Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Rules, Procedures and the Rights of Parliament
Issue 2 - Evidence, November 22, 2006
OTTAWA, Wednesday, November 22, 2006
The Standing Committee on Rules, Procedures and the Rights of Parliament met this day at 12:13 p.m., pursuant to rule 48(1) of the Rules of the Senate, to consider the question that whenever the Senate is sitting, the proceedings of the upper chamber, like those of the lower one, be televised, or otherwise audio-visually recorded, so that those proceedings can be carried live or replayed on CPAC, or any other television station, at times that are convenient for Canadians.
Senator Consiglio Di Nino (Chairman) in the chair.
[English]
The Chairman: First, honourable senators, I should like to apologize for the delay in starting and for what will likely be a shortened meeting, unless we can convince some of our friends on the Liberal side to miss caucus, which I doubt we will be able to do. There has been a caucus meeting called by the Liberal Senate leadership for 1:45 p.m. I suspect our colleagues will probably have to leave.
In extending my apologies, I should like to welcome our witnesses. With us today, and certainly with our gratitude, are representatives from CPAC — Ken Stein, Chairman; Philip Lind, Vice-Chairman; Colette Watson, President and General Manager; and Robert Buchan, Corporate Secretary.
As a resource accompanying our guests is Mr. Barry Kiefl from Canadian Media Research Inc.
Because of the limited time, I would ask each of you to try to limit your remarks so that there will be some time for our colleagues to ask questions.
Ken Stein, Chairman, CPAC: Honourable senators, we will be brief in our remarks, to leave ample time for your questions.
I am chair of the board of directors of the Cable Public Affairs Channel, CPAC, la Chaîne d'affaires publiques par câble.
As the committee chair pointed out, I am accompanied by Mr. Lind, Vice-Chairman of CPAC's board of directors and also Vice-Chairman of Rogers Communications; Colette Watson, President and General Manager of CPAC; Robert Buchan, Legal Counsel and Secretary to CPAC's board of directors. The board of CPAC also includes representatives of Cogeco, Vidéotron, Access Cable in Regina and Persona Communications.
Thank you for the invitation to appear before this committee. Our last appearance before a Senate committee was October 9, 2003, when CPAC appeared before the Standing Committee on Internal Economy, Budgets and Administration to advance a formal agreement for CPAC's broadcast of Senate committee proceedings. This meeting was the precursor to the successful conclusion of a three-year agreement between CPAC and the Senate.
[Translation]
It will be our pleasure to bring the committee up to date on the implementation of this agreement, to discuss Senator Segal's motion for the broadcast of Senate chamber proceedings and to respond to any of your questions.
[English]
First, it would be helpful for us to begin with a brief backgrounder about the channel. CPAC is owned and operated by a consortium of Canada's cable companies, large and small. It operates on a not-for-profit basis as a private company. Unlike the vast majority of Canadian broadcasters and programming services, CPAC is entirely commercial free.
CPAC will soon be celebrating its fifteenth anniversary. Over the course of these 15 years, cable companies and, in recent years, other distributors have invested in excess of $54 million in the operation of the channel.
[Translation]
In accordance with its licence, CPAC has broadcast programming from both Houses of Parliament under the terms of the exemption order and in keeping with the provisions of the specific agreements negotiated with the House of Commons and the Senate.
CPAC has had an agreement with the House of Commons since 1992 when the cable companies first created CPAC. The first agreement with the Senate was reached in 1999 and most recently renewed in March 2004. This agreement ends on August 31, 2007 when our agreement with the House of Commons also expires.
[English]
I shall now ask Mr. Lind to talk about our viewers.
Philip B. Lind, Vice-Chairman, CPAC: When CPAC's broadcast licence was last renewed in November 2002, the CRTC also issued a mandatory distribution order to all but the smallest undertakings in Canada. The terms of this mandatory distribution order applied to both types of programming broadcast by CPAC and will continue as long as CPAC distributes the House of Commons programming service.
