Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Transport and Communications
Issue 14 - Evidence
ST. JOHN'S, Monday April 18, 2005
The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications met this day at 9 a.m. to examine the current state of Canadian media industries; emerging trends and developments in these industries; the media's role, rights, and responsibilities in Canadian society; and current and appropriate future policies relating thereto.
Senator Joan Fraser (Chairman) in the Chair.
[Translation]
The Chairman: Honourable senators, welcome to this meeting of the Senate Transport and Communications Committee in St. John's. This week, we are beginning a series of hearings that will also take us to Halifax and the Moncton area. No doubt we will hear some very interesting presentations from witnesses.
[English]
We begin this morning with representatives of Newfoundland Broadcasting Company Limited. I would welcome Mr. Scott Stirling, President and CEO; Mr. Doug Neal, Senior Vice-President; Mr. Jim Furlong, Director of News; and Mr. Jesse Stirling, Vice-President, Sales and Marketing. We ask you to make a presentation of 10 minutes or so and then we will have some questions for you.
Mr. Scott Stirling, President and Chief Executive Officer, Newfoundland Broadcasting Company: I would welcome you all here to Newfoundland and Labrador and thank you for allowing us to make a video presentation today, which will give you a sense of who we are and what we are all about. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. This year we are celebrating our fiftieth anniversary of broadcasting on Newfoundland television.
(Video presentation)
We are NTV, pioneers in broadcasting in Newfoundland. NTV is proud to have served the island of Newfoundland for the past 50 years and, for more than 30 years, we have been broadcasting 24 hours a day. In 1995, NTV reached out to Labrador and the rest of North America via satellite. We are growing, and by doing so, we are able to provide service to the public. We entertain and we inform, and the public likes what it sees.
NTV delivers international and national news, information and entertainment, while always maintaining an emphasis on local issues and programming. Because of this local focus, NTV has provided its audience with many more hours of world-class news reporting than is set out by the guidelines of the CRTC.
Not only has NTV exceeded the regulatory agency's expectations, but we have also been able to deliver a product that the viewer has come to know and to trust.
That having been said, local news programming, especially live programming, has proven to be expensive and time-consuming in its production. For example, it takes many hours of preparation by a group of people each week to produce the remote segments we provide to our viewers each day during our award-winning NTV Evening Newshour.
Our production vehicle has become a well-known sight on the highways of Newfoundland. The NTV Hummer is an all-weather, mobile production studio and electronic news-gathering vehicle that has more than proven itself. This vehicle was custom-designed by NTV and fabricated from the base vehicle entirely in Newfoundland. The Hummer is the key to our mobile news production and has also been used by CTV for Canada AM and other CTV national specials.
One of the keys to the success of the NTV Evening Newshour is the live mobile productions that have become an integral part of our weather segments. Those segments take us nightly out of the studio and into the communities we serve. Preparation for those weather "hits" begins with either Toni Marie Wiseman or Sharon Snow, who are our weather presenters and front-line contacts with organizations in the community.
Very few people appreciate the effort required to produce the eight to 10 minutes of live, remote television we provide each evening. Early in the afternoon, the NTV Hummer rolls off our parking lot, headed out to provide our audience with another interesting addition to our newscast, another slice of life in Newfoundland.
Once on site, the technological challenge of setup begins as the clock counts down towards air time:
Newfoundland and Labrador's no 1 newscast, the award-winning NTV Evening Newshour with Lynn Burry, Fred Hutton and Toni Marie Wiseman.
Fred on the desk: "Good evening, everyone. Also in tonight's broadcast, three Liberal MPs..."
Weather in Newfoundland and Labrador is of critical importance, but this segment of the NTV Evening Newshour goes beyond weather. It is our daily link to the communities we serve. The presence of the NTV mobile production vehicle, the Hummer, has become something of a landmark in the broadcast scene. It has taken us to unusual places and unusual events on a daily basis.
The Hummer has also taken our viewers live to the cultural and historic events that reflect and shape our lives. It has become part of bringing North America's oldest sporting event, the Royal St. John's Regatta, into the living rooms of Newfoundland viewers. It has also enabled us to broadcast on a yearly basis such events as the Santa Claus Parade. In terms of hard news, we are live at all leadership conventions. We are there at election time with the latest results and coverage. When the community needs us in times of difficulty, we are there as well.
All this we do as part of our service to the community. Being involved in the fabric of Newfoundland life is something we've been doing now for half a century, and it is our pleasure to serve.
NTV believes that an incentive to do more local programs of this type could be in the form of additional CRTC Canadian content credits for live, local productions.
Mr. Scott Stirling: That concludes our presentation. We would be happy to answer any questions that you have.
Senator Tkachuk: As you may or may not know, we have been on the road examining this question for quite some time. I should like to hear your views on competition policy. It would be easy for one company to own all the media in Newfoundland, since it is an island. What are your views on public policy respecting competition? Should it be easier for television stations to get licences? Should it be more difficult? I do not know whether you have any radio assets, but my remarks would also apply to that medium.
Mr. Scott Stirling: We have a radio station called OZFM with transmitters that go right across Newfoundland, so our station is province-wide. As well as our television station, we also produce an entertainment magazine. We started to acquire these assets in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Our magazine, The Newfoundland Herald, was the product of the first company that our founder began in 1946. 1951 saw the beginning of Newfoundland Broadcasting. We had an AM licence for radio and then we applied for a licence for television. There were no other applicants in 1955. For fifty years, those three properties have been up and running and we continue those today, although the AM licence was sold and we applied for an FM licence back in the 1970s. That is what we have now, OZFM.
We do have cross-ownership. We do not have concentration of ownership. In radio, there are 17 commercial licences in this province and NewCap owns 15 of those. They have a concentration of ownership. We have cross-ownership in the sense of owning a radio station and a television station.
Senator Tkachuk: Is your competition simply CBC?
Mr. Scott Stirling: The Atlantic Satellite Network, ASN, out of the Maritimes, gets into this market. CBC television and radio are also here. With a 500-channel universe, with satellite and digital cable and so on, we now have literally hundreds of competitors. There is also the impact of technology which, is one of the questions you have been considering. We now have an Internet radio station out of Halifax that is coming into this market. That has local content and it is going after local advertising. Digital radio is coming as well, so there is lots of competition.
Senator Tkachuk: Do you think that we need a body like the CRTC to enforce programming rules and public policy, or do you think that perhaps there should just be a body that would organize, the numbers on the dial?
Mr. Scott Stirling: There will always be some regulatory body. When Geoff first applied for a licence, the application was to the BBC, the Board of Broadcast Governors. There will always be some kind of licensing body. You may be referring to how aggressive or how detailed that licensing process will become, or how many rules and regulations it should make, Our perspective is that each company should be able to flourish economically and not be regulated as to content. In the past, we were regulated to the point that we had to have so many hours of children's programming for children under 11 years old, as well as a certain amount of programming for teenagers. The regulatory rules have continually shifted through the decades. Now, those kinds of children's programs are no longer regulated. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, they thought that was a good idea, but it was difficult for us because we had to find those kinds of programs, and they did not generate revenue. I am glad that they have pulled back and relaxed some of their regulations.
However, we just underwent licence renewal two years ago and many more conditions were put on us, which we find onerous, economically.
Senator Tkachuk: What sort of contitions?
Mr. Scott Stirling: I am referring to Canadian content. For 48 years of our 50-year history, our broadcast day was from 6 a.m. until 1:30 a.m. The reason for that was the time difference. We have a thing called "simulcast," simultaneous substitution. The hours between 9:00 and 11:00 in Toronto, or between 8:00 and 11:00 on the East Coast cover our prime time, so during those hours we can simulcast. That means, in this market, that simulcast begins at 9:30 and goes to 12:30. We had Lloyd Robertson and the CTV National News at 12:30 following the simulcast hours, and we have our local news after that. For 48 years, the commission allowed us to count our broadcast day from 6 a.m. until 1:30 a.m.
Now they want us to have an 18-hour broadcast day, the same as everybody else. They do not want to make an allowance for our geographic time zone difference, so now we do not have access to three hours of simultaneous substitution; we only have access to two hours. We had our own solution to the problem but, apparently, it did not satisfy the commission. We said that we would drop that third hour of simulcast, that we would show Lloyd Robertson at 11:30 p.m., and then our local news would follow for an hour. We asked for from 6 a.m. until 1 a.m., which would give us one hour instead of 90 minutes. We do have the time zone difference and losing one-third of our simultaneous substitution was a big deal for us, because it is a major source of revenue.
The commission decided that we must have an 18-hour day, and they would not allow us to count 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. They said we should run from 7 a.m. until 1 a.m. However, we have a newscast on between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. We are committed to news, as you saw in the presentation. Our reporters give live school reports and live traffic information. For example, this morning you would know which schools were going to be closed. It is important for our viewers to see and hear the news in the morning, but now that will not be counted as being part of the Canadian content.
That is an example of regulation trying to fit us into a box that fits most time zones, but does not fit our time zone.
Senator Tkachuk: If you wanted to buy the newspapers in the province, do you think that the government should have anything to do with preventing you from doing that?
Mr. Scott Stirling: I do not believe so. We could have 10 newspapers if they could survive economically. Economically, I think it is up to the marketplace to say what survives and what does not. Freedom of the press is one of the cornerstones of democracy, so to have the government regulate in this area, I think, is undemocratic.
Senator Munson: I have to plead some conflict of interest because I have to acknowledge that, when I worked at CTV, every time I came to Newfoundland, Jim Furlong and his team were more than gracious. They were professional in accepting national news people here to cover stories and they offered great guidance. I should put that on the record.
Mr. Scott Stirling: Thank you.
Senator Munson: I saw your Hummer. Have you expanded your newsroom and your coverage in the last 10 years?
Mr. Jim Furlong, Director of News, Newfoundland Broadcasting Company: Absolutely, senator. To relate it to when you were here, we now have a full-time bureau in Corner Brook where we feed from daily. We also have a full-time bureau in central Newfoundland. The size of our newsroom has doubled. We have discovered that local news is in demand. I am sure Scott, Doug and Jesse are tired of listening to me talk about the multi-channel universe and how all the fears about the local news broadcaster being unable to survive were unfounded. We are thriving. A hundred channels will have news abut what happened in Rome, but if you want to know what happened in Grand Falls or anywhere else in this province, then you have to come to us or to CBC. It is not an act of charity on our part. It is good business. People love their local news. We are doing well.
Senator Munson: What about the situation in Labrador now? In the past you seemed to have some difficulties providing strong coverage in Labrador.
Mr. Furlong: We have a series of stringers in Labrador in both the east and the west. Our next beachhead would be the ability to feed out of Labrador, which still eludes us. It is one competitive advantage that the CBC has over us.
Senator Munson: What is your rating in the six o'clock news market these days?
Mr. Furlong: We have a daily audience of between 160,000 and 170,000. That is an amazing number of people inasmuch as there are only 500,000 people in the province. CBC has an audience of 37,000 to 38,000. Our climb upward has been steady in the last decade. We overtook them about six or seven years ago. They made some programming adjustments in terms of where they were going to position their news that turned out to be not in their best interests. We gained an advantage over them by being on ahead of them. They decided they would move to our time slot and teach us a lesson but, again, that was ill-advised. We now dominate by about four to one in the marketplace — about 165,000 to about 40,000 from the last BBM.
Senator Munson: Mr. Stirling, as you described it, the new CRTC regulations make life difficult for you. Should we send a message to the CRTC to back off a bit because this is not making your life comfortable?
May I assume that you are doing well in earnings and profits?
Mr. Scott Stirling: Number one, we would appreciate it if you would go back to the CRTC on our behalf.
Number two, this goes directly to the discussion you are having about cross-ownership and concentration of ownership because we have cross-ownership. When the commission came two years ago to look at the licences, they opened up applications for another radio station. For 27 years, our radio station, OZFM, has been providing service to the entire province with a rebroadcasting network of transmitters, but that is sustained by the revenue in St. John's. An applicant wanted to have a station only in St. John's. From our point of view, that was aimed at skimming off revenues in St. John's, whereas we are subsidizing the entire province. Therefore, we felt that we should have a second licence, since we were up against NewCap with 15 licences, including four in the CMA. That was an exception the commission made because, normally, you are only allowed three in the CMA. They already had four and they had many other stations across the province. Our radio station was finding it extremely difficult to compete, one station against 15 that can package and counterprogram. We felt we would be at a tremendous disadvantage unless we were allowed a second radio station licence.
We were turned down. It was said that the reason we were turned down was cross-ownership: "You have television. We cannot let you have a second radio station." In that sense, we were penalized, and we are now struggling, especially in radio, to be successful.
This is an example of television helping to sustain radio. One of the pluses of cross-ownership is that you can allow a business to diversify. If we were talking about a car dealership, for example, it would be like saying, "We have the Chrysler dealership but we also want to sell trucks and skidoos. Why should we be allowed to sell only one item? Why can we not have diversity?" Diversity protects you. At times the radio station has supported the television station. There is nothing wrong, I think, with cross-ownership.
Senator Munson: Does that include newspapers, as you mentioned?
Mr. Scott Stirling: Yes. I do not see why the CRTC would try to regulate newspapers.
Senator Munson: We have heard some testimony about profit margins and so on. Is there a profit margin that a company should reach, like a 30 per cent profit or a 15 per cent profit? At what point do you take that profit and pour it back into your newsrooms and cover local events completely? Is there a threshold?
Mr. Scott Stirling: We do not operate in that way. We do not look at profits and percentages. A public company would look at it that way. We are a private company. For example, when we were competing with CBC and they were number one in news, our concern and our argument, when we went to the Competition Bureau and to the CRTC, was that CBC was undercutting advertising rates. They were subsidized, and it was not fair for them to have the top-rated newscast and to charge less than we did, particularly with our ratings that were not anywhere near theirs. That was a real threat to our survival. We went to the Competition Bureau but, unfortunately, we did not get the resolution we sought.
We realized we had to have a mobile production studio. We made the decision to invest in the Hummer, which cost between $300,000 and $500,000. We could have said that we were content with our 10 or 15 per cent profit and decided that we could not afford the Hummer. However, we realized that we had to do that to compete. Putting the remote in and having a live component to our news, was one of the key things that we did. It reversed the trend and put us back to number one. We looked at it from the point of view of what is good for the company and will make it stronger.
Senator Munson: I do not know if this question is appropriate, but I would like to hear your views on foreign ownership. Should the rules be restricted, relaxed, changed?
Mr. Scott Stirling: I do not think they should be relaxed because it is a question that touches on the concept of our sovereignty. This is a democracy. We have the concept of free speech and being able to reflect the views of Canadians and Newfoundlanders.
Let us deal with it at the provincial level. We are a Newfoundland company. We are Newfoundland-owned and so we reflect Newfoundland. If we sold out and were part of, say, ATV, then 80 per cent of the news would be Maritime news from Halifax and Dartmouth, and all the concerns would be about that area.
We are all about Newfoundland. There is that kind of foreign ownership, outside the province. If you had American companies buying up the media in Canada, then pretty soon, you would have to distinguish the news and the viewpoint of Canadians versus Americans.
Senator Munson: Maritimers are not foreigners, are they?
Mr. Scott Stirling: They are CFAs, which means, "come from away."
Senator Tkachuk: They are going Conservative.
Senator Munson: My Conservative friends here are very hungry these days.
What is your relationship with CTV?
Mr. Scott Stirling: We buy a certain amount of programming from them and we have a news affiliation with them. It is called a news supply agreement. We provide them with local news; and they provide us with national news, but we are no longer an affiliate. About three or four years ago, we were a complete affiliate of CTV. We took all of their programs, their national commercials and their news. Now, we have a news supply agreement and they will sell us some of their programming.
Senator Munson: I have to ask you, do you still have those all-night debating sessions?
Mr. Scott Stirling: We certainly do.
Senator Munson: People can turn on their TVs and see some pretty lively debates at three o'clock in the morning.
Mr. Scott Stirling: It still happens on occasion.
Senator Munson: Is it still impromptu?
Mr. Scott Stirling: Yes. About three years ago, there was a big argument or political debate about Voisey's Bay. The government at the time was very close to signing a deal. There were many overnight debates where the leaders were invited to debate with Geoff, our chairman. It is a more unrestricted format. They can just talk. I think it all began back in the days of Joey Smallwood, when Geoff and Joey literally went on after normal sign-off and stayed on till breakfast time. It is amazing how many people stayed up all night to watch that. It does still happen on occasion.
Mr. Douglas W. Neal, Senior Vice-President, Newfoundland Broadcasting Company: That is not considered to be Canadian content.
Mr. Scott Stirling: It is not counted as Canadian, but it is Canadian content.
Senator Eyton: Thank you for your short presentation. I have to say that, while conquering the one-and-a-half-hour difference between here in Toronto, I was a little groggy when you showed your video.
I would like to know a little more about the business. How did the company start? Your founder was Geoffrey who, I assume, is directly related in some way to the two of you; is that correct?
Mr. Scott Stirling: Father and grandfather.
Senator Eyton: Tell me how it started.
Mr. Scott Stirling: It began as a tabloid paper back in 1946 called, The Sunday Herald. Back in those days, there was a battle for the hearts and minds of Newfoundlanders — whether they would join Canada or whether they would go for independence. Joey and Geoff were on opposite sides of that battle. You may know from history that that was a very close vote. I think it was 51 per cent to 49 per cent. In the early days, The Sunday Herald was politically involved, but it was not a political magazine per se. It was more tabloid in its scope with common man kind of stories and so on. It was not all political.
