and others with a need to disseminate information and knowledge for the public good.
In your questions, you ask: In light of the many changes in Canada's media landscape over the past 20 years, what is the role of Canada's public broadcasters? Speaking for the Knowledge Network, we understand that, at times, serving the needs of the few benefits the many. As a broadcaster serving B.C. and headquartered in B.C., Knowledge Network delivers programming that provides British Columbians with an opportunity to become literate about their province, its geography, ecology and climate, its social, political, economic and cultural histories, and its contemporary issues and concerns. This is our definition of regional information programming and it contributes to our identity, emphasizes our unity and reflects our shared values.
We believe that this is the intention of the declaration of the Broadcasting Act, stating that the programming provided by the Canadian broadcasting system should be drawn from local, regional and international sources and include educational and community programs.
You also asked: Do Canadians have appropriate amounts and quality of information about international, national, regional and local issues? Given that Knowledge Network is a regional broadcaster, our concern today is with the production of quality regional programming in the broadcasting system. We believe, as an educational broadcaster for the province, we bring credibility to information programming. Because we partner with educators to produce our regional information programming, we bring a depth of information that cannot be covered in a news clip.
For example, Slide!, a Knowledge-Network production, explains the physics and geotechnical forces contributing to land slides. It points out the hot spots in this the most vertical of provinces. In addition, we produce Knowledge Tools, an online collection of resources that delve deeper into the issues and resources available.
Last month, for example, when news reports were broadcasting that homes were destroyed in North Vancouver, we rebroadcast Slide! and gave viewers the background and the tools to gauge the risk for themselves. We have the entire program online and we provide teachers with classroom resources at several grade levels.
I would encourage you to take the time to visit our Knowledge Tools area on our website, at www.knowledgenetwork.ca, to see other resources promoted by our television programming and tailored to meet the needs of British Columbians. This diverse library covers subjects including climate change, literature, autism, history, geography and much more. In our Knowledge Tools, you will find videos, articles, webcasts, other interactive features and curriculum resources. This model of partnership with educators in B.C. in producing B.C.-relevant programming brings balance, credibility and context to this information.
I would now like to discuss the current situation regarding the funding of regional educational programming from the broadcasting system. We wish to make you aware of a trend in the industry that results in funding previously been available for regional programming now being redirected towards programming that deals only with broadly appealing or national issues.
The business needs of national broadcasters and national speciality channels dictate that they spend their production and pre-licence dollars first on programs that appeal to the largest and most commercially appealing demographics. However, some of the broadcasting system's profits must support productions that do not fit commercial broadcasters' needs but rather advance the regionally unique social, cultural and educational agendas of people in each area of Canada. This support is clearly stated in the Broadcasting Act but not easily found in the broadcasting system.
The existing Canadian production and funding system was intended to support a variety of genres. However, the system of minimum threshold licence fees from a national broadcaster or achieving this threshold with accumulated licence fees from numerous regional broadcasters continues to mean that programs with the widest possible appeal are the most likely to be funded and that regional relevant programs, including documentaries, are having diminishing support. Vertical integration results in corporations having control over all the lines of a business in television, from development to distribution.
Through funds like the Canadian Television Fund — CTF — these private-sector companies are able to access programming that is funded in equal part by public money. If these programs are exclusive to a second-tier broadcaster, the viewer may have contributed to the financing of the production three times as a consumer of advertising, as a subscriber and as a taxpayer. Indeed, some taxpayers may never see these programs at all.
Commercial broadcasters in today's market are paying higher licence fees to trigger the nationally oriented program funds, leveraging longer periods of exclusivity and shutting out second-window broadcasters in an effort to build brand loyalty for their networks. For the same licence fee, Knowledge Network has gone from sharing first windows to taking a second window a year after delivery to no longer having access at all to documentaries produced through the Canadian production funding system. As a result, the amount of funding in the system directed towards public-interest programming is vanishing. In spite of all the good these funds accomplish, they are no longer an appropriate vehicle for ensuring an adequate supply of regional information programming.
The CTF is currently undergoing a review and a potential reorganization to address the stated dearth of popular Canadian drama. However, as stated in the spirit and intent of the guidelines, one of the fund's key goals is to support and encourage Canada's cultural diversity, linguistic duality and regional expression. The mere measure of an audience size is not an adequate or complete representation of the value provincial educational programming brings to the Canadian viewer. Therefore, we believe it should not be the most significant determinant of participation in CTF-funded projects.
Let me share some success stories of late that are not likely to be repeated as we see our access to funds for documentary production diminish. You may have heard of a very successful film, The Corporation. It won three of B.C.'s Leo awards for best documentary and enjoyed sold-out runs in theatres across Canada and the U.S. I was proud to be there when, in accepting his Leo, Bart Simpson, the producer, noted the project would not have been made but for the pre-licence funding provided by the Knowledge Network. Of course we are not the only participants. Vision TV and TVOntario led in pre-licensing the production. Our support makes a difference for these ground-breaking productions and producers have told us so.
We believe that our ability to participate in these kinds of productions is being eroded by the new emphasis on audience measures that do not take into account the fact that we are licensed to broadcast in British Columbia alone and cannot compete with national broadcasters. This is not to say that we do not get significant audiences. I have here a chart showing Knowledge Network's performance against selected national speciality channels and the CBC for adults in prime time in the B.C. market in fall 2004. More British Columbians tune in to the Knowledge Network than any other comparable station except the CBC.
I will now explore some ideas about sustainable models for funding regional information programming. First, I want to tell you that 27,000 British Columbians enrol in our Partners in Knowledge program, supporting our efforts by providing $1.7 million dollars per year to have commercial-free alternative educational television programs of their choice, programs that would otherwise not appear on the first tier of service. They have joined our station and voted with their dollars to ensure that we can provide a broad range in programming. In addition to bringing them the best educational programming from around the world, they expect programming that is relevant to British Columbia.
Nevertheless, we cannot expect these donors to bear the entire cost of the production of B.C. programming. As acquisition costs for Canadian programming rise and appropriate programs and proposals become scarce, more of our budget from the province's education system is consumed to meet the regional mandate established in the Broadcasting Act and our conditions of licence with regard to Canadian content. It is unreasonable to suppose that the entire cost of development, pre-licensing and production of original Canadian regional information and cultural programming should be funded from provincial educational sources. Regional broadcasting has been left behind in the rush to develop and sustain a viable commercial television industry nationally across Canada. Although we salute the industry's accomplishments, we are eager to participate in the next necessary steps to ensure the same sustainability and vitality in public regional broadcasting. We want to ensure that the resulting changes support high-quality television experiences designed to inform and engage British Columbians with relevant and enlightening regional content.
In conclusion, our interest lies in working with our colleagues in the Canadian broadcasting system to ensure a wide range of programming and program-funding alternatives. Knowledge Network understands the need for large corporations to generate profit, to stabilize and grow the television industry in Canada. It is our position that there needs also to be investment in productions that do not fit commercial mandates or meet only the needs of large national audiences. Exciting possibilities could include the development or redirection of funds for specific regional production. New models could also involve subscription fees for provincial broadcasters in recognition of their role as regional broadcasters.
As we begin the next decade of our broadcasting life, we seek the flexibility to support a Knowledge Network that can deliver both educational and regional programming for the viewer and financial support for the independent B.C. producer. We hope the current imbalance will be rectified by guaranteeing that the industry as a whole meets its responsibilities by funding public-interest programming. These funds can then, through the Knowledge Network's regional, educational and public service mandate, ensure that current, relevant, targeted B.C. programming is available for British Columbians.
Thank you again for the opportunity to speak with you.
Senator Tkachuk: How is the Knowledge Network funded?
Mr. Robert: We are funded through the Ministry of Advanced Education with a base grant, plus we have the donations that I mentioned. As well, this year we raised about $1.2 million in partnerships for productions, by partnering with educational partners to produce productions.
Senator Tkachuk: You do not get any money from the carrier — for example, from Rogers?
Mr. Robert: No. Our budget is about $7 million per year.
Senator Tkachuk: You talked about access to money, cash, for purposes of programming. There is Telefilm Canada, which funds commercial ventures, and there is the Canadian broadcasting fund. How is that different? Then you mentioned CTF. Can you sort these out for me, please?
Mr. Robert: That is the Canadian Television Fund.
Senator Tkachuk: So there is the Canadian broadcasting fund and the Canadian Television Fund?
Mr. Robert: I think it is just the Canadian Television Fund.
Senator Tkachuk: How does the Canadian Television Fund work?
Mr. Robert: I will ask Ms. MacDonald to help me out here. She works very much with that fund.
Ms. Sarah MacDonald, Director of Programming, Television and New Media, The Knowledge Network: Basically, independent producers create program ideas and create a budget for programs. They have to get enough licence fees from broadcasters in Canada in order to trigger another chunk of money that will come from the Canadian Television Fund. Suppose you get 30 per cent of your budget in broadcaster fees. The Canadian Television Fund does a matching thing, where they bump it up another 25 per cent or 30 per cent. Those two sources make up a fairly major chunk of a lot of independently produced Canadian television programs. Beyond that, there are things like tax credits, distributor advances, and that sort of thing, to close the financing gap. The key is really for an independent producer to get enough broadcaster money in order to be able to access those funds.
Senator Tkachuk: So, an independent producer has to go to the broadcasters, get people to say, "I will buy this thing," if it is any good?
Ms. MacDonald: Yes.
Senator Tkachuk: When you watch television in Canada, you will see credits such as "brought to you by" CBC, Telefilm broadcast fund, et cetera, and then there is the Canadian Film Board. Are they out of the business in Canada or are they still in the business?
Ms. MacDonald: You mean the National Film Board?
Senator Tkachuk: Yes. Do you get funds from them?
Ms. MacDonald: No, we do not get any funding from the NFB.
Senator Tkachuk: Do you qualify for funds, say, from CBC or is it just from that one CTF fund?
Ms. MacDonald: We do not get the CTF funds directly. What we will do is licence a project from an independent producer, so that we get the right to air it; they get the funds. However, it is an important source of programming for us, the fact they can access those funds.
Senator Eyton: Just following up on ownership and revenue, is Knowledge Network owned by the province?
Mr. Robert: Yes
Senator Eyton: It is similar to TVO in Ontario, then? It has its own mandate?
Mr. Robert: I always try and avoid saying that, but yes, it is true.
Senator Tkachuk: Saskatchewan Communications Network, SCN, in Saskatchewan?
Mr. Robert: SCN is more similar.
Senator Eyton: Directors would be appointed by the province, I imagine?
Mr. Robert: Yes.
Senator Eyton: You talked a little bit about the program ideas and the funding. I think I understand the financing arrangements you just talked about. You must have other source of revenues. You say you spend $7 million a year. You mentioned membership — 27,000?
Mr. Robert: Yes, 27,000 members.
Senator Eyton: They contribute as well, in varying amounts, I suppose?
Mr. Robert: Yes.
Senator Eyton: How much would come from them?
Mr. Robert: The figure is $1.7 million. We have been operating that membership drive for, I think, over 20 years now, so we have a dedicated group.
I should just point out that, of the entire budget, about $1.7 million comes from Partners in Knowledge, approximately $1.2 million we raise for productions with partners, and the remainder comes from a grant through the Ministry of Advanced Education. Those are our sole sources of funding.
Senator Eyton: What happens if a producer/director has a hit on their hands? Suppose you are licensed here for British Columbia, you own it here: What happens if the producer sells it to New Zealand? Is there any benefit for you?
Mr. Robert: Not as a licensor, no. If it were one of our own productions, we might.
Senator Eyton: How long have you been around?
Mr. Robert: We are starting our 24th year.
Senator Carney: Mr. Robert, one of the differences between TVO and Knowledge Network is that TVO's budget is considerably larger, about 10 times as large. Seven million dollars is not very much. Right now, it would fund maybe three Canadian feature films. Three million dollars does not go very far in producing television shows, so that is what I want to ask you about. What percentage of $7 million goes to overhead, and what percentage goes to the acquisition or the production of product? Is it 50/50?
Mr. Robert: It would be very close to 50/50. We put about $245,000 per year of partner donations into pre-licensing these films through this process.
Senator Carney: Roughly, you have $3.5 million for acquisition of materials and local production?
Ms. MacDonald: If I include funding that I get from Partners in Knowledge for programming, plus the money I get from base, I have about $2.5 million for programming.
Senator Carney: What percentage of that goes to acquire production product and what percentage goes to B.C. producers? That has been a sore point with the local producers.
Mr. Robert: About $1 million to acquiring programs, both Canadian and non-Canadian, and $1.5 million of that to either producing here in British Columbia with Knowledge Network partner programs — we will partner with somebody and create the funds to produce — or pre-licensing.
Senator Carney: Your viewers are quite diverse, so they like the programming you buy from Britain or Australia, et cetera. However, when we are talking about local B.C. production, you are relatively restricted to that $1.5 million dollars?
Mr. Robert: That is probably fair to say. Often, if we have an issue that is of importance to British Columbians, where we can purchase a program and it is very much cheaper for us to do that, we will often contextualize it by wrapping it in a local panel, talking about the local resources available, or we will have additional resources associated with a program like that on our website — although most of our website is devoted to British Columbia productions.
Senator Carney: You started off as part of the Open Learning University.
Mr. Robert: Open Learning Agency.
Senator Carney: I had some involvement with that, as you probably know. How much of that local production is geared towards educational T.V., academic programs for a degree-earning institution, and how much for the general public, or do you do any education credit-earning programs?
Mr. Robert: Academic credit-earning programs have been reduced on our schedule. They are only broadcast at the request of institutions — and now with the Internet they are requesting that far less than they used to. The same goes for production of tele-course programming. We only used to produce those in partnership with an education institution, and now that is not their demand. They prefer to produce web-based courses.
Senator Carney: So the fundamental mandate of the Knowledge Network — which was to be the number one priority in the Broadcasting Act, an educational channel — has been altered over the years to become a general public interest channel?
Mr. Robert: You hit on it at the very start of your question, when you were saying education and then academic. I think it has moved from being a source of academic curriculum to education that is aimed at a larger audience and that is not a formally accredited kind of education. However, it is still subject to the provincial authority and subject to those elements of education.
Senator Carney: Your budget has declined over the years quite markedly, for whatever reason. Could you tell us something about the scope of the decline.
Also, provincial government here every so often burbles about selling you and turning you into a private broadcaster. I do not know if they can, under the Broadcasting Act, but the privatization of Knowledge Network comes up every so often.
Can you explain that context? What has been the decline in your government-funded revenues? I have been one of your partners. I think you have done a wonderful job. However, your fundamental funding base has been quite drastically curtailed. What is the status of the privatization of your network?
Mr. Robert: Let me tackle the funding question first. It has not been reduced by a hugely significant amount. I just saw an article that was something like 15 years old that talked about us having a $9-million budget. If you include the support services we get from the Open Learning Agency, we are the same now. That has not kept up with inflation.
We have moved away from those direct productions that we were completely funding, and that is exactly what has happened. The Knowledge Network is no longer required to produce to the same level as it used to produce in order to create academic programming. It is a very simple equation: We are no longer producing programs for academic and curriculum purposes, and that is where the reduction in funding has come from.
In regard to the question of a change to our business model, which may or may not involve privatization, the government announced they were going to start looking for other options as to how the Knowledge Network could be funded. They issued an RFEOI, a Request for Expressions of Interest, to which there was some response, and the government is still contemplating its options in that. The RFEOI was issued a year ago, approximately. The government has not chosen an option as yet.
Senator Carney: Would that be private ownership? When they talk about privatizing or choosing other options, does that mean you would cease to be a public broadcaster?
Mr. Robert: At the time this was done, the idea was to capture as many viable options as are possible and then make a decision from among those. The question of whether it would be private or would involve a change in business model, any of those changes in ownership would be subject to CRTC approval. There would have to be a public hearing in regard to any of significant changes that would call for an amendment in our broadcast license. So that part of the process is not even contemplated at this point.
Senator Munson: Just a brief question. I notice you have this chart of selected speciality and public broadcasters. BCTV is not a public broadcaster or a speciality channel. They have not shown any indication of wanting to appear before us, so it is difficult to get to complete picture of the television media in this province — which is disappointing. Do you know whether BCTV does any educational programming — since they are not here to tell us?
Mr. Robert: With our definition of educational programming, I would have to say it is difficult for them to do it. Part of our definition of educational programming involves it being under the provincial authority that it is mandated by the province in order to do that. Each education broadcaster in Canada has a mandate from their provincial government to do the kind of broadcasting that they do. There is a dialogue that goes on with the government to able to do that. They may do public service announcements — PSAs — programming that you certainly could learn something from.
I think it has been said that all television is educational, so depending on how you want to define educational programming. However, according to the provincial educational definition, I would say not. We do partner with other broadcasters in documentaries — and, of course, documentaries we do consider to be educational.
Senator Munson: How do you explain your numbers being so high? You are ranked second. In comparison, Newsworld is ranked ninth. You are right behind the main channel, CBC. Is your high rating a result of how you program and how you balance your programming?
Mr. Robert: I think it is a combination of factors. We have seen a large increase in our viewership since 2003. It is our programming. I give a lot of credit to Ms. MacDonald and the people she works with. Our high rating is also an indication that people are interested in regional programming, a regional broadcast. They want to see stories that are relevant to them.
These 20 broadcasters we have chosen capture 27.9 per cent of the market, so there is still a majority that is not on this page of viewers. In our milieu, in our area, we are continually strengthening and growing our audience. It is up 40 per cent from —
Ms. MacDonald: This particular book — we just got it last week — has shown significant increases in every demographic for Knowledge Network. We are of course ecstatic about that.
Reality television is out there. I believe, however, there is a body, a group of people, a demographic, a psychographic, interested in intelligent, informative programming. If you flip around the dial, you see less and less of that. It is working for us, so that is part of it.
Just so you know, we try to measure against a consistent group of broadcasters in our ratings. Hence, this is the group we select. We do some arts, some history, a bit of children's, which is how we came up with this group. They are not selected so that we came out second.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: One in three British Columbians watch your channel at least once a week. In your opinion, what is the most valuable, or the most popular things you are doing? What would you say is consistently well received and valued by your viewers?
Ms. MacDonald: I would like to talk about two things. The Partners in Knowledge who give us donations have a big appetite for British drama, so those consistently perform well. We have a few programs in that area that do well for us.
On the more educational side, we had incredible success this fall with three one-hour documentaries we did on child and youth mental health. Each documentary looked at a different particular disorder. We had one on anxiety, one on depression and one on psychosis, and those documentaries had phenomenal ratings for documentaries. They tend to get less viewership, generally, than entertaining programming. However, I think we had audiences of up to 80,000, which would be quite a lot for that genre of programming for us. Hence, that three-part package is an example of a major success for us.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: I have been in public life in many ways for a long while and every so often one has the feeling he or she is preaching to the converted, so to speak. Do you feel with all this excellent programming that you are bringing in other than the converted? Do you feel you have an impact on the people you would hope to reach in terms of family life, children, parenting, all those things?