As a result of this mandatory carriage status, CPAC is now available in more than 10 million Canadian households. Over the past few years, CPAC's weekly audience reach has ranged from 2 to 3 million viewers, post-9/11 and during the election campaigns, to a low of 640,000, in the week of September 18.
CPAC began to experience a steep decline in viewership during the Gomery commission period lasting until November 2005.
CPAC and the Senate obtain ratings services from Nielsen Media Research Canada. We have appended the most recent report on Senate viewing to this presentation.
CPAC's owners strongly believed that Canadians should have access to the work of Parliament. That is the reason that I, along with other cable operators at the time, worked so diligently to obtain an agreement with the House of Commons and a licence from the CRTC to create CPAC.
Research also confirms the importance of the service. In fact, in a study conducted for CPAC by SES Research earlier this year, 75 per cent of Canadians surveyed said it was important to have CPAC available to Canadians.
We understand it is not all about ratings, and we profoundly believe, as experts in the field of programming, that we can package this programming into a product that an increasing number of Canadians would want to watch. By doing so, Canadians would become more engaged in the democratic and political process of this nation and educated about the important work of parliamentarians.
Colette Watson, President and General Manager, CPAC: This committee has the advantage of exploring the issue of televising Senate proceedings with the benefit of hindsight, if you will, based on the experience of the House of Commons. The House of Commons began televising its proceedings on October 17, 1977. For the past 29 years, proceedings from the House of Commons have run live, gavel to gavel, and uninterrupted. This has left committee work as secondary on television.
We can tell you that many members of the House of Commons would prefer to showcase their committee work rather than procedural matters, and we have heard it from both Houses of Parliament that parliamentarians do most of their work in committee. The Senate may want to give itself more flexibility in this regard.
[Translation]
Now, twenty-nine years later, the Senate can also benefit from the explosion of new media technology. The world of television has changed dramatically and continues to change as we speak. If timely, frequent or live access is the objective, internet broadcasting may be a solution for this committee to explore. We have attached a few recent articles about these changes as Appendix A.
As members of this committee no doubt know, the current agreement between the Senate of Canada and CPAC provides for 20 hours per week of Senate programming while the Senate is in session.
[English]
The CRTC exemption order states that this agreement covers anything provided to CPAC by the Senate of Canada, whether it is procedural or committee coverage. For the most part, the programming in this 20-hour allotment is committee coverage and, given the varying length of committee hearings, there is a challenge in making these committee proceedings fit into a 20-hour block. Typically, CPAC is required to fill the time at the end of most televised committee hearings. CPAC is not permitted through the CRTC exemption order to edit any material provided to us by the Senate without the consent of the Senate. The Senate has made some strides in this area, but timed hearings would allow the Senate to modernize its broadcast and improve the flow of hearings in order to enhance the viewing experience for its audience.
Additional on-screen text would also improve the viewer experience. We believe that enhanced context keys and more frequent speaker identification would keep viewers more involved.
More than 30 years have elapsed since the House of Commons first began studying the issue of televising House of Commons proceedings. This is an opportunity for the Senate to create an updated and more modern approach to the issue.
Mr. Stein: We would like to thank the committee for this opportunity to appear before you, and we welcome any questions you may have.
Senator Smith: I should like you each to respond as you see fit. You touched on the question of viewer interest, and you also referred to committees. I do not know if any of you have gone into the Senate during Question Period, for example, but it is not quite as dramatic and partisan as in the House of Commons. Given the amount of time that the Senate might get on CPAC if we go this route, how do you measure viewer interest? Do you do surveys, or is it measured on feedback that you get? Do you measure it in some way? I should like you to enlarge a bit on your reference that there does seem to be a lot of interest in the committee work, because perhaps that should be intensified. We have to be listening to what viewer interest is in the various options out there.