If I may deviate a little here, Joey had started a political newspaper, which was not a success. He had a lot of unprinted-on white paper that he could not sell. Geoff negotiated to buy the paper. Joey said, "Geoff, it will never work. I tried it." The response was, "Well, Joey, I am going to write about all kinds of other things other than just politics."
Of course, 1949, we joined Canada. In 1951, Geoff applied for a radio licence. It was called CJON AM back in those days. It was rather revolutionary at that time. There was a station here, VOCM, that had been around for 40 years or so. Its message was mainly religious and it would sign off at six o'clock at night. Geoff went to the owners of VOCM and asked to buy the 12 hours of overnight. He thought there could be money in that. However, they decided not to sell. Then he applied for a licence, transmitted for 24 hours — a novel thing back then — and was successful. That was CJON AM.
In 1955, he applied and was granted a television licence. I think he applied two or three tries before it was granted. Perhaps the government changed from Conservative to Liberal. 1951 was the beginning with radio and 1955 with television.
The Chairman: Your documents indicate that you tried to get a licence before Confederation, but could not because the Newfoundland government of the day said that it did not have the power to utter a broadcasting licence. However, there was this other one. As I always understood it, Joey dragged this province into Confederation on the radio. What happened there? This is not necessarily pertinent to our inquiry, but it is interesting.
Mr. Scott Stirling: We did have radio. We had society, culture, government and all the rest of it. However, it was mainly a religious radio station back then, VOCM.
The Chairman: With a government-issued licence? Mr. Stirling could not get a government-issued licence.
Mr. Scott Stirling: I am sorry he cannot be here today to answer that, because that is back before my time, and I have not investigated that issue. VOCM recently celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary. It has been around quite a long time.
Mr. Neal: I believe all of the radio stations of the time had more of a religious significance than a commercial significance. There were, and still are today, VOWR, VOAR and VOCM. Those are quite different from any call sign that has ever been issued in the rest of Canada, so they fall outside of the norm. Those were grandfathered in at Confederation.
The Chairman: There has to be an interesting footnote to history here.
Senator Eyton: I want to just carry on with my history lesson, but I am not sure about the other members of the committee. So, there was a newspaper within the ...
(Technical difficulties. Recording malfunction.
Mr. Neal: No, not that I am aware of. As a matter of fact, we designed it from the ground up. When I found it, it was a small pick-up truck that was destined for the mines in Sarnia. It was a leftover. We built it into a production vehicle. Hummer, themselves, actually, were quite interested in it. I sent some pictures to them. I do not know what they did with them. As far as I know, they were going to put them on their website, but I have never seen them there.
Senator Eyton: They have probably been duplicated and they sell thousands of them. Do you make money on your local broadcasting?
The Chairman: Senator Eyton, sorry to interrupt. We are having difficulty with the recording equipment. As you know, all Senate committee meetings are transcribed so that we can refresh our memories. I do not know how long this will take. We could suspend for a few minutes to see if they can fix it or we could carry on with everybody taking copious notes.
Senator Munson: The good thing is that, for the first time, NTV is recording it all.
Mr. Scott Stirling: We would be happy to give you the tape.
The Chairman: Very well, we will carry on since our problem seems to be fixed. Now we have double recording.
Senator Eyton: I was asking about your local news gathering and broadcasting. Is that a profitable part of your business?
Mr. Scott Stirling: Yes, it drives the business. The local news drives the ratings. It drives the image of the station and it is our top rate by far, with regard to advertising rates. From a picture, the Hummer does not show what it can do but inside, it is a mobile studio and we can produce a complete show from there using remote cameras that feed in the images. There is a producer inside.
One of the points that we wanted to make in that video is how many hours of preparation it takes to do, live, a five-minute piece of remote in our newscast. We do a lot of setup and there is a lot of investment, but we only get five minutes of Canadian content for that five minutes, regardless of all the preparation time that goes into it.
Senator Eyton: Is that emphasis the explanation for the dramatic reversal of coverage and audience participation that I have seen over the last eight years? I see, a blue line climbing upward.
Mr. Scott Stirling: Yes.
Senator Eyton: You are reaching and audience of about 300,000.
Mr. Scott Stirling: Across the country, yes.
Senator Eyton: The red line is now somewhere around 100,000.
Mr. Scott Stirling: At CBC. To answer your question simply, yes. This is due to the additional commitment we made to local news gathering and reporting and, as Mr. Furlong said, we have opened a full bureau on the west coast, in central. Eventually, we would like to include Labrador, if we have a way of accessing it. Yes, it has been dramatically connected to that.
CBC, however, has gone the other way. They have cut their local news from an hour or two hours, because they had a late night news show and they had weekend news, and are now producing a total of two and a half hours news a week. They produce half an hour on week nights. That is it. We produce more regular series with independent production now than they produce in news. The result is, I think the more committed we are to the community and the less committed they are, the audience has moved over to us. There is no question about that. The twenty and a half hours of news that we are producing now is almost 10 times what CBC is producing.
Senator Eyton: I have general or broad sense now of the business. Where are you looking for growth? Every business I know looks at preserving what you have and perhaps enhancing that level and growing in some dramatic way. Where can you find growth, given your holdings and the business you have today?
Mr. Scott Stirling: We would like to grow in radio. Two years ago, we did apply for a second station to help counter program and to package. We hope our ratings grow in the one station we have because, in the last three years we have introduced three new sounds. There has been a lot of sampling, and a lot of people moved over to listen to other programs. We hope to bring them back. We are making many efforts by way of community involvement and tying-in with local events. That is one way.
The other way, on the television side, would be to emerge on the national scene and take in some national revenues. I believe that there was an expectation by the commission when they gave us our licence this time around that we would dramatically increase our national revenues because we are on satellite and can be seen across Canada. We tried to explain then that the national advertiser buys NTV for this market.
We would like to be sold nationally. We reach a lot of people in Ontario. In fact, more Newfoundland viewers, I am sure, have moved away than those who have stayed in the province. We have tremendous viewership outside our province, but the national advertisers still buy the conventional stations across the country for their market. They will buy the specialty channels, which have far fewer viewers, for their national reach, but they have not yet shifted to buying the conventional stations. That is where I would like to see our growth. However, our growth is not as aggressive, realistically, as the commission thought would be the case.
I believe, however, it is a question of timing. Sooner or later, we will be able to attract advertisers.
Senator Eyton: You are now, in effect, the Newfoundland voice reaching out to Canada. You bring in other Canadian voices into Newfoundland. That is part of your role. I have a place in Boca Raton, Florida and, on my satellite service, my Canadian channel is NTV, which I appreciate because it keeps me in touch with Canada. I am a listener. I am not sure if any advertiser has given you credit for that. I would say that many people in Boca Raton tune in to NTV because they want Canadian news.
Mr. Scott Stirling: We are very proud of the fact that we are top-rated in the Bahamas, for example. The cable company there tells us that we are the third most watched station. We are on the cable systems in many of the Caribbean countries. We are on certain cable systems in Florida and we have air time in Tampa. We have not figured out how to make money on that, but we are happy to be there and we are happy to export our culture.
Senator Eyton: Coming back to growth, it seems to me that there are places where you could, but the only inhibitor that I have heard from you is the need for a CRTC licence for an additional radio station. Apart from that, do you have, as you would see it, a pretty clear field?
Mr. Scott Stirling: The challenges are many. One thing we have not talked about here is access to good programming. It is a huge challenge for a small station is to ensure program supply because, if you do not have programming, then you have nothing to sell. Programming sources have been becoming more difficult, and that is a concern.
You asked about the difference between some of the regulations here versus those in the U.S. From a broadcaster's point of view, some things are better here, and some other things are perhaps better in the US. It depends on how you view it, whether it is positive or negative. One of the differences is that, in the U.S., the networks cannot buy their affiliates. They can buy up to a third of them, but they cannot buy the majority of their affiliates. Under Colin Powell's son, Chairman Powell, the FCC made a move to change that, to relax that rule so that, in fact, they would be allowed to buy affiliates. However, the affiliates mounted a campaign in congress to stop that from happening. Their argument was that, "If the networks own too many of the affiliates, they will have leverage over the small affiliate, and the small affiliate will be unable to get its programming and they will not be able to make a good deal." They were stopped from expanding.
In this country, there was no debate about that. CTV was able to be bought out by BCE, the phone company. They bought out all the affiliates across the country, except us. Sure enough, what the Americans said would happen, happened to us. The programming source dried up and the deal that we could have made was impossible for us to make. This year, we are happy to say that they did sell us Desperate Housewives. However, we would also like to be able to buy Canadian shows, such as Canadian Idol, which are on ASN, which CTV owns. It has been difficult.
Senator Eyton: This committee, is concerned with convergence and concentration, convergence of the technologies and the different ways in which broadcasting and the media work today. As I understand your comments, concentration for you is not a problem in competing here in Newfoundland and reaching out to Canada and having a Canadian signal here.
We are about to write our report. What would you recommend to this committee that we might conclude in the area of convergence? In your comments today, you referred to satellite radio and the many other things that are currently happening in broadcasting. Do you have any recommendations for the committee?
Mr. Scott Stirling: From your point of view, we have a concentration of ownership. You may have heard me say that we are all for concentration of ownership. However, in fact, we consider ourselves to have cross-ownership. We have a radio station and we have a television station, so there is cross-ownership. We do not have a concentration of ownership in the sense that NewCap does. It owns 15 out of 17 radio stations. Because we are small market and we only have ASN, CBC and NTV, it may seem like we do have a concentration of ownership.
On the issue of convergence, there is tremendous optimism, including by us early on, that convergence will be a fantastic model for the future and that we can integrate all our companies into a more efficient media empire. AOL and Time-Warner tried that and CTV has done that, as has Global with the National Post. We have the three components — a magazine, a radio station, and a television station — so we thought we could do our own convergence. Of course, we also have websites now. A lot of convergence has happened in that sense.
However, we have found that you can water down your core brands by trying to converge. I asked the people at CTV and Global, "What is your experience of combining your newspaper and your television station?" We were starting to think that maybe we should be combining our magazine, our television and our radio. What they told us is exactly the experience we ended up having. I guess we should have listened to them. They told us that, when you go to an advertiser and offer newspaper and television advertising, the advertiser may say that he only wants the television coverage and he will ask for a discount. Alternatively, he may ask that you throw the Internet into the package and that you advertise on your front page. It became, in our experience and in theirs, a way for the advertiser to get a discount. That does not pay the bills. If you have a website, you have the real costs of the website. If you have a newspaper, you have tremendous costs. You cannot discount it. It has to stand alone and be sold on its own.
Many of the media companies that bought up smaller media are subsidizing those and, at some point, they will have to make a decision, just as AOL and Time-Warner did, about how to scale back from that grandiose concept.
The Chairman: As we previously established, I am a techno nerd, so I would like to understand how you are funnelling into houses in Boca Raton, Toronto and Calgary. I gather there are many Newfoundlanders in Alberta. Is this because, once it goes to the satellite, the footprint of the satellite is so huge that, to reach Labrador, you also have to reach Boca Raton? Did you have to make arrangements to do that and, if so, with whom? Did you have to pay for that?
Mr. Scott Stirling: No, your first comment is the answer. Our focus was to get into Labrador and to unite the province. That was our goal. When Doug first joined me as president 17 years ago, that was our focus. We must be on the satellite; otherwise, we have no way of getting into Labrador. We felt, politically, economically, culturally and in every other way, that it was important for this province to unite. That was our total focus. It is a surprise to us to find out that we are international. We get emails all the time from, say, someone in Boston telling us that he or she is watching our programming. People ask us how that is possible. They ask whether it is pirating. There are many strange nuances in all of these things.
A couple of years ago, I found out that there is a law in the United States whereby a community in a remote area can apply to broadcast over a satellite signal. It turns out that NTV is being broadcast to a region of Colorado that reaches several communities and small towns. They have written to our performers and asked them to come down and perform at their festivals.
The Chairman: Do you receive any revenue from this?
Mr. Scott Stirling: No.
The Chairman: They do not pay you for using your signal.
Mr. Scott Stirling: We only found out about this because a performer told he was going to Colorado. They also asked us for some hats.
The Chairman: Do you mean typical Newfoundland hats?
Mr. Scott Stirling: Our NTV hat. We have no control over where our signal goes. I have heard that it was in the Cayman Islands and then it was gone. It was in Bermuda, then they lost it, and then it was back. At this moment I do not know precisely where we are being received.
The Chairman: Work remains to be done in that area.
Obviously, news is a major part of your strategy. Where is the central Newfoundland bureau?
Mr. Furlong: Grand Falls-Windsor.
The Chairman: How many journalists do you have?
Mr. Furlong: In total we have 12 or 13. I hate to use the word, but we pioneered the notion of photojournalism where the reporter is the cameraman, is the editor, is the writer. We started that about a decade ago and the industry headed there after us. That has served us in very good stead.
The Chairman: When you said that you could not get a feed out of Labrador, but you have stringers there, how do they get their information to you?
Mr. Furlong: By airplane. It is yesterday's news. We expect that the technology will overcome these problems shortly, that is, problems such as the ability to transmit pictures out of there. This is not acceptable to us as a news organization.
Senator Tkachuk: Can you use the type of telephone that they are using in Baghdad?
Mr. Furlong: Yes, we can do that. There are a couple of other ways of doing it, but the quality of video is not there yet, but it is almost there.
The Chairman: It will look almost like a war zone.
Senator Tkachuk: Yes, it would look like that.
Senator Munson: How does the CBC do it?
Mr. Scott Stirling: Satellite.
Senator Tkachuk: It costs money.
Senator Munson: If you use satellite transmission to other parts of North America, why will a satellite signal not work from Labrador? CBC is doing it.
Mr. Scott Stirling: It is the cost. CBC is the national channel, so they are not just feeding to St. John's or to Halifax, everyone is fed that signal. However, we would do it just for us, so it would be cost-prohibitive. We are trying to grow to the point where we can do that. We added the Hummer recently and, as our news has grown, our revenue has grown. We have been able to do more, That is what we would like to do.
Mr. Furlong: We are almost there. If you were to come back next year, I would be able to give you a better answer.
The Chairman: Did you indicated in your video that you have correspondents in Ottawa? Did I misunderstand that?
Mr. Scott Stirling: Through CTV.
The Chairman: That leads to my next question. Where do you get your national and your international news? Is that all CTV feed?
Mr. Scott Stirling: I will let the news director speak to this, but we have other affiliations, such as with CNN, as well as CTV.
Mr. Furlong: Recently, about a year and a half ago, we became a partner with CNN. However, our national representative is CTV, whom we use for international news as much as we can because we are looking for a Canadian perspective as opposed to an American perspective.
The Chairman: Does CTV have any objections to your affiliation with CNN, given that CTV has its own all-news station?
Mr. Furlong: No, CTV also has a CNN agreement.
Mr. Furlong: We are all part of this.
The Chairman: We have not yet heard from CTV, so you must forgive for not being aware of that.
You have an FM radio station. You applied for, but were not successful in winning a licence for another FM radio station. Do you think there is any future left for AM?
Mr. Scott Stirling: The AM station that NewCap has is probably their top-rated station. I think part of that relates to heritage. It has been around for 75 years and it has a talk show. This is a very political place. People want to communicate and they are committed to news, and they always have been.
They have a strong brand dedication. For example, there was another AM station, CJON, which we started in 1951. When Don Jamieson and Geoff split up the assets, Don ended up with the AM station and made some programming changes. It quickly lost its brand. He did not get the call letters, CJON, they stayed with us, so he had to re-brand the station as Q Radio and it just lost its identity. Today, the station has Newfoundland music, folk music and so on, but it has a low rating. It would be very difficult to bring an AM station in here and make it relevant and competitive. It would cost a lot.
The Chairman: An established brand has life and vigour; is that correct?
Mr. Scott Stirling: Yes, it certainly does.
The Chairman: These are questions that arise in other markets as well.
Senator Tkachuk: You mentioned that you also have an Internet site. What do you see in the future for that? Does it make money? Everybody has one, but I am not sure if anyone makes money at it.
Mr. Scott Stirling: We look at it as a brand extension, and so we have not put banner ads on it because, again, it would not be paying the costs of it.
Senator Tkachuk: A brand extension of TV or the newspaper?
Mr. Scott Stirling: The television has its websites, so it is a brand extension. NTV.ca is an extension of NTV. OZFM.com is an extension of OZFM and The Herald has a website. Each one of them is a brand extension. For example, with radio, we recently had a big contest in which some of our listeners were trying to win a car. They had to hold on to a car and the last one holding won the car. We had a camera down at the mall to film this event. You could go to OZFM.com, click on this camera, and you could watch the event live.
On NTV.ca, the cover page has a view from a camera set up just up the hill here, looking down on the city and the narrows, and we can move the camera. I think OZ has had 3.5 million hits, so there is a lot of traffic, a lot of people. From our guest book, you can see that many Newfoundlanders live outside Newfoundland and miss home, so they come to our website, and they can click on the cameras and see right across the province.
We have linked up with the government. The government has cameras on all the highways to show the traffic conditions. We show that on television, but on radio, you can go our website and see all of that. It is a way of providing more service to buy those brands and that is how we are using it now.