Mr. Robert: Absolutely. That is the most important measure for us and that is why sometimes looking at things like the volume of the viewership — you were very good at pointing out that the average minute audience may not be huge but we know that different people are watching us at different minutes. We have children's programming that we know is being watched by children, obviously. In terms of a program like the children and youth mental health series, we hope that parents are watching, and we measure to make sure that is who we are getting.
When we partner with someone to produce a program to have an impact on an issue in the province, we work with that partner to say: Who do you need to talk to? What do you need them to understand? What behaviour do you need them to change? We determine how to communicate that. Hence, it may not be necessary for us to reach a huge number of people, if we are reaching the right people. That is one of our key measures for success.
When we talk about targeting our audiences and working with our partners in order to make sure we hit those targets — it is difficult to measure that just using the BBMs and those gross kinds of measurements. However, we get an incredible amount of feedback from viewers. When we did the children and youth mental health series, we had hundreds of calls from people who told us that the series had made a difference. When we did a program on fetal alcohol syndrome, talking about what it is like to be an adult with fetal alcohol syndrome, we received calls from judges and from people working in the penal system, telling us that they wanted to incorporate this into their training.
It is getting that message out there, getting it to those targeted audiences and then letting the community also pass along that message. We do use community a lot to pass along messages about these particular kinds of programs.
Senator Chaput: If I understand correctly, the process works like this: You will find an independent producer in your province and they come up with a concept that is agreeable to you. They will get funding through the CTF. They will come back to you and this production will be developed and offered through your network. Have I got it right?
Mr. Robert: That is correct.
Senator Chaput: Do you also work with independent producers from out of B.C.? If so, what percentage?
Mr. Robert: One of our targets is to do 30 per cent of our independent production pre-licensing for producers in British Columbia. Conversely, 70 per cent of it goes across Canada, to producers in other regions.
Senator Chaput: When it has to do with educational programs, do you first consult with the schools or the educational community, or is the concept developed by the producer and yourself? How do you work that out?
Ms. MacDonald: For independently produced stuff that we pre-licence, they come to us already developed. We do not engage in development at Knowledge Network. Usually, someone else has funded development, or another broadcast or another fund, so it may be they have consulted, and in certain genres they do.
Hence, if there is an educational children's program there are often educational consultants on that — documentaries not so much but, where appropriate, there is consultation.
Senator Chaput: Do you also have programs in languages other than English, or just English?
Mr. Robert: Just English.
The Chairman: As you know, this committee is focusing primarily on news. For quite some time, Télé-Québec and TVO have both been engaged in public affairs programming that is edging up toward the news end of the spectrum, interviews on current events, sometimes controversial interview programs. You have not gone that way, have you?
Ms. MacDonald: There was a program five years ago that was on for a couple of seasons that was modelled to some extent after Studio 2. It did not do very well for us, audience-wise; nor did we get a lot of feedback on it. Looking around the dial, there was a fair amount of B.C. current affairs programming, including on the community channels. We decided that for the money it cost us it was not worth it, so we cancelled that program.
The Chairman: Let me try to discover why that would be. This is a very media-conscious province, with intense public debates about all many things. Why did they see a market niche to be served there that did not seem to exist for you? I am not asking for a scientific answer here, just your best sense of it.
Ms. MacDonald: If you consider the budget that is spent on Studio 2 versus our budget for our weekly current affairs program, I do not think we could do it well enough for the money we had in order to grow that audience for it.
The Chairman: That is a perfectly logical. If you cannot do it well, then you will not get the viewers; it becomes counter-productive. If you had the money, if money were to drop out of the sky, would you like to go back there?
Mr. Robert: We made a choice around that time to be more involved in partnerships outside of strictly in the building of the Knowledge Network, and I think that has been good for us. To step out into the community and work with other educators, to find out what their needs are and the messages they need to get across, makes the programming much more compelling. We have had much more success with that approach, rather than — "Here, we have chosen these topics for you today." Working with the educational community has paid off for us both in those partnerships, as well as in the audience numbers. That is a somewhat different approach, but it works for us.
Ms. MacDonald: Let me tell you what we produce now, instead of that program, what it has been replaced with. We do a series called The Leading Edge: Innovation in BC. It is a magazine series that looks at the research taking place in B.C.'s post-secondary institutions. Each half hour covers two or three stories of a scientist, what he or she is working on, why they are doing it, what they hope to accomplish, that sort of thing. This program has grown over the last three years. Every year it has had a bigger audience, a different take.
The Chairman: Thank you both for a very interesting presentation.
Senators, our next witnesses are from The Tyee, about which we have already heard some tantalizing references in our proceedings here today. I invite Mr. David Beers and Mr. Charles Campbell to come forward.
Mr. David Beers, Editor, The Tyee: Thank you very much for the honour and privilege of addressing you today. Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet is the title of a recent book by the eminent American psychologist Howard Gardner. After interviewing 100 journalists, Gardener found them to be "by and large despondent about their profession." Many had entered the profession armed with ideals of covering important stories, doing so in an exhaustive and fair way, relying on their own judgment about the significance of the stories and the manner in which they should be presented, writes Gardner. But he found — and I quote: "Instead, for the most part, our subjects reported that most of the control in journalism had passed from professionals to corporate executives and stockholders with most of the professional decisions made less on the basis of ideals than of profits."
How apt a description of The Vancouver Sun environment, where I spent three and a half years as an editor. There, amidst the mouldering morale, I did do some good work with some good colleagues. I even shared in a couple of journalistic awards before being fired without cause. Fired, I should say, a month after 9/11, which was a pretty large news story and a week after writing about the need to protect even distasteful free speech in frightening times.
The experience simply confirmed for me what I had already come to think, and that is that Vancouver is a heart-breaking place to be a dedicated news reporter, news editor or news reader, because a single company owns the big papers, the big T.V. news station, and so many other media properties. There is simply not enough competition to keep that owner honest. By honest, I mean dedicated to informing readers rather than pandering to advertisers or to political allies.
Other speakers today I believe have detailed the cost of that, the slashed staff, the lowered standards, the embarrassing boosters and the conflicts of interest, the lack of accountability to the public and the stunted civic conversation that results in this part of Canada. However, do not feel sorry for us way out here on the far edge of Canada with our peculiar situation. Feel alarm for where all of Canada may be headed, for B.C. is but an expression of today's trends. Consolidation of titles, cross-ownership of mediums, convergence and homogenization of content — most of Canada will soon enough look the same if your panel is not successful in crafting and winning a different way forward.
To that end, I would like to tell you about one hopeful experiment that I have been involved for the last year and bit. It is called The Tyee. It is a website named for a feisty, free-swimming salmon in these parts, and our focus is British Columbia because I believe that for most people regional media is more vital and engaging than national and it does important work that micromedia about your neighbourhood or even your town does not do.
We have been up for 14 months. Our budget is quite small for honest-to-goodness news media, news media that aims to follow journalistic practices and ethics, but thanks to the rich talent and goodwill of many B.C. journalists The Tyee breaks investigative stories and publishes analyses, slice-of-life writing, provocative views. This being the Internet, our stories can be read the minute they are posted anywhere in the province and beyond, and readers can post their own comments to our stories and create their own province-wide conversations. The Tyee also provides links to many other stories.
The Tyee is free of charge and closely read by opinion shapers, including politicians and the media, and, according to The Globe and Mail, publishes some of the best journalism in B.C. This month, about 45,000 people read The Tyee at least once, many of them daily. Our modest success confirms my suspicion that many people are hungry for an alternative to what CanWest offers, and many other people, once they glimpse what better media they could be getting, develop the same hunger.
Competition is the key. However, make no mistake: It must be competition for readers rather than really for advertisers. We have been taught to think the two go hand in hand, but in my experience the publications healthiest for democratic conversation are circulation-driven, whereas media that depends too greatly on advertising revenues are the ones prone to hollowing out their original mission, sacrificing their thinkers and diggers and eccentric wits to the bland demands of creating advertising environments.
So how then to foster more reader-driven competition when big media with big money seems intent on drying it up and hollowing it out? How to give Canada's democracy the media it is going to need to survive and thrive? Here are some proposals.
First, create legislation to break up concentration of media ownership where it is already too high. CanWest's level of ownership in B.C. would not be legal, even in the United States. No one should be able to own all the major newspapers in a major market. Second, order the CRTC to not approve television broadcast licenses for companies that own daily newspapers in the same market. Prime Minister Trudeau did this in 1982; Prime Minister Mulroney undid it in 1986. Third, prevent deals that overly concentrate ownership. Fourth, require owners to reveal profit margins for regional operations. The people who pay for subscriptions and advertisements should know if their investments in the local media scene are being siphoned away to some far away place like Winnipeg or if it is being reinvested in local quality.
Fifth, foster media owned and operated by membership-based society. Some might call them co-ops, even though I know that is a loaded politic term. This would let citizens take the lead in creating and supporting their media. I have been looking for some kind of mechanism that would allow citizens to express an interest and support for media, in a spontaneous organic way, and then find some of the funding that it takes to advance it, because real journalism is expensive. So provide government money to membership-based media that gets to a critical mass of support.
Sixth, provide tax writeoffs to those who join media membership-based societies. Seventh, create tax incentives for media philanthropy. Some of North America's best publications that are very much reader-driven exist because someone with wealth and ideals ensures that they do. Eighth, develop a community-based web portal to provide alternative perspectives. The portal could be managed by public libraries, provide CBC news and information to attract a critical mass of viewers, plus access to dozens of alternative news and information sources such as the Vancouver Community Network, working TV, Indymedia, The Tyee, needless to say, and many others who want to join in.
One last one — ninth — find ways to help alternative media do convergence. I am sure in your inquiries so far you have seen that convergence is the way of the future. There are many reasons to try to match and blend media from different media platforms, but that leaves out alternative media, which does not have the resources, so try to find ways to help alternative media do convergence. The way for any smaller enterprise to build awareness, and I know this only too well at The Tyee, is to cross mediums — in other words, for an Internet news site to contribute to a radio program, for example, or a magazine team to help to produce television documentaries.
If some of these ideas seem impractical, may I leave you with a thought: It would be a mistake, I believe, for Canadians to feel bound by what incremental changes other countries may be trying. We border a giant that offers a vivid picture of how too much media power and wealth in the hands of too few can warp a nation's ability to know itself, to tell itself what it needs to hear in order to solve its problems and to find its way.
Mr. Charles Campbell, Contributing Editor, The Tyee: I would like to thank the committee for allowing me to appear before you. You have heard from a lot of people; I will try not to cover familiar turf.
Concentration of ownership, which is nowhere more outrageous than in Vancouver, the limits of the Competition Act, the long shadows of media moguls, huge newspaper profit margins, spineless middle managers. I could add on to the heap of grievances, based on 23 years in the media and four years at The Vancouver Sun as a department head and member of the editorial board, with stories that are worse than those in common circulation, but I will not.
I want to look to the future and I want to address the most important question you are trying to answer. How can we increase the strength and diversity of our media so our civic discourse is as open and thoughtful as we can make it? It is not going to happen through new anti-trust laws that break up CanWest Global Communications. We have had 30 years of hand wringing on this front, and I do not believe the Canadian government is suddenly going to find the courage to act; nor is it going to happen through some sort of finger-wagging national media council telling newspapers and broadcasters what they shall and shall not do. It is going to happen through new initiatives to create diversity in the form of media ownership.
We have in Canada a great tradition in the CBC, we have the Atkinson Principles at the heart of The Toronto Star, a lively, independent paper in Winnipeg now run from an income trust, many alternative weeklies, and the differences in the ways these institutions reflect the world begin with the form of their ownership.
You spent some time hearing about the so-called democratizing potential of the Internet. In the last few years, I have watched the flush of excitement about its potential collapse as dramatically as the tech bubble. At the height of our swoon for technology's grand promise, CanWest used convergence as an excuse to create the situation that so many now find untenable. Now CanWest uses the Internet's open borders to defend its right to hold a narrow viewpoint. Despite all its resources, CanWest has joined Shaw and Rogers in delivering prosaic websites that do not take advantage of the web's unique possibilities, most particularly its potential for interactivity.
The fact is, traditional media depend on traditional advertising sales and they are terrified of cannibalizing their own audiences. Sometimes I think they actually want to drive us away from their websites. It seems particularly true in Canada. Where do I find flashes of Canadian innovation? At the CBC sometimes with Radio 3, with the television program ZeD, which has a smart Internet component. Every now and then someone at The Toronto Star's website shows signs that they understand the medium. However, mostly I find innovation in small formative enterprises like the B.C. news and commentary website I am currently involved in, The Tyee. It gives me the same feeling of excitement and pride I had during my 11 years editing the Georgia Straight when alternative weeklies were emerging in a significant way across North America.
Internet news media are in their infancy. It is axiomatic in T.V., radio and print media that local faces matter most. We know the names of our local stations and newspapers, but by and large we do not yet know the names of the websites that reflect our local and regional communities back to us. This will change and this is the Senate's great opportunity.
How can you increase diversity in the forms of ownership of these new faces? The federal government spends a lot of money on many things in the name of a healthy culture and vigorous civil discourse. If I give $25 to the Liberal Party, the government goes into the taxpayer's wallet and chips in another $75. We want our politics to be driven by citizens, not corporations.
If I make a film about a basketball-playing dog that is in some definable way Canadian, governments provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in labour tax credits and other incentives. We want to encourage our own voices. Sometimes those results yield valuable dividends. However, when it comes to encouraging diverse civic discourse in the media, we do not do much. Often we do it badly. When we allowed split-run editions of Time and Sports Illustrated, the government apologized by indiscriminately throwing piles of cash at Canadian magazines. We certainly have not shown much stomach for tackling the difficult conglomerate issue, partly because corporations such as CanWest have the good sense to put the likes of prospective prime minister Frank McKenna on their boards of directors.
On some fronts, we have done better. In return for a broadcasting licence, broadcasters contribute in some way to the general health and Canadianness of the broadcasting industry. That is a no-brainer. There is the CBC, of course; there is the National Film Board, which was created in the 1930s to silence the objections to U.S. films overrunning Canadian theatres. Was it easier to create the CBC and the NFB because those media were relatively new at the time? I think so. What if the Senate committee recommended a new kind of support for today's new media? What if the Senate said news and commentary websites owned by locally based, member-driven, non-profit societies were a good idea? What if the Senate said the Government of Canada should fund such enterprises in the way they fund political parties? The world of viable tax incentives is not entirely within my experience, but I am sure that in Canada of all places we could come up with some effective incentives to encourage that kind of diversity.
In my wilder flights of fancy, I wonder what creative means the government might employ to change the ownership structure of traditional media. Could newspapers be converted to community-based income trusts subject to special rules on terms favourable to existing owners? It makes some sense to me, but it does not seem likely.
I am sure about one thing. You can have diversity of ownership in the media and it will not matter a wit if all the owners are wearing the same suit and belong to the same club. This committee must put forward concrete mechanisms to promote different kinds of ownership. The simplest and most promising opportunity is to promote the development of new media on new terms. It might even be politically possible.
I wish you well in meeting your challenges.
Senator Carney: Madam Chair, I must declare a conflict of interest: Charles Campbell and I are both Saturna Islanders — and that should be on record.
You have put forward a lot of very interesting ideas, which I am sure we will want to explore, but I have two main questions. Mr. Beers, can you tell us a little bit about The Tyee? How do you reach your website?
Mr. Beers: You go to www.thetyee.ca.
Senator Carney: You say you have 45,000 readers. Who are they? Second, one of the journalists earlier today said that she considers writing for The Tyee her volunteer effort. Therefore, who are your journalists? Third, if it free, how do you make money?
If you tell us something about The Tyee, then it will give us a framework.
Mr. Beers: The Tyee was conceived not as a sure-fire business plan, as you have very quickly figured out. The Tyee is meant to be a small people political experiment in media. In other words, it was meant to demonstrate what we might be missing in the current media world. Rather than go around and complain about it and give cranky lectures at the journalism schools, I thought it might be better to just put forth a positive example of what might be done. The money comes from some socially responsible venture capital funds, about $40,000 from the B.C. Federation of Labour, some sweat equity from me — and I do take a salary. Quest Publishing is an investor as well.
In total, we had a bit under $200,000 the first year, for everything: to design and maintain the website, for me to edit, for a half-time business director, for all the content, for all the accounting, et cetera, rent, phones. I am told that that amount is somewhere between a third and a fourth of what the CanWest publisher here takes home, so it is a very small amount of money. We post two to three stories a day, five days a week. Hence, we put out 10 to 12 stories a week, original content.
I think you have accurately sensed that The Tyee is not sustainable in its concern form. It is very much run on the goodwill and passion of the journalism committee. A lot of our contributors are as eager to demonstrate what kind of good journalism can be done in this part of the world as I was when I decided to found the site. We pay our contributors, but we do not pay them very much.
Senator Carney: That leads to my second question. Thank you for that fascinating background. If that is the case, is the future of media online news media?
Mr. Campbell: I will speak to that. The problem is that we had this flash of excitement and then this collapse, and we are trying to find our way on the Internet. We are developing models to make advertising work on the Internet. However, at the core of the problem is this issue of big corporations that are afraid of cannibalizing their own audiences. They are really quite terrified of that, I think.
So what is going to happen is that nimble players, small players — you are going to see in Internet news media the same thing that happened in the technology sector generally. The enterprises that are going to work are going to be the new, small companies that are nimble, that have a thought investment from people who are prepared to experiment.
If we look at the development of new technology or at the development of something culturally new in Canada, we often look at enterprises that are able to find some kind of government support; however, right now new Internet media cannot find government support.
I have been poking around looking at the government grant opportunities for The Tyee of late and I found one, but not at the federal level. There is virtually nothing out there that applies to our exact situation. There is an opportunity for the government to look at how it can create incentives for people to invest in these new kinds of media.
Senator Tkachuk: I want to follow up and ask a few questions. With respect to the federal government's small business loan program, is the fact that it is asset-driven the reason you do not qualify?
Mr. Campbell: I have not looked specifically at that.
Senator Tkachuk: I am not sure whether an Internet enterprise qualifies, but I know there is one. Perhaps you might want to look at that and see whether there can be some adaptability for a non-asset-based company like yours, which is really sweat equity, period.
Mr. Campbell: A loan-based program in the formative stage of Internet media, a loan-based program, is not I think what is needed.
Senator Tkachuk: What would be special about the news media — which is a business to me?
Mr. Campbell: That is the problem.
Senator Tkachuk: What would be special about the news media getting grants? Why should the news media get grants?
Mr. Campbell: I have made the argument that we want our civic discourse to be driven not just by business interests, so we create a mechanism to fund political parties. I view the news media as being an important if not more important part of our cultural life as film or music or any number of other types of cultural expression that the government chooses to support in ways other than by providing loans. That is my view of it.
Senator Tkachuk: You are not concerned that the government will control what you do if we fund you?
Mr. Campbell: I do not see the government controlling the activity of political parties.
Senator Tkachuk: There is an argument for that.