Mr. Stein: The research we do is quite solid and significant. It is not anecdotal. We do depend on anecdotal, but it is primarily based on real research, the Nielsen research and that done by Mr. Kiefl.
Our experience has been that our ratings are strong from viewers when there is something of interest to them. Committee proceedings tend to be more interesting perhaps than more formal processes. Obviously, Question Period in the House of Commons is of interest — the give and take of it. If it were televised in the Senate, the process would probably change. That is for the Senate to decide.
Ms. Watson: We undertake weekly research through Nielsen with Nielsen Media Research Canada. I believe the Senate also subscribes to that data as well. Twice a year, we undertake a viewer survey to expand a little bit, to be more qualitative with respect to why they watch, what they watch, what would they watch that is not on and that we could bring them. That is the kind of data we look at with respect to how we package programming and what is missing.
We are hearing that viewers are sometimes confused. Most viewers flip in and out of channels quite often and quite quickly. While you may orally explain the context of a hearing at the beginning, many of the viewers who will be tuning in would not have tuned in to that part. You need to continue to keep them involved throughout the whole three-hour broadcast, either with on-screen information or repeating it orally. If they feel excluded or confused, they will change the channel.
What we see in the House of Commons at 3:00 in the afternoon is a procedural proceeding that does not necessarily involve a viewer, it is not all that compelling, so they do not understand without the proper oral explanation.
We noticed a few years ago that when CBC Newsworld and CTV Newsnet started broadcasting Question Period, between 2 and 2:15 their anchors explain what the debate is about, whether it is same-sex marriage or a budget bill, whatever is about to be debated. Many of our viewers went from watching Question Period on CPAC to those channels because there was someone there to explain it to them. That is what is lacking in the unfiltered portion that we provide for you.
Senator Smith: The hard-nosed decision that we must make, and we welcome blunt advice or thoughts, if we decide to go the route that you have full coverage there is obviously a price to that, which we must figure out. Then there is an assumption that we would certainly have to edit a fair bit, because if you have been up there and heard ``stand, stand, stand,'' that would be a cure for insomnia for viewers, I think.
The Chairman: It might have its benefits.
Senator Smith: It might, but to the extent that the Senate picks up a couple more hours a week as between an edited version of proceedings from the House versus maybe more coverage of Senate committees, do you have a gut instinct as to which people would watch more and have more interest in?
Mr. Stein: I am sure we all have views on this, in terms of viewers and their interests. One of the interesting things as distributors is the whole concept of what the Internet is doing and how people are using the Internet for accessing information and news. The Internet has evolved from a system that primarily was used by people looking for websites, surfing, that type of thing. It is now much more used in the research that is being done over the last while to deliver audiovisual information products.
As Ms. Watson pointed out, the advantage of the Internet is that you can join into something an hour or an hour and a half after it has gone on and you can usually find a context for that so that you can understand it. From the point of view of the proceedings — and I am not just talking about the Senate but also committees of inquiry, House of Commons standing committees and those types of things — the more people know about them or can access other information it can also generate their interest. They might turn on to something on CPAC, see something with respect to health care and then be encouraged to go to the Internet to access more information on that, to be brought up to speed to perhaps what the Senate is actually doing.
In terms of the 21st century, the combination of television and the Internet, which is still evolving, would probably be the way to go, and that would focus much more on the committee kind of deliberations rather than the proceedings in the Senate. However, as we said earlier, it is for the Senate to make that decision.
Ms. Watson: I would agree. In the brief, I suggest that you take advice from the other place, where they really wish they were not stuck with the procedural and had more flexibility with respect to committees.
The Chairman: Before I call on Senator Fox, I will ask one of the questions on my mind. Does CPAC have the capacity to carry more of the Senate, particularly in prime time, or is there a limited time only available?
Mr. Stein: We have had many discussions about that.
The Chairman: I thought so.