Senator Tkachuk: Is that the future?
Mr. Neal: It is hard to say, is it not?
Mr. Scott Stirling: For us, that is the future. You can get too grandiose with these things and I do not want to name anybody, but I will. Canada.com, which was Global, started a grandiose concept and put millions of dollars into that. It was a convergence, but it did not have a distinct brand. What is your goal? What is your objective? Are you trying to extend the brand of Global? Disney did exactly the same thing. They had one, Go.com that they lost millions on and finally had to change it.
You must have a clear understanding of what it is you are trying to achieve. We know what we are trying to achieve, which is brand extension at this point, and there are lots of commercial ways that you can make money on a website, but as to tying it in with a medium, I think it is mainly brand extension.
The Chairman: Do you charge for access to your website?
Mr. Scott Stirling: We have invested in the websites and we sustain them through our medias. However, at some point, we will probably have to charge because we are getting so many listeners, especially to OZ, who are ...
(Technical difficulties. Recording malfunction.)
Mr. Scott Stirling: ... Here is a subsidized, billion-dollar corporation. CBNT in Newfoundland were getting, and probably still are getting $25 million. As we said, they are producing 2.5 hours of news a week. We are producing 10 times that. Even now, they have a bigger staff and news department than we have. Then they went after advertising and undercut us. They were number one. It seemed pretty clear-cut to me, but we could not get anywhere with that. With predatory pricing, you must prove intent and that is one of the most difficult things to prove. It is like being shot and having to prove that the person meant to kill you rather than maim you.
Senator Munson: This testimony is important for the preparation of our report in dealing with the Competition Bureau.
Mr. Scott Stirling: Even though we are small, the same principles apply on a microcosmic level as they do on the macrocosmic level. If you can get value from what we have to say based on our experience, then it might apply on a larger scale.
Senator Munson: Have you paid a price in being fiercely independent and has it been a high price? You talked about the BCE gobbling up affiliates and gobbling up CTV, but the buck stopped here. You did not buy into it. Were you tempted to join that great, big company?
Mr. Scott Stirling: That goes back to our founder because he is the one that makes those decisions. Because he started this company, because he is a Newfoundlander, because he believes in our culture and our society, he is fiercely pro-Newfoundland. I think that it is his belief that, if he sold out to a huge multinational or even national public company, some kind of sovereignty would be lost to Newfoundlanders. I think it was more patriotism than anything else; the love of Newfoundland. Halifax-Dartmouth has ATV, but ATV covers the Maritimes, so there are times where New Brunswick's perspective might clash with Nova Scotia's, whether it is on fisheries or whatever. To have a voice that speaks only for your province is very special.
Senator Munson: As a New Brunswicker, I do not want to get into that debate. However, I remember Lionel Television, the home of the lobster, so there is something to be said for having a single voice in your own province.
(Technical difficulties. Recording malfunction.)
Mr. Jesse Stirling, Vice-President, Sales and Marketing, Newfoundland Broadcasting Company: It is not the way Canadian media is bought and sold. It is bought based on geography and points in that geography. Provincially, our competition challenges are CBC, NewCap, Transcontinental, ASN-ATV. Those are deeply funded, publicly traded companies internationally and across Canada, as well as CanWest, CHUM, Corus, Rogers, Bell Canada and Astral. Then there is us, Stirling Communications International, an independent voice, the last privately held, multimedia company in Canada.
It is a source of great pride, but it is much more difficult to have a voice sales-wise on the national scene when our top newscast, which is incredibly dominant locally, gets half a rating point nationally. You realize where you fit in the grand scheme of things. Our spill audience is not paid for by the advertisers, as is the case with other local stations on the satellite. The challenges are real. The only reason we have been able to survive and succeed is the quality of our product, the quality of our local news, delivering those rating points to us.
It is important to paint a picture of where we are in terms of our challenges provincially and nationally. Right now, it is the strength of the television product that is sustaining the magazine, radio and television enterprises.
The Chairman: The core strength of your organization, if I have understood, is news.
With respect to ad rates, the CBC was undercutting you when it was number one. How do the rates compare now that it is no longer number one?
Mr. Scott Stirling: They are still selling below market rates, but their ratings are just not competitive with us in terms of the masses and the advertiser wants to get the audience, so that has made all the difference in the world. It is the same thing with the NewCap problem we are up against right now. If OZ has a fantastic book, then it will not matter. However, we should not have to be that good to compete. We should be able to be good without having to dominate to survive.
The commission recently relaxed the conditions on CBC to allow them to go after American movies. In our market, you are now seeing Harry Potter and all the top movies. You have to ask yourself: Why are they getting taxpayer money to compete in the advertising pool and to be subsidized? It seems like a conflict. They also compete against CTV for the rights to the Olympics and they can outbid CTV. Now, that is a very commercial enterprise. The same applies to hockey games on Saturday nights.
You have to be a pure product. What are you? Are you taxpayer-supported or are you advertiser-supported? There is a conflict in the decision making. If I were supported by two sources, then I would have to ask: On what am I basing my decision? Will I put on a commercial program so that I can take advantage of advertising or will I do something for the public good? There is a conflict, almost a type of schizophrenia.
Mr. Furlong: I happened to be watching television on Saturday night when I switched over to CBC where a Jackie Chan movie was on. There is something fundamentally wrong with spending Canadian taxpayers' dollars on that movie while we struggle on by ourselves.
Mr. Scott Stirling: I would also add that, since you are having trouble with your audio, you can rely on us. We will get the tape to you.
Senator Eyton: Take comfort. It is your record.
Mr. Scott Stirling: Last night, CBC had a show on at 8 p.m. called, Sex Traffic. It was a depiction of the sex slave industry with depictions of violence, rape and nudity. Had NTV done that, you would call us a crass, commercial station. You would accuse us of trying to increase our ratings. We would never consider playing something like that at 8 p.m., but CBC did play it nationally.
As a viewer and a broadcaster, I was disturbed by that. How do they get away with that? When is it art and when is it commercial? Again, for them, the fine line is no longer clear. It would be for us. They are subsidized. How do they get away with that? Is that appropriate?
Senator Tkachuk: They are governed differently.
Mr. Scott Stirling: I think they govern themselves differently.
The Chairman: This is a switch of topic, but we are supposed to be looking at a broad range of public policy as it affects the news. Does The Herald use the postal subsidy system?
Mr. Scott Stirling: Yes. We are pulp paper and we are eligible for third-class postage.
The Chairman: Are you satisfied with how the system works?
Mr. Scott Stirling: Yes. We almost lost it. We had to fight for it. It would have been devastating to us had we lost it, because this is a rural area, so many of our magazines are mailed to stores and then the stores distribute them, so our readers receive them through the postal system. Losing that subsidy would have doubled the cost of our circulation, so that was a huge deal for us and, luckily, we did qualify.
The Chairman: Are there any other elements of public policy, cast broad, that you would like to change or, on the contrary, that are so important to you that nobody should ever meddle with them?
Mr. Neal: One of the things that we have not said — and it comes back to CBC again because it has always been an issue with us — is that CBC should reflect Canada to Canadians. It should be a publicly funded organization. It should get out of the commercial or private sector. It should not compete with us for advertisers' dollars. It should be a vehicle whereby certain productions, when they are in their infancy stages, could be funded and could be shown to the Canadian public on CBC.
If, indeed, they did become commercially viable, then perhaps it would be the job of the commercial networks to pick those products up, utilize them and show them to the rest of Canada. If they are going to use taxpayers' dollars, I do not think they have any right being in the marketplace and selling advertising.
The Chairman: That was my last question.
Senator Munson: Just a couple of nuts-and-bolts questions. Is there a union at your shop?
Mr. Scott Stirling: Yes, there is.
Mr. Furlong: CEP.
Senator Munson: Do you work well with them?
Mr. Furlong: It used to be NABET.
Senator Munson: Do you work well with the union?
Mr. Furlong: Yes, we do.
Senator Munson: How important is the Canadian Press as a national wire service in the lifeline of your news organization?
Mr. Furlong: Not really.
Senator Munson: Not for The Sunday Herald?
Mr. Furlong: I cannot speak for The Herald, senator.
Mr. Scott Stirling: Things have changed.
The Chairman: Broadcast News does not figure?
Mr. Furlong: No, not really.
The Chairman: Gentlemen, thank you very much indeed. It has been most interesting. We have kept you longer than we said we would, but your evidence has been most informative.
I am just being reminded of our technical difficulties.
Senators, our next witness is Professor Ivan Emke, from Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Welcome to the committee. The way we operate, there is a 10-minute opening statement followed by questions from us to you. The floor is yours, Professor Emke.
Mr. Ivan Emke, Professor, Department of Social Science, Memorial University of Newfoundland, As an individual: Thank you, honourable senators, for inviting me. I have sent around a copy of more extensive notes, which you can look at later. I will be talking about some of the work that I have been doing, here in Newfoundland and beyond, in terms of rural communication strategies. I teach at Memorial University in the Corner Brook branch. I teach sociology and anthropology and some folklore, and I was trained in communication and sufficiently in public relations to make me cynical, so I have a range of interests in terms of communication.
The projects I have been involved with have two major funding groups or bodies. One is based in Stephenville, Newfoundland, which is on the west coast, the Community Education Network. We have done a lot of activities with low-power radio and cable television. The other group is the New Rural Economy. They are based out of Concordia University. We are studying 32 rural communities across Canada, chosen randomly. One of the sub-themes is communication. That is the one I am working on. We are looking at communication tools in rural communities, the possible link between economic development and communication tools. Those are the kinds of project that I have been working on, that I talk about in this paper and from which I bring some evidence.
I think it is a curiously Canadian trait that we study communication, from Innis and McLuhan on, and at the government level, from the Aird commission in the late 1920s to today in St. John's. It seems to be a Canadian pastime, partly because we are such a huge country, with a huge geography, trying to figure out how to hold it all together. I will talk about several different media. We think of communication as being either glue which holds people together or oil that lubricates social relationships and so on, or sometimes as a web, a network of interactions. One example of a tool that could act as glue is community newspapers. These are institutions that sometimes hold communities together.
In the New Rural Economy Group, we started by looking at, if we were to characterize these 32 communities in terms of whether they are "leading" or "lagging" based on some social and economic indicators, could we see a relationship between what kind of communication tools they have available and their status. We found, as you will find on page 3 there in terms of leading sites, 42 per cent had a local newspaper that was published within the site boundaries, a weekly newspaper. Eighteen per cent of lagging sites had a local newspaper. In terms of an established newsletter produced by, sometimes, a social service agency, we found 43 per cent at leading sites, 25 per cent at lagging sites. Now, this is not causation, but there is certainly a correlation between certain communication tools and leading status in terms of development and so on.
The next step is to ask what is in the newspapers, because you have a perception that these newspapers are full of lost cats and records of Aunt Sophie's visit to Boston. We did a content analysis of a sampling of these newspapers from our field sites and coded each story, and we found that about a third of the stories were clearly based on community events, things going on, things coming up, things having gone on. About a fifth of the stories were related to education, whether it was adult or high school or community education. Economics represented 18 per cent of the stories, so you are talking about a fairly substantive block of material that was focused on development and economic information. History was 8 per cent, human interest, 5 per cent, so the human interest level was fairly low. It would be interesting to compare this to dailies to see how they would stack up.
Now, to look at this more closely, we decided to think about the role that the editors take in their communities. We did a survey of community newspaper editors in Canada and we chose only those from communities with a population of 75,000 or less. We sent our survey to a sampling of them and we had about 205 responses. I have outlined the details of the methodology in my paper. These 205 were from all parts of Canada, from both French and English newspapers. The first thing that we wanted to know was the types of contents. What is in these papers? Does it relate to the community or not? On page 4, I illustrate some of the findings of the types of content that appear in every issue. Editorials appear in about three-quarters of the newspapers. Letters to the editor also appear in about three-quarters of the newspapers, so they are getting responses from community members. These are ways that people talk to each other and, possibly, develop some consensus. Also prominent were opinion columns by local writers as opposed to nationally syndicated writers, reports from municipal and regional councils and so on. First, we established that the newspapers themselves are primarily focused on the local community, the purview of the people who would read it, which is different from a national or a provincial newspaper that tends to be focused on the capital city and on large political events in the provincial or federal government.
We also asked the newspaper editors about their perception of their role within the community itself. I discuss that a little, but you can see there is a chart on page 5 where I present the results, and there are some statements that we are asking the editors to respond to, to agree or disagree. We are trying to tease out how they feel they act within their own communities. The first one, which is a kind of self-serving response, is "The community newspaper plays an important role in a region's economic development." Of course, most people agreed or strongly agreed with that. The next one is interesting because within communication, of course, there is this interest in being objective or criticizing when it is necessary, and so we are balancing two different roles here: "The most important goal of a community newspaper is to maintain journalistic integrity, even if it means having to criticize local leaders." We found that, surprisingly, in a way, over 90 per cent agreed or strongly agreed to that. Therefore, there is a strong sense that they are not just boosterists for their community, but also there to maintain journalistic integrity. The next statement was similar, and we tried to use more emotionally laden language as well, because we talked about, "Sometimes community newspapers have to champion particular development strategies and dismiss others." That is fairly strong language. We found the response was much more mixed there, but still, in general, there was support for the idea that the newspaper's role is indeed to guide development and to champion certain things and dismiss others, so they have a very activist role.
Those are a few of the things that we have done in relation to newspapers. The study was much larger, but I want to move on to a couple of the other media and we can come back to some of these. The Community Education Network has been using cable television frequently. Under old CRTC regulations, cable systems would have to provide a community access channel and these are the channels that we utilized. They are often located now in schools. Sometimes they are located in Lions Clubs or service groups. They are usually just text messages about events coming up, sometimes the weather forecast, but they are available for schools or community groups to use. We found it is very successful in terms of going into a community, with some assistance, targeting an issue like water, possibly, developing a programming day around that and having the local people talk about it. We try to avoid bringing in outside experts, and if we do, we make them sit in the audience rather than at the front table, so we try to make it as community-driven as possible. For example, they had an issue with water in Mainland a number of years ago, and through the program and some trigger videos, they were able to develop a decision on how they would move forward with their water problems.
The link to schools is fairly crucial because we find, for one thing, young people are not afraid of technology, unlike people of my age. They lap it up. We have students from grade 8 on up who will run the cameras, who will run everything that has to be done with a very small amount of training, and so it really does not take very much to put these events on in terms of the technology.
One of the groups that we have worked with that I just want to mention is the Burgeo Broadcasting System. Burgeo is a small community, about 2,400 people or a little under, on the southwest coast of Newfoundland. They have their own community-owned cable television system. They are not big enough for any large system to come in, but with around 600 subscribers, they can pay salaries for two people, a technical person and a programming director. If you wonder if there is money in cable television, talk to them. They charge $19.50 a month for their cable service, which includes HBO and a number of other categories, so people are getting a fairly good service. One of the interesting things is that, occasionally, people will pay their cable bill a year in advance, come into the office to pay it off, which is generally unknown elsewhere, so there is a strong sense of community. They have a show on every Sunday night. I do not know how many communities of that size have a weekly half-hour television show. It is called This week in Burgeo, and it is watched by about 95 per cent of the people there. We did a telephone survey and found that was the case. They rely on youth volunteers from the school, and every year, they take 14 new youths and there is always a long waiting list to be involved in that. The television studio has now been located within the new school complex. That link between schools, where they are using some educational outcomes, curriculum outcomes, in learning how to write and how to present, and community television has been pretty profitable in that case. Those are the kinds of projects we work on in the Community Education Network.
It has always struck me that community cable channels would really be a blessing for cable companies that are worried about losing subscribers to satellite services, because that is one thing they have that satellite services would not. In some local communities, people are reluctant to get rid of their cable television because they would lose access to these programs. Therefore, if they want to play bingo, which is a big thing in many communities, they have to go to the home of a friend who has cable, and in a way, that is one means by which cable companies can compete with satellite services, at least in rural Newfoundland.
I want to talk briefly about radio. We have experimented with something called "special events radio." This is legislated through Industry Canada. They allow a community group to broadcast actually for up to 30 days once a year, but we have only done it for three days, on an FM signal and using a portable FM transmitter. We use a 30-watt transmitter. Industry Canada assigns you a frequency. We have local people involved in doing as much as possible — the on-air talent. We always have local musicians come in. We have local schools do things and so on. This has usually been around an event of some kind, for example, if a community is having a "come home" year or if there is a conference. This is something we just started doing. When there is a conference, members of one of the academic groups I am involved in just go into a site, do not pay any attention to the people around us, and we leave. We started doing this last fall in Tweed, Ontario. I do not know if you have ever been to Tweed. It is a small community between Ottawa and Toronto. We broadcast a conference from there, and during coffee breaks we would go around with a hand-held microphone and ask people where they are from, what they are learning at the conference, et cetera. This was broadcast to the community so people got a sense of what these people, these strangers in their community, are doing and what they are learning about. We thought it was a useful way also for an academic group, in this case, to actually speak to local communities and try to make sense to them, not always successfully.