Mr. Campbell: There is, but the government gives money to the NDP and the Conservatives and all sorts of —
Senator Tkachuk: I do not agree with any of it, by the way, so you are talking to the wrong person.
Mr. Campbell: Fair enough. I do not know what your feelings are on funding Canadian culture — perhaps you have concerns there. Those too are businesses, but they are businesses that play an important role in representing and reflecting our communities back to ourselves. Media does that, and to the extent that it is increasingly driven by corporate concerns, our civic discourse suffers.
Senator Tkachuk: I have to commend you for starting a new venture. What are the B.C. people not getting that you are delivering or that is missing? What information are they not getting?
Mr. Beers: The Tyee regularly run stories that seem to be right under someone's nose, would they want to go and report them, but they do not get reported. There are only a few major papers of record in the province, and they do not cover much of the rest of the province.
There is a major political shift under way, for example, in Victoria, and has been since the Liberals were elected. The Liberals were elected fair and square; they have all but two members in the legislature. The Vancouver Sun, the paper of record in the province, does not even have a reporter in Victoria. They have a columnist, but not a reporter. Hence, there are large gaps in the reporting. We could all complain about those gaps in the reporting, complain about things we are not hearing, or we could just do the work, publish the stories — which is what we do.
What we have tended to do a lot in the first year is break stories, publish analytical stories. We exist to demonstrate the gaps in mainstream corporate media. We have covered a lot of political stories. We look at who is affected by these changing government policies, and particularly at who is hurt — because we are not reading a lot of that in our media.
Another positive aspect of The Tyee, because it is a website, is that it can reach into every corner of the province. Like many of the other provinces, in British Columbia a big divide exists between the rural and urban areas. B.C. is trying to figure out how to transition economically into the 21st century, which in turn means a lot of change and upheaval, no matter who is in power, no matter who the politicians are. Major structural shifts are going to have to happen in this province, economically and demographically, and that means that the big smoke, as they call the cities, and the heartland, as they call the rural areas, must talk to each other. There must be an understanding of the conversations in both places, and they need to be able talk to each other.
The Tyee, and it is a nascent medium — I am not making huge claims for it; it is small — is we hope the beginning. It is meant to be seen as potential rather than absolute finished product. The Tyee can be read by everyone in the province at the same time; people can contribute stories from anywhere in the province. I believe it creates a far more rich and vibrant forum for the conversation B.C. needs to have than the newspaper and television news media.
The Chairman: Like Senator Tkachuk, I have to commend you for launching a new media venture. It is always really exciting to see somebody launch a new voice.
Mr. Beers: I should have mentioned, I am having a lot of fun, too. I am kind of crabby, but I am having a lot of fun. Believe me, I am.
The Chairman: It is every journalist's dream to go out and start his own paper, one way or another.
Mr. Beers, you said yourself that it is not sustainable in its present form. I am just trying to wrap my mind around what the business model for something sustainable can be. I would, in my own mind, tend to draw a distinction, for example, in terms of government funding between start-up money of some sort and a continuing stream of any importance of government funding, because you are then starting to bump up against that fundamental sense that the initial purpose of freedom of the press is free of the government.
Therefore, do you go to an advertising-funded model, do you go to a subscriber model? Long haul, what can make this thing sustainable?
Mr. Beers: Yes, yes and yes. Let me go back to the proposals I put forth.
First of all, I proposed some type of government incentive system for the creating of media co-ops or media membership-based societies. The Tyee is a for-profit model right now, because we got up and running very fast and we did not even know if there would be any interest in The Tyee. I have compared it to going into the middle of a forest and lighting a Bic lighter and calling out, "Does anyone want to come and sing camp fire songs?" I had no idea one lone woodsman would stumble through and join me.
The Chairman: And you set fire to the mountainside.
Mr. Beers: Once the forest caught fire, everybody came and looked. Basically, that is the Internet. It is hard to know that a little website even exists. We had no marketing budget. So The Tyee was started as a for-profit venture, but now, as I say, we have a lot of people looking at it in a short amount of time and I am starting to think we have demonstrated that one model might be co-ops.
Take Mountain Equipment Co-op, for example. You can buy hiking gear by joining that co-op. You pay a membership fee, and for that fee you get a different sort of selection and quality of goods than you would get down at the other corner store. MEC is democratically run. People who shop there elect board members, and they help direct where it is going. Their memberships might help subsidize some of the support that advertising might normally bring in, but even a co-op model must have an advertising component, it must.
My whole discussion was not advertising bad, business bad, profit bad. It was that things are terribly out of balance. In many countries, such as England, the media is mainly circulation-driven newspapers. They have loyal circulation. People pay a good price to read the papers. That is the source of their income. In Canada, the media is mainly advertising-driven, and that is the case at CanWest.
The Chairman: Let me push back a little bit on this. In Britain, they have a gigantic market and very little distribution costs. The City of London, Greater London, is as many eyeballs as there are in all of Canada. All you have to do is run a truck 20 miles this way or 20 miles that way and you are in reach of all of them. We do not have that. We have much harder markets to distribute, and if my memory serves — and I do stand to be corrected on this — there is significant reader resistance, at least for newspapers, to circulation price hikes. Readers do not like it.
Given that, how much do you think people would be willing to pay for The Tyee, and would it be enough?
Mr. Beers: That is an interesting question. One thing I know about the Internet is that people will not pay anything for it the first day it is up. That is why what you have heard from Charles and me is some attempt to get to a point of how we can bridge these new media entities. We know the media is new, we know the demographics are shifting. We know that younger people read the Internet, opinion leaders read the Internet. Internet properties are now starting to be bought and sold for hefty prices.
We know the Internet culture is changing, so how can we bridge these start-up Internet enterprises to the point where they can attract a loyal following? This is what I am talking about. CanWest ran up a $4-billion debt in assembling its convergence strategy. We cannot imagine that kind of money. If you want to create London in Vancouver, or London in B.C., you have to do it with the Internet. Distribution costs, zero. However, you have to help people know it is there and you have to not support every darn Internet enterprise.
That is why I like the idea of the membership-based society, because people are expressing a desire and interest in belonging to this thing. How much would they pay? I think the more The Tyee is around and the more it is known and the more people become, dare I say, reliant, if not addicted to it, the more they will pay. We get calls all the time saying, "I would like to give you some money; I just want you to give you some money." Therefore, there are people out there ready to fork out money like people do for public broadcasting in the U.S.
However, you are right: The Internet also has trained us to expect something for nothing. That is why the pay-as-you-go model — because you build your circulation from 1 to 10 to 100, unlike a free weekly.
Suppose you and I wanted to start a free weekly tomorrow. It would cost us some money, but we would print 60,000 copies, say, put them on every corner, in every café, and say that our circulation is 60,000. With the Internet, you have to build it one at a time. If people do not look at it, you do not get a click.
You have to think about different ways of nurturing these mediums if you see them as having value and as having potential to contribute something to civil society that balances off the increasing concentration of media ownership that we are seeing.
Mr. Campbell: I just want to add a couple things. Mr. Beers has covered a lot of important turf, including the importance of the Internet in the Canadian geographic context. How the Internet will develop as a business model is really uncertain. We have seen a lot of changes in a very short period of time, and we will see a lot of changes over the next 5 or 10 years.
People will be much more likely to pay a subscription or membership fee to an enterprise like The Tyee if the government sees it as a worthy enterprise and decides — whether through a tax credit or by contributing matching funds — to make it worth their while to pay that fee. There are many ways in which governments do that, and there is a wide range of incentives. I do not know exactly what those incentives are, but there are a wide range of incentives that governments can employ.
I think in the next 5 or 10 years, we will see a different model. We will see a base of advertising, all sorts of things develop, to help support these enterprises.
What is important now, however, coming back to my key point, which is creating diversity in the form of ownership, I cannot argue with the notion of corporations owning media, that is fine, but I am grateful to have the CBC as an alternative form of ownership. I am grateful for the other alternative forms of ownership that exist, like The Toronto Star.
The opportunity here is for the government to help shape the form of ownership of new news media on the Internet, and that is what I think you have to consider most carefully.
Senator Carney: I just wanted to tell the committee that there is a government model that might be adapted to this — that is, Industry Canada's Community Access Program, CAP. Through that program, the government allocated money to put Internet cafes or Internet centres in many rural parts of British Columbia, and then extended it to urban centres, with the idea of allowing everyone in the province in the smaller communities to be able to access the Internet. On Saturna, as Charles knows, the Interest is accessible in the nursing station, in the library, in the old post office. It is a terrific asset to the community, because they can access anything.
Hence, it would be possible to model the idea of the media community-owned co-op — or not even community-owned but media co-ops — and fund them in a way to see how they could develop into an alternative way of delivering news.
The essential point that Charles raised is that it is accessible to all people in B.C. Remember, the daily papers do not want to service Atlin; it costs them money. Chatelaine does not want to deliver a magazine to Mayo. Companies increasingly look at where they can economically distribute to, and that is it. They do not care if other parts of the province do not get access The Globe and Mail or The Vancouver Sun.
We might look at CAP — a program that was designed to ensure that the Internet was available in all these communities, after which it is turned over to the community in some sort of self-supporting way — to see if we can parallel that with a media co-op, to encourage this kind of diversity and debate. The notion came to me when these witnesses were talking. I think it is going to be an important growth.
The calibre of the editorial content on The Tyee is superb. You have a former legislative reporter for The Province, Barbara McLintock. I have read some of her stuff, and it is amazing. People want it, and I think they will pay a subscription fee, like they do for The Economist, at the other end of the scale.
The Tyee may end up with a print version, as well as a website, a spin-off of it. However, these new ideas have to have some sort of nurturing, and there are models. That is what I wanted to draw to the attention of the committee.
Mr. Campbell: Hear, hear. The only thing I would add to that —
Senator Carney: By the way, Charles and I did not cook that up.
Mr. Campbell: We talked about the difficulties that are faced in having a conversation between the urban centres and the more rural places, the small cities and towns in British Columbia. This is a huge issue. The country has changed fundamentally in 20 years. We have become fundamentally an urban country, with a working forest and a park and a few other outlying resources in the hinterland, or whatever it is being called these days. There is a dysfunctional relationship between the urban and rural parts of our provinces, and the Internet is something that can bridge that divide. It is a conversation we are not having as a country and it is an important conversation.
The Chairman: I am glad you said "provinces," because, as you have just observed, it is not just here that great divide exists.
Senator Munson: How would the legislation work to break up this media convergence or conglomerate you see here in Vancouver?
Mr. Beers: I take as my lead the anti-trust legislation in the United States — and there may be some reasons that that can never happen in Canada, but I do not know of any. When the U.S. marketplace no longer provided opportunities — monopolistic ownership was restricting people's choices and skewing what the market would have normally provided — Theodore Roosevelt created anti-trust legislation. To this day, the United States does not allow the same concentration of ownership as Canada does.
Perhaps we could begin to look at newspapers the way we look at the airwaves. We assumed — it is not so true anymore, but we assumed it at one point — that the airwaves were limited, finite and public. Essentially, the airwaves belonged to everybody; they had to be divided up into X number of slices. Consider that CanWest owns in the neighbourhood of $300 million of printing presses locally and is able to vertically integrate its advertising strategy from television all the way through weekly newspapers. Good luck penetrating that market on their own terms. CanWest has scared away all the big players. The Toronto Star has looked here many times seriously.
I think the committee could start looking at regional media, which plays a very important role. The newspaper of record in your city or your wider region is basically the touchstone for a lot of conversation that everybody has about their collective fate. National newspapers are important, but regional publications do a specific amount of work and they are different from little niche publications and magazines. The newspaper of record for a region does its own sort of work, and the trend all across Canada has been the winnowing down of ownership in each region to one owner.
Therefore, you could start to look at this as a market that is not working anymore, one that does not have equal opportunity for entrants.
Senator Munson: Do you think you reflect a majority point of view in Vancouver and environs about CanWest and its control of practically everything? Do you think people are picking up their newspapers, and saying: "I am really tired of getting this one point of view from both the television station and I guess 50 per cent of regionals?"
Mr. Campbell: I would like to meet someone in Vancouver, anyone, who would stand up and say, "I think The Vancouver Sun and The Province are really great newspapers." I have never heard anyone say that.
Mr. Beers: For the most part, people do not think critically or analytically about their media. You have to have done it for 20 years like me in many different settings to be able to imagine what was not in their newspaper that day. So that is the idea.
When I call it a small experiment rather than a brilliant business plan, that was the whole idea. Let's get this thing up and try to do some good journalism. I thought: Maybe Barbara McLintock, one of the great politic reporters of our day in B.C., would be willing to write for The Tyee. In that way, we would get to see what she could have been doing rather than what she was doing for The Province.
That is the whole nature of The Tyee experiment. People who read The Tyee are certainly critical of CanWest, but I think a lot of people do not spend a lot of time thinking about it.
Senator Munson: Just a brief question. How does a newspaper get away with not having a political reporter at an assembly? Talking about standing up, why do not they stand up and demand it?
Mr. Campbell: I think they have given up. They do not have any expectations. Having expectations is just an exercise in being disappointed.
Mr. Beers: It is not something the CanWest newspapers run on the front page: "Today, our lone reporter at the legislature went over to CTV and we are not going to replace him until after the election." Who is going to run that on a front page? There might be a small note about it in the Georgia Straight on page 7, but I call it the hollowing out of mainstream media.
Listen, we all get newspapers. There are lots of newspapers around. They have stories, they have faces, and they have bylines. It is easy to believe that the media is doing fine. However, one has to take the long view and look at issues like standards, staffing, areas of coverage, to slowly come to the realization that what is being hollowed out is the editorial content and that the focus is on creating environments for advertising.
Senator Munson: One small observation. We will see tomorrow whether this meeting was covered. Who knows.
Mr. Beers: CKNW wanted to talk to me.
Senator Eyton: Thank you for being here today. I am curious — and I am going to share some personal observations of mine about the state of media. The picture you draw is so dire and dark that I wonder if somehow I have lost the ability to read and understand.
I have been coming to Vancouver for a very long time, to British Columbia for a long time, and I have been part of a whole variety of investments in this province. I think the first time I came here would have been about 1968, and I can tell you, at least it is my personal impression, that both The Province and The Vancouver Sun are significantly better newspapers than they were in 1968 or 1970.
I will go beyond that and expand the example a little bit talking about Canadian papers. I think I am happy with the comparison you have made with the U.S. There is a dearth of good papers in the U.S. There are two or three that we could name; however, in general terms, the Canadian papers, the national papers certainly, compare remarkably well with the papers that are available in all sorts of major American cities.
I find a great dearth of news or information when I am travelling, and I travel a great deal, and not only about Canada. There is almost nothing about Canada, but really very little about the world about us, international affairs. I think that we are significantly ahead of almost all the big city newspapers in the U.S.
You cited England as an example. England is blessed with a wonderful media and tremendous choice and variety, and perhaps for some of the reasons that our chair has alluded to. France has a great active media, as well.
However, apart from that, there is hardly any place in the world where I think the newspapers are as good as the Canadian papers, Canadian journalism. I recognize we always want to try to make things better, but I find, as I have been listening to a number of witnesses during these hearings talk about how things bad are, my own impression from travelling — and I repeat, I travel a great deal to all sorts of strange corners — is that we are well served by our journalists and our newspapers generally, recognizing they can always be made better. Can you comment on that?
Mr. Beers: So when you come to town and you pick up the newspaper there is plenty to read and it is lively and insightful, as far as you are concerned, more so than other places you have been?
Senator Eyton: I will get more international coverage here than I will in most American centres, for example.
Mr. Beers: Some of the people you have been hearing comment today, and myself — I have lived here for 13 years now; prior to that I lived in the Bay area, which had a very competitive news media, three very serious lively newspapers. I think what you might be hearing from people here is that a lot of us have watched social change happen, we have watched big events occur, we have watched high stakes political moments come and go, and we have watched the media deal with those moments. In other words, we have got the long view. We are the home crowd, we know what the opportunities were for coverage and what was delivered instead.
I will give you one example. After 9/11, The Vancouver Sun began cutting staff. It just so happened that, right after 9/11, the Campbell government, which The Vancouver Sun had been adamantly in support of throughout, came into power. So you have this great disaster and you have this huge political transformation happening in the province — at which time The Vancouver Sun cut staff and shifted millions of dollars into a program called Believe in B.C.
During that program, hundreds of pages of advertorial suddenly started showing up in the newspaper. Nothing like it had ever been seen before. It was stuff cranked out by the public relations department singing the praises of various business sectors of the company, not particularly labelled as advertisement. My inquiries told me, and this was straight from the publisher, that The Vancouver Sun expected to lose $1.5 million on that. The whole idea was supposedly to bump up everybody's enthusiasm about the potential of the economy and this new government and to make their advertisers feel good, and they were willing to lose $1.5 million, just after 9/11, the election of new government, and they were cutting he staff.
If the devil is in the details that you have not been able to observe as you dip in and out of this province —
Senator Eyton: I did not say it was perfect.
Mr. Beers: For me, this is not a sign of being slightly imperfect. These are priority decisions that tell me that something is dramatically wrong in the incentive system. You would think around the time of 9/11 there would be an incredible support to out-compete and report the story — similarly with this new government — and instead The Vancouver Sun carried headlines that were verbatim off the press releases of the Liberal Party. You got basically a retrenchment and withdrawal of engagement with these great political changes rather than an in-depth look at it.
Senator Eyton: It is too bad we do not have someone from CanWest explaining their point of view why that might have happened.
Mr. Beers: I think it is essential that you do that, but I can tell you that it was in that period that I resolved to try to do something like The Tyee.
I decided to test this experiment: My attitude was, maybe I am crazy, maybe I hang out with the same 50 people all the time and you are the norm. What would be a cheap and interesting way to run an experiment about that? What if we were to put up a website — would anybody come and look at it? Would they get bored with it after a month, after which the numbers would decrease? The numbers have gone up steadily every month since we put it up.
Senator Eyton: I think it is a great idea.
Mr. Campbell: I think what Mr. Beers has said is important, and I think there is a lot of good reporting that goes on in The Vancouver Sun. There are a lot of very capable people, a lot of people whose independence is beyond reproach. The way they handle themselves is great. As an institution, however, I found that after four years of working there I could not handle it anymore. I just saw too much that made me say: "I am sorry, but that is not the right thing to do." If you do that very often, before long you will get anywhere in the organization.
You have to decide between speaking up and not getting anywhere, not be able to do the things that you want to do, or shutting up and getting on with what you can do. Most of the people that work at The Vancouver Sun have decided that, in their own way, they are going to try and get along, and that has really dire consequences in the culture of an organization that is supposed to be lively and aggressive and encouraging our civic discourse.
Mr. Beers: In San Francisco, where I came from, there was an easy solution for that kind of problem. You do not like where you work, you are not being treated well by your boss, but you do good journalism, walk across the street. Here it is quite the opposite. If you get into trouble with the company that owns all the media, you will not work.