Ms. Watson: Senator, we would like to reinforce that this is a privately owned network created by a group of individuals who have accumulated some expertise in programming and creating programming channels. It is not that ratings are the be-all and end-all, but we find that when the House is not sitting and we can program the channel with public affairs, politics, leadership conventions, podium speeches, Empire Club speeches, commissions of inquiry, our ratings triple, compared to when the House is in session or we are distributing committee coverage.
That is just an observation, that when we are able to have the flexibility to program what we think is relevant with respect to the three Ps — we operate on three Ps: politics, Parliament and public affairs. That is all you will ever see on CPAC. It is what we do; this is our day job. Hence, we are better able to gauge what Canadians will want to see.
To have additional limitations placed on this privately owned network from a house of Parliament to take over prime time would mean that the programming that we create would then be moved aside. Then our owners would ask themselves why they are here; what is it that we can bring? There is a perceived lesser value to the channel, if you will, as a result.
The contract comes up in a year, and there is always the opportunity to discuss how these things are distributed and where they are slotted. For the time being, if we were to move our prime-time programming for Senate programming, I suspect it would have a negative impact on ratings.
The Chairman: Thank you. That was a very frank opinion and I appreciate that.
Senator Fox: First, I wish to congratulate CPAC on what they are doing. It is a real contribution to Canadian democracy. Not necessarily the Senate part, but the programming generally has improved a great deal over the years. Many of us here have participated on programs, such as Revue Politique with Pierre Donais, and it has developed into a first-class kind of programming. Also, kudos are due to the cable industry that is basically financing this service, which I am sure is not at a profit.
Having said that, we have before us this motion from Senator Segal recommending that the proceedings of the upper chamber, like those of the lower one, be televised or otherwise audio-visually recorded. As far as gavel-to-gavel coverage is concerned, I would be the first one to say that it would not be in order. I do not see why we would do gavel- to-gavel coverage of the Senate. I do not think the programming is there. In any event, this motion has to be read in the context of the contract with CPAC that exists at the moment, which speaks in terms of 20 hours a week.
From my point of view, the part of our proceedings that would interest Canadians most at this stage, given the fact that they already have access to many of our committee hearings, is Question Period. Question Period in the Senate, as you know, is a 30-minute period of time. I think we should be looking at whetting the appetite of Canadians as to what goes on in the Senate, and in that regard I would think that the part of our Senate proceedings that are the most interesting, which are not covered at all at the moment, is Question Period. I wonder if it would be possible for CPAC — without prejudging the recommendations that this committee will come up with eventually — to carry Question Period perhaps on a pilot project basis over the next year or so, and whether this could be done within your 20-hour agreement with the Senate.
Ms. Watson: Our agreement with the House of Commons requires that we repeat Question Period after the end of the parliamentary day. We normally schedule it at 9:00 p.m. at night. As you know, Question Period in the House of Commons is 45 minutes long. Because we operate in the television word, we include member statements for the first 15 minutes to round it out to an hour. We could program an hour and 15 minutes and combine 30 minutes from the Senate and 45 minutes from the House of Commons and air that at nine o'clock at night, three days a week, and certainly offer that to the Senate. It would not take away from the 20 hours. The 20 hours would be over and above that, I would think. That would be one solution.
What would remain unsolved, if we were to do that, is how you would televise the Question Period.
Senator Fox: What does that mean?
Ms. Watson: It means the chamber is not equipped for television coverage at the moment.
Senator Fox: That is basically the area of questions in which I am interested; the question of how we could have Question Period covered, subject to what the costs would be for the Senate to do so. I do not suppose you people are the witnesses to tell us what that would be.
Ms. Watson: I am not an expert in heritage preservation — which would be, I believe, your highest cost — that is, how you would preserve the architectural integrity of the chamber.
The Chairman: That is a question we would be dealing with.
Senator Keon: Senator Fox just stole my thunder. I was going to ask you about Question Period and whether it could be coupled with Question Period from the other place. I will move to another point.