That model is obviously high energy at the time. Lots of people get involved. It is a notable event for the community. We are also interested in whether it has any effect down the road. On page 8 I gave you some responses to a survey we did in the Bay St. George South area, south of Stephenville. We broadcast several days of community radio and then we did about a hundred surveys in which we asked people if they had learned something during the broadcast. Our hearts were warmed to find that about two-thirds had learned something, something new. As well, we asked if they had gained new respect for the actions and abilities of local leaders, because one of our assumptions is that if you see local people being interviewed or hear them on the radio, you get a sense that, "Hey, we know what we are talking about, actually," and it is a pride-building activity. Again, we found that people did agree with that. "Since listening to the broadcast, I now have more hope for the future of my community," the response was split there, but still 50 per cent said yes and only about 18 or 19 per cent said no. "Since listening to the radio broadcast, I am now more interested in community affairs." What we were trying to put numbers to here was the assumption that even though it is a three-day occasion, it does build some capacity within the community and some interest in interacting and getting involved in local events.
I end that section of the paper with a question: "Does media matter?" As part of our research, the New Rural Economy conducted a large survey of close to 2,000 households to find out what kinds of sources they rely on when they experience a major life change, something like an economic change, a health change. As you can see on page 9, we found that 1,452 people said they used family as one of the primary means of support, 808 said professionals, such as a doctor or someone like that, but 592 said media. This was the third most commonly mentioned source of support, so individuals with health changes or whatever are going to the media, whether it be television, books, the Internet and so on, looking for assistance in managing that change. We are interested in how do they manage that change. Doctors will tell you that they have increasing numbers of patients who come in with sheaves of material from the Internet on their illness, and this is not always so welcome, but it is one of the ways in which people manage change.
So, do media matter? Yes, because people are using the content in their personal lives to manage important elements of those lives, and so what is in that survey is of primary importance.
I end with some possible policy directions, and you can look at those at your leisure, but certainly the work that we have done is arguing for small-scale, low-power, community-driven events, which do not have huge effects. We are not talking about market shares and so on. We are not talking about competing with large broadcasting companies, but in terms of building local community capacity at the grassroots level, it is probably one of the most successful ways, because they have no other voice. The national media do not reflect them.
I mention there that we live in a "Knowledge Society," but I would urge, let us make it also a "Knowledge Democracy." One way to do that is by supporting community-based communications initiatives.
I am sorry for the ramble, if that is what it has been, but I have tried to give you a snapshot of some of the things we have been doing and our attempts at gathering evidence around this issue. I would welcome your comments.
The Chairman: Well, as rambles go, this has been one of the more interesting ones I have heard.
Senator Tkachuk: Yes, it has been.
You mentioned on page 6 of your brief that:
The community cable channel used to be a more prevalent (and even required) part of the service of cable systems, but unfortunately the CRTC has been decreasing the requirements for such channels.
Was it mandated that the local cable company provide a local community channel in every community, and when you say it has been decreasing, what do you mean exactly?
Mr. Emke: The idea was that you had the right to a monopoly on cable in that community.
Senator Tkachuk: Yes.
Mr. Emke: To give something back to the community, you had to make a channel available, and theoretically, it was available to anyone who wanted to make a program. If you belonged to a choir or whatever, you could go to the cable company and say "I want to do a program." That did work to some extent, but it was very top-down. For example, in Newfoundland, Rogers took over from Cable Atlantic, and when Cable Atlantic was in charge, they would allow this, but they would ship the videotapes to St. John's so they could watch them and then ship them back to the community. This would be things like kindergarten graduation.
A lovely woman in Burnt Island said to me, "What do they think we are doing, taking off our clothes?" They found it really offensive that they could not do their own community broadcasting on their own channel unless it was shipped first to St. John's for approval. However, that was part of the regulations, that to have a cable system in Burnt Island or wherever, you had to make a channel available.
Now, that used to be a requirement, but it is no longer as important for the renewal of a licence that you show that you are making that available to everyone. The large cable companies like Rogers still have a local cable channel. You can see it here in St. John's, in Corner Brook or wherever. However, they have a kind of professional package. For example, in Corner Brook, we had all these shows about fishing tackle; and some guy with a drum performing with other musicians and so on. They got rid of all of that and came up with a slick supper show kind of idea to try to professionalize it. That has lost a lot of the viewers who really were interested in fishing tackle, and even if they were not, they got a kick out of seeing their neighbour talking about it. Therefore, while Rogers can say, "Yes, we are still offering community cable," the nature of it has changed and they are basically trying to compete with broadcast companies. Our feeling is that they should try to put the teeth back into that regulation. You can just make it available to a school. A school can do this because you have a PowerPoint presentation running with coming events and the kids change it. This happens in a number of communities in Newfoundland. They put on birthday announcements or anniversary announcements. They actually, in some cases, charge money to put that on, so it is self-sufficient. They can pay a person over the summer to help do that within the community. It is not competing with anybody, but it becomes a central focus for the community.
Senator Tkachuk: Are they decreasing the requirements because of competition; in other words, because satellite companies do not have to provide a channel for that and, obviously, cannot?
Mr. Emke: Yes.
Senator Tkachuk: Is that why?
Mr. Emke: I think that was a large part of the argument from the cable companies, that this was unfair competition. It does cost something to make a studio available and so on that satellite services did not have to provide. It put them in an unfair situation because they have to offer similar bundles of channels, but if they have to offer a community channel as well, it puts them at a disadvantage. Now, there are ways to deal with this. I suppose you could put some kind of tax on satellite services and direct some of the money toward community programming. I know in the United States they have experimented with the idea of having a channel available that is all community-based programming. I think it would be fascinating to be able to watch local programs from Surrey, B.C., or from somewhere else.
Senator Tkachuk: Yes. I have always thought that owning a TV station should be just a business opportunity. It would be like opening a grocery store — it is not some great cultural icon — and perhaps with the diminishment of community programming, we could make it easier for someone in, say, Weyburn, Saskatchewan, to get a licence to operate out of the community and offer it for free. Of course, there would be advertising and all the rest of it and there would be competition, maybe, or perhaps a local community newspaper would open up shop. Would you be in favour of this? Do you think the CRTC requirements are too onerous and perhaps they should be lessened to open it up to competition?
Mr. Emke: Well, I would probably prefer the carrot to the stick, in the sense that you make it possible for community groups to start low-power radio or television that does not directly compete with larger-market stations and, to some extent, the college community-radio category. The CRTC is like that. I worked at a college station where we had to do a voice-over of all our announcements, none of the ads could be pre-taped and so on, and since we stumbled over everything, we were not as slick. It was a way to allow the fancy national advertising to be on the commercial channels. There are ways that you could maybe appease some of the commercial interests. However, I would prefer that you make it available and promote it, much as CAP, the community access program, has made computers available in many rural communities by putting in the technology. Why could one not put a radio station transmitter in the community, which would be of equal or less cost?
We are terribly underserviced in terms of radio in Newfoundland. As you drive across the island, you start to lose radio signals, and one particular radio station tends to appear all over the dial; but that is another issue, where they are broadcasting at too high a power. We have lots of space on the spectrum where we could allow small communities to have their own station with an investment no larger than a CAP site.
Senator Tkachuk: Yes, exactly. Is it solely as a result of the diminished CRTC requirements, or perhaps pressure from the larger companies, that whereas before there were more local community cable companies now there are just the big players, like Rogers and Shaw?
Mr. Emke: I think there is a certain amount of that. Now, it is possible that some of them feel that it does give them an advantage. I think the regional cable company, which is now Persona in Newfoundland, has a sense that these community channels are valuable because they are afraid of the DDS satellite services coming in. Different companies have different cultures, and Rogers would be probably less likely to see it as an advantage than Persona, which is a smaller company operating in many rural communities. They see a real advantage to having the community station run out of the local school because that keeps their subscribers.
Senator Tkachuk: I would think that would be an advantage over satellite. That is why I was trying to get at why they would be trying to get out of that market; in other words, I would be able to at least watch, for example, city council on my community cable channel, which I cannot do on satellite.
Mr. Emke: Yes.
Senator Munson: We have not had a report quite like this. You have done a lot of work to discover these interesting facts. One of our main questions is a simple one: Are communities, minorities and remote centres appropriately served?
Mr. Emke: No. You mean served by the present system?
Senator Munson: Yes, exactly.
Mr. Emke: I do not think so. When I go to rural communities, one of the common complaints is that their stories are not out there. If we construct an idea of who we are as human beings based partly on our media interactions, it is especially hard for youth, who are watching the same MuchMusic as everybody else, to see the link between Weyburn, Saskatchewan, and MuchMusic downtown. If they construct their identity through the media, they will obviously try to leave their rural communities, because those communities are nowhere evident, unless it is something like Corner Gas, that television program which is very popular. However, I do not think that rural communities see their stories. Now, there have been attempts at that, like the Country Canada station that CBC developed, although that is on digital television so very few people can get that, and certainly very few rural people. I think that is one reason why we generate such excitement when we go to a place to do a small project about which we think, "Oh well, no one will be interested in this." People are excited because they can hear their neighbours talk. Radio and television are such magical things. The technology is pretty simple, but it is so magical to be able to sit in your car and listen to your mayor or an old person from the community talking about what it was like back then.
Senator Munson: Is the Burgeo community television on a certain channel? Is it Channel 13, beside all the big ones? How does that work?
Mr. Emke: Yes. I think they have Channel 12. They have a channel that is always text, and also a channel that is sometimes weather reports. They run a radio station as the audio for that, a radio station that is not available otherwise in the community, and then occasionally, they will run their own community programs. People will sometimes come in with videotapes, say after their fishing trip, and they will say, "This is what the lobster looked like today," or whatever. They broadcast church services, at different times so as not to compete, for shut-ins. They have This Week in Burgeo, and something called The Chuck Wagon, which is a music show. They have Pansy's Garden, which is a children's show. They have a lot of kids programming, and they read books and do crafts and so on. Those are their regular mainstays, and the one programming director, whose salary is supported by the subscriptions, organizes all of that.
Senator Munson: So there are two people who can survive and make a living in that environment?
Mr. Emke: Yes.
Senator Munson: How prevalent are those kinds of community-owned systems across the country?
Mr. Emke: I have not found many. Now strangely enough, there is another. Ramea is an island about 11 kilometres off Burgeo and they have one as well. It has not been as successful, but it is similar. They set it up in an old Pentecostal church because, of course, communities very close together sometimes have to compete, and it has worked out okay. Other than those two examples, it is very hard to find community-owned cable systems. There are community cable channels, like Bay TV, closer to here, where local people run the channel, but they do not own the cable system, whereas these are small communities that actually own the cable system. They had bake sales at Burgeo to pay for letterhead so they could write to banks and ask for money. The Bank of Nova Scotia was the only bank in Burgeo and they refused to lend money to the community for this, so they went to the Federal Business Development Bank and got $55,000. This was in 1984, and they paid it off within a couple of years, but they strung the cable on a weekend, with a lot of local people helping with the wires and so on, and it was successful that way. There are a couple of issues there. I think a local bank should support local people. These are people who all had deposits in that bank and so on, but that is just a side point. It just indicates the extent to which communities really have to struggle sometimes to get these moving forward, because even institutions within their communities are not always very supportive.
Senator Munson: In your brief, under "Possible Policy Directions," you write:
Reaffirm the necessity of community cable television stations, and provide incentives to hand over the operation of these to community-based groups and schools. The CRTC should re-think their retreat on this issue.
What kind of incentives are you thinking of?
Mr. Emke: Well, one could be, if it were still necessary to have a community cable channel, you could say, "Okay, if you hand it over to the school, you have done your job and it will no longer cost you any money to run it. You just make sure it is still on the air, just like every other channel." That would be an incentive for these cable systems to find someone who would be willing to do this, whether a Lions Club or a school. We found that it works well in schools because students are interested in the technology. They are focused on computer technology, and with convergence, you are talking about working on computer programs, which are then broadcast. It teaches those kinds of skills, so that principals say, "Well, I can meet my curriculum objectives through the kids being involved in this." That is the kind of incentive I am referring to.
Senator Munson: In looking at your charts, do the communities that have these arrangements in place seem to you to be more vibrant? Are people talking to each other? Are the economies better, too? Is there a correlation there?
Mr. Emke: There is a rough correlation. The leading communities are more likely to have newspapers and cable television. Other things we have looked into, like bulletin boards, people thought we were crazy. We were driving around communities trying to keep track of how people communicate with each other, how they stay aware of what is going on. This would even include things like bulletin boards or spaces for people to talk, whether wharves or coffee shops or whatever. We think communication is a pretty dense subject, so you cannot just look at communication tools like media. Our sense is that those communities are able to come to some sort of consensus. You could think of concepts like collective entrepreneurship, this idea of a community as a whole deciding to take a risk. "Oh, we are planning to buy the fish plant," or whatever. We usually think of entrepreneurship as an individual effort where somebody has a great idea, but there is also a collective entrepreneurship whereby groups can make a decision to take a chance together. Now, it does not always work, because in Newfoundland there are some pretty difficult situations. Ramea, one of the communities I talked about in relation to Burgeo, did buy their fish plant and they basically decided to do that on cable television. They all got together and said, "Okay, here are the choices. FPI is leaving. We could get this plant for a dollar. What needs to be done?" They have a lot of people who had worked in the plant and they said, "Well, we need cement here and we need paint here," and so they helped to negotiate all that and thousands of hours of community labour went into it. We ask ourselves, without a cable television channel, how would those decisions get made? Would some people on council talk about it and then talk about it at the fire hall with other people? We think that that lubricates or makes possible decisions. Not everybody agreed, but everybody knew what was on the table.
Senator Eyton: Professor, as you have seen, I follow Senator Munson. He often asks the questions that I would like to ask, so I would like to go back a little.
You introduced yourself and you have what looks like a very interesting paper, but unhappily, I have not had the time to go through it thoroughly. I wanted to know something more about your background and your interests. In your remarks you mentioned that you were involved in low-power radio and CATV. Then you mentioned a survey that had to do with rural economies and their relationship to local communications. I wanted to know a little more about your background, your associations and the funding. Where do you get the funding to do those activities?
Mr. Emke: I am a standard academic, so I would seek funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, SSHRC, for example, which is one of the three major granting bodies of the federal government. Some of the New Rural Economy material has been funded through a grant from them. The idea of one grant we are working on now, an initiative in the new economy, was to try to look at what are the changes taking place in rural communities as we move to a new economy? This idea is a catch phrase in a way, and sometimes we have debates about whether there is a new economy or whether the old one is just becoming a little different. SSHRC had a series of grants available for research on the new economy and we were fortunate enough to get one. We are looking at services in the new economy, changes in governance, environment issues and communications, and I am focusing mostly on communication.
A lot of the work is on the Internet, but I have not talked about that. It was not necessarily part of your role. I am not sure.
Senator Tkachuk: We are interested in it, so if you have something to say, go ahead.
Mr. Emke: You are interested in it, yes.
The Chairman: We need to understand the whole process.
Mr. Emke: SSHRC is a major funder. A fair amount of the work I did with the Community Education Network, basically, nobody funded it. You just do it.
Senator Eyton: Is it a national network or more localized?
Mr. Emke: No, it is more localized. They have received funding from the Office of Learning Technologies. Occasionally, we will get a little money from Canada Rural Partnerships. It was set up in an area where there were a lot of needs in terms of adult education in the early 1990s, and the idea was to establish a network whereby schools would become community centres where people would be able to come in the evening to take adult basic education and so on. Some of the first experiments in cable television were offering adult basic education on cable. This was right after the first fishing moratorium. People could take their adult basic education at home. They would watch the instructor on cable. It very much came out of an educational focus, and they have struggled along with little pockets of money from here and there. Sometimes the school board will support an initiative.
Senator Eyton: This is largely a provincial undertaking, then?
Mr. Emke: It is.
Senator Eyton: It is something that is based here in Newfoundland?
Mr. Emke: It is, yes.
Senator Eyton: In your earlier remarks, I think you used the number 32?
Mr. Emke: That is the New Rural Economy Group, and there are 32 communities across Canada.
Senator Eyton: Across Canada.
Mr. Emke: Yes.
Senator Eyton: When I get down to your very good summation at the end of your paper, where you talk about possible policy directions, you think that has national implications beyond just this province?
Mr. Emke: Yes, we do. The work I do with the Community Education Network is local, and yet, with the New Rural Economy, I get to interact with various communities across Canada, and I observe that there are a lot of similar problems. In a week and a half, we go to Benito, Manitoba, where we are jump-starting a newsletter. It is called Newspaper in a Box. There are maybe 400 people in this community, and they said, "What we need in this community is a newsletter. We need something because we cannot just go with bulletin boards." We go in there with a little technology, and we have grade 8 and 9 English classes, some local retired people and the library. We will go in and produce over the course of about six days the first newsletter and then let it go, and hopefully, they will continue. Having been there before, my observations are the problems in Benito are a lot like the problems in St. George's, Newfoundland, in terms of rural issues — lack of a voice, the need to communicate about an issue, whether it is nutrient management programs in Ontario rural communities or fisheries here.
Senator Eyton: What I find remarkable is that we have had quite a lot of evidence presented to this committee, and so far as I know, this is the first advice we have received about what appears to be, on one level at least, a kind of national effort, with some national recommendations and suggestions. I find it odd, but still remarkable, that we are hearing about it here in Newfoundland.
Senator Munson: There are a lot of firsts here.
Senator Eyton: Yes, there must be. When you talk about "community-based," from what I have heard from you, you are really talking about low-power radio, local cable casting and local newspapers in one form or another.