Senator Carney: You are talking about journalists. I am talking as a reader. On Saturna, population 300, we get four newspapers, except for Saturdays when the mail boat does not come in. Those papers are the National Post, The Vancouver Sun, the Victoria Times Colonist and The Globe and Mail, so we are richly served, let alone the Saturna Sunset Scribbler, our own paper.
The problem for the reader is three of those newspapers have almost identical copy — the National Post, The Vancouver Sun and the Victoria Times Colonist. In those three papers, the core material is all very much the same, and then they have local news. As a reader I sense — that is why I am just going to tie in the other sources — as a reader I find myself constricted in my access to news, because the same story by the same person and the same three newspapers does not satisfy my need to know what is happening, and that is the problem for the reader on this issue.
Senator Tkachuk: I do not think anybody here likes monopolies. Do you think, if the federal government were to introduce new proposed legislation, it should prevent one ownership in one media, or should it prevent cross-ownership?
I am big believer that we should allow more access in electronic media, radio and TV, make it easier to get in. If you want to start a TV station in your garage, start one.
What do you think? What should we as legislators and policy-makers be talking about, not that we are necessarily going to do any of these things — we have no control over that. However, at least as a committee, we can try to add substance to the stuff and make recommendations.
Mr. Beers: I am very grateful for this forum, and I am very appreciative that you are making the inquiry. I do not expect mountains to be moved.
I am very concerned about the idea that a critical link in somebody's media diet, to mix metaphors, like the big regional papers, I am very concerned that one company could own all three in a major Canadian market. If I were looking to break up monopolistic tendencies, that would be the first place I would look, for some of the reasons I explained to Senator Eyton — that it not only removes competition for the readers, but it removes competition within the industry — in some ways, reporters have their wings clipped.
Mr. Campbell: I have a couple of things I would like to add, if that is all right. The ownership issue is not just the two dailies. It is the two dailies and the TV station and the majority of the community weeklies. It is a big problem.
Senator Tkachuk: You had the two TV stations before, you had CTV and CBC, right, so you just added one. It is the same thing.
Mr. Campbell: It is also the dominant player in the market by quite some distance.
However, getting away from that, there was a great piece — somehow the writer managed to get it into the National Post — examining the long-term consequences and the future of what the Aspers were doing in terms of convergence. The writer he said that this will one day unwind, and I think he is right. I think the thing that will make it unwind is real competition. You can create and enhance the ability of real competition in new media through the policies that you suggest and explore as a committee.
When I was at the Georgia Straight, people were so damned excited by what we were doing. I would frequently tell people that it was not what we were doing that was revolutionary; rather, it was just that the standards of comparison worked in our favour. People were so desperate for something else — people got the paper, read it, it was full of stories. Sometimes, the stories were pro-government, sometimes they were anti-government, sometimes real news got investigated, but there was this vigorous enthusiasm for creating a better alternative, and people really responded to that.
People are responding in the same way to The Tyee. If new media on the Internet are given a leg-up to compete with the existing media, they will take off, and you can help those new media do that.
Senator Tkachuk: Are people still excited to go to work at the Georgia Straight?
Mr. Campbell: Less so. It grosses $21 million a year now, so it is not quite the same. However, I will tell you, they may not be excited, but they are proud in a way that the people at The Vancouver Sun are not proud.
Senator Carney: Also, the owner who started the Georgia Straight sold it for several million dollars. Maybe that is the business model.
Mr. Campbell: He sold it?
Senator Carney: I think he did sell it for several million dollars.
Mr. Campbell: No. Dan has been the sole owner for 36 years.
Senator Carney: Well, if I am wrong, I apologize, but I think he sold at least part of the interest in it.
Mr. Campbell: No, he is the sole owner,
Senator Carney: My source is impeccable, Charles.
Mr. Campbell: I am not sure you are right.
The Chairman: Since we have a disagreement here, we will go to the research staff and have them get the answer for us.
Gentlemen, thank you both very much. It has been a very stimulating portion of our hearing. We are extremely grateful to you.
Mr. Beers: I am happy to carry on the conversation, maybe via Internet.
The Chairman: So are we. We have other witnesses already present, and the clock continues to tick on, so truly many things.
Mr. Beers: Thanks again for giving us a hearing here. We appreciate the opportunity.
The Chairman: Our next witness is Mr. Paul Willcocks, who has more than extensive experience in the news field. I am not sure there is not anything he has not done.
Thanks very much for joining us today, Mr. Willcocks. You have 10 minutes, and then we go to questions.
Mr. Paul Willcocks, as an individual: I can always give you a copy of the full presentation.
The Chairman: Splendid. If you cannot get through all of your presentation, we would be pleased to circulate a copy of it to the members of the committee.
Mr. Willcocks: Thank you very much, and thank you for the invitation. I was especially pleased because it describes me as a writer and eminent observer, so that gives me some extra credibility with my children, if nothing else.
I will go through my whole bio. I am a freelance journalist now writing about B.C. politics for daily newspapers, including The Vancouver Sun, community papers around the province, and doing some radio and television. Although I started as a journalist, I also had a fairly long stint in newspaper management across most of Canada. I was a publisher of what was then Canada's only foreign-owned daily newspaper, ran two newspapers for the Irvings in St. John's, New Brunswick, then was a publisher and group manager for the Thomson Corporation through an interesting time. As well, I have served as vice-chair in the Canadian Press, and I had a number of roles. My point is that I come at this from a variety of different perspectives.
I will attempt to address some of the key questions you have raised. I guess my basic point will be, in a polite way, that government should probably stay out of this. That is based not on any view that the mass media are in particularly great shape now, but just my belief in where solutions may lie.
A few general observations I guess about my experience in working with newspaper owners over a long period. I was publisher of the Red Deer Advocate, which was then British-owned, when I was recruited to work for the Irvings in New Brunswick. I turned to the Kent Commission report to find out about my prospects down there, and it was fairly bleak in terms of the way the Irvings ran the newspapers, their control of them and the overall integration in the province, so I flew off for interviews.
Arthur Irving raised the issue of interference in the newspaper's content, and said that he and his brother J.K., who I reported to, would never ever say a word about what was in the newspapers or give any direction or exert any influence, and that if anybody said they did, I would be able to say that they were a damn liar. So I took the job.
I have always, as a publisher and as a manager coming up through the news side of the business, taken the responsibility to readers seriously. My view is that there is a contract with them that we who put the news together will tell them everything that they would find interesting or important as soon as we know it, and that is sort of the basic relationship that we have. That is what we did in St. John's through the period that I was there.
We reported on the effects of a relatively closed economy, when there was a very powerful interest that believed strongly in vertical integration. We looked at issues like pollution in the Bay of Fundy, which inevitably led to a lot of stories about the Irving interest there. We put out generally good newspapers, and the owners were I know unhappy a great deal of the time about that.
J.K. personally threw one of our reporters of one of his businesses when he went to do a story there, which obviously was not thrilling for me as the publisher.
However, the point is, through that time, they never ever raised a single concern with me, directly or through intermediaries, complained about the content or were involved in any way. They wanted the papers to be run properly. They were run in a business-like fashion, and that was the end of their involvement in it, which was interesting, given the attitude toward them as owners.
After St. John's, I went to The Peterborough Examiner, joined Thomson, published a newspaper for them. I had the same desk as Robertson Davies had used for his 10 years as publisher. I got challenged by the talk of the glory days, before Thomson had bought the newspaper, and how much better it was. I looked back at those newspapers in our bound volumes, and they were not better. They were uniformly average to worse newspapers that did not, I thought, reflect at all life in a small central Ontario city through an extremely challenging time.
I then moved out to Victoria through a period when the Thomson Corporation was going through the experience of giving newspapers one last chance. They made a great deal of money, Ken and Lloyd Thomson, over the years out of newspapers, but Ken has come to view them as a mature industry, which was the kiss of death, as far as the Thomsons were concerned. They made a very good try, I think, at changing that, established in their mind that they could not, and ended up selling the entire billion-dollar business off in bits and pieces.
I think the perfect newspaper owner, from a publisher or an editor's or probably some committee members' perspective, would be a private local owner with little interest in maximizing profitability and little interest in using the newspaper as a vehicle for his or her personal goals in terms of politics or influencing local events. The problem is that there has always been very few of those owners.
However, what I have found in the owners I have worked for, and this experience ceased about eight years ago when I went back to freelance journalism, so things obviously could have changed, is that they were uniformly interested in how many people were reading the newspaper each day and were uniformly interested in how much money I could send back to them at the end of each month. Through much of the time, they shared quite an intense interest in meeting whatever quarterly profit target either they had set or shareholders were watching for, or more often investment analysts were watching for.
That is a significant factor in terms of news quality — and I would not downplay that — but I think owners, whether it is a co-op or a private individual or a corporation, are always going to have their profitability targets and expect them to be met. The common thread through all those people, in spite of a great deal of fear throughout that period, was that none of the owners was ever really interested in content. That just was not accepted as related to the profitability and the circulation of the newspaper, the long-term value of the franchise.
I do not think there is any guarantee that owners would be disinterested. Most of Canada's newspapers started as vehicles for the views of the proprietor toward exerting their influence, and I think owners will always have a right to say "This is what I want in the newspaper." What I think of as the check on abuse of that right or actions against the public interest is that exercising it brings risks. The public does notice and react, and I think if you look at CanWest's experiment in requiring newspapers to run national editorials and have a shared viewpoint on those issues, the reaction to that was extremely negative. The editorial ceased appearing relatively quickly. If you are interested in profitability and the value of your franchise, then there are some things you cannot do.
I think that is particularly true probably when we are talking about corporate ownership. Even when it is a closely held corporation, as most of Canada's media companies are, the owners have an obligation to all of the shareholders, a legal obligation to all of the shareholders, and if they are using their newspapers in a way that advances their own interest, at the expense of the actual economic value of the newspapers, then they are breaking that trust with shareholders and exposing themselves to risk.
I am certainly worried about the newspapers and worried about the mass media generally, because when I started, probably across Canada on a typical day, if you take at least the urban and semi-urban areas, about 80 per cent of the people in the country were reading a newspaper, watching the same newscasts, and flawed or not, those newspapers provided a share of understanding. When people got together the next day to talk about the issues that were there, they may still have disagreed, but they had the day before read a news story, hopefully a useful news story about those issues, and they could debate it on a common basis. The newspaper helped make them a community.
That is being lost now, because that readership is down 40 per cent to 70 per cent, depending upon where you live. We are reaching a point where that role sort — as a key element in a shared understanding of what is happening in our society — is being eroded. That should certainly have us definitely, those of us who work in the industry, that so many people are finding that we just are not necessary.
At the same time, I do not see the reasons for that lying in convergence or concentration. I do not see any evidence that demonstrates that.
Our communities have changed and become much more diverse. You do not have to look any farther than the immediate area here, to recognize that more than one third of Vancouver's population does not count English as its first language and comes with a very different set of cultural values and cultural interest, and we have not found a way to reach those people at this point. We have not found a way to reach younger persons that newspapers should be part of their daily lives. My view is that what is going to drive newspapers, what is going to drive radio, television to some extent, to continue to attempt to do that more effectively is there own economic self-interest.
I would also note that we talked a lot about concentration, but in fact, as I am sure people have pointed out, the media world has actually become much more diverse in Canada. Here in Vancouver it was really not that long ago that people had a choice of two daily newspapers, two Canadian television stations, three American television stations and a handful of radio stations and a few community newspapers, and now they have access to four daily newspapers, although three have the same owner, two Chinese-language daily newspapers, and a host of community and targeted publications right across the board. Their choices, even given the concentration of ownership, have never been wider, and are, as you heard from your last presenters, growing, even in very small ways, to become more wide, to give them more choice.
Again, that is not to say that any of those media are doing a superb job, but it is to say that I have not seen evidence that convergence or concentration are the problem.
I think there are concerns. I think concentration of ownership deprives us of some of the potential for experimentation. You do not have 40, 50, 60 different newspapers trying to find different ways of reaching readers, with the chance that the best practices will be adopted by others. A corporation tends to come up with one plan that it hopes will work and drives forward on that basis. As well, we have certainly lost some of the diversity of voices. As Senator Carney has pointed out, you are going to find a great deal of overlapping copy in The Vancouver Sun, the National Post and the Victoria Times Colonist, if you have access to those papers. To some extent, you always found that because those newspapers always relied on the Canadian Press for much of that coverage.
I am not naive. There are concerns about abuses of the cross-ownership possibilities as well. An owner with a large number of properties could be tempted to want to use editorial coverage in a newspaper, for example, to promote television offerings, or vice versa, not through ads, but through the way the news coverage is directed. That would violate the trust with readers, and it would give that owner an unfair competitive advantage against others who did not enjoy that kind of cross-platform ownership. However, I have not seen the kind of evidence that that is happening that would call for any sort of action or intervention that carries with it other risks.
I want to address at least a few of the questions you posed, even though you can probably tell from my remarks generally where I am coming from.
You ask whether Canadians have appropriate amounts and quality of information about international, national, regional and local issues concerning availability, relevance, lack of bias and inclusiveness. My position as a journalist and a reader is that only Canadians can answer that question, and they answer it most clearly by deciding to support new sources if they are dissatisfied with existing ones. The market is the only effective way that I can see for concerns about the media to be addressed, and it is slow, painfully slow, and sometimes cumbersome, and there are obstacles, but the alternatives — state regulation or councils that can dictate news coverage or more publicly funded media — all seem to me to create new problems, especially around freedom of expression that should be taken seriously, and demand that we act with a lot of caution.
You asked if communities, minorities and remote centres are being appropriately served. Again, I think the market probably decides that most effectively, but my impression is that lowered cost of entry and a greater advertiser interest in targeted markets mean that most of those communities are being better served probably than they ever have been. Across much of B.C., even small communities are served by competing newspapers today that are making a serious effort to provide them with the news and information they need, and in many cases are excellent.
There is a problem. The experience and the priorities of minority groups are not nearly well enough reflected in what had been our mass media, but I think that their economic survival is going to compel them to make every effort to address that, or they are going to face a very difficult future.
You asked about changes in concentration or cross-ownership affecting diversity. It would be foolish to argue that it does not have some impact, that group ownership is going to attempt to pool resources in a way that is going to reduce the amount of information out there. However, as I say, that has happened in the past through the Canadian Press, through Southam News, through other organizations like that, Broadcast News, and I do not see that the impact at this point has been significant enough to call for any public policy response — which broadly, given your question about what the Government of Canada can do to address the situation without affecting press freedom, is not very much in all.
The Competition Bureau and the CRTC can usefully continue to attempt to maintain market competitiveness based on economic impacts, but beyond that, any proposal to improve diversity or quality that I have seen is either ineffective or contrary to basic principles of freedom of expression, or both, in a lot of cases.
My view again ultimately comes down to respect for the public. If they are not receiving information they feel they need, they will abandon the dominant media and seek alternatives. If they believe corporate interests are being placed ahead of their interests by some owners, they will quit reading or quit watching, and the media will either improve or be replaced.
Finally, you asked about foreign ownership, changing restrictions on that. To be logically consistent, I would say yes, you should lift foreign-ownership restrictions, but I do not take that decision. Despite everything that I have said, I believe that we have to recognize we are moving through a period of fairly rapid change in Canadian media ownership and management approaches, and we have not really had enough time yet to assess all of those implications. The only effect that I can see in lifting foreign-ownership restrictions at this point would be to provide capital for some of the players currently in the market or players from the U.S. to bring about further consolidation. Until we have had a chance to see just how this plays out over the next several years, that seems to me to be unnecessarily reckless, since everybody in the business entered into it knowing what the current rules are and accepted them. It just seems prudent to leave them in place.
Thank you for the chance to speak to you. Although I have said a lot of things that indicate not as much of a role for government, I applaud what the committee is doing. One of the things that I would consider to be valuable would be an ongoing schedule of some sort of hearings like this into the state of the media in the country as we move through this period. I am basing my comments on what I have seen in the past. That is not to say that this situation will not change, and I think given the importance of what we collectively do and the slowness with which the market can sometimes bring about changes, it is very useful to have some sort of outside scrutiny and criticism and a forum for discussion of how the media are doing.
Senator Tkachuk: Thanks for the presentation. I agree with a lot of what was said. I always have a strong concern that there be lots of competition in the market.
A number of witnesses have told us that local dailies here do not have reporters in the legislature. How do they get by this? Do they use freelance, do they borrow all the copy from the Victoria paper? How does the legislature get covered by the newspapers?
Mr. Willcocks: Well, The Vancouver Sun has had — and I am loathe to speak for The Vancouver Sun — a columnist there. The reporter has gone to television; they have not replaced him. For the most part, they use copy from the Times Colonist reporters. This is a function of convergence.
My guess would be that The Vancouver Sun management thinks the most effective thing they can do is use the Times Colonist reporters and the Canadian Press for legislature coverage, which gives them resources in return in Vancouver to bring to bear on the issues — and of course they have my insightful column on B.C. politics every Saturday in The Vancouver Sun.
In my view, it is a management decision — and one that brings risks, because there are things that happen in the legislature that need to be covered from a Vancouver perspective. For example, reporters writing for the Times Colonist should have a different set of priorities to address issues. Readers will judge whether they are being served well by that.
Senator Tkachuk: How many reporters does the Victoria paper have there?
Mr. Willcocks: Two.
Senator Tkachuk: I come from a one-newspaper city in Saskatchewan; there is another one-newspaper city to the south of us. I always think there is a lot of competition. I can read the National Post or The Globe and Mail; I can turn on the TV and get my information that way.
Your advice to us would be to do little and let the market forces work?
Mr. Willcocks: Yes.
Senator Carney: I would like to put on the record that Mr. Willcocks was the 2003 winner of the City Mike Award for commentator of the year at the Jack Webster Awards, and so he speaks to us with that kind of distinction, which of course gives credibility to his comments, I would imagine. That is a joke, Paul.
You have been quite explicit, but there are two areas I would like to ask you about. One is you said choices for readers have never been wider. You are a freelance commentator. Would you say that choices for freelance commentators have never been wider or have never been narrower?
Mr. Willcocks: They remain about the same. My political columns in The Sun, I run in most of the David Black newspapers on Vancouver Island, run in most of the smaller dailies around the province, and a lot of David Black's papers and some of his competitors in other parts of the province. There are a reasonable number of different options.
The concerns the previous presenters raised about the difficulty for journalists who want to work in a major market through the concentration of ownership are legitimate ones. It was somewhat possible in the past to at least have an alternative. If you fell out of favour at one location, there might be another location that would hire you. Having said that, it was relatively rare — most Canadian cities were one-newspaper cities. Hence, if the owner or the managers at a paper decided you were not someone that they wanted to employ, then you did not have many options beyond moving there either.
So I think the options are as wide as they have been, yes
Senator Carney: You have increased your options by diversifying your market to the David Black papers in the smaller communities as well as the Times Colonist and The Vancouver Sun.