On the question of committees, to my way of thinking the committees that interest me most are the special committees. Serving on the routine standing committees sometimes can be cumbersome, not very interesting and so forth. Certainly some of the special committees are tremendously interesting. Some of the reports have been outstanding. Is there flexibility to work with you to tilt the exposure to more of this rather than some of the less interesting, routine work of the standing committees?
Ms. Watson: Nothing would please me more if the Senate were to program those 20 hours. Those 20 hours are completely yours, and so if you would rather one committee over another we would be happy to take those recommendations and do it. We take what is given to us and then we give it an air time.
Mr. Lind: I am sure Ms. Watson would agree, and I am sure you probably would not assign her this responsibility, but if Ms. Watson could program you would do better. You would have better ratings because she would pick the best that you have. I think everyone else in this room would probably come up with the same conclusions, but when you have a formula that is on the wall somewhere it is not the same as making judgments week after week about what is good and what is less interesting.
Ms. Watson: What has to happen is a discussion between the clerks of all the committees about which hearings take place in the televised rooms so they become the ones sent to us.
The Chairman: Ms. Watson's experience and expertise and professionalism are already known to us. The issue would be something that we would have to deal with and would welcome any assistance, but ours is not a game of ratings, ours is a game of educating and informing the public. Sometimes we have to forego ratings on the basis of what message we think the public is more interested in or should be more interested in.
That is a suggestion that we should be consulting with Ms. Watson and others for that purpose.
Senator Andreychuk: I want to go back to the comment about the best you have. How do you judge what is the best? One of the problems I was not aware of, and that you brought to me, is that perhaps we are not programming or understanding. I chair committees and am a member of six committees. We start when we get a quorum, and sometimes we do not get a quorum on time. Sometimes we allow witnesses to go longer than the allotted time, et cetera. We try to manage it on the subject matter and our mandate as opposed to the viewing audience. It would be helpful if, at some point, the committee clerks, chairs and vice chairs were made aware of that — that is, how we come across, what we need to do to ensure that the format is better for the viewer. That does not take away from the discretion of what we are showing and what we do.
I would disagree with Senator Keon that the special committees are the most important. Study of proposed legislation is sometimes the most important work a committee does, because it may get coverage. There may be a controversy with respect to a bill, proposed legislation, that the government has introduced. It gets a party airing over there; each party puts their point of view. We pride ourselves in the Senate with respect to our committee work, which is in depth; as well, we have a long-term, collective memory, et cetera. We look at proposed legislation more in-depth. Often groups come to us who have miscued or were not aware of or did not get engaged in time on the other side, so the debate is sometimes more fruitful on our side.
I have been on a committee that has been hearings for quite some time, and some of those hearings were carried on CPAC. I was asked by people about the other point of view, and I tell them that that will be before the committee in the week following, but that hearing may not get televised. It is a balancing act. We must be more skilled when our committees are televised and make it more appropriate.
I want to go back to the topic of Question Period, carrying the one in the House of Commons along with our Question Period. We are an appointed house and they are elected. Putting the two together, would the public soon see us as the same or would the public understand the difference between the two chambers?
Mr. Stein: It is difficult to make that judgment now because right now the proceedings are not televised. Our observation is that once you start televising the proceedings they change on their own. Therefore, they will change, just by the fact that they are televised. That is usually advantageous because then you are talking more to the public at large than to other senators. It is something that evolves as well. Certainly, it is the most interesting part of the House for Canadians, and I am sure it will be interesting from the Senate point of view.
Senator Andreychuk: One of the points on the House side is that they are very controlled by the clock and there are 15-second clips, whereas we have prided ourselves on giving more depth to issues. I am inferring that we would start playing to the camera to get our point across. There would be greater competition to get on that half hour, so inevitably we would have to reduce our time for all of us to get on? It would be a management issue for us and how we are perceived.