Mr. Emke: Yes.
Senator Eyton: You stopped there, and you have already said you excluded the Internet because you thought it might be too sophisticated for us, or something along that line.
Mr. Emke: No.
Senator Eyton: We are interested in the entire range.
Mr. Emke: Yes.
Senator Eyton: You mentioned incentives repeatedly in your possible policy directions, which I think is quite a lovely list, and "incentives" is kind of a cloak for all kinds of things. I have a strong belief that everything has to be costed, and in the end, money counts.
Mr. Emke: Yes.
Senator Eyton: Maybe it even counts at the beginning, but it certainly counts in the end. You have talked about how people can come together and it is not just one entrepreneur; it is a group that can be entrepreneurial. I am curious as to how you think we could use this as a platform along the lines you describe, as a kind of national effort in smaller communities. First of all, I would like you to describe the incentives in their infinite variety, what you think would provide the best incentive. I am talking here in dollar terms and how it might be applied nationally. It is one thing to refer to one community, and you mentioned one small community that installed their own CATV system somewhere south of Stephenville, I think, but I would be curious as to how you think that that could attain national significance and become part of a national program.
Mr. Emke: One of the persistent problems we find with networking is that when we go to a conference where we get rural people together, they learn from each other, but they are not aware of the possibilities somewhere else. We like to preach the Burgeo example sometimes, and other communities can pick up on it, but I think networking is a problem. In terms of incentives specifically, I am not sure how that would work. Obviously, the Internet can help with networking. The Internet has some value there.
Senator Eyton: I want to talk about money, though. Everything costs money.
Mr. Emke: In rural communities, HRDC, now HRSTC, used to fund a lot of part-time positions — a lot of people cutting brush in Newfoundland, which is fine. However, it always struck us that you have this problem of youth out migration; these are young people who cannot find jobs. Maybe they have post-secondary training, but they cannot find jobs in their own communities. In one of the Community Education Network programs, we designed what we called a "community communications facilitator" position. We wrote a job description, pretended it was the real thing. We gave it to HRDC, and they actually passed it. They said, "Okay," and we hired eight people to be community communications facilitators in eight communities. It was HRDC money, so it was money that was going to those areas anyway, because there are subsidies to organizations, municipalities and so on in various forms; it was not a new subsidy. We were able to hire eight young people to do something that gave them more human capital or experience with something different. They organized communication events with the students and with the communities. Our argument to HRDC then was, "This should be an ongoing activity. If you will have to provide some sort of stop-gap measures for employment in rural communities" — and of course, there is a debate about whether that should be going on at all — "why do you not fund some jobs with a higher skill level and that have broad usefulness for the community?" These people were able to negotiate: "Okay, we will have a program this week," and every month they would have to have a program: "Get the church choir in this week," "Get somebody else in." We thought it was building community capacity, but it was using a pre-existing strategy.
Now, that is not new dollars. There is still a debate about whether they should be spent, but at least it was redirecting those funds.
Senator Eyton: What happened to those eight people? Was it productive? Has the precedent been followed?
Mr. Emke: They all did different things and they were all productive in their own way. One, for example, started focusing on expatriates, and set up lists of Newfoundlanders in Fort McMurray and other places. His argument was that he wanted to get them involved, because they would do webcasting as well. Once you are doing broadcasting, webcasting is not much further along. There would be programs that they could watch on the web in Fort McMurray or wherever. His idea was to get those people, that human capital that had left the community, investing in the community again and keeping the life going. Others did the more conventional cable program once a month. We found it was very successful. However, after it was over it was dropped because we did not have any more money.
Senator Eyton: It was a one-year program, was it?
Mr. Emke: Ten months. It was 10 months of fun for them. We tried to argue that that should be continued, but it did not work out. That is a frustration, I think, because you develop an initiative and then you have to watch it fall.
Senator Eyton: You also mention in your suggestions something that you refer to as a "Rural-Urban alliance," and I am trying to imagine what that might be.
Mr. Emke: In the New Rural Economy Group, we have talked for a while about some key problems of rural communities, and one of them is the perception that rural areas are being left out, whether it be in the current government agenda or otherwise. The feeling is that in order for rural society to grow or survive, they need to make an alliance with urban people so that urban communities feel some necessity to assist rural communities. We feel there is a disconnect, that urban communities do not have a sense of the value of rural communities, other than maybe as fine places to visit or drive through once in a while.
Senator Eyton: Weekends.
Mr. Emke: Weekends, yes. There is this romanticism about rural communities, and yet there is still this sense of rusticity, the feeling that rural communities are backward and all that kind of thing. I love to point out the creativity of rural students on some of these projects. Some of the rural students go to Queen's or wherever, and they just happen to be talking to somebody and say, "Oh yes, we used to work on a community television channel." People who come from Toronto or wherever are agog. "How did you do that?" I do not think the idea that rural people can also be innovative has been widely accepted. Therefore, we try to talk about — and why I threw it in there, too — how can you develop some kind of rural-urban alliance so that there is more understanding? We have the Rural Secretariat at the federal level, also the provincial level. I do not know if there is an urban secretariat, but the feeling in rural Canada is that everything else is the urban secretariat.
Senator Tkachuk: They are right.
Senator Eyton: It is called infrastructure.
Mr. Emke: If there was some way that could be done, and if communication and regional programming could support this, where rural communities could start to speak to urban interests and point to, "Okay, here is what we offer to you," "Here is the value of maintaining us here in this land," that is what I am driving at. That is a big debate, whether we should allow people to stay in these little communities and whether it makes sense, economic and otherwise, to do that.
Senator Eyton: Very interesting.
The Chairman: Indeed, fascinating. Just for our records, you have referred in your paper to three, and maybe more, surveys, one of the editors of community newspapers, one in Bay St. George South, and one of households.
Mr. Emke: Yes.
The Chairman: Could you please send us copies of the reports of those surveys so that we have them for our records?
Mr. Emke: Certainly.
The Chairman: On special events radio, this is the first time I have heard of a program through Industry Canada to set up radio stations.
Mr. Emke: Well, it is short term.
The Chairman: And the CRTC just says, "Oh, go to it"?
Mr. Emke: Part of that deal is that it has to be a community-based group; it cannot be for profit and it is for a special event.
We had been doing this for a couple of years, and a friend who works closely with me and is a little paranoid said, "Let's not tell too many people because if the CRTC finds out about this, it might close us down."
The Chairman: About how much money would be involved in a special event?
Mr. Emke: Well, the entire cost of the Tweed event was about $2,800.
The Chairman: You're kidding.
Mr. Emke: Through my friend, we purchased a 30-watt FM transmitter, and we rent it out to various communities to try to pay it off, and so it was $2,800 for everything.
The Chairman: Wow.
Mr. Emke: It involved driving a van from Nova Scotia and back too.
The Chairman: To Tweed, Ontario.
Mr. Emke: To Tweed, Ontario. It is like a rock band tour.
The Chairman: Maybe you need regional branches.
Mr. Emke: That is right.
The Chairman: For the kind of community you describe, whether it be cable or low-power radio, whatever, if it were really to take hold, it would need somebody to undertake something like your News in a Box would it not?
Mr. Emke: Yes.
The Chairman: It would need people going out across the country for short periods of time saying, "This is community TV in a box," "This is community radio in a box." Who could pay for that?
Mr. Emke: Yes.
The Chairman: You can see that like Senator Eyton, I am interested in where we can find the money for good projects.
Mr. Emke: These are questions we worry about late at night at doughnut shops, too. How do you pay for that? In some ways, I feel like a kind of prophet. I am talking about these old-fashioned technologies, low power. Everybody is into high power and things like that, and I enjoy that, but I do not think it is where the future is for rural communities. How do you pay for it? We spend a lot of money on economic development programs of one sort or another, and one of the communities close to the Community Education Network has tried to use some of their economic development money for communications events in some way. They get some money from the government to hold an annual meeting, and so they broadcast it, and it does not cost much more to broadcast it than just to hold it in a hall. That is using money that is available for their regular activities, but channelling it toward communication.
Thus far, we have not found many organizations, other than a few foundations that might work on economic development issues, who are willing to fund it, so a lot of it is either through academic funding bodies like SSHRC or finding ways to redirect money that would be spent on something to a communication-intensive program instead.
Now, maybe we need a kind of CIDA-level arrangement for Canada. I know that non-governmental organizations based in Canada work on farm radio networks in Africa, for example, and that is important. Radio is very important in developing countries. We almost need farm radio in Canada again. A lot of that is talking about new monies, or skimming off the profits of another part of the communication industry and putting them toward community communications. Part of it is a philosophical debate about what broadcasting should do for us. Who owns the airwaves? The Aird commission talked about who owns the airwaves. Is it the public ether? If you are allowed to broadcast or are given a monopoly on cable or satellite or whatever, perhaps you need to pay something back.
The Chairman: The CRTC does have programs whereby broadcasters have to deposit "X" amount of money into "X" different kinds of funds.
Mr. Emke: Yes.
The Chairman: I assume that is also a formula that you have contemplated?
Mr. Emke: Yes, we have. Now, some of those, Telefilm or programs like that, tend to be focused on professionals, providing jobs for lighting technicians, for example. We would be talking here about funding basic materials, and they might see it as competition.
The Chairman: Kindergarten graduation?
Mr. Emke: Kindergarten graduation, yes.
The Chairman: That is not heavy-duty competition for CTV.
Mr. Emke: I would hope not, but you never know.
The Chairman: We would all like to watch it, actually.
Mr. Emke: People will watch local events. As I think I mentioned here, you could put up a television camera in a mall and people would watch that to see who was walking by. I recall when I was graduate student, I used to stay up late and watch national programming while doing papers. Global had, for Canadian programming, Night Ride and Night Walk. One involved walking around the streets of Toronto at night with a camera, so it was an hour of Canadian content. On Night Ride, they would drive around the streets of Toronto with jazz playing in the background.
Senator Tkachuk: It is safer.
Mr. Emke: Yes, it is safer. One of the organizations here in Newfoundland shows Scenes of Newfoundland in the middle of the night, and there are waterfalls and various things, but people do watch it.
The Chairman: Sure.
Mr. Emke: Night Ride and Night Walk had almost a cult following among graduate students, because you would be working and there would be this jazz soundtrack and you would see that street corner there. It was local. People could have watched anything, but they watched that, which is astounding.
The Chairman: Fascinating.
Senator Munson: In your surveys, were there any worries that politicians could get their hands on these community radio stations or TV stations, because if it is about spreading the word, the first people out the door would be politicians trying to spread their own word.
Mr. Emke: Well, we invite them. We invite them for some of the programs, but as I say, they do not sit at the head table. They sit in the audience. We think it is symbolically important that local people sit at the head table. If you intend to have a community television event, you have the local people there, and then you might ask the politicians to attend. It is important to ask them because they obviously have some power. You do not try to be adversarial toward them. We let them give their message, but also allow local people to get their message out. However, I think they can probably get the ear of major media outlets more easily than community television and community radio.
Senator Munson: We talked a great deal about serious issues, and the report is spot-on. It is a great report. However, I cannot let you go without asking you this question. You talked about your accomplishments and your first line is, "My research on funeral services is currently being supported..." and so on. I guess you did not bury the lead. I am curious. I was a reporter for 35 years and I saw the first line, on funeral services, and I went to the last paragraph to see what the relationship is. I know it has nothing to do with anything, but I had to ask the question.
Mr. Emke: That is an entirely different research project, which I would be glad to talk about, but I am here to talk about communication.
Senator Munson: We will bury that for today. Thanks.
The Chairman: We will bury that. I have one last question for clarification purposes. You said in an answer to one of my earlier questions, "I do not think this is where the future is." It sounded to me as if you were outlining a rather lovely future here.
Mr. Emke: I meant the high-tech, fancy kind of stuff. I do not think that is where the future is for rural communities.
The Chairman: For rural communities, okay.
Mr. Emke: I think they will benefit more from the kind of thing we have been talking about, yes.
Senator Eyton: As always, I have a follow-up to Senator Munson's question. Can you talk a little about governance? We have talked about community-based media, broadcasting and so on. Communities come together, and in the early days, four or five people make it happen, but then six months or a year later, the question arises of who really runs it. How can you ensure that it is representative of the community on an ongoing basis? I come from a culture where I am used to chief executives, annual plans and continuity.
It seems to me it would be difficult to impart those same qualities to a community-based organization unless it has leadership. Therefore, the question of where it comes from arises, and how do you ensure that it truly continues to represent the community?
Mr. Emke: Yes. That is a good question, because some of the projects are wonderfully anarchic and do not go anywhere because of that. One of the things that I think help the projects that I look at as being successful is they institutionalize the intake of new volunteers. In the case of a school, every fall, 14 new students or something like that become a part of it, or every year, the Lions Club has to do whatever. You institutionalize those arrangements so that the community players are involved.
Actual leaders can be problematic, because in some cases, and not naming names, community leaders have not been able to give up power over community broadcasting or whatever to new waves of volunteers, and that has meant the death of that entity, because once they leave, everything is gone.
I think that is a problem for voluntary sector organizations in general, trying to regenerate at the same time as maintaining a focus on what their message or their brand is. However, by institutionalizing the intake you will always have new people coming in, and that is accepted. You entered the organization under those conditions and you expect it will be that way. As people leave, the organization is able to replace individuals and train new people. It is important to train a wide variety of people, because in some cases, individuals try to protect the knowledge of how to run a camera, for example.
Senator Eyton: I am just thinking to myself that if I lived in a small community, I would like to be the person who picked the programming. It seems to me that would be a lovely thing, but on the other hand, if there were enough counterbalances to make sure that did not happen, it would probably be healthier for the community broadcasting. Thank you.
The Chairman: Professor Emke, thank you very much indeed.
Mr. Emke: You are most welcome.
The Chairman: It has been a fascinating session. We are very grateful to you and we will not forget what you have told us.
Mr. Emke: I will send you the reports, and all the best in your deliberations.
The Chairman: Thank you very much.
[Translation]
We are very pleased to welcome Mr. Steven Watt, Executive Director of Le Gaboteur, Newfoundland's French-language newspaper. Before undertaking this study, I was unaware that Newfoundland even had a French-language newspaper. That is very good news indeed. Thank you for coming. You have ten minutes to make your presentation, after which we will go to questions.
Mr. Steven Watt, Executive Director, Le Gaboteur : Madam Chair, since very little is known about Newfoundland's French-language media, I will start by briefly introducing ourselves to you.
The Fédération des francophones de Terre-Neuve et du Labrador launched Le Gaboteur in 1984. In the ensuing years, we have become a fully independent press and we currently have the status of a non-profit corporation.
Depending on the situation, we have either one or two permanent workers on staff. I represent the newspaper and I handle administrative matters. We also have an editor in chief who puts the newspaper together.
Our operations are supervised by a board of directors made up of volunteers who are members of the Francophone community. Personally, I am not a member of Newfoundland's Francophone community. Rather, I serve that community. This is true of other employees who hail from Quebec or the Maritime provinces. It is rather difficult to find people within the community who are interested in or qualified to do this kind of work. We are, however, in contact on a regular basis with regional associations in St. John's, on the west coast and in Labrador. We regularly rely on the services of regional freelance journalists who happen to be members of the Francophone community. They write articles for our newspaper free of charge. We edit the articles and then publish them.
Geographically, we serve an enormous market, but one that demographically, is quite restricted. Newfoundland and Labrador is home to approximately 2,000 persons whose mother tongue is French. According to the last census, these numbers have remained stable, after declining for decades. These 2,000 Francophones reside primarily in St. John's and in the Avalon Peninsula, on the island's west coast, that is approximately 1,000 kilometres from here, along the Port-au-Port peninsula, and mainly in Labrador City, Labrador. These three St. John's communities form a diverse group composed of university professors, customs officers, several transplanted Saint-Pierre and Miquelon families, business people and public servants. The Francophone community on the west coast is made up primarily of Acadians who immigrated to Newfoundland in the early 20th century. The Port-au-Port peninsula, the true cradle of Newfoundland's francophone community, is where a number of institutions were first established in Francophone Newfoundland. It is also where the Fédération des francophones founded Le Gaboteur.
Among the various issues in which the Committee is interested, I would think the most relevant one, in so far as Le Gaboteur is concerned, is this question: are communities, minorities and geographically remote centres well served by the Canadian media? As you undoubtedly know, ours is not the only newspaper of its kind in Canada. Francophone newspapers, particularly those that publish outside New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario, often serve a population that is scattered across a particular province. Such newspapers embody the meaning of a community newspaper in the narrowest sense of the word. It is not that they focus on any one community in particular; rather it is that they belong to the community. Indeed, we belong to the province's Francophone community and our mission is to reflect and validate this community and to help it flourish across the province and beyond its borders. To my mind, our mission is not one that would interest a private sector business or a larger company. We are destined to remain a very small operation not only because of the number of Francophones in the province, but primarily because of our mission.
Our newspaper is important to the community, not simply because it is a reflection of that community and a source of information, but also because is provides a permanent record of the community's development. We represent a small group of people who are separated from each other geographically. Naturally, the pace of activity changes over time. At times like that, the newspaper provides a source of information and serves as a kind of archive for our collective memory over the longer term, in the face of staff changes and changing institutions. While the print media may use fairly old technology, it still functions very well. It plays a very important role in situations like this one. To my mind, newspapers are one source of information that can be shared.