Mr. Willcocks: Yes
Senator Carney: Have you heard about this controversial contract arrangement where CanWest commentators and writers have to give up their rights to their copy in perpetuity? Are you affected by that kind of thing?
Mr. Willcocks: Yes. That is pretty standard, and it was by The Globe and Mail, too. You sign away your rights forever and for all purposes. It is not something that actually troubles me, because nobody has found a way to make meaningful money out of my copy after the fact yet. I will worry about it more when they are able to do that. In principle, I suppose it is troubling to some freelancers; however, in reality, the copy has limited economic value to me once it has run in the newspaper.
Senator Carney: So this is a potential concern, but not a concern for you now to sign away your potential right?
Mr. Willcocks: No.
Senator Carney: What do you think of the future of blogs, and do you think people will turn to blogs for your kind of commentary?
Mr. Willcocks: Yes, I have a blog. I probably get about 3,000 hits a month from people either who are coming to read my commentary or are doing research. Probably two thirds of them are people who are doing research — doing a Google search and my stuff just comes out. It is a useful way for people to get information without having to buy a newspaper.
Senator Carney: What do you write in your blog that you do not write in your commentary?
Mr. Willcocks: Nothing. I put my columns up on the blog, because as a freelance writer, I do very little writing for which I cannot get paid, and there is no way to get paid for blog content.
The Chairman: I wish to follow up on that. You are familiar with this CanWest contract that has freelancers across the country making representations to us, and I think to others, that you have to get all your rights in perpetuity throughout the universe. You were busily selling your column to competing groups of newspapers and putting it up on your own website. How does that happen? Did you not have to sign the contract?
Mr. Willcocks: The column The Vancouver Sun gets is different. I do four columns a week for them, and they are different. I do not put The Vancouver Sun column up on my website. I started my blog as a diversion. I just wanted a place to put the column so that when the Terrace Standard email was down and they could not get it, they could just lift it off website site instead of bothering me. Of course, being journalists, none of them ever remembered to do that, but other people started reading it as well.
Senator Eyton: Senator Carney did not have to tell me you were good; I came to that conclusion after you finished your remarks. I was persuaded. Thank you for being here.
I did not get a chance to ask Mr. Beers — and I think you were here during his presentation; I am not sure whether he is here or not. He made nine very specific recommendations. In my view — a very quick judgment and not perhaps knowing enough about it — I judged six of them to be either impractical or inappropriate, particularly if you believe in private property and a free economy. However, three of them seemed, to me, on the positive side.
The first was, in effect, a tax writeoff for philanthropy to the media — for example, Jimmy Pattison giving $1 million to The Vancouver Sun to establish a desk on African affairs, or something of that sort. I found that to be intriguing. If you give a donation to a university, why not to the media. It still has a community function, interpreting it that way.
Do you have any comment on that? I had never thought of it, but it struck me as interesting.
Mr. Willcocks: It is an interesting idea. You may already be able to do that, I am not sure, if you went through the process of creating a foundation that was eligible.
Senator Eyton: I think the idea was more to give the gift and then to have the media that was the beneficiary in fact manage it according to their rules, which would I think include independence, an opportunity of spending it as they chose?
Mr. Willcocks: It is an interesting idea, one that probably carries with it its own set of risks. It deserves examination vis-à-vis what kinds of things get funded, where the major forces of funding in our society are likely to be, and what sort of diversity you are actually achieving.
Senator Eyton: If somebody wants to do it perhaps.
The second was a community-based web portal. In a way, I suppose, The Tyee is something like that. However, I am always curious about precedent — who has done it before and has he done it well and has it worked? Are you familiar with any precedent that would meet that description?
Mr. Willcocks: No. I do think that is a very interesting idea, that it actually has potential for government involvement in a positive way. Nobody is doing it effectively at this point; it has been much talked about without really being done.
Senator Eyton: The third one, which is really quite similar to that, is facility convergence for the alternative medium. In effect, you would not be all by yourself with a singular way of delivering your message; there could a convergence, with diverse parts making it up and working cooperatively. That struck me too as a positive and useful suggestion.
Mr. Willcocks: Yes. It is a positive, useful suggestion. I think it is already happening to a large extent. Look at The Tyee. Many of the people who come to my blog are people who have seen links for it on someone else's blog, website or electronic publication.
Senator Eyton: I thought he was referring to a more cooperative effort, where, because of joint effort, it would be bigger and grander and more effective.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Mr. Willcocks, you certainly have brought a balancing perspective today with your very insightful comments.
I do not know whether I have paid enough attention, but I still do not understand how you put your full column on the blog? I do not understand how that fits with giving up your rights for this column?
Mr. Willcocks: I do not put up the one I do for The Vancouver Sun. I do not put that on the blog, mostly because I do not want the other papers to be able to — what I am putting on the blog are the columns that I want other papers to be able to pluck off and use. The Vancouver Sun buys the column they buy with the understanding that it is just for them.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: However, there is only a slight modification — you more or less told us you modified them a bit.
Mr. Willcocks: Well, no, they are quite different; they are quite different.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: However, if you had signed that contract with the paper, you cannot put it on the blog?
Mr. Willcocks: Theoretically, I suppose.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Theoretically, or as a matter of fact?
Mr. Willcocks: Well, as a matter of legal fact, the enforcement of it I do not think would ever happen. I do not think The Vancouver Sun would push it.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Are you sure?
Mr. Willcocks: Pretty.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Okay. The other question is I hope more useful. There are two daily newspapers in Vancouver owned by one company; is that right?
Mr. Willcocks: Yes.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: It seems to me that that is a bit of a laboratory experiment in itself. How do those papers differ, and if they do differ, what does that add to our questioning, what does it mean? How different are they? In what respects are they different? Does this give a message regarding ownership and ideology in the papers coverage, et cetera?
Mr. Willcocks: As a reader, they are different, in that they are aimed at different markets for the most part.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: What I am really interested in is as a reader. Hence, it is a different market?
Mr. Willcocks: The Province, I would say, is aimed at less of a business reader, more of a morning commuter reader. There is more emphasis on sports, for example. They are attempting to segment the market that way, would be my analysis, as a reader of the two publications.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: In terms of editorial comment, are they quite similar, or are there significant differences?
Mr. Willcocks: Significant differences in tone, in my judgment. The Province strives for a more populous, slightly more right wing, law and order, "We are all in this together, Joe," kind of editorial tone in the way they comment on things. In my mind, they are more conventionally right wing on social issues than The Vancouver Sun.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Is there any significant divergence, or are they basically just two versions of the same thing aimed at two different populations?
Mr. Willcocks: I do not think you would find a hugely significant divergence in their fundamental opinions, no.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: You would never find the editor of one in fact debating the other?
Mr. Willcocks: You might well find issues on which they take different opinions; however, these are two publications with very different views of the society we live in.
Senator Carney: Yes. I just wanted to make a clarification. There has been one owner of the two Vancouver papers for at least 35 or 45 years. I was a columnist at The Vancouver Sun. Both papers were bought by, was it FP?
Mr. Willcocks: Yes.
Senator Carney: Max Bell and FP bought it, and then the Southams bought them, and then of course CanWest bought the Southams, so it has been a two-newspaper, one-owner town for 40 years, and then the Southams bought the community newspapers, which consolidated the ownership issue, so it is not a new concept.
The other thing about the readership, there was a belief at one time where both papers went morning. The Vancouver Sun was an afternoon paper and The Province was a morning paper. They took The Vancouver Sun morning, with the expectation The Province would die, but the damn thing will not die. It really upset the corporate owners. The Province grew and grew and grew — and actually the circulation was greater than that of The Vancouver Sun, because they have different readership. The Province developed a market of the so-called blue collar, Fraser Valley area, and The Vancouver Sun was supposed to be the more elitist newspaper. I do not know if that is true today.
There is quite a division. I think the competition may have had a role here — and I am saying that from memory, not from necessarily fact. The papers are not allowed to exchange copy, and there is significant separation of the editorial operation, so it is not a new experiment. Whether it worked or not, it has been around for a long time.
The Chairman: The Province, the damn thing refused to die, as you put it, and there was a variety of reasons for that. However, among journalists, it is believed that in part the reason is that The Province hired an absolutely brilliant editor, who has now gone off to be the editor of the New York Daily News, Michael Cook. It would be hard for Michael Cook not to succeed as the editor of a tabloid newspaper, I would think, an argument for journalistic competence.
Senator Chaput: If I understand correctly what you said, sir, you are saying that, at the present time, in spite of all the changes, there is not much the government should do, except maybe follow closely what is going on and monitor it if need be?
Mr. Willcocks: That is correct.
Senator Chaput: What about the new media — the online news. Should not somebody look at developing new terms or new rules, before we get into real trouble?
Mr. Willcocks: Well, no. I think our best chance to avoid getting into real trouble is to have as few rules as possible. I think one of the advantages of the new media is that experiments like The Tyee can be launched relatively cheaply. The more of those experiments we have, the more likely we are to find ones that work, and the more positive pressure that will be put upon the mass media, the mainstream media, to look critically at what they are doing and make sure they are doing a good enough job to continue to survive.
Senator Chaput: Did they not say they would need funds to go on, though?
Mr. Willcocks: Yes.
Senator Chaput: You just said that. Should there not be some rules or terms related to those funds, if they do ask the government for monies as an example?
Mr. Willcocks: Yes. If the intention was to provide government funds for start-ups — I think it is a risky idea and a huge challenge to have government-funded news organizations of any kind. If The Tyee can persuade its 45,000 monthly viewers to contribute $5.00 a month, it will have more than enough money to thrive.
I do not think government funding is going to create a model, a sustainable model that works.
Senator Chaput: No, I understand that. Could they be looking at indirect funding — say, having access to a tax credit or that type of thing?
Mr. Willcocks: I suppose they could. However, I have difficulty seeing a way of doing that effectively, so as not to raise through a side door the issue of how government funds news media without compromising the integrity and independence of those media, whether it is a print form or a broadcast form or Internet form.
The Chairman: If I could come back to something you mentioned a couple of times, Canadian Press, just because you have had such an enormous variety of experience in different media, different places, different sizes. How important is CP? To whom is it most important — big papers, little papers, tiny papers? Has there been any change in the various pressures on CP over the years as a result of various corporate shifts?
Mr. Willcocks: I think Canadian Press is very important. It is more important, probably than they realize, to medium-sized papers, and certainly important to small newspapers, especially small newspapers that are not part of a major corporate group at this point, because if all the news is only coming from corporate groups, it is going to be harder for those papers to get content. I also think Canadian Press is extremely important to Canadians in a way that we have not thought through fully enough. There is always going to be very good reporting of what happens in Toronto for people who live in Vancouver or what happens in Vancouver for people who live in Montreal.
What Canadian Press ensures is that the situation belies the priorities. The problems of people in Prince George are at least reported on, so they are available for the paper in Vancouver, Ottawa, Rimouski or Fredericton. It does provide a genuine, national cooperative news service that I am not sure any of the models of corporate in-house news services can replace very readily.
I think the pressure on Canadian Press has been with us for, at least in a serious way, 15 or 16 years now, as the larger corporate groups wonder if they could not do much of what Canadian Press does more cheaply and with some competitive advantage.
I do not know that it is much worse at this point than it has been. However, it is a difficult problem for the Canadian Press; it is always there, always lurking.
The Chairman: Is there anything that we should recommend?
Mr. Willcocks: I have not thought about that.
The Chairman: I cannot keep you here all afternoon, but I think I will ask you, because of your experience and your present independent status, if you could think about that and maybe write us a letter.
Mr. Willcocks: I would be pleased to.
Senator Phalen: There is a January 10 article by Paul Wells in Maclean's magazine that quoted a witness before this committee regarding a dwindling number of journalists reporting the national news from Ottawa. The article refers to, and I quote, "foreign owners in the Canadian newspaper market."
Do you agree?
Mr. Willcocks: Did I agree that we should allow foreign owners — is that what you are asking?
Senator Phalen: Yes.
Mr. Willcocks: No, quite the contrary. I do not have a principled objection, but my point was that, given the pace of change we are seeing and the relative newness of this — we have not had a chance to assess the current degree of concentration and cross-platform ownership — the only result I can see of allowing foreign ownership at this point would be to accelerate that change. It seems reckless to me to lift existing rules until we have had more of a chance to see how this develops over the next several years. All of the players who went into this knew what the rules were when they went into it.
Senator Phalen: Some have argued that if foreign ownership restrictions in the Canadian media were reduced or eliminated, Canadian news would become less diverse and become more American. Is that a real threat?
Mr. Willcocks: I think less diverse is a potential threat, yes. I am saying concentration, I have not seen a major effect conversely at this point, but I think it is something that needs to be watched closely. The effect on increased foreign ownership would be increased concentration, so I think there are enough people warning that that could lead to a loss of diversity, that it would be reckless for the committee to recommend lifting the foreign ownership restrictions at this point.
Senator Merchant: Thanks very much. We spoke of the changing demographic, and we know that there is a generation gap. Have you some thought as to how we can engage the different people who are now living in Canada, as well the young people, how we can engage them in dialogue. After all, they are the ones who are coming up; we want them to participate in society.
Have you some thoughts? What is happening with young people? What is happening with elementary and high school students, and similarly through the different ethnic communities? If you write and you do not have an audience, there is something missing there.
Mr. Willcocks: There is not much point to actually doing it at that point, no. It is far too broad a topic to deal with, given the time that is available. The industry is trying to do better in that. We have not made ourselves useful to them, and clearly they do not see themselves reflected in our newspapers and in our broadcasts, to some extent, or else they would be paying attention.
One of the obvious answers is that, when you look at newsrooms of all kinds across Canada, they tend to be filled with white, middle-class, middle-aged people. Our workforces need to reflect more of the diversity that is in our communities, and that is a big problem, because there are a lot of people my age that are not going anywhere right now.
Senator Merchant: So nothing is being done then?
Mr. Willcocks: Oh, no. I think a lot of effort is being made, and I think probably an editor who is actually doing that work would be a better person to probably talk about it. Newspapers are trying in different ways to involve young readers. They are trying to make the coverage more meaningful for the full range of groups in their community. Unfortunately, I do not think they have been very successful so far.
The Chairman: Thank you so much, Mr. Willcocks. This has been very fascinating, as you can tell.
Mr. Willcocks: Thank you very much.
The Chairman: Senators, our last witness for the scheduled witnesses portion of this, before we open the floor to members of the public, is Councillor Nick Volkow from the City of Burnaby. I understand the mayor had hoped to be here today with us, but he has not been able to do that, and Councillor Volkow is representing the city.
We are very grateful to you for agreeing to do that, and we welcome you. The floor is yours.
Mr. Nick Volkow, City Councillor, City of Burnaby: Prior to starting, I understand that we have community television here attempting to record the proceedings. The rules of the committee, I believe, are that that is satisfactory, as long as the delegation or the witness does not mind; am I correct in that?
The Chairman: At the request of one witness this morning, we did agree to that, and since you have requested it, I will agree to it again. However, after that, we should revert to the normal practice of Senate committees, which is that we do not do this, outside of our normal contractual —
Mr. Volkow: I am in your hands. I do not know the rules.
The Chairman: No. We did agree to it this morning, so I will agree to it in your case again this afternoon. However, it opens up endless complexities, which I do not want to bore anybody with right now, so carry on, Mr. Volkow.
Mr. Volkow: Thank you, Madam Chair, honourable senators, for the opportunity for the City of Burnaby to appear in front of you. I will be very brief. I know it is late in the day, and you have been here three and half hours without taking a break. I know sitting on council that we generally try every two and a half hours to take a break.
The Chairman: As soon as you are done, we get a two-minute break.
Mr. Volkow: The reason for our appearance this afternoon is in response to a letter we received at council from the Community Media Education Society. The society wrote council a letter respecting their presentation, which I believe they have made. However, it was council's wish that, upon reading their presentation, we send a letter of support in regards to various items that they mentioned in the letter.
This may appear to be a mundane issue — especially after having heard the delegations I have had the pleasure of listening to this afternoon — but it is an important issue to many groups within our community in Burnaby. For the benefit of members of the committee, the City of Burnaby is the third largest city in British Columbia. We have a population of 210,000, Vancouver being the largest city, Surrey next, and then Burnaby.
Having said that, Shaw Cable, which has had a studio in Burnaby for many years, is now closing. It is the city's understanding that it is closing because down the street is the new Shaw tower. If you were to walk around, you would see it right at the foot of Granville, across from the Pan Pacific Hotel. Our understand is that that will be the only studio available to community groups, not only in Burnaby, but those that are not specifically based in Vancouver.
The problem with that is that a number of the groups who used studio represent various types of issues — some deal with mental health issues, others with housing issues. At one time, there was a studio in Maple Ridge, which is a little farther out. These groups could avail themselves of the equipment and the services at the community studio, as well as participate in panels. They could produce their own programming with respect to their various interests. It is our belief that with the closing of the metrotown studio that will no longer be the case.
As I say, this may sound like a mundane issue, but the ability to access studio space close to your prime client group is an important issue. For those in Burnaby or Maple Ridge or farther out, Port Coquitlam, to have to travel all the way into downtown Vancouver will be burdensome.
I wanted to be very clear that the presentation that the CMAS sent to council was brief, in keeping with the rules of the committee, but they did raise some interesting issues that I think tie into the issue of the closure of studio space for community groups. I wanted to quote — and I believe the committee is in receipt of the same letter Burnaby City Council received — three paragraphs from that letter. Council believes that the issue of studio space is directly tied to the privilege that we as citizens give to the various cable companies, in order for them to be able to avail themselves of public air space. In other words, there is a quid quo pro, and for many years that has been the availability of studio space and people who assist community groups in presenting their various ideas to the public.
Let me quote from the letter: "Currently, community channel spending, which is public money collected through a cable tax levy, amounts to $80 million a year. The Standing Committee —" and this is the Lincoln Report to the committee — "was very frustrated by the absence of data on community television and was dismayed that virtually no information exists on what happens as a result of cable company expenditures, approximately $75 million to $80 million in support of community television each year." And that is quoting directly from the report.
The other paragraph reads as follows: "Secondly, recommendation 91 causes the CRTC to require public access to the community channel rather than simply recommending access for community groups and volunteers. Thirdly, recommendation 90 creates funding for independent groups delivering community programming. The Canadian Television Fund specifically excludes community programming from funding eligibility."
Let me now read the interesting line for us at the city: "However, an anomaly exists, in that commercial programs are shown on the community channel while local independent programs are denied any public money in spite of being the only producers who comply with CRTC Public Notice 2002-61 program guidelines. These groups survive only through volunteer support, yet local demand is so great that volunteers keep coming."
Not to put too fine a point on it, it is the belief of the city that there is a responsibility not only on keeping studio space only within communities to a reasonable level, but to reduce the availability in a major metropolitan area like Vancouver to one studio is really beyond the pale.
I do not know that the argument of costs in regards to having community groups — as I mentioned, the various types we have within Burnaby, the Burnaby Multicultural Society, the Burnaby Association for Community Inclusion. These people do very fine work, and on occasion they have the opportunity and ability to access studio space. However, if studio space is reduced only the one down the street from here, I do not think we will be seeing exactly the same participation rate that we currently have.