Mr. Stein: I can give a comment as a policy junkie and as a viewer. It would evolve from where it is, but senators would want to distinguish this from the other place, so you would come to balance how to manage your Question Period. You would have to evolve over time how you dealt with that, much in the same way that the House has. You may arrive at a different place. You may, in fact, have longer answers, not the back and forth there is in the House. It may evolve differently.
The Chairman: It may be useful to insert that parties control the time, and of course there are controls that the House itself insists on. Our system in the Senate is somewhat different, but it is something we would have to take under consideration.
Senator Cordy: I want to talk about flexibility. Senator Fox said that coverage from gavel to gavel may not be the most engaging sessions for the viewers who — with remote controls in hand — may change quickly. You have contracts now with the House, and I am wondering how difficult it is to have a contract that would allow flexibility. For example, Question Period we might really like, specific committees we would really like. However, there are sometimes wonderful debates in the Senate that take place on issues that capture the public who are interested in what is being said but the debate is not necessarily getting the publicity that it could. This could be a way for that to happen. Once the contract is signed, how difficult is it to get one with built-in flexibility, and how difficult would it be to say we want debate on a specific issue covered by CPAC?
Ms. Watson: You have that today. Our contract with the Senate today is completely flexible; it is proceedings from the Senate. Whatever you send us is what we air. If you want to send us debates, they will get on. If you want to send us Question Period, it will get on. That exists. We are recommending that you do not hamstring yourselves with a gavel- to-gavel convention, which would limit you to what the House has, because you have great flexibility as it exists now.
Senator Cordy: We do not have cameras in the chamber now.
Ms. Watson: That is a technical limitation, but not reflected in the contract.
The Chairman: I suspect that the audience, to a large degree, is looking to be entertained. I am not sure that that is correct, but that is my feeling. Our mandate is obviously not to be an entertainment device for Canadians; it is to inform, TO educate, et cetera. Is this something that you have seen in the broadcasting of the House that when the programs are more entertaining you get a larger audience as opposed to when they are an educational component?
Ms. Watson: There are two ways to look at it. Television audiences come to television to be entertained and informed. News channels get a large audience not to be entertained but to be informed, and then there are entertainment channels. The viewers will define a certain destination as where to get either information or entertainment. We fall into the information category.
When we run documentaries, which are expensive to produce so we do not have a lot of them, viewers love them. They write to us, e-mail us, call us, and they view them. Our Prime Minister series, for example, gets tremendous viewership. Viewers find it both informative and entertaining.
When there is a vote, people tune in to watch. When there is an election campaign, our viewership triples because viewers are looking for information. When a war breaks out, a viewer will go to the news and they will not watch movies for a while. It depends. There are two types of product viewers are looking for, and we fall into the information category. Certain types of information are more viewer friendly than others, but we do serve a purpose.
[Translation]
Senator Robichaud: You said that right now, CPAC primarily broadcasts committee meetings made available by the Senate. You also stated that information is lacking, that when viewers channel surf with their remote control, they may happen on a committee meeting, but have no idea what the proceedings are all about. If more information was provided, perhaps the viewer would not constantly be changing the channel. Would you not agree?
Ms. Watson: Yes indeed.
Senator Robichaud: But would providing that information be the Senate's responsibility?
Ms. Watson: Yes. We made the same suggestion to the House of Commons, namely that more information should be put up on the screen to inform viewers and keep them interested. However, there is a certain reluctance to provide on-screen textual information, for lack of state-of-the-art equipment.
Perhaps we could look at this together, since CPAC does provide textual information when broadcasting symposiums or commission of inquiry hearings. Because it represents additional work for us, maybe we would need to discuss this option first.
Senator Robichaud: The agreement still has a year to run. Correct?
Ms. Watson: Less than a year.
Senator Robichaud: Between now and the expiration of the agreement, could you possibly provide this visual information? We could then determine if it enhances the message being conveyed to viewers.
Ms. Watson: We could certainly do that, but we need the cooperation of each committee clerk.