During my year and a half working for Le Gaboteur, I have observed in the course of my efforts to increase subscription levels that subscription figures did not correspond to the actual number of readers. On the west coast and in Labrador in particular, newspapers find their way into households through the schools or are shared by community associations, again according to an age-old model. I learned in my history classes that this model was used in the late 18th or early 19th century and it remains relevant to this day.
I want to stress the importance of the print media and of newspapers that can be shared among people because it calls to mind differences that set communities apart from one another. The Port-au-Port peninsula region on the west coast is without high speed Internet access, something which obviously cannot be said of St. John's or Labrador. The print media makes it possible to strike a balance of sorts in terms of communication between different regions without equal access to resources.
I noted that you seem to be very interested in the role of the state and of government policies and institutions in media industries. I can tell you that we rely substantially on government funding in the form of an annual grant from the Department of Canadian Heritage, as well as on funding from the Publications Assistance Program. Like many other newspapers, it would be very difficult for us to hire a newspaper carrier to deliver 100 newspapers to homes across the Avalon Peninsula. Therefore, we rely a great deal on the media and on the Publications Assistance Program. Their assistance has allowed us to grow as a newspaper and to comply with the Official Languages Act and with the regulations which state that if government advertising is published in English, it must also appear in an equivalent francophone publication.
Obviously, we hold a monopoly and I want to emphasize that our relationship with the government is not strictly a charitable one, because we do provide a unique service to Francophones across the province. It may not need to do so on a weekly basis, but when the government does need to get a message out to Francophones, we, as a Francophone newspaper reaching out to the population across the provinces, must be ready and able to oblige because again, the fact that Francophones are scattered across the province presents a problem in terms of selling local advertising space.
Because our readers are scattered across three regions of the province, it is very difficult to convince a small business in St. John's to take out a paid advertisement in the newspaper when two thirds of the readers live 1,000 kilometres away. This fact, and the fact that we target a very small community make it difficult to sell local advertising space. At the same time, however, we give a bilingual government the opportunity to get its message out to a minority official language community. I believe these are the main points I wanted to cover today.
The Chairman: We appreciate that the newspaper ultimately finds its way into many households through schools, as it notably the case in Manitoba. We heard how that same trend has been observed in that province. Do you have several copies of your newspaper for us?
Mr. Watt: Unfortunately, I do not. However, I could get some for you.
The Chairman: We would appreciate receiving at least one copy. We do not want to put you to too much trouble.
[English]
Senator Eyton: Mr. Watt, I was curious as to what your publication looked like, and if we are getting a copy, that would answer that part. Would you tell me more about its circulation? What kind of circulation and what kind of readership are behind your comments on both those subjects?
Mr. Watt: We currently have a print run of a thousand copies. We have a total distribution of approximately 650 copies, about 95 per cent of which are paid. The figure one thousand is basically a minimum print run at our current printer. It is not a desire to waste paper and we do our best to distribute those at special events or such like.
Senator Eyton: You talked about a factor where readership was a higher number than your circulation. What is your estimated readership?
Mr. Watt: I have never tried to approach it in any scientific fashion. It seems to be primarily a phenomenon on the west coast, in Labrador City, where we noticed that our residential subscriptions are very low, and yet when we talk to people, everyone seems to be aware of what is in the paper.
Senator Eyton: Are there subscribers to the paper?
Mr. Watt: Yes, it is an annual subscription. Traditionally, before I arrived on the scene, people received it along with their membership in the local associations. There are francophone associations in Labrador City, on the west coast, and in St. John's. What we found was that we were getting about $4 or $5 for a subscription and it was costing us about $12 to $15 to deliver the paper over the course of a year. We switched to a paid format with a $30 subscription rate a couple of years ago, which caused a tremendous drop in subscriptions, and we are trying to rebuild now with the model that residential subscriptions are half price. We basically provide residential subscriptions at the cost of delivery and corporate subscriptions or for institutions like schools, libraries and government institutions are $30. If money is an issue, we want to make the paper available to as many households as possible, and on the other hand, we recognize that those institutional copies are being read by several people in most cases.
Senator Eyton: Can you touch on the history of the publication? You mentioned you had been around for a year and a half, and I think you said that you had two other people working with you on the publication.
Mr. Watt: Yes.
Senator Eyton: The publication itself has been around longer than that, I assume?
Mr. Watt: Yes, the publication itself has been around since 1984, so we celebrated our twentieth anniversary last year. Moving is a big theme in the history of the publication because we actually moved cities three times in that period. It was originally founded in St. John's. After about two years, it moved to Stephenville on the west coast to be closer to the most active francophone communities in the province, which tended to be on the Port au Port Peninsula. It then moved back around 1995 or 1996, if I am not mistaken, to St. John's, basically because the other provincial organizations were here, the provincial federation, as were most of the government agencies, which were increasingly becoming our major source of advertising revenue.
Senator Eyton: I know we will see a copy of your newspaper, but can you tell me a little about the content and how it services the needs of the local communities?
Mr. Watt: Content is a bit of a challenge, especially the balance between general information and community events when we are dealing with three very distant geographic communities, each of which has its own association newsletter. I should have mentioned that we are essentially a bimonthly publication. We publish 21 times a year. That is twice a month except during July and August and at Christmastime. We try to strike a balance among general information in French, general news and commentary; information about upcoming community events and what is happening in community organizations; and thirdly, coverage of community events. Publishing pictures of people's children is a great marketing tool, but a great responsibility of the newspaper too. It is a great sales tactic, but it also illustrates that these are community events that would likely not be covered by any other media, and it allows people to see their culture as news and to establish a record of those small events that are often put on by ad hoc groups.
Senator Eyton: I would like to get some idea of the financial profile. I assume it is a non-profit publication?
Mr. Watt: Yes.
Senator Eyton: Can you break down the revenue stream for me? Assuming you start with a dollar, what percentage would come from different sources?
Mr. Watt: Essentially, in the roughest of figures, I would say two-thirds from advertising income and one-third from various forms of assistance, mainly an annual grant under l'Entente Canada-communautés for official language communities, and the Programme d'aide aux publications, the postage subsidy for publications sent through the mail.
Senator Eyton: What is the figure for subscriptions?
Mr. Watt: Subscription revenues would not be more, I would say, than a tenth of our income. As I mentioned, especially for residential subscriptions, we basically lower it to the actual cost of delivery, so it is generally not treated as a revenue-generating opportunity.
Senator Eyton: The subscriptions?
Mr. Watt: Yes.
Senator Eyton: And the trend lines for those sources of revenue, the subscriptions and advertising and government support?
Mr. Watt: Advertising, especially in the short term, is doing well in the wake of the moratorium last year, which was not a disaster for us, but certainly hit us fairly hard. We are trying to rebuild a base of local advertising in spite of the challenges I mentioned. That is something that we try to work on especially in the summers, when we are able to hire a student or two, because during the year, we have a limited number of bodies and it is hard to follow up on long-term projects. On government advertising, we are trying to develop stronger relationships with the responsible individuals in the government departments here and in the province. Much of our federal advertising comes through an advertising agency based in Ottawa, but there are, of course, Newfoundland-specific announcements, job offers, et cetera, that require that civil servants working here in St. John's are aware of our existence, and so I try to concentrate on building, perhaps "strong" relationships is not the right term, but efficient working relationships with them so that they know we exist and that they can place advertising with us.
Senator Eyton: There is revenue coming out of that, too? It was a revenue question.
Mr. Watt: Yes, over the last two years, I would say the greatest increase is through government advertising, but for local initiatives rather than national necessity.
Senator Munson: I have the toughest question of the day to ask you. You have seen a fair amount of scurrying around here while you were talking because there is a vital question and there are different answers to it. Le Gaboteur, what does it mean? Somebody said "tugboat," somebody said "gossipy," somebody said it was a play on words.
Mr. Watt: As far as we can tell, it is a variation on "caboteur," which is a package ship or a mail ship, and in the French accent of the west coast of Newfoundland it comes out more as "gaboteur" than "caboteur."
Senator Munson: I understand.
The Chairman: It would be like the old steam packets carrying news from one outpost to the next?
Mr. Watt: Yes.
Mr. Watt: Essentially, we share a name with the English language newspaper that serves the Bona Vista Peninsula, The Packet. That is my introductory line whenever I meet the editor of The Packet.
Senator Munson: It is a play on words, essentially.
Mr. Watt: Yes, it is an appropriate name because that is the mail ship or the package ship that brings the information and the pronunciation is uniquely franco-Newfoundland.
Senator Munson: Speaking of that, how many Acadians live in Newfoundland?
Mr. Watt: Is that a cultural question or an ethnic question?
Senator Munson: Well, it is a cultural question in terms of the audience you are reaching. You said St. Pierre and Miquelon, or that readership.
Mr. Watt: Yes. St. Pierre and Miquelon, if I can address that question just briefly, has been a challenge for us. We have come very close. One problem is where it is distributed by mail. It is printed in Corner Brook, so it goes from Corner Brook to St. John's to Toronto to Paris to St. Pierre. We believe we have fixed that by putting "via Halifax" on our deliveries, and nine times out of ten, it seems to get them there faster, but I am not entirely convinced. We actually got Air St. Pierre to agree to take a certain number of copies for free. Our final hurdle is finding someone in St. Pierre who would agree to bring them through customs. All that is to say currently, we do not have many subscriptions in St. Pierre and Miquelon, and it is hard to sell them when people risk getting their newspapers two months late. Just remind me of your question?
Senator Munson: Your circulation, I guess it is Acadians? I have to ask these questions. My wife is an Acadian from New Brunswick, so if I do not, I am in trouble.
Mr. Watt: Generally, I am not necessarily the best person to speak on this, but the francophone organizations in this province, and especially the francophone federation, have fought hard to be recognized as part of the Acadian community so that the francophone community in Newfoundland can participate fully in events like the 2004 celebrations. Those were very successful in Newfoundland, both in terms of the activities of francophone communities, including St. Pierre and Miquelon, who participated with the provincial organization here in Newfoundland, and in creating links with anglophone communities in the province. Those communities have an incredibly rich French heritage because the west and north coasts of Newfoundland were not French territory until 1904, but the French had fishing rights on those coasts. All of these communities with French names up the northern peninsula and along the south coast were used by the French. There are the ruins of old bread ovens in these communities, there are French sailors buried in people's backyards. Those are just two examples of these communities' many, often very physical, links with French heritage, and the 2004 celebrations were very successful in linking the francophone organizations in the province with communities that have an interest. The people living there do not necessarily have a personal interest in the French language and culture, but that could be developed through their interest in the history of their communities.
Another major event that francophones from this province have recently taken part in is the Inter-Celtic Festival held in Northern France, in Brittany, I believe, and that was also very successful. Franco-Newfoundlanders and Labradorians very proudly consider themselves to be part of Acadia.
The reason I asked whether that was a cultural or an ethnic question is the west coast is the best example of Acadian migration, where a population that came from the Maritimes settled in Western Newfoundland and developed that, along with a few French sailors who jumped ship over the years.
Senator Munson: I can see why you are reticent, by the way, on the circulation numbers, because I have worked at the Bathurst Northern Light. They never had circulation numbers because somebody would buy the paper, then hand it to the neighbour and somebody else would read it and they just kept handing it on. It came out on Wednesday, and so by Thursday, everybody had read the same paper.
Mr. Watt: Yes, which is one reason we are fairly reticent about putting the entire paper on the Internet, for example. However, our circulation figures are certified for a number of reasons, and considering the potential market, are not something we shy away from talking about, but we always add the caution.
Senator Munson: I do not mean this to be an unfair question, but you did say you are largely dependent on government, and you talked about Heritage Canada. I am sure from what we know that many small newspapers across the country are dependent on advertisements from government.
Mr. Watt: Yes.
Senator Munson: Is there any pressure on a small newspaper to be friendly to government because of that? I emphasize that I do not want this to sound unfair.
Mr. Watt: No, it is certainly a fair question. Are you speaking of direct pressure?
Senator Munson: Just the editorial bent.
Mr. Watt: I am thinking of when I was in Ottawa last week, meeting with my counterparts from various newspapers, and one problem that someone mentioned is they put the National Defence ad on the same page as the funeral announcements, and they got some feedback on that. However, that is a rare case, and if we were to criticize something about HRDC, they would never call us to complain. That being said, the continuing survival in their present state, not necessarily the continuing survival per se, of various francophone organizations in a minority setting like Newfoundland is dependent on overt political recognition of the importance of minority official language communities and support of those communities. I would say if we were to take a line too critical of those supporting those positions, the backlash would come more from the community than from the government itself. It is not only the financial survival of these institutions, but also the recognition of the existence of these communities that are dependent on a policy of bilingualism and recognition of official languages communities.
Senator Munson: However, you would have no hesitation in writing an article or an editorial about the government, let us say, allegedly not giving enough to minority groups, saying, "You are not moving fast enough, we need more here," and so on? That would not affect the advertisements that you would be getting?
Mr. Watt: No, and two editions ago, there was an article critical of Canadian Heritage, of the speed at which the l'Accord Canada-communauté — I am not quite sure what the English term is.
The Chairman: Canada Community Accord.
Mr. Watt: I guess I could have figured that out on my own, but I dared not. It criticized the speed with which the Canadian Community Accords are being renewed and negotiated.
Senator Tkachuk: Just so I understand it, your financing is dependent on circulation, on advertising, most of which is federal government advertising?
Mr. Watt: Yes.
Senator Tkachuk: Would you say 80 per cent, 90 per cent, a hundred per cent?
Mr. Watt: I would say 70 to 80 per cent.
Senator Tkachuk: Eighty per cent. And the balance, do you get a grant from Heritage Canada?
Mr. Watt: Yes, we get an annual operating grant of approximately $60,000 from Heritage Canada.
Senator Tkachuk: The advertising dollars that you get, how does that work? We have had some testimony about the commission that was paid by ethnic newspapers. I think it was in Toronto, was it not? Do they charge you a 17 per cent sales commission, or how does that work?
Mr. Watt: For the majority of our federal advertising, we work with an advertising agency that we co-own with several other French language newspapers outside of Quebec, and they take, I believe, a 25 per cent commission on advertising sales.
Senator Tkachuk: This advertising agency that you own along with other newspapers, do they sell advertising for other French language newspapers across the country or just for yours?
Mr. Watt: It is called REPCO Média.
No, as I said, it was founded by our newspaper and other francophone newspapers outside of Quebec, and it serves several other newspapers in addition to those, but they are all, at the moment, French language newspapers.
Senator Tkachuk: So you are a non-profit?
Mr. Watt: Yes, the newspaper itself is not-for-profit. The advertising agency is a for-profit corporation, but it is wholly owned by non-profit newspapers.
Senator Tkachuk: So the dividends flow back to your newspapers?
Mr. Watt: Exactly. It was established rather recently, but yes.
Senator Tkachuk: In the future, will the profits then flow back into the newspapers as capital for future expansion or improvement?
Mr. Watt: Yes, exactly.
Senator Tkachuk: That would be the whole point of that?
Mr. Watt: Yes. This particular agency was created about a year and a half ago and it was born out of a division. There was a predecessor agency called OPSCOM owned by a greater number of francophone newspapers, but there was a bit of a division between those located in markets like New Brunswick and Ontario who wanted an agency less specialized in government advertising, and those outside of those regions who were more dependent on government advertisement and wanted an agency that specialized in that. Several newspapers went with Les Hebdos Sélect, which is a Quebec advertising firm, and the rest of us founded a new company on the model of the old one where we were actual owners of the agency.
Senator Tkachuk: The new advertising agency deals mostly with the federal government?
Mr. Watt: Exactly, yes.
Senator Tkachuk: So almost all the revenue is from the federal government?
Mr. Watt: A large portion. There are other important clients, including General Motors, the University of Ottawa and the Council of Canadian Bishops. It serves those who are looking to advertise in French outside of Quebec on a national scale, which makes the federal government the major client.
Senator Tkachuk: A big client, absolutely.
Mr. Watt: However, there are other substantial clients.
The Chairman: I also come from a journalism background in a minority language community and I really understood what you said about the way to enrage your readers would be to take a position against, shall we say, official language policies. I can think of nothing that would have been more likely to bring rioting mobs into the streets. For purposes of newsgathering, do you have links with any other French language media, whether minority community media or Radio Canada, as people here do, or La Presse or Le Devoir? Do you have any links like that?
Mr. Watt: The major link is with the national organization representing French language newspapers outside of Quebec, which is the Association de la presse francophone. We both contribute to and use their press service, so any national news we present in the paper tends to be from that news service or news from other communities across the country. Other than that, we are in contact with Radio Canada. For example, our newspaper is published on a Monday, and the previous Friday, a reporter speaks on the morning show on Radio Canada. We also have contact with the radio and television reporters here in town — no formal relationships, but certainly a working relationship with them.
The Chairman: Could you use any of them as, in effect, stringers? If Radio Canada sends somebody to Goose Bay to produce an interesting story, could you get a feed from them in print?
Mr. Watt: We have never done it. The stories that come out of Newfoundland on Radio Canada tend to be different from the type that would appear in the paper; that is, on Radio Canada, it is primarily news about Newfoundland for people living elsewhere, whereas for us, it is primarily news from Newfoundland and Labrador for people here.