I am sorry that Senator Carney is not here. She mentioned The Economist. I just received the latest issue of The Economist — Joel Bakan, who is a UBC law professor here, was instrumental in making the documentary The Corporation — and the cover of this week's edition is on corporate social responsibility.
I will close with these few paragraphs from The Economist. It says: "Recall that Joel Bakan, the angry law school professor and scourge of modern corporations, argued that CSR is usually a scam. Corporate social responsibility is for governments, he says, not firms, to decide questions of social, environmental and industrial policy."
I will close with a paragraph of the editorializing The Economist. It says: "It is indeed desirable to establish a clear division of duties between business and governments. Governments, which are accountable to their electorates, should decide matters of public policy. Managers who are accountable to their shareholders" — and we have heard a lot about them today — "should run their businesses."
I wish to thank the committee for the opportunity to speak, not only on behalf of the City of Burnaby, but on behalf of the various community groups located not only within our city, but within the Greater Vancouver area.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. On the plane out here, I was reading my neighbour's copy of the Harvard Business Review, which had a very interesting piece on the four — I think that was the number — stages corporations go through when they become faced with an issue of social responsibility. Obviously, the first stage involves getting something onto the public agenda, which you are doing here today.
However, going to the core of what I think you were saying, you were saying, were you not, or did I not hear it properly, that Shaw is not abiding by its conditions of licence?
Mr. Volkow: I do not their conditions of licence. I do not want to read too much into it, but historically in the Lower Mainland and over the years there were a number of studio spaces available, made available by the cable companies. There was one in East Vancouver at one time, one in Kitsilano, ours in Burnaby, one in Surrey and one in Maple Ridge. These have all closed down. That is the reason I read into the record the presentation from the Lincoln Report. By any measure, $80 million is a great whack of money, to be quite blunt about it. Unfortunately, the reporting of that issue by the major media — and CanWest has been raised a number of times — is almost nil; you do not find reporting about the television fund and the opportunities for community groups to access the community channel.
What is occurring — and I do not know if it is across Canada, but I am an inveterate reader of newspapers; I read four a day. I also watch quite a bit of television — I am quite partial to the Knowledge Network, who made a presentation here early on; and I watch the community channel. I have been disturbed over the last few years about the number of people who previously worked for the commercial stations, professional broadcasters, that are now getting time and hour-long programs of their own on what is purportedly the community channel. This is my personal opinion, but it concerns me greatly that that is occurring.
As to the licence and whether they are not meeting theirs, I would leave that in your hands.
The Chairman: I know Senator Eyton has a question, but I just want to follow up on something. Back when there were all these very impressive number of studios, was there more time available, or were they all competing for the same limited time that is still available today?
Mr. Volkow: They were probably competing for the same amount of time. However, the issue was the ability of groups in those areas to be able to produce within their areas. In my view, in Maple Ridge and Surrey, the programming was not the same in all the time slots across the region. In Burnaby, the cablevision stations usually had tie-ins with Vancouver. Hence, what they saw in Maple Ridge, let's say at 4 p.m., was not what Vancouver viewers were watching at 4 p.m.
As I say, some professional broadcasters are getting their own space, and there is advertisement now running on what is purportedly the community channel. This raises a number of concerns, mainly with the groups that are being shut out of time, to be able to get their messages across. Some people may have viewpoints or opinions on the issues they may want to bring forward that may not be too comfortable to some folks, but I do think they should at least have the opportunity to bring forward those ideas.
Senator Eyton: Thank you, sir, for coming here today and making that presentation. It is one that is manageable.
Mr. Volkow: It is pretty mundane in the big picture.
Senator Eyton: Has anybody spoken to Shaw and made the case?
Mr. Volkow: Over the years — and I have been on council for nine years — there were occasions on which Burnaby Council wrote letters to the predecessor, which was Rogers, and now Shaw, concerning this and similar issues in regards to the availability of air time to community groups.
Senator Eyton: You are not sure whether they talked about this issue?
Mr. Volkow: On this one here, I am not too sure. Actually, the issue has just arisen.
Senator Eyton: Well, I thought, as a broken down lawyer, that, number one, you would go speak to them and that, number 2, given that it is your geography and their cables, you are in a very strong bargaining position to say, "Here is what we would like to do," and try to get some sort of compromise. The roughly 300,000 people could be serviced by that studio are a credible mass, and I am sure they could do lots of good things that would be compelling to the community.
Mr. Volkow: Well, as a broken down truck driver, I will take the advice of a broken down lawyer and look into that a little further.
The Chairman: As a broken down journalist, I thank you enormously, Mr. Volkow.
Mr. Volkow: We are all breaking down here.
The Chairman: We are grateful to you for being so patient, for waiting through a long afternoon when we were running overtime. This is the kind of thing that it is important for us to hear. It is all very well to hear grand corporate theories, but it is also very important for us to hear your type of presentation.
Mr. Volkow: If I may say, I do envy the work that you are doing. This is a fascinating topic.
The Chairman: Thank you very much.
We are now going to ask groups to come forward. In fact, we may be able to hold at least some of our groups to three rather than four panellists, which will be useful for us. I will, therefore, ask for our first group, Mr. Pedro Mora from the Vancouver Community Television Association, Mr. Bob Hackett from the School of Communications at SFU, and Mr. James MacKinnon from the Campaign for Press and Broadcast Freedom — CPBF — to join us. Welcome. gentlemen.
Mr. Mora, please proceed.
Mr. Pedro Mora, as an individual: Thank you. I have been producing community television in Vancouver for almost 20 years. Allow me to review some facts about community television and perhaps to suggest some public policy that would help Canadian media to be more democratic.
The CRTC for many years required cable television stations to provide access to community producers, until around 1996, when the CRTC dropped that requirement. The owners of community television, which are in every case the cable company owners, started gradually closing down community television studios and offices, until finally, in September 2001, when even the most popular and long-lasting community television programs were unceremoniously cancelled, terminated.
In 2002, the CRTC, in the broadcasting public notice, required that TV stations owned by cable companies should once again give broadcasting access to community television groups. Gradually, the cable TV managers gave back some broadcasting time. We, the community groups, like ICTV and Work TV and VCTA, are now precariously surviving the dictates of the cable managers.
Why is this community media in crisis? The public policy required for democratizing community television in Canada either does not exist or perhaps is not well defined or the CRTC is not interpreting properly — and that is something this committee could perhaps recommend.
Allow me to be more specific. The CRTC, in spite of our many requests, is not willing to review their community television regulation, which does not provide for community television groups to apply for a licence to operate a community channel. This CRTC regulatory oversight, which gives the cable companies an exclusive authority to administer the community television channel, is the unhealthiest condition for that independent community producer. It is not only that community media is subjected to the approval of the cable company's whim, but that we, the community producers, do not get compensated for our grassroots programs, while their emulation of commercial media are generously compensated. To add insult to injury, the compensation comes from the CRTC cable levy supposedly intended to community television.
I hope you can recommend the appropriate legislation to require the CRTC to change the present regulation, to truly ensure that Canadian television becomes healthy, independent and democratic.
The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed, Mr. Mora.
Mr. Hackett, please proceed.
Mr. Bob Hackett, as an individual: I wonder if I might defer to Mr. MacKinnon. We have two parts of a joint presentation.
The Chairman: Mr. MacKinnon, please proceed.
Mr. James MacKinnon, as an individual: Thank you for this opportunity to speak, and if it is any consolation, I have been here from 8:15 this morning as well.
I am speaking on behalf of the Campaign for Press and Broadcast Freedom. It is a national citizen-based organization. As for myself, I am a working journalist in my day-to-day life. It is fair to say that their campaign was founded largely in reaction to the concerns we have heard about today, about concentration and convergence of news media in Canada. Throughout the 1990s, we observed an increase in this concentration and perhaps an increase in concern over the use of the media outlets under our concentrated system here in Vancouver. The point was raised by several senators over the day that the situation in Vancouver is not new, and certainly it is not new, but one thing I might point out is that the concern about it and citizen involvement in attempting to change that system is not new either.
I wanted to add one further example of CanWest's sphere of influence here in Vancouver. CanWest is a major donor to journalism programs — for example, $500,000 to the UBC School of Journalism, $300,000 to the B.C. Institute of Technology. While such support is important to these institutions, it also highlights the fact that schools of journalism face a potential constraint on their community responsibility to provide scholarly analysis while also looking to CanWest for student internships, guest speakers, instructors, direct funding and other benefits of the relationship between academe and leading local media.
In more recent years, the campaign has shifted its energies away from a reaction to media concentration toward a pro-active demand for what has come to be called media democracy. It is no exaggeration to say that we are now part of an international media democracy movement. Among the more notable accomplishments of this movement was the mobilization in the United States of a reported 3 million citizens to oppose any loosening of the market domination cap set there. I should point out that the level of concentration in the U.S. is in fact lower than it is in Canada. A more symbolic success has been the founding of Media Democracy Day, which was first celebrated in Vancouver and Toronto in 2001 and is now an international event.
I should define what is meant by the term "media democracy." The idea suggests that the primary function of the news media in a liberal democracy is to sustain and support democratic values and civic participation. The concept does not exclude the many other purposes; it merely suggests that these lesser purposes should not be permitted to override the democratic vitality of the news media.
We believe Canadian public policy has not been sufficiently vigilant in this regard. As a result, a news media system is increasingly guided by the commercial imperatives of private media corporations.
I can see that I am running out of time, so I will leap to one quick point. One aspect of Media Democracy Day that I want to draw attention to is our Independent Media Fair. It hosts a gathering of community media outlets that are not a part of any media conglomerate of any size. The list runs to 70 outlets. You heard from one of those, The Tyee, at this committee. It is tempting to see that as this wealth of independent community news media and declare that a media democracy has been achieved. I think that would be going too far. It would be more reasonable to say that this diversity represents the desire of many Canadians for richer, more diverse and more accessible news media.
The Chairman: Thank you. You took a breath, so I took a breath. I would like to point out, of course, that for any of you who have written statements or who want to turn what you are saying into a written statement, do not hesitate to send them to us. We will make sure they are circulated to the committee.
Mr. Hackett, please proceed.
Mr. Hackett: Thank you, members of the committee. I am a professor of communication at Simon Fraser University. For 10 years, I co-directed a media monitoring project at SFU called News Watch Canada. I also worked with the CPBF that Mr. MacKinnon talked about in organizing their annual Media Democracy Day.
I want to briefly, first of all, extrapolate from the academic literature a number of books, including some of which I have written, highlighting why there may be a tension between the values of democracy and the existing structure of our media system dominated by corporations and commercial imperatives to the extent that they are.
Academics suggest, first of all, that there is a problem in terms of constituting an adequate democratic public fear, a public forum. Particularly in light of developments in the media in the last 10 years, various writers talk about or refer to, for example, the decline of the public service ethos that you see most strongly in the United States. I really think we do have to look to the U.S. to see what are the implications of a fully commercialized so-called deregulated system to see where we might be going if we go down that road — conglomerate conflicts of interest, a tendency towards grabbing audiences cheaply and easily through so-called reality programming and infotainment and so on, so a problem of constituting an adequate democratic public sphere that supplies the information that citizens in a democracy need.
Second, political and economic inequality. If the logic of democracy is one person, one vote, the logic of commercialism is one dollar, one vote. We recognize that in terms of health care. We need to recognize that same principle in terms of our media system as well, that a strictly commercial system introduces inequalities of access and that different groups in the population will be serviced differentially.
Third, there are tendencies in a commercial system towards homogenization, partly from commercial pressures, from mass advertising going back a century, much more recently through conglomeration and convergence, tendencies towards rationalization, towards repurposing the same content and so on, which you probably have heard about earlier today before I was here.
Fourth, a decline of a sense of community. Media are not serving communities as well as they should under strictly commercial imparts. I think Councillor Volkow's point from Burnaby was quite well taken, and indeed in the United States you see that very clearly happening when you have massive media concentration in radio. A company called Clear Channel, which now has 1,200 radio stations throughout the U.S., has basically clear-cut local programming.
In Canada, I do not think our situation is yet nearly that bad, but we have been doing research for 10 years and we have found what we consider to be systematic blind spots in Canada's press, including poverty and class inequality, environmental degradation as a systemic problem, as distinct from spectacular oil spills, issues affecting labour and working people, white collar and corporate crime, and the vested interests of media companies themselves.
Hence, we want to suggest — and I hope we can follow it up on questions — five policy principles. First, establish a market-domination cap. We do need limits on concentration and convergence that work at local and regional, not just national levels, given our situation in Vancouver. Second, we think we should maintain ownership requirements. To do otherwise would probably be short-term gain for long-term pain. Third, we need public arm's-length funding to community and independent media counter-balanced within the media system, not as a substitute for limiting media concentration, but as a supplement to it. There are ways to do that without turning government into censors. We can talk about that if you like. Fourth, we need to expand the role of the public broadcaster, including revitalizing regional programming. CBC does at least set a standard for journalism, even if its audiences are not uniformly large.
The Chairman: You are going to have to do your fifth point in questions.
Mr. Hackett: Thank you.
The Chairman: Thank you all very much. We will now turn to questions.
Senator Munson: Just one brief question. You talked about, Mr. Mora, the community producers as being subservient to the cable operators. I would think, for example, that a meeting like this would be a classic opportunity for community television, to air views like this, and yet there is not an opportunity to do that. Is that an example of where you have no control, or is that simply a decision by the cable operators of what is covered in a community way?
In your opinion, what legislation would like to see us recommend to the government and the CRTC?
The Chairman: The questions will all be asked in block, after which the witnesses will respond.
Senator Merchant, you had a question?
Senator Merchant: You mentioned that you are unable to get the CRTC to give a licence to the community television people. Have you some notion why your applications have been rejected? Is there something you can do? It is possible for you to make another application, to try to remedy the situation?
Can you let us know why you feel community television has not been able to gain access, because you said that that was given to the cable companies?
The Chairman: What was your fifth point, Mr. Hackett? Also, why do you think there are blind spots? Is it because the public is not interested? Is it ideological, or is it just that that is the way it has always been?
Mr. Mora: The first question was about why cable television is not here. I am here and I have not been allowed to tape this panel, because that is your rule, so it is not cable television that is failing but in this case your rule.
Your second question was this: What is appropriate legislation? Appropriate legislation would be the mandate from legislation to the CRTC, so the CRTC would democratically give licences to community groups rather than automatically attach the community television licence to a cable licence. To me, they are two separate activities: One is providing cable to the city; the other is operating a television station. In the eyes of CRTC, they are packaged together, one automatically goes with the other one. The appropriate legislation would be to be very specific in what the regulations should be from the CRTC so we, the community groups, could have that licence and operate our own community televisions.
To answer the last question, about whether I have made an application, I went to the CRTC office here and explained that I would like to file an application in the name of VCTA, the Vancouver Community Television Association. We were told there is no such a provision. I wrote to the CRTC, but the answer, as always, from is this: "The regulation is that the licence is packaged with the cable, so there is nothing we can do. We will review that every five years, and maybe we will think about what you are saying now in five years." That is what they said, yes.
The Chairman: I did not realize that that was connected with the application, but thank you very much.
Mr. Hackett: Our fifth point, Madam Chair, was to regulate bandwidths, to support the public good, mainly through setting aside airwaves, satellite communications and Internet bandwidth. They should not simply be treated as a commodity. There should be a set aside, as there is in the United States, one for public service and educational services and community programming — and I would hope one that is larger than in the U.S.
The other question related to why there are blind spots in the news agenda. We have a book entitled "The Missing News: Filters and Blind Spots in Canada's Press." We would be quite happy to donate that to the committee. Briefly, however, it has to do with the news values and the complexities of certain kinds of stories — for example, white-collar and corporate crime, which some people estimate costs Canadians about $30 billion a year. Those stories are almost always absent from the news agenda. As such, people get a skewed view of the world from the news, as it were.
I think it all has to do with commercial and corporate pressures. There is, I believe, an ideology that the Fraser Institute has done very well for itself in sort of gaining access to the media in the last 10 or 15 years through conscious publicity strategies that were actually publicized about five or six years ago. So there is an ideological affinity between corporate ownership and the views of the corporate-funded policy institutes. As well, I think there is also, in any commercial system, a trend towards the more affluent consumers. The history of the British press shows that newspapers that were oriented towards working-class readers have gone out of business, with literally millions of readers. The Daily Herald would be an example there. On the other hand, smaller circulation papers oriented towards an upscale readership, such as the Daily Telegraph or The Times of London have done quite well for themselves with a fraction of the readership. So once again, you know, there is a bias towards the views, the sensibilities, cultural and political, of affluent consumers.
The Chairman: Thank you so much. Mr. MacKinnon, did you want to add anything?
Mr. MacKinnon: I just wanted to add that you can often fill in the blind spots by turning to the community and independent media outlets like The Tyee, for example, but that those outlets simply cannot compete in a system that is structured to support media monopolies like the ones we see in Vancouver. Mr. Hackett — I think it may be in the book — has suggested a public policy of structured pluralism, where the government structures the media system to encourage the diversity of media and then steps back in order to avoid a conflict between government and media that is so much a concern here.
The Chairman: Thank you all very much. Mr. Mora, if you want to wait until all this is over, I will be glad to have a private conversation with you about the superficially apparently, I am sure, lunatic reasons for not giving you full permission today. They are not superficial and they are not lunatic, however maddening they may be to you.
Mr. Mora: Thank you.
The Chairman: Thank you all very much. I think Messrs. Hackett and MacKinnon did have a written presentation. Please do give it to us.
Our next panel will consist Rafeh Hulays from the Canadian Arab Federation, Riadh Muslih, ADALA, from the Canadian Arab Justice Committee, and together Brian Campbell and Barbara Jo May, who will count as one person, from the B.C. Library Association to come forward.
You have four minutes to make your presentation. At the three-minute mark, I will raise a finger to indicate one minute left. Presentations will be followed by questions from senators.
Mr. Hulays, the floors is yours.
Mr. Rafeh Hulays, as an individual: I am the vice-president of the Canadian Arab Federation for Western Canada. I wish to thank you for the chance to put forth our concern about the issue of media concentration in Canada and especially in Vancouver. A healthy democratic system cannot exist when ideas and the means to deliver them are monopolized. This is especially the case when these are monopolized by an ideologically driven ownership that has a history of imposing its view on its media outlet and bullying its supporters.
Monopolies are inherently dangerous in any business, and governments around the world have recognized this fact. When it comes to the media, this is especially dangerous, since it concentrates massive amounts of power in the hands of the monopoly. It simply corrupts our political system and institution and makes an informed public impossible. It bullies our politicians to adopt policies that may not be in the national interest or reflective of Canadian values. The reporters and editors are hesitant to challenge their employers, since there is no prospect of employment in their field outside the monopoly.