Senator Robichaud: You would be prepared to discuss this arrangement then?
Ms. Watson: Certainly.
[English]
The Chairman: Since we have Barry Kiefl, who is an expert and who also assists us in the Senate, we may want to ask him to make a comment on this as well. I think it would be useful. Before I do that, I want to ask you this: Do you receive any comments from the public about the Senate committee broadcasts that you air for us?
Ms. Watson: Anecdotally, no, we have not received comments.
The Chairman: Does no one watch?
Ms. Watson: No, they watch, but they just do not call about it.
Mr. Lind: One important and excellent point was raised. When people tune in and get a Senate hearing, they do not know it is a Senate hearing. You have to explain in text that it is a Senate hearing, which committee it is and what it is about. It has to be there. If it is not there, they are gone to the next channel. This is vital for a better appreciation of what we are doing. I have heard that from people who watch. They say, ``It takes me 10 or 15 minutes to get into this thing because I do not know what is going on.'' It is frustrating for us because, as the distributors, they think we own the programs, and they say, ``Why are you so dumb about these things?''
Senator Robichaud: You say it is the other people who are dumb.
The Chairman: We get all the blame, as usual.
Mr. Stein: I will add something to that. We have experience from running our own services, such as Shaw Television in the West. We spent the last number of years trying to determine how to make the community channel relevant to the communities we serve — more relevant, more interesting, and more informative. We have come up with a new technical format. You have probably seen it on Pulse 24 where they layer the information on the channel. Sports does the same thing to give people a context.
The most important thing is that people's thirst for information about public affairs is quite high. There is a huge demand for information about public issues presented to them in a way that is not just entertaining but informative, and not boring. We found that with Shaw Television. When we focus much more on local events, people say it is terrific because they understand what is going on. They get it neutrally. It is not filtered news. It is as it is happening. It is interesting.
One of the chairs of a standing committee of a House committee said that CPAC does a wonderful job at providing a forum not just for the House in the House but for members in terms of their ability to have neutral discussions, to appear on CPAC during prime time and discuss issues with members from all parties. It is a combination of these things that is important.
With Senate committees, we have just started, and it would be important to follow up on the suggestion of looking at the kinds of technologies, how we can use the formatting, how we can use the control of the committee, how we can use the Internet in terms of providing information so people have a better understanding of what is going on. It would be more interesting to people, we would benefit and the ratings would go up. You would benefit because people would know exactly what you are doing.
The Chairman: Before we call on Barry Kiefl, Blair Armitage would like to add some comments.
Blair Armitage, Clerk of the Committee: In one of my other roles, I am the director responsible for televising committee proceedings in the Senate, and I have had the benefit of talking to Ms. Watson over the last few years. She has been sharing with me some of these ideas already. We have put in place a process with the committee clerks and our office to allow them to begin giving us a bit more information. The tools were only just finalized last summer.
As you can well appreciate, as a non-partisan service, we have to be careful that the information we put on the screen does not have a spin one way or the other. We have been working with the committee clerks and the Communications Directorate to come up with a way to provide context for the viewer without inadvertently ending up on one side of an issue or another. The process is a little slow, and the clerks are concerned about doing a good job at what they are doing and developing a rapport with their respective committees.
During the Bill C-2 hearings, the committee team that was working on that was very conscious of this. They did do quite a bit of work in providing context with the witness and the part of the bill they were studying. It takes a lot of work. As you well know, committee meetings sometimes come up at the last minute, and getting the information you need on a witness or an organization is often difficult and perhaps not the first thing on your mind.
We are certainly conscious of it, and we are providing the tools to the committees. They are developing their comfort level with it and with the committees themselves to take advantage of it.
Senator Andreychuk: That is why chairs and deputy chairs need to be brought together to be advised as to how to handle televising. In my case, I no longer comment on the credentials of witnesses or why they have been called, in order to get more time with the witnesses. I know of some committees where too much information is being given — for example, information about where the witness was born and raised, and so on. In my case, I say ``Professor, you now have the floor.'' I now understand why I should be saying more than that, but perhaps not the whole CV. We need some training and discussion.