The Chairman: For people here.
Mr. Watt: The stories they work on tend to be more national or of more general interest than ours, so it has never worked that way in the past, and for that reason I do not think it would be all that profitable.
Senator Tkachuk: I am intrigued by the advertising agency part of it. You get most of your revenue from the federal government, you get grants from the federal government, and then a number of these newspapers have invested in an advertising agency, which then sells advertising to the federal government. Do you compete against private sector agencies? Did you pay the same kind of commission before? You said this ad agency is rather new, a year and a half old.
Mr. Watt: Yes.
No, we paid a similar commission in the past. Basically, the newspapers that founded this company could have turned to an external advertising agency to represent us, but because our needs were so specific, we chose to go this route, to found our own company, which is not necessarily the easiest route. However, our alternatives were not based in Ottawa and were not specifically geared to minority language newspapers, et cetera. Is your question in terms of this advertising agency competing with others?
Senator Tkachuk: Well, you have a non-profit newspaper that gets money from federal government advertising, from grants from Heritage Canada. You must have accumulated some capital or the newspapers have obviously risked cash.
Mr. Watt: Yes.
Senator Tkachuk: How did all this work? The shareholders are all non-profit organizations, so did you borrow money from a bank to start the new advertising agency?
Mr. Watt: Essentially, we started with about $6,000 in capital.
Senator Tkachuk: Did you know you would have federal government contracts?
Mr. Watt: Nothing was guaranteed, obviously, but to reach back into the 19th century, we are the official gazette in French for the government. Our papers are the only place where these official announcements can be placed in French; therefore, given the terms of the Official Languages Act, we were confident about maintaining the level of government advertising and, hopefully, increasing it with a specialized agency better situated to obtain it. In terms of where we are getting the money from, theoretically, each individual newspaper could deal directly with the federal government department in question and get the advertising with no commission taken off. That would be impossible for many of the newspapers and not very practical for most of them, or for the government agencies looking to place the advertisements. Instead, we collectively created this other entity, which does that job for us at a centralized level, so that most of the ads that come through that agency are placed in all of the newspapers it represents, and the commission taken is, essentially, to run the agency.
The Chairman: Do you have links with the small English community papers in Quebec? It seems to me there would be a natural community of interest there.
Mr. Watt: Yes. I have lived in Quebec City and I know of our sister paper there, and in the Townships and other places.
The Chairman: They are out there.
Mr. Watt: Our national organization, the Association de la presse francophone, is aware of them and is in contact with them. Ironically, most of the contact has come through the organizations representing Quebec community or weekly newspapers, of which they are members and in which they form a linguistic minority.
As far as I know, there have been no direct links with those papers.
The Chairman: Okay.
Mr. Watt: It is something that struck me when I became involved in the business and I would certainly push for it.
The Chairman: We have heard from associations of community newspapers, and I am thinking particularly of Alberta but not only Alberta, that in unity there was strength.
Mr. Watt: Yes.
The Chairman: The bigger the group that could go to Ottawa to represent you, or anywhere, but in terms of federal public policy, the more effective it is likely to be. It just struck me, listening to you, that there ought to be some community of interest there. Anyway, that is your business, not ours.
Mr. Watt: Yes.
Senator Munson: Well, just because I am an old reporter and I am always curious, even about the silliest question, you said your newspaper comes out on the second and fourth Thursdays of every month except December and July. What happens in December and July?
Mr. Watt: That is actually...
Senator Munson: Is that wrong?
Mr. Watt: No, that is correct, but it has been changed in the last few months. It actually comes out on the second and fourth Monday of each month except December, July and August. Because we have such a small staff, everyone has to take a vacation at the same time, so that creates two-week periods during the summer or at Christmastime when people can do that, and also because a lot of the activities wind down just before Christmas and during the summer. Quantity of news and human resources management are the main factors in that.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. It has been very interesting, Mr. Watt, and we are grateful to you for joining us.
Senators, this is the portion of our session in St. John's where we open the floor to members of the public. We have with us, therefore, Mr. David V. Jones.
I will ask you to give a statement of not more than five minutes, Mr. Jones, and then we will take five minutes for questions. Perhaps you could tell us a little about yourself.
Mr. David V. Jones, As an individual: Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak today. I live in Mount Pearl, Newfoundland. I just recently retired, last July.
The reason I am here today is I am very concerned about the sexual content of various TV channels. It was always bad, but it has gotten considerably worse over the years. Unfortunately, I do not have a letter here with me that I wrote to the CRTC a number of years ago in connection with a television show on the Women's Network here in St. John's, Newfoundland. It is the Sunday Night Sex Show, with some lady. I wrote to the CRTC about that a number of years ago and I was not happy with the reply that I received, and of course, the program is still being shown on television at the present time, to my dislike.
This particular program, along with many more programs, contains very graphic sexual content that is getting considerably worse here in the city of St. John's and, in fact, all over Canada. I am very concerned about two issues here. We are talking about a physical and a psychological point of view. From a physical point of view, young people are susceptible to picking up all kinds of diseases from this activity. For instance, they look at these shows and they think it is okay to go out and do certain things, which it is not. The offshoot, of course, is that people could get chlamydia, syphilis, hepatitis or, even worse, AIDS, which is quite devastating. We do not want a situation in Newfoundland, or in Canada, for that matter, such as is presently going on in Africa.
From a psychological point of view, of course, this looking at sex and the sex shows on TV bother a person's psyche. First of all, from a religious point of view, some people think that sexual intercourse outside of marriage is a serious sin, and of course, they are right. All use of sex outside marriage is seriously sinful. This has been indicated by the Popes, by the teachings of the Vatican and, of course, other churches have picked up on this and usually acknowledge that the Pope speaks from a world point of view. People usually toe the line when somebody in his position speaks. Unfortunately, we do not have a Pope right now. We are waiting on the election of a Pope sometime this week. However, the past Pope spoke out quite often about sexual content being seriously sinful, and as I mentioned, it is not just the sexual intercourse that is seriously sinful, but all aspects of sex outside of marriage.
I recall some time ago when I was living in Toronto, I had an encounter on Yonge Street one day whereby I had to mention some religious aspect. It was not of a sexual nature. I think it was in connection with a person whose path up to their doorway was not safe, so I mentioned to them, "Your walkway needs to be repaired because somebody could get injured or killed." I alluded at the time to the biblical aspect of a person having to get his premises repaired so nobody gets injured or killed in the process of going on his property to deliver the mail or do whatever. Anyway, the person said, "Do not dare to impose your point of view on me. You get out." I said to him, "Sir, please do not get upset." I said, "I am merely mentioning this to you." I said, "You know, with freedom of speech here, I am free to mention it to you. I am not imposing my view on you; rather, I am just mentioning to you that there are more ways to kill a person besides having an abortion or taking out a knife and stabbing someone. There are such things like not keeping your property in proper repair, these sorts of things." Fortunately, we left on a happy note. The person was pleased and we left on a happy note, so that was okay with me, even though initially he was quite upset when he mentioned imposing my will upon him.
The other thing I just wanted to finish up with here in connection with —
The Chairman: Yes, because time is racing.
Mr. Jones: I just want 10 seconds. In connection with sex on TV, I just thought I would mention that the Bible says it would be better for a person to have a millstone put around his neck and be thrown into the sea than show scandal to young people. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak here today. I appreciate it.
Senator Tkachuk: Do you object to the fact that these particular programs are on television or that you do not have a way to block them out; in other words, you are forced to take a channel you do not want?
Mr. Jones: Well, actually, senator, I do have a remote at home and I do not look at it myself, but I look at it from a world point of view, and this is not good. We even have a situation now where you cannot shut sexual content out of libraries. The Internet people cannot shut it down, and this is all wrong. People need to be able to shut it off if they want to. You do not want your children looking at this kind of stuff in libraries. Unfortunately, the librarians cannot do anything about it, and this is all wrong. They need to be able to go in and shut it down, but unfortunately, that is not the case. As far as I know, there was a problem with blocking out the connection to the Internet.
Senator Munson: You said you wrote a letter to the CRTC and the reply was not acceptable. What did the letter from the CRTC say?
Mr. Jones: Well, actually, Senator Munson, I do not really recall. I searched frantically this morning for that letter. It was a number of years ago that I wrote that letter to the CRTC, but it was a follow-up letter. There were two letters because the first did not give them the locality, and apparently, our channel 18 here is not the same program as in Ottawa, or some other thing, so I had to write them a second letter and give them more specific information. However, the CRTC replied to me in a very negative tone. I do not remember the exact details of what they said to me, and to be quite honest with you, I wish I had found the letter. However, the show is still on TV now and it should be taken off. It is very graphic.
Senator Munson: What show is that?
Mr. Jones: I think it is called Sunday Night Sex Show. Our local channel here is channel 18.
Senator Munson: It is not an educational program?
Mr. Jones: Well, you know, this is the issue. This is not education as far as I am concerned. This is definitely wrong. Some people may construe it as education, but it is not. It is very graphic, and young people may think that this is right, but you could get all kinds of infections if you go experimenting with this kind of stuff. In fact, a while ago, a young person interested in being a wrestler looked at a program on wrestling on TV and actually put it into practice with another young person and killed that person. Some people perceive certain things on TV as right when they are not right at all.
I know if they had to do anything about it, it would not be on TV right now, but apparently, it is, so nothing was done about it.
Senator Munson: Well, you talked about freedom of expression, though, when you were talking to a gentleman, saying that you had a right to express your views. Is that not the same thing for others using these channels, to have the right to view what they would think of as sex education?
Mr. Jones: I agree that we should have free will in society. That is very important, senator. However, we have to draw the line on what is acceptable and what is not acceptable behaviour. From a moral point of view, I think it is accepted in society that certain thing are normal and certain things are not normal, are immoral. From a societal point of view, this stuff is really immoral and it should be taken off television.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. Jones. I am sorry, your time is up, but we are grateful to you for having come to us to express your point of view.
Mr. Jones: Thank you.
The Chairman: Our next member of the public is Mr. Craig Westcott, who is current affairs editor at The Express.
Welcome to the committee, Mr. Westcott. Perhaps as you begin, you can tell us what The Express is, and then you get five minutes, we get five minutes.
Mr. Craig Westcott, Current Affaire Editor, The Express, As an individual: I have scripted my presentation to be about four minutes and it includes something on The Express. I would like to thank you, Senator Fraser, and your fellow committee members for coming to St. John's today. I would especially like to welcome Senator Munson. About 11 years ago, senator, you and I and some of our colleagues spent a week in Davis Inlet, in Labrador, reporting on a crisis. I think I had more hair then. You were with CTV and I was with The Telegram. Welcome back to Newfoundland.
My name is Craig Westcott and this is my eighteenth year in the news business in Newfoundland. I have worked with The Telegram, The Sunday Express, CBC radio and a number of magazines and weekly newspapers. For three years, I published my own independent weekly newspaper on the southern shore. Today, I am the current affairs editor at The Express, which is a weekly newspaper here in St. John's. I am also the editor of two trade magazines, one covering the province's mining industry, the other covering the oil and gas industry. All three publications are owned by Transcontinental Media.
Transcontinental bought those publications, as well as some 25 or 30 others in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, in February 2004. At the time, the Federal Competition Bureau placed some very loose restrictions on the deal, including a vague order that the company preserve two weekly papers that were, until then, competing against a couple of Transcontinental dailies, namely, The Telegram here in St. John's and The Western Star in Corner Brook. I will speak of my experience at one of those weeklies, The Express.
Since the deal was approved, a number of things have happened that lead me to believe that Transcontinental is trying to quietly kill off The Express, not preserve it. First, there was the removal from our office of all the paper's advertising sales staff. They were transferred to The Telegram building, the home of their long-time competitors. They were shuffled away into a cubby hole so small, I would be surprised if it passed an inspection by occupational health and safety officials. When two salespeople are in the room, they literally have to stand up so that a third can enter to take her seat. Secondly, Transcontinental completely changed the pay structure for sales staff, taking away their base salaries and putting them on straight commission. Thirdly, after the long-time sales manager quit, the company waited months before replacing him.
The sale staff, needless to say, are demoralized. Our revenues have fallen significantly. Staff are on the verge of quitting. Morale is also abysmal in the newsroom. In the black humour atmosphere that now pervades, one colleague is half-jokingly making notes to some day write a story entitled, "How to Kill a Newspaper."
The newsroom staff have also been relocated. We have not been dispatched to The Telegram building, but we have been packed away in a small room where we sit, almost literally, cheek by jowl. We have been unable to unpack some of our boxes, including files and personal effects, because there is simply no room to place any of it.
If The Express is extinguished, there will be one less voice to speak for Newfoundlanders. However, my concern about the Transcontinental acquisition extends beyond The Express. The deal has also been bad for the province. Shortly after buying up the press, Transcontinental closed a web plant in Grand Falls that had been operating for nearly a century. Indeed, jobs have been eliminated throughout the Newfoundland operations, but I have seen no evidence that any of the savings have been reinvested in the journalism product.
Transcontinental now owns 17 of the 21 newspapers in Newfoundland and Labrador. For print journalists, there is really no other place to work. The four independent papers are struggling. Copy from the Transcontinental dailies now appears in the former Optipress weeklies, and vice versa. Independent newspaper voices are getting harder and harder to find. Transcontinental has a virtual monopoly on newspaper publishing and printing in Newfoundland. I believe that this degree of concentration of media ownership is bad for journalism and bad for democracy. Big media companies like Transcontinental are enjoying the savings of merged operations, but are not reinvesting that money into communities from which they derive their profit.
I urge members of this committee to recommend strong and effective restrictions on the monopolization of Canada's media. Canada is too diverse a country to have its news coverage apportioned among just a handful of media conglomerates. Thank you for your time today and good luck with your deliberations.
Senator Tkachuk: The 17 of the 21 newspapers that are owned by Transcontinental, were they previously independents or were they also owned by one person or one company?
Mr. Westcott: Most of them were owned by a company called Robinson-Blackmore, which has a long history in Newfoundland. Several years ago, Robinson-Blackmore was part of a merger with a company in Nova Scotia, Cameron Publishing. The restructured beast that emerged from that was called Optipress Publishing, and it was that company that Transcontinental bought in February of last year.
Senator Tkachuk: The four other newspapers, where are they located?
Mr. Westcott: One is in Conception Bay South. Frank Petten, the publisher, was supposed to address the committee this morning. One is in a town just outside St. John's called Portugal Cove-St. Phillips; one is a monthly alternative newspaper and the fourth escapes me just now.
Senator Tkachuk: Well, did Transcontinental have to get by the Competition Bureau even though Robinson-Blackmore already owned these 17 papers? Did it have to meet a test of the Competition Bureau?
Mr. Westcott: It did. I am not privy to what the test was, but at the time that the acquisition was approved, the Competition Bureau put out a release saying that the sale is approved contingent on the preservation of The Express and a paper called The Humber Log in Corner Brook, which was a competitor of The Western Star.
Senator Tkachuk: The Express, then, was outside of the Robinson-Blackmore group, or was it inside?
Mr. Westcott: The Express was the flagship of the Robinson-Blackmore group. It was the chain's newspaper in St. John's and the main competitor of The Telegram, which was already a Transcontinental paper.
Senator Tkachuk: Okay, I understand. They allowed it to happen on the basis that they would not close down one newspaper.
Mr. Westcott: That is right, and the editorial functions were to be kept completely separate.
Senator Tkachuk: Has there been any attempt by the staff at The Express to go to the Competition Bureau to tell them what has been going on, because it seems to me they should be very interested in this.
Mr. Westcott: No. It has been raised internally. I have raised it with the publisher several times. Other staff members have addressed management, but no one has approached the Competition Bureau, to my knowledge. This is probably the first official forum in which it has been raised.
Senator Munson: Thanks for being with us. I wish we had you here as a witness for a longer time, and I will tell you why. I think you are very courageous, because we have invited individual journalists to appear before us who work for some of these big organizations, and whether they say it or say it quietly or not at all, although they are told that they are free to go and speak about their own views and not those of the company, they will not show up, and for obvious reasons; you have. Are you concerned that what you are saying here could put your position in jeopardy?
Mr. Westcott: I am a father of three and it may very well be a career-ending decision that I have made today to come here. However, on one of your points, from time to time, Transcontinental is in the news. It is a big entity and it is not uncommon for all staff to receive a memo saying that no one is allowed to comment on any issue if approached by other media, and to refer all calls to a specific person within Transcontinental. I cannot agree with that, because as you know well, people in our business make our living by expecting and hoping that people will be frank and forthright about their views when we call them looking for interviews. To be told that you cannot speak yourself seems to me somewhat hypocritical.
Senator Munson: You say there should be strong and effective restrictions on media concentration. Could you be more specific about what you would like to see us recommend, or at least look at?
Mr. Westcott: Yes. I think if there were some way of measuring the total circulation of a company province by province and ensuring that no more than 50 per cent of all print publications would be allowed to belong to one organization within that particular province, it would at least encourage some degree of competition.
The Chairman: Mr. Westcott, as chair of this committee, I will ask you to write to me once a month for at least the next six months.
Mr. Westcott: Right.
The Chairman: It can be a two-line letter if you wish. I just want to know what is happening to you.
Mr. Westcott: Okay.