This brings me to the coverage by CanWest of the Middle East, Israel and the Palestine conflict and the Arab and the Muslim communities in Canada. For many Arab-Canadians, CanWest seems to make every effort to demonize them and their culture. There have been many conflicts by Arab groups against CanWest, but their organization maintains an uncompromising and apologetic position. Because of confrontation, I will give two examples.
An article published in June 2002 by CanWest syndicated columnist George Jonas illustrates this practice by stating, and I quote: "Islam is at fault for blowing up civilians, including women and children." He added: "Islam and the new evil Empire" — imagine what would happen if this visualization was said about Christians or Hindus or any other organization.
It gets worse. In October 2001, a National Post editorial said: "A small but substantial number of Canadian Muslims and Arabs are willing to assist terrorist operations." A week later, senior National Post editor Jonathan Bay argued, as follows, in a column titled "The Healthy Views of bigotry": "The Arab culture is unequal to others." The article continued as follows: "Multiculturalism is an unrealistic trait that assumes all living cultures are equally civilized and enlightened once you scratch the surface." Which of course is agreed with.
The CanWest coverage of the Middle East and the Palestine-Israeli conflict is appalling. It simply revolves around Israel is good, Arabs are bad. Reporters have a choice: They can tow the line, shut up, or lose their job.
Since the purchase of CanWest by the Aspers, it is almost impossible to have for views that are sympathetic to us published, while the editorial pages are filled with praise for Israel and attacks on Arabs and Palestinians. So if you live in Vancouver, you will never hear about the recent move by Israel to expropriate large tracts of land from Palestinians in Jerusalem, something that has been covered extensively by Haaretz and is available on the news wire from Reuters. Through CanWest's control of large number of outlets in Canada, its influence is frightening, and through its incitement and propagation of Arab hate, it is sowing discord in Canada.
There is currently no effective oversight of CanWest, something that should be done as soon as possible to preserve the integrity of Canadian democracy. It is time for Parliament to take a hard look at the impact and effect of media concentration in this country and establish an effective oversight mechanism to prevent abuse. Thank you for your time.
The Chairman: Your timing is impeccable. Thank you.
Mr. Muslih, the floors is now yours.
Mr. Riadh Muslih, as an individual: I represent ADALA, which is an Arab advocacy group. Thank you again for inviting us.
For the Arab-Canadian community, which I can speak for, as well as for the Muslim communities, the western media has traditionally been biased in almost all respects. This is more so where it touches on the Arab-Israeli conflict. This we are willing to live with and intellectually and rationally confront where we can and where we have the opportunity. However, the biggest obstacles that hinder us to being accepted as equal citizens of this country is a concentration of media in the hands of very small and extremely powerful few, particularly when those few have traditionally held to an agent that is squarely influenced by elements we bear differences with and others who still carry on with the old stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims.
In Canada, CanWest Global, the largest media outfit in the country and one of the largest in the world, falls into this category. A university professor once said that you can fit all the media in Vancouver in one building, alluding to that concentration in major cities, such as Vancouver, where the two daily newspapers and a major television channel are owned by the same company, with one family holding in excess of 85 per cent of the stocks.
When you recognize the rights of the media owners to set their own policy preferences and promote their points of view, a right we should all enjoy, uphold and respect — CanWest at the same time made it a policy to muzzle other views in a way that exercises a censorship, power that not even the government dreams of having, a power that is not much different from those held by undemocratic countries where most of us come from.
When CanWest Global entered its buying spree across Canada from the 1970s to the 1990s, it promised to recognize and respect local autonomy of opinions. In actual fact, however, the corporation has centralized much of its editorial writing on major Canadian and international affairs in the hands of its editors in Winnipeg. When it felt like it, the corporation attempted to rewrite or block editorials written by local journalists, more critical for Arabs and Muslims. It has continued with impunity and refuses to adhere to the rules of ethics. Its editorials, articles and even some of the news items do not differ in their extreme ideas from those published in Israel or in Arab and Muslim press.
Its power over its journalists, who really do not have many venues for employment and livelihood, make it next to impossible for us who feel malaised to confront, because no journalist in the mainstream media is prepared to listen to us, let alone convey our views for fear of losing their jobs. Thus, by allowing this concentration of media into one hand, something that Canada has more than anywhere else in the world, we have really no place to go to engage in a free, respectful and democratic way, something we Arabs and Muslims would very much like to be part of.
The Chairman: Thank you very much.
Mr. Campbell and Ms. May, the floor is yours.
Ms. Barbara Jo May, as an individual: Thank you, Madam Chair. I think I will just run with it as best I can.
We are here on the of the B.C. Library Association. Both Mr. Campbell and I are public librarians. Our association is about 800 members strong and represents the interests of library users as well as libraries. We are going to make a few comments about the state of media in Canada and also give a general indication of the policy and regulatory directions we think could help ensure both an informed public and a robust democracy. We will be submitting later a written submission to the committee.
We are here today because librarians believe that the public has a right to a diversity of information, opinions and entertainment, and that can be provided through the broadest array of sources. We are concerned about consolidation, we are concerned about convergence, we are concerned about cross-ownership of media. Closer to home, we are concerned about what David Beers referred to as the narrowing of the social or public discourse, the narrowing of public debate on vital social and political issues.
Libraries are institutions. Our whole purpose is to assure wide access to the absolute widest range of information, culture, knowledge and ideas. It is absolutely one of the core values. We also understand through our daily work how people seek information and the evolving issues that are associated with access to information through the Internet or other new technologies. We see how people seek information to better their lives, to better their communities, to increase their understanding and participation in the political process, whether that is a neighbourhood issue, a global concern or a national debate.
Libraries do this in lots of ways. We promote media literacy on a day-to-day basis in our work, and we do training programs through school libraries, through public libraries. We promote general literacy, which obviously is still the key to an informed citizenry. We provide Internet access in public libraries, which is vital to people who cannot afford computers or cannot afford access in their own homes.
We use occasions like Information Rights Week, we support Media Democracy Day, which Mr. MacKinnon was mentioning earlier, to raise public awareness of media issues, and we try to build diverse collections and find diverse new sources, both online and in our print materials. However, libraries can only make available, organize and promote resources that are published or produced. We are increasingly worried about the kinds of news sources that are available to people about local and provincial news, and for a lot of the same reasons that have been covered in presentations this afternoon.
We are worried about the legislative reporting that goes on in this province. We have some comments that we will submit that give you the details about public concerns about media from surveys that have been taken by the Canadian Media Research Consortium and other agencies.
I will quickly outline some of the measures that we think could possibly lead to a more open and diverse information society. We recommend that a moratorium be placed on the issuance of broadcast licences until there is a clear policy in place concerning merged or converged companies. We believe, as did the previous speakers, that there should be reasonable limitations or caps put on the number of media outlets that a company can hold within a defined area. We believe that the current foreign restrictions on ownership should be maintained, and we would like to see more support for community and independent news media of all types. There is The Tyee, there is ICTV, Co-op Radio — Vancouver has lots of vibrant independent media.
The Chairman: Thank you.
Senator Tkachuk: My question is for the first two presenters. They made the claim about CanWest being pro-Israel; however, many Jewish groups have said that the CBC is anti-Israel. Hence, some say Global is pro-Israel, others that the CBC is pro-Israel — which I do not think is so. There is Newsworld, which certainly is not; there is RDI, which is far from it. The Toronto Star is not pro-Israel; The Globe and Mail has a very nice balance. You cannot have them all agree with you, but we do have a very wide diversity of opinion. Is not this a healthy part of the debate in this country?
The Chairman: I have a question for the library representatives. Are there any specific media policies that in your view impede the flow of information? It could be anything — because I do not know the answer to this question: fees, copyrights, coverage. You suggested that there are gaps in coverage along the lines that were discussed earlier, the corporate policies that in your view make it harder for you to do your jobs.
Senator Eyton: It is really just a follow-up to Senator Tkachuk's comment. I take and support his point that there is alternative media. It is certainly possible to see that the Palestinians have a story to tell, and I think I have seen it enough and particularly in books that are readily available, but as well in the sources he mentioned. However, assuming for the moment that there should be something done about it, there is a reference to some sort of oversight that you would propose in the country where we value freedom of speech. Subject only to libel and slander and sedition and criminal incitement and extreme actions like that, what sort of oversight can you contemplate that, the governments could do that in fact would render by fiat the balance that you are looking for?
Mr. Hulays: A couple of things. There is no diversity of opinion in Vancouver when it comes to the news. The reality is that much of the public get their news out of the newspapers, and the newspapers here are owned by the same family — whether it is the small newspapers or the large newspapers. They get their marching orders from headquarters. There is no freedom of speech when a newspaper owner that monopolizes the market poses that opinion; in fact, it is contrary to freedom of speech. Freedom of speech means that people in the community that may have different opinions than those that are in a power position should have the right to have these opinions heard. In the Lower Mainland, there are almost no outlets in which that is the case.
What type of an oversight committee? When we talk about commercial ventures, there are quite a few anti-monopolistic rules that apply to it. When it comes to the fourth estate and the newspapers, television and media, there should be similar rules and regulations governing those as well, but also there must be a process in which a community organization like ours can actually complain to a body that has some teeth, and at this point in time that does not exist. We can complain all you want to CanWest, but CanWest simply ignores us. We complain, for example, about some of the articles that have been published about the Arab community that are defamatory. There is no response.
The Asper Foundation brought into Canada, and broadcast on television, hatred, spurious speakers that propagate hatred against the Arab and the Muslim community. Actually, one of them was recently banned from coming to Canada, because the Canadian government deemed that he was promoting hate, but he was a speaker on the Asper Foundation that had a full hour on a television station propagating his hate. For a community like ours, which is not a powerful community, not an established community, let's be frank, there is no mechanism. The Canadian government has not done a good job, in my view, of protecting a community like ours, especially against a corporation that is extremely powerful.
The Chairman: The two of you get four minutes to respond, and you have already had three minutes, so I will give you one minute, Mr. Muslih.
Mr. Muslih: I am afraid we did not know that. We are not coordinating together, we are not speaking together.
Having said that, honourable senators, I hope you are not buying into the argument that anyone who brings the truth is anti-Semitic and anti-Israel. The Globe and Mail, the CBC, all those other media you have mentioned, they have been accused of being against Israel and anti-Semitic just because they have presented a different point of view.
My argument was that, on top of that, in Vancouver itself, there is a heavy concentration in the hands of CanWest. I am personally not in favour of any oversight. I am against censorship, and that is what I said. We do not want censorship. We do not want private organization censorship. There are regulations to control banking and other businesses, but it seems that when it comes to the media there is no regulation.
The Chairman: You appreciate our difficulties.
I did not see that Senator Trenholme Counsell wanted to ask a question about libraries, so just before you respond to me, I will let her sneak in her question about libraries.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: I did want to ask the librarian present, I assume you are a librarian, whether, as the B.C. Association of Librarians, and perhaps you can even extend that nationally — I believe you to be very objective — there is a generalized opinion or fear that there is a lack of diversity and a lack of various opinions in the media of Canada?
Ms. May: I will answer your question by saying that, yes, resolutions have been passed, not only through our library association, but also the Canadian Library Association and even our colleagues below the 49th, that express concerns about that matter.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Can we get copies of those?
Ms. May: You certainly could, yes, yes. We believe, in terms of this role of ensuring that all voices are heard — some voices are louder than others, and certainly corporate media in this city is a loud voice, and I think media policies have to be formed to actually make sure that those other voices are heard.
In terms of support for independent and community media or the public broadcaster, we are not saying that we do not want a commercial sector in media. We think there should be a healthy commercial sector with good competition within it; however, at the same time, you need to provide other voices.
I do not know, Mr. Campbell, if you want to address the copyright question, because, Senator Fraser, that is a huge policy issue for libraries.
The Chairman: Do not address it hugely. We would be glad to receive a huge letter, but a brief response now.
Mr. Campbell: To put it briefly, our concern is that the copyright legislation in Canada is tilting. The amendments that are being proposed for copyright legislation are tilting towards the creators and the owners of the created works, and those owners are mainly corporations, making it very difficult for libraries and other organizations to access a lot of information.
A recent example that was on the Internet related to Martin Luther King Day, where there was no ability to show the documentary on the history of the Civil Rights Movement because they could not get copyright clearance in the many different ways that were necessary. We have done a number of workshops on this. There may be too much copyright because creation is becoming difficult and research is becoming difficult because of the limitations and the direction of Canadian copyright law.
The Chairman: Seriously, we would be glad to have, not only the resolutions, but any material you want to give us on that.
Thank you all so much. Again, my apologies for the cut-offs, but we just have to do what we have to do.
I am now going to ask Mr. Donald Mackenzie, Ms. Raisab Ward, director of the Institute for Computing, Mr. James Ho, from Mainstream Broadcasting, and Mr. Richard Ward from the Community Media Education Society to join us. It appears as thought Mr. Ho is not with us.
You know the drill. You get four minutes each. Then we get all the senators' questions in a bunch, and then you get to answer.
We shall begin with Mr. MacKenzie.
Mr. Donald G. MacKenzie, as an individual: Good afternoon. I appreciate the privilege of being able to present for a few moments.
I will begin by expressing appreciation on behalf of myself, and I am sure many others, to the Squamish, the Musqueam and the Tsawwassen, within whose traditional territories it is our privilege to gather.
I shall begin by quoting from an aboriginal young man who I heard doing hip-hop recently at the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre. Most of it I was not able to, but I am glad I caught this one: "Tales of current events told by those with dollars and cents." I made the teasing comment that if "cents" were spelled "sense" — s-e-n-s-e — that might be not too bad.
There is a publication called Business Edge, which is relatively new here in Western Canada, and even newer in central Canada, and I speak with their editor in Alberta, and I said to him, after perusing several of their issues, "I am getting the impression that you people actually care about aboriginal stuff and environmental stuff." He replied: "Well, I have a bias in both of those areas, but we believe that there is a market out there, there is interest in both of those files, and they tend to be under-represented in the mainstream media."
The third item is thinking back to William Lyon MacKenzie King, some maternal grandfather, William Lyon MacKenzie, and how his printing presses used to get tossed into the Toronto Harbour. The gangs of thugs who did the printing press tossing into the Toronto Harbour were of course youths from the privileged Family Compact, Family Compact families.
Fourth, there is to be a World Urban Forum here in Vancouver next year. I would like to see it renamed World Rurban Forum — r-u-r-b-a-n — to reference the need for rural-urban connectivity, which was referenced earlier today. There is also referencing of the phrase "benevolent despotism," and it might be better if it were "beneficent despotism," despotism that not just wishes to do good, but actually does do good. I point out that "benevolent" is the adjective and "despotism" is the noun, and as a consequence of that sometimes you can lop off an adjective relatively easily.
There is also referencing of robust funding for public interveners, and I would say that aboriginal people should be uniquely qualified for that sort of proactive support, and within aboriginal people, particularly aboriginal youth.
The seventh and final item I flag for myself here is that, within oral culture, there is a sacred obligation to tell the truth. In the early 21st century, could it be that all media should be cognizant of some sort of sacred obligation to tell the truth?
Ms. Raisab Ward, as an individual: I am a professor at UBC and director of the Institute for Computers. I have been a Vancouverite for 33 years. I am Canadian of Arab background, and I believe that I have the right to get unbiased, objective and accurate news, and the press here in British Columbia does not allow me that. CanWest, which owns all our dailies, is very biased towards Israel. However, it is more than that, in that it does not allow accurate or objective news. When Mr. Asper was asked on a CBC interview about that Middle East, he said "Let them go and start their own newspapers."
I was at a dinner just over two years ago that was attended by someone from CanWest. I talking about this subject, and that person said: "Well, we cannot publish anything which would put Israel in any negative light." The news we are getting is not objective, and not unbiased. This is very dangerous, because we have no other local papers to read from British Columbia. I do not want to read a Toronto newspaper, because it does not report anything about British Columbia. At UBC, nobody buys the CanWest papers. I do not know any professor who gets The Vancouver Sun or The Province, but this is the intelligentsia. Most of the people here read those papers, and they are really always indoctrinated against the Arabs and the Muslims. I happen to come from that background, and it really upsets me, and I believe that here in British Columbia we should have every right to get some objective news. I have no means, I do not like to watch TV, and I just like to read, and I do not want to go to the Internet to get my news all the time. The Vancouver Sun and then the other paper, my local paper, are all owned by CanWest.
I find CanWest constantly demonizing Arabs and their culture. It is just not right, it is not a democracy. We should not allow any person in any province to own more than 50 per cent of the press, especially if their policy is to brainwash you against one thing or another.
Reuters has made a fuss with CanWest about the world views of terrorism. I have heard things about them. For example, important demonstrations, the first demonstrations in Iraq were not even reported. When Scott Riddle came here and the other, Derek Salivais and Eric Vance, there were hundreds of people, they do not report them. Arabs are always murderous terrorists and Israel is always doing it in self-defence. More than that — they were always pro-Chrétien, until Chrétien decided not to go with the Iraq war, and then suddenly they were printing a lot of bad stuff about Chrétien.
Yesterday, the Canadian Democratic Congress put a report in the newspapers, eight of them in Ontario and Quebec, and again CanWest, the National Post was number in using anti-Islamic —
The Chairman: I am sorry, your four minutes are up. However, remember, you can always send us written further material, if you wish.
Mr. Ward, the floor is yours.
Mr. Richard Ward, as an individual: I am a director with the Community Media Education Society. Councillor Nick Volkow said much of what I had to say, but I will give some background.
The community channel, according to the Broadcasting Act, is one of the three pillars of Canada's television system. Back in 1997, the CRTC removed the requirement that cable companies offer a community channel. Following a public outcry across Canada, particularly in Quebec, the CRTC corrected itself in 2002 guaranteeing that community TV can be provided either by the cable company or by an independent not-for-profit society.
Community television is funded by a levy, which is effectively a tax; hence, it is not cable-company money, it is public money. In cities with more than 6,000 subscribers, 2 per cent of gross cable revenues goes to the community channel. Smaller communities get a full 5 per cent. Here in the Lower Mainland, $5 million is spent each year on community television. Of that, 99 per cent is used for cable-company-controlled programming. None of it goes to operate ICTV, the Independent Community Television Co-operative, the not-for-profit group whose programs follow both the spirit and the letter of CRTC regulations.
I would like to refer to the report by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, entitled "Our Cultural Sovereignty." The group that I represent, CMES, strongly supports the final recommendation to empower the Auditor General to audit companies licensed under the Broadcasting Act.
I emphasize recommendation 19.17 of that report in particular in reaction to that statement about our cultural sovereignty that Councillor Volkow went into in some detail. I asked the standing committee when they were preparing this report to find out how the cable levy money was being spent. I said "I am a member of a not-for-profit group, but you are Parliament, you can find out." The answer, the result as you can see, is that they were frustrated and dismayed. I believe that when Parliament is defied so directly, I believe it must act forcefully, or else we all lose the power that democracy gives us.