The Chairman: Or it can be a two-page letter if you wish, but we appreciate people coming before us. Can you tell me about newsroom numbers? Has the newsroom staff been held stable since Transcontinental bought the paper?
Mr. Westcott: At The Express it certainly has. We have a small staff. We have an editor-in-chief, although his title is "editor," three reporters, a sports editor — he is called an associate editor — and me. This is my second time around working at The Express, and a few years ago, there was, I believe, an extra body there. We are very constricted in terms of time. I also edit two magazines, either one of which could be a full-time job.
The Chairman: Are they both Transcontinental owned?
Mr. Westcott: They are, yes. One is published ten times a year and the other six times a year, so I do not have time to get a haircut. As you can see, what is left of my hair is pretty unruly, but that is the nature of this business, I guess.
The Chairman: What about other newsroom resources? You talked about the physical space. I assume you were moved in order to save on rent or other premises costs?
Mr. Westcott: I am not sure, but we were moved within our own building and I do not know what the rationale for it was.
The Chairman: Okay, but there are other resources involved in gathering news, everything from the ability to buy wire services to having a library, resources in general. What has happened to those?
Mr. Westcott: Nothing. We do not have a library or a morgue.
The Chairman: You never did?
Mr. Westcott: We did years ago, yes, but that change predated the Transcontinental acquisition. We have a very limited budget for travel. I have been pushing for some professional development for myself and other staff members, but have been unable to accomplish that.
The Chairman: Now, I appreciate you are a journalist, but do you happen to know what has been happening to the circulation and the volume of advertising in the paper?
Mr. Westcott: The ad volume has fallen significantly. If I were to bring in a paper predating the Transcontinental acquisition and one since then, especially lately, you would see a clear difference in the advertising lineage in the paper. We have always had circulation problems at The Express because it is a TMC. The idea is to get it into every home, and we use carriers but we have never been able to hit 100 per cent. However, I have been told by someone in the circulation end of the paper that our targeted circulation is about 40,000; that as many as 7,000 copies a week simply get shifted from one side of the warehouse to another before going to recycling, that they just do not get to the street because of circulation problems. I am not sure that is something you can blame on Transcontinental. I believe that is just the logistics of circulation.
The Chairman: Years ago, there was a Quebec movie about people distributing material from door to door that showed some of the grimy underside of that. It showed them throwing it away. It is a chancy vehicle, direct distribution.
Mr. Westcott: It is, yes.
The Chairman: I think everybody is aware of that. However, in terms of ad volume, I gather from what you said earlier, and I appreciate you are not in advertising, but as an experienced observer, it would be your suspicion that Transcontinental is allowing the paper to run down?
Mr. Westcott: They say they are not, but the sales staff are demoralized by the way they have been treated and you can see the effects in the paper itself. If they are trying to rectify the situation with sales, they are certainly taking the wrong approach. Advertising sales are critical to the paper because we have no circulation revenue.
The Chairman: I suspect that is about as far as we can righteously take you.
Senator Eyton: I echo Senator Munson's comments. I applaud your coming here and being as candid as you have been. Did your colleagues know you were coming, and what was their attitude?
Mr. Westcott: One of them is here today, I believe, watching me. He says there is a phenomenon among the police — death by suicide, where you taunt the policeman into shooting you, and that is what I am doing here today.
Senator Eyton: Well, that is candid again. I think you are a wonderful newspaper man. Can you give me a little more detail on the deal with the Competition Bureau? You talked about the two weeklies. You said there was a commitment to maintain them. How precise was that and what was the duration of that commitment?
Mr. Westcott: I am not privy to the details of the Competition Bureau's deliberations. I believe that it was for a two-year period, but the Competition Bureau is not very forthcoming with information. I think it consisted of a short press release to the effect that the two weekly papers in the competing markets were to be preserved and their editorial departments kept separate, and that was about the extent of it.
Senator Eyton: Yes. I expect that we can get a copy of the principal terms of that deal. Finally, can you tell me what changes there have been in the senior levels of management, the publisher and other senior people within The Express, since the purchase transaction?
Mr. Westcott: Some of the very senior people from Optipress have left the company, whether of their own volition or through a friendly push out the door, I am not sure. Locally, the publisher of The Telegram has been named the group publisher for Newfoundland. A vice president with the Optipress chain in Newfoundland has been promoted to publisher for one section of Newfoundland, and there is an equivalent person on the west coast of the island.
Senator Eyton: That is a fairly recent appointment?
Mr. Westcott: About a year ago, I think.
Senator Eyton: I said "finally," but I have one other question. What about the appearance of The Express? Does it look the same? Is it about the same number of pages and similar kind of content, or has it changed dramatically there?
Mr. Westcott: Before the acquisition, we were regularly publishing about 48 pages a week. We are down to about 38 a week, although with the lineage in there, we could easily go down to 28 a week and meet a decent advertising-to-editorial ratio. The appearance is the same. The cover looks the same; there are the same number of columnists and staff. It is just that the lineage is obviously down, and with the morale problem we are suffering, I do not feel the product is as exciting as it used to be or could be.
The Chairman: Has The Telegram's visual presentation improved? Is it better printed, better designed?
Mr. Westcott: No, it is bobbing along at the same level of mediocrity that it has been for the last 10 years.
The Chairman: We will take that from a competitor. Mr. Westcott, again I thank you. Today is April 18. I look forward to letters from you dated May 18, June 18, July18 and so on.
Mr. Westcott: I appreciate it. Thank you for your time.
The Chairman: Thank you very much.
Senators, our next witness is Mr. Patrick Hanlon.
Good afternoon, Mr. Hanlon. I will ask you to tell us who you are and then give us a presentation of some five minutes, and we will have a few minutes to ask you questions.
Mr. Patrick J. K. Hanlon, Member, Catholic Civil Rights League of Canada, As an individual: As for who I am, I guess I am your biggest fan in St. John's, in that I have been here all day, watching with great interest; I have had a very informative day here. I come to you as a private individual, although I have been watching the media by way of membership in the Catholic Civil Rights League of Canada. It is a national voice for the promotion of the defence of Catholic beliefs in the media, government and courts. I am also quite active as a political science student, doing various things.
I come to you today after looking at your report and your order of reference, which basically says that you should also take a look at the media's role, rights and responsibilities in society. I come to you to say today that the media have a responsibility and a duty not to offend and not to corrupt. Those are my two main speaking points.
Right now, it seems that anti-Semitism and all the other "anti" this and "anti" that are not tolerated by the media or by society in general, but anti-Catholicism is very much the last acceptable prejudice in society, and this is demonstrated especially through the media. Observing the media, I find many derogatory comments and many biases and slants in different issues and stories, whether it be news or so-called comedy or whatever the case may be. There seems to be, on the part of some people, an effort to attack and to offend and it is something that I would like you as a committee, as legislators, to seriously consider trying to counteract.
A lot of people probably do not see all the negative anti-Catholicism, but indeed it is there. Over the last couple of weeks, since the Pope passed on, we have seen, for example, the CBC interviewing many people lining up to view the Pope's body and saying, "Oh, we love the Pope," and things like that — great. They did a wonderful job on that. However, when they are talking about "hot button" issues or so-called political issues, whether it be women's ordination, celibacy, abuse, contraception, homosexuality, so on and so forth, it seems that the CBC, in my opinion, have been interviewing people who are critical of the former Supreme Pontiff and disagree with the church. I do not watch the CBC 24 hours a day seven days a week, just a few hours every day. They are not interviewing many people who say, "We agree with the Pope's stands on homosexuality"; "We agree with the Church's teaching on celibacy in the priesthood and women's ordination." That is lacking and, of course, it is a bias in the media.
Even Vision TV, the multicultural, multi-denominational network in Canada, broadcast an episode back in October on vocations to the priesthood on a show they call 360. It blamed celibacy and the absence of women in the priesthood for the lack of vocations, but in fact, as the church teaches, it is materialism creeping into the minds and the hearts of people. People do not want to take an oath of poverty any more. That is wrong. The church is blaming a lack of social and individual fostering of vocations, but Vision TV tended to harp on celibacy, women's ordination and so on.
As a Catholic, I find it offensive that my views are not adequately represented in the media. We even see this attitude coming in through American television. Back on February 22, NBC showed a program called Committed, in which two non-Catholics were given Holy Communion. They did not know what to do. They were not Catholics; they did not consume it. They put it in their pockets. They put this piece of consecrated Eucharist, which Catholics believe is the body and blood, soul and divinity of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, on a cookie tray with crackers and dip. This is completely offensive. Now, fortunately, the Catholic League for Civil Rights in the United States complained to NBC, which promised not to re-air that program. Unfortunately, we do not get a promise every time from Canadian broadcasters not to re-air a certain program, nor do we from American broadcasters booming their signals into Canada. A lot of it should not be on the media in the first place, let alone putting it on and then trying to apologize, if they actually apologize, which is very infrequent.
There are comedy issues. There is a thin line between comedy or satire and outright offence, and this seems to be ignored by the media and regulators. I have written to the Canadian Broadcasting Standards Council, to the CRTC and so on, and it is a recurring problem.
Our Canadian airwaves should —
The Chairman: You are running out of time, Mr. Hanlon.
Mr. Hanlon: Yes. Canadian airwaves must not and should not offend. Canadian diversity and Canadian pluralism do not mean that we have to offend, to bash and to criticize. It means that we should celebrate one another's differences, not attack and not be anti-Catholic. Indeed, we need to respect one another. I would like, since practising Catholics are a minority in this country, to be treated with the respect with which other faith groups, and even atheists, and other visible minorities are treated.
Also, I will briefly touch upon the media and sexuality. We are an overly sexualized society. It causes corruption. It treats people as objects, and that is a problem. I think that is being portrayed by the people beaming into the minds and the souls of our young people, our young children, through, say, MuchMusic. If I can have just 10 seconds, I saw on Marketplace on January 9 on CBC MuchMusic saying, "Well, we will not show any sexually graphic content until after 9 p.m." In fact, the CBC said MuchMusic has shown this material between 4:30 and 8:30, which is prime time for children. It is just not right. It is just not decent.
The Chairman: Thank you.
Mr. Hanlon: These are my two points; the media and the Canadian airwaves should not corrupt and offend.
The Chairman: You have made them eloquently. Give us a chance to ask you some questions.
Senator Tkachuk: Well, on many points, I agree with you. I do not have too many questions to ask you, but I do notice, as a Catholic, that it is not so much anti-Catholic as it is anti-Christian.
Mr. Hanlon: Indeed, yes.
Senator Tkachuk: Items that are considered news about Catholics and Christians, if they were said about Buddhists, Muslims and Jews, would result in people being hauled in front of a human rights commission. Again, satire is fine, but a lot of it is offensive. However, I do not think you can make laws against free speech. We can only have people like you and other Catholics and Christians continue to make the case publicly, so I thank you for that.
Mr. Hanlon: Indeed. Thank you.
The Chairman: Mr. Hanlon, as you will have gathered, although the wording of our mandate is very broad, this committee's study has in fact been focusing specifically on news and information.
Mr. Hanlon: Indeed, yes.
The Chairman: I have two questions. First of all, do you perceive a bias in news, and if so, more in some kinds of news than others, more in print than in broadcast? Can you try to focus in on that?
Mr. Hanlon: Yes.
It seems a lot of the speakers today have been appearing on the CBC, and I find that the CBC particularly sometimes broadcasts the worst of it, whether through the news or documentaries or whatever the case may be. I found some material on CTV, but hey, they are good people, just like we are all good people. CTV, on average, is not as bad as the CBC in my opinion. However, you will find it in news commentaries, editorials within news programs and so on. It is there.
The Chairman: When you see a specific example of bias, or even, sometimes, I expect, of inaccuracy — since inaccuracies crop up everywhere and I cannot see why they would not in this context — do you have anywhere to turn other than a Senate committee, which does not come to town every morning?
Mr. Hanlon: Indeed. It is nice that you are here, actually. Not a lot of committees find their way here. National committees usually stop at Halifax, so I appreciate that you have come to the nation. Personally, I will write a letter to whomever and they will send a form letter back: "Dear Mr. Hanlon: Thank you very much for your concerns. Your letter has been referred to Mr. or Mrs. Such-and-Such. We will keep your comments under consideration for the future." I am sure you have written a lot of them yourselves as politicians.
The Chairman: "Your opinions are important to us," yes.
Mr. Hanlon: Indeed.
The Chairman: Have you ever been in touch with the CBC Ombudsman?
Mr. Hanlon: Yes. You get the same response there. You keep harping at it, you keep lobbying the media outlets, and hopefully, some day they will listen and see that, "Yes, we need to treat all people with respect." However, it helps when media regulators, the CRTC, the Senate of Canada, whatever the case may be, actually says and does something about it, because if people make a rule of their own accord, they will break it the next year. If the regulators hold the licence over their heads and say, "You have to do this," or, "You cannot do that," whatever the case may be, that helps.
The Chairman: Well, as you know, government regulation, whether directly or indirectly through a regulatory agency, of freedom of expression is a two-edged sword, to put it mildly.
Mr. Hanlon: Yes.
The Chairman: My last question is, is there a press council in Newfoundland, and if not, would it help to have one?
Mr. Hanlon: There may be one, but I have not come across it yet.
The Chairman: I do not think there is. Would you like to see one?
Mr. Hanlon: It would help. It would be nice. We have national bodies and national organizations, but it always helps to have something on the local level.
Many of the national companies, the national broadcasters, whether newspapers or radio or whatever the case may be, tend to be the worst. The local people, NTV here and the local radio stations are half-decent, but I find the big national ones, the "CFA" channels, the come-from-away channels, tend to be the worst, unless something dramatic crops up in Newfoundland, a particular Newfoundland issue. It would be helpful, possibly, to have a press council here.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. It was an interesting few minutes.
Senator Eyton: Thank you, Mr. Hanlon, for being here. I was interested in your standard — I think an impossible one — by which you were looking for some kind of communication that did not offend. I may not have your standards. I suspect I do not, but I am personally offended a dozen times a day, every day and every week, and I have long ago given up thinking that it is possible to control content or to restrict it in today's environment, and given modern thinking. On the other hand, I think it is possible to promote good values and attitudes. There is a positive response as well. The negative is, "You must not do"; the positive is, "Here is a better way of doing it," and presenting that alternative. Do you have any suggestions for how this committee might consider positive alternatives, promoting the right values and the right attitudes? For the most part, I think the "restricting" approach, outside of some criminal or quasi-criminal limits, is an impossible task today.
Mr. Hanlon: Not being a bureaucrat, I cannot get into it in great detail: "This law should be passed," or, "This program should be in place," or whatever the case may be. However, maybe some incentives for positive programming would work. Yes, we do as Canadian society say that certain things are not acceptable. We do have restrictions. Look at hate speech. We are told you cannot say certain things about a certain minority, and essentially, that prohibition against hate speech is a limitation on people's freedom of expression and democratic right to say what they want. Therefore, it is possible that we can tell the media not to discriminate and not to overtly attack people of various faith communities, including my own.
Senator Eyton: Well, I would just observe that that was not a response to my question. My question was what can you think of that might help to promote positive action?
Mr. Hanlon: Incentives.
Senator Munson: You are talking to a senator who is a United Church minister's son, so you have come to the right place.
Mr. Hanlon: I have a church minister's son on one side and a Catholic on the other. So far, I can identify.
Senator Tkachuk: One on the right and one on the left.
Mr. Hanlon: One on the right, one on the left, quite literally, senator.
Senator Munson: I think what you are saying is in this age of free expression what you are looking for from journalism is balance, that if on the CBC or CTV whomever says something in a very ranting way about priests marrying or not marrying, that there should be that balance so you do not get the 30 seconds on one side and then you do not hear the other side. I think many journalists try to seek balance — at least I try — in presenting a report and letting the viewers make their decision at the end of the day. I guess that is what you are not seeing, is balance.
Mr. Hanlon: Probably balance. There are some issues with comedy sketches, or so-called comedy, and the example I brought up was an American program, but there are Canadian examples, like NBC and the Eucharist episode. That is not news; that is not give-and-take — this is one side, this is the other. That is blatant attack. That is blatant criticism. However, in news programs there are various opinions out there, and indeed, if they give five minutes to one side of an issue, they should give five minutes to the other side.
The Chairman: I am not talking now as a senator, but as a former recipient of complaints.
Mr. Hanlon: Indeed. You have probably received some from me.
The Chairman: I am not sure, unless you have written to Montreal.
Mr. Hanlon: I have many senators on my email list. You have probably all received emails from me.
The Chairman: However, I would just observe that if you keep your complaints coming and they are specific and reasonably couched, that is, not accusing everybody at that station of being biased —
Mr. Hanlon: Of course.
The Chairman: — but rather, accusing them of having missed balance or whatever, those complaints have an effect. Even if the media outlet in question never wants to admit it was wrong, rational, righteous complaints do have an effect over time. There — end of former journalist's speech.
Thank you very much for joining us.
Mr. Hanlon: And thank you all, senators.
The Chairman: We are very grateful to you.
Mr. Hanlon: It has been a pleasure sitting and watching you all day. If only I could afford a trip to Ottawa. If any of you would like to make a donation, I can visit you sometime in the actual Senate chambers. God bless.
The Chairman: Thank you.
Senators, our next meeting is at 9 o'clock tomorrow morning at the Delta Barrington Hotel in Halifax. For this day, we stand adjourned.
The committee adjourned.