The community channel here in town should not be converted into a slick promotional vehicle for cable services. Community TV should not be taking advertising revenue from commercial broadcasters, which it does here in Vancouver. Volunteers should be able to use the community channel for their own ideas, as a place to learn practical media skills. The idea of community television is well respected internationally. In association with ICTV, CMES has hosted delegations from Brazil, Japan and South Korea, who know Canada as the birthplace of the community channel.
If your report sets out Canada's position on world media, perhaps we can advance towards globalization with representation. We are encouraged by your study of media policies. We look forward to action. Thank you very much.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Thank you, chair, colleagues and speakers. We have heard a lot about the Israeli-Arab situation.
Mr. MacKenzie, do you believe that in Western Canada, particularly here in B.C., issues relating to the aboriginal community are covered fairly and comprehensibly?
The Chairman: My question is directly related to that, because I thought I took from your remarks, Mr. MacKenzie, that you did not think that aboriginal affairs and communities were properly covered. If I was correct in that, then will you answer that when you answer Senator Trenholme Counsell. Do you believe the solution lies more along the lines of having more aboriginal media or having more aboriginal people in mainstream media? The floor is yours.
Mr. MacKenzie: Yes. Yes. I have a bone to pick with Broadcast News, and not just Broadcast News. Frankly, for the past while, I have found there is so much bad news that I do not look at the pictures on TV; I just read the text, and that says about as much as I can stand. Some might believe that this is quibbling and nitpicking, but I do not think it is. I see aboriginal people referred to as "Aboriginals" and "natives," and that sort of thing. In my opinion, that sort of language is condescending and snide, especially when you are one of the most put-upon categories of Canadian societies.
Hence, I would like to see at least a carrot, if not a stick, in terms of the tone of this language. We should say "aboriginal people" and "native people." I think part of the answer to one of the questions is yes and yes.
There is an aboriginal young man named Duncan McHugh, who is from central Canada, and he is connected with CBC here. He has told me that he is one of very few aboriginal persons in mainstream media. I will also mention, just so everybody knows, that our lovely and beloved Gloria Macarenko is one sixteenth Tlingit, and very proud of that. I tease her about clinging to the Tlingit.
In terms of gestalt, it is my feeling that a gestalt, with English we find ourselves believing in what I refer to as hyper-consumerism. "I believe that those aboriginal people are really bad people, because they really believe that in their traditional culture we should truly deeply care about Mother Earth, and that single bottom-line stuff just isn't one for them if they are culturally astute." I found the references to the corporation and the dribble that, in my opinion, my acquaintance heading up the Fraser Institute was spouting in that rather magnificent film — but I think that is part of the context.
The Chairman: You are running out of time.
Mr. MacKenzie: I think that aboriginal people who are culturally astute are seen as a threat to the cradle of hyper-consumerism, therefore we should demean them. Thank you.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. MacKenzie. Thank you very much to all of you.
This brings us to our next panel. I would invite Mr. Kevin Potvin, Ms. Joan Jenny and Mr. Chris Budgell to join us, please.
This time it will be the clerk who waves the finger after three minutes, and you each get four minutes.
Mr. Potvin, please proceed.
Mr. Kevin Potvin, as an individual: Thank you very much. I represent the Republic of East Vancouver Newspaper.
Just before we get started, I thought it might be good to note for the record, as I am sure she would like us to, that Senator Carney did not think it worthwhile to stick around for the public part.
The Chairman: Senator Carney hung in as long as she possibly could. She flew all night to be here; she is not in the best of health. She asked us to convey to anybody who was distressed by the fact that she absolutely had to leave her profound apologies. She cares very much about this visit to Vancouver. Believe me, she is going to know absolutely everything that happens here.
Mr. Potvin: Just for the record, I thought that it was interesting that we could be reminded today in the news that editorial control is the point of ownership. You can see it in the news where the Asper family, owners of CanWest Global, have initiated a restraining order in a nine-figure deal to do with the possession of The Jerusalem Post. I gathered from the reports that the main issue at stake is editorial control. It seems there is a dispute between the partners over who is going to get editorial control of the newspaper. This is enough to hold up completion of a nine-figure deal, so obviously ownership of newspapers at least is all about or at least significantly about editorial control, in case there is any confusion about that.
I wonder what the point of this Senate committee is. You are dispatched here to hear from various industry representatives and public their concerns about the state of the media today. As Senator Tkachuk pointed out, generally senators cannot do anything specific and will not do anything about it. So you come out here, you do these hearings, and then you all go home again, in one day. I wonder if, by doing so, every participant here is contributing to the status quo, which we have all recognized as wrong. Everyone now thinks: "The government has done something about it; there will be reports issued. Everyone has had their say." People actually dissipate the energy for change by pretending that this committee serves some kind of purpose.
So, can anyone tell me what they see happening as a result of all this, anything concrete happening?
The Chairman: Thank you very much.
Ms. Jenny, the floors is yours.
Ms. Joan Jenny, as an individual: Thank you. I represent Northern Comfort Production.
I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you this evening and I honour you all for being here. As a writer, producer, director, I am here speaking as a member of the public as well. I am a previous intervener, in 1996 at the CRTC hearings, and a core team member of the Craig Broadcasting System.
This committee here today is a courageous group with an agenda that could be possibly seen, given the complexity of the issues on their plate, as unrealistic. One issue alone could be profitability and monopoly. Another issue is possibly media responsibility, relevance to the community and how it is delivered.
Media itself, the message never changes. The message revolves around the authentic needs of the people in all communities. The story of the people will always be the source, not the corporations, not the journalists, but the peoples' experiences, good, bad or ugly. David Beers of The Tyee said it best: "Do the work."
I would like to give you a few examples of the work that I have done that represents media. In 1985, I did a piece on anorexia in The Province with a fashion editor. I received no money. In 1986, Keith Fraser of The Province assisted us in home schooling issues on the heels of the royal commission on education. I received no money. In 1992, in South Central Los Angeles, I worked with gang members to do a piece that was covered by KCLA and the Los Angeles Times. I received no money. In 1995, CKVU, on the heels of Fabian Dawson of The Province, did a piece on the ethics of B.C. Hydro International project that threatened to displace the Penan people in Malaysia. The project stopped. I received no money. I can go on and on.
The public turns to the media sources in an automatic reaction to find this work in times of need. Media relations is a high calling and it is a privilege to participate in it; it must be balanced with profit and access. It is called "media relations" for a reason. We all must meet each other halfway. In the discussions regarding The Tyee venture, I believe it should be looked at as possibly simply a business venture, such as the Auto Network Co-op, which was assisted in its start-up by VanCity Financial Resources.
I would like to now quickly focus on a realistic task for this constructive committee, and that is the issue of cable access to the community.
Shaw Cable's resource, made available to the public in 1980s, was the only formal training I have ever received. Councillor Volkow has given you the best brick for you to lay in our community right now. When I say "access," we had all the equipment, we had the station, we did everything ourselves, there was no corporate identity, and that is how we all created our skills. It spoke to what we talked about earlier vis-à-vis youth being disenchanted.
A lot of the issues in British Columbia — we have lost resources through our government, the education system is failing our youth, so public access through the cable networks is essential for us. Thank you.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Ms. Jenny.
Mr. Budgell, the floors is yours.
Mr. Chris Budgell, as an individual: Thank you. I am just representing myself here, so I will call myself a citizen. I do not like to be called a consumer. I only heard about this on the weekend, so I do not have prepared notes. I found this very hearing to be stimulating.
I have a lot of thoughts about all the different things I have heard, so I thought I would touch on a couple of things I have heard much about. I should say, too, that I have a lot of respect for the things I have heard. I have considerable scepticism for some of the positions that sound like they are leaning towards the status quo and do not do anything, but I am not going to suggest what I think you should do.
The two things I want to comment on are the idea of creativity in a changing environment, and control and censorship. They are two very separate issues.
I find the issue of creativity very interesting. We have not talked about the history of media assistance, and that interests me. I like to look at things from a long historic point of view to get my bearings, so I am looking at the fact that print media goes back to, let us say, at least Gutenberg. Following that invention, there was undoubtedly a period of great creativity; I am not sure how long it went on for. There seems to have been another period of creativity in the print media in the 19th century, largely because of the Industrial Revolution, and with the era of, what do you call them, the print barons, late 19th, early 20th centuries, some creativity there. Then we had some cinematography, which has not been mentioned here at all, which I consider a medium too, broadcast radio, then television, and then suddenly we get to the Internet.
What strikes me as interesting is the importance of the creativity process that came into being with each one of those mediums. I would suggest that television, for example, inherited much of what it was from cinematography and broadcast radio. In fact, there was a rather brief period of creativity when television came along — I am old enough to remember some of that — I would suggest it was less than 10 years. There was a spurt of real creativity, and I mean that in a very broad sense, content included.
What you have got now with the Internet is the big issue, I think. In general, we are looking in the rear-view mirror. We are trying to figure out where we are by looking at where we have been. The Internet is through the windshield, and we turn that direction and we see a blur, maybe even a scary blur. I think the Internet is going to erupt underneath the entire establishment, all the institutions in Canada and around the world, and we are not ready for it. You are not looking enough in that direction.
It looks like I am running out of time, so I am not going to say anything about the censorship issue.
The Chairman: Maybe somebody will ask you a question about that.
Mr. Budgell: Good.
The Chairman: Just before I go to questions, let me reassure Mr. Potvin, or try to reassure him, not only my Conservative colleagues, but even my Liberal colleagues I am sure would agree with me, that this committee study was not launched by the government and we certainly do not represent the government. The initiative was based entirely in the Senate itself. It came from what you might want to call back-bench senators. It received significant bipartisan support, had to do so, indeed, in order to get a mandate from the Senate to proceed. In no way is this hearing a government study. As what to what we hope to achieve, you will have to wait to see what we say when we table our report.
Senator Tkachuk: I want to make sure you understand. What I said is that we do not have the power. We the power to recommend, and then it is up to the government to decide if it wants to do implement the recommendations. That is what I said, not that we will not do anything.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: I detected in the first questioner a bit of cynicism, and I want to say, I think I speak on behalf of all my fellow senators, although I have not taken a survey, but certainly I have talked to enough, that we are not the least bit cynical about this. There are quite a few people in the room; this has been an incredible day of learning for us. I think if we are going to be paid by the Canadian public to be in Ottawa, we need to learn from people across this country, and it has been a tremendous day. We owe so much to all the people who have presented, so I do not think that this will fall on deaf ears at all. I think that, even if we just use our individual voices whenever we can throughout Canada to present what we have learned, it has been very worthwhile. There will be a report, which will be in the official record, and so I hope that in the end all of you can feel that it was worthwhile.
The Chairman: Of course, we hope that it will be the greatest report that anybody ever wrote anywhere on any topic.
My specific question was to Ms. Jenny. I did not quite follow when you were giving that long list of fascinating stories, important stories that you had worked on, when you said "I received no money." Was that because somebody refused to publish them or because you did it on a volunteer basis?
Ms. Jenny: It was because the stories would not have been published if I had gone through the regular channels. It was because I put everything on the line. I created the whole project, handed it to them, it cost them no money; therefore, they were able to do it or willing to do it.
Mr. Potvin: First of all, I would like to respond to what you said. I am confused. I thought you were advertised here as senators and, as such, would be representing the Government of Canada, which the Senate is a part of. The reason everyone is here is not because you are citizens; they are here because you are senators of the Government of Canada. That is why everyone wants to speak to you. We do not get a lot of chances to do so, out here on the coast especially.
As far as your comment about making recommendations, I guess that is what I am getting at. This ties into your comment, as well. It seems to me that this has all happened many times before. The Kent commission took place — I am not sure; Mr. Hackett might tell me — 30 or so years ago. In reading the reports produced by that commission, the one thing that stuck with me is that one of Mr. Kent's final recommendations was that there should be no greater concentration of ownership in any branch of media beyond 10 per cent in a sophisticated, large, urban market, and we have gone well past that. So that commission, which was far more extensive than this one will ever be, proved its worth.
The Chairman: Not to get into inside baseball here, but I think we have a vocabulary difficulty here, which matters a whole lot to us insiders on Parliament Hill. To us, there is a massive distinction between the government and Parliament. To us, the government is the Prime Minister, the ministers — the executive, if you will. We are, none of us, members of the government in that sense, which is the sense in which we use the word all the time. As we go about our work, we see ourselves as legislators, members of the chamber of sober second thought, people whom the people of Canada pay to inquire into subjects of public interest. That is where the confusion arose, I think.
I can understand that to many people it is all Ottawa, isn't it?
Mr. Potvin: Well, it is.
The Chairman: However, once you are in Ottawa, there is a big difference. Thank you all very much indeed.
We will go now to our next group of witnesses. I must say we really do appreciate how many people have turned out stayed on. It is fantastic. Everybody knows that Vancouver is a wonderful city, and this is just one more piece of proof.
We now come to our last group, and I would invite Sid Chow Tan, Isabel Minty and Said R. Khan all to come forward and join us.
Mr. Khan is with the 2010 Vancouver Visa Team. Apparently, Mr. Khan was not able to hang in.
We are very grateful to you both for doing so, and four minutes, the clerk raises his finger after three, questions, and then responses.
We will begin with you, Ms. Minty.
Ms. Isabel Minty, as an individual: I would like to address my remarks in the context of what we are now facing — a readership, a listenership, a viewership that is totally disgusted with the limit that is available to us. We should, as citizens, be able to hope, expect, that the broad issues will be addressed, and we are finding that is not the case. This limiting point of view accompanied the corporate push for the free trade agreement and the mantra of that time, which was "public bad, private good." We are still moving along those yardsticks that we are now becoming, and you folks unfortunately, to my mind, are very complacent. You are rationalizing that this is not so bad.
It is not acceptable that, in a democracy with the background of Canada, we are stuck with the kind of media that seems to be acceptable to you. It is not acceptable to us, which is why the broad members of the public head for alternate media. You are aware of that. The political satirists are doing very well — the public needs that. We are disgusted. We head for the policy alternatives monitor, because the broad balance is not in the news because we have the mantra of "public bad, private good." Over and over again, when you seek out another point of view, you realize that is a fiction, and the reason it is presented as truth is that there is no alternative available. The emperor has no clothes, and the public sees it, even if the ownership and you folks do not.
We are hungry for things like The Republic — Mr. Potvin's paper — for example. We get much better information from these types of print than we are getting from what you think we should be delighted with CanWest. We are not delighted.
CanWest has a gentleman's agreement that there are two subjects verboten. One is the needed balance in the coverage of international news. Any objective reader will see that any nation that is not opening its arms to corporate takeover — bad. Any outfit that says our resources are for our people's benefit, no — I have got it mixed up.
In any event, the point is that if you want what is yours to stay with your people and benefit them, you are a bad nation. If you are going to open up and let us take you over, like so many unfortunate third-world countries, South Africa and South American countries, good, and we are only now realizing how the IMF and the World Bank are absolutely robbing these citizens of any opportunity for benefits. However, in the corporate press and CanWest papers, we are not going to find that information.
The other lack of balance is that we have so much expanded gambling in the country. The police have tried to tell bureaucrats and the elected politicians that the reason we have so much expanded gambling is to launder the proceeds of organized crime and the drug trade.
The Chairman: Ms. Minty, your time is up. You may get a question and be able to expand on it, but in the meantime, I thank you very much.
Mr. Tan, please.
Mr. Sid Chow Tan, as an individual: Thank you very much, madam chairman. I would first like to acknowledge the Coast Salish First Nation, in whose traditional territory we are holding this meeting. I would like to thank this committee for the opportunity to address it in person. I make these comments as an individual, although I am a founding director of CMES, which has been talked about here and also a founding member of ICTV, Independent Community Television Co-operative.
I would like to begin by saying that corporate interests are rarely congruent with public interest and common wealth. This is especially true of community television in the Lower Mainland. For the past eight years in Vancouver, Rogers first and now Shaw have closed all neighbourhood television offices and denied citizens their rightful access to cable community challenge. Here, experience has shown that citizens and community groups have no timely legitimate and effective action when cable companies deny the public access and mismanage the community channel. Over the past eight years, the commission has first let Rogers and now Shaw incrementally dismantle the successful network of volunteers, thousands of them, and community groups working out of neighbourhood offices throughout Lower Mainland.
The absurdity of cable companies operating and programming the community channel was illustrated two years ago, when Shaw TV turned off live cameras at a Vancouver city council meeting. Hundreds of citizens orderly voicing the lack of public transit in council chambers were ignored by "community television" because the mayor did not recognize the "mob" and adjourned the meeting. Councillor Fred Bass, one of the councillors, asked the camera to be left on to cover the speakers, but to no avail. Was this a good community television decision by a corporation?
More recently, Shaw TV cut its live coverage of a Vancouver community council to show a junior hockey game. Neither team was from the Vancouver or Lower Mainland area. I made a complaint. The answer from Shaw TV was that no regulations were broken. While it may be true that no regulations were broken, I believe the spirit of community television was violated. Does this action by Shaw TV sound reasonable, cutting away to a hockey game while a city council meeting was in progress?
As well, Shaw TV receives money from Novus Entertainment Inc., a competing cable company, for coverage of council meetings. Shaw TV already receives $5 million from the community channel levy should they want to revive the public service of council coverage. Interestingly, that Novus community channel money is going to Shaw TV and they are competitors. Again, Shaw TV has said no regulations are broken. Again, while this may be true, I believe the spirit of community television is violated by this seeming double-dipping of community channel money.
As for Novus, for several years it paid money and received from the community channel levy to the film industry production fund. It had a choice for providing local groups with funding to help program the community channel. Again, while no regulations were broken, I believe the spirit of community television was violated.
More egregiously recently, the District of North Vancouver was concerned about the closure of Shaw TV's studio there, somewhat similar to Burnaby and Councillor Volkow and the closure of the Burnaby studio. The matter was raised, and the president of Shaw Communications, Peter Bissonnette, was quoted as saying: "If anything, there will be more opportunity to make Vancouver more animated." I have seen the closure of over a dozen community television facilities in the Lower Mainland, and the result has been less community participation in community television. The only animation has been citizens and groups uniting to express their disappointment with cable company control of community television.
The Chairman: Thank you. Sorry to cut you off, but fair is fair. We cannot make any exceptions.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Ms. Minty, you were cut off just as you were going to say something about drugs, and I wanted to hear what you were going to say.
Ms. Minty: Yes. Thank you for the question. This is the untold story in the media, and certainly CanWest is a participant: The casino gambling industry exists so that the proceeds of organized crime and the drug trade can be laundered. In North America, the laundered drug trade money is keeping this economy afloat. It is a paper economy, and no one is supposed to recognize that. We are all supposed to pretend we are an economically viable nation. We are running out of industrial base, you know that. What we have going is laundered money into development, into business, into resort development of all kinds, housing, condos, whatever. You will often find a numbered company that got its money from laundered sources, and this is the untold story, and you will not get it in a CanWest newspaper. It is a story that the Canadian people should know.
The Chairman: Thank you both very much indeed. Thank you to all the people who are here who have contributed so greatly to our meeting here in Vancouver.
The committee adjourned.