Mr. Armitage: We are working on a binder exactly to that end with the Internal Economy Committee. Once we have their approval, we will be distributing it to chairs and senators, and so on.
Ms. Watson: You do not have to say it, as long as it is written. For example, identify the witness as, say, Professor Jones; he wrote a book, he studied, he is tenured. That information can be put in three lines, and that key can be flipped over and over. What happens now with the Senate is that you identify the speaker, the speaker's title and the committee, but you do not identify why the committee is meeting and what the committee is studying.
The Chairman: Thank you for adding that. Since we have Mr. Kiefl here, I think we would benefit from his knowledge and wisdom.
Barry Kiefl, President, Canadian Media Research Inc.: The work that I do both for CPAC and for the Senate itself is analysis of data that comes from Nielsen Media Research. Nielsen is the famous Nielsen ratings company. They operate in Canada and they have a joint venture with another organization some of you may have heard about, Broadcast Bureau Measurement, BBM. The two companies recently merged into one service and offer a television rating service to all Canadian broadcasters, English and French, over-the-air broadcasters, specialty channels and services such as CPAC. The service that CPAC is subscribing to effectively is the same service that CBC or CTV or Radio-Canada will subscribe to and it is the same audience panel. It is a panel of about 3,500 households in Canada and 6,000 people. In Canada, that panel is comprised of a large number of people relative to, say, a Gallup poll. The sample size allows one to get into smaller groups of people that are interested in watching channels such as CPAC, for example.
The audience panel or sample is something that most broadcasters use to develop audience estimates for programs. If CBC wants to look at the audience for the national news or CTV to its early evening news, the panel generates information related to individual programs by title.
CPAC has a wide variety of programs in its schedule but it is limited to looking at just time periods rather than individual programs. They are one and the same, except one cannot look at titles. The reports that are done for you look at the time periods, for example Saturday night from 7:00 until 11:00, the hours when the Senate committee hearings are aired on a Saturday evening, as opposed to giving a program title. The audience sample — that is, the panel of 3,500 households and 6,000 people — is distributed across the country, proportionate to population. It is truly a pure, random sample of Canadian households. Nielsen is trying to measure those accurately. It sends a technician into each of those 3,500 homes and wires up each television and every DVD player or VCR player — that is, every device that can possibly play back a television program. When I say ``wires up,'' they hard-wire all of the television sets in those homes into a personal computer in the household. If it is an apartment, the household will be the personal computer perhaps in a closet; if it is a single-family dwelling, the computer will be in the basement. Every morning, at about 3:00 to 4:00 in the morning, the personal computer in the household dials up a Nielsen computer in an area outside of Toronto and the data for the household is downloaded on a second-by-second basis. Whatever TV channels were watched in the previous 24 hours, the second-by-second information is downloaded into the Nielsen computer. The very next morning, major broadcasters such as CBC or TVA will get whatever called overnights — that is, information that allows one to see what was watched the night before. Smaller broadcasters such as CPAC have to wait a period of about a week to 10 days to get the information from those 3,500 households, but it is a very cutting- edge, sophisticated electronic measurement system. It is equivalent to the system that is used in the United States or any of the other major countries in the world.
The Chairman: How does the coverage of the House of Commons and the Senate fare? Do you have any statistics on that?
Mr. Kiefl: I have been producing reports for Mr. Armitage for the last three years. I think I have expressed in several of the reports my surprise at the fairly large audience for Senate committee hearings.
The Chairman: That is because of all the good-looking members, such as Senator Andreychuk and Senator Cordy. How do you define ``fairly large audiences?'' Do you have a number?
Mr. Kiefl: The best way to define it is to think in terms of how many people in the course of a year would actually attend a Senate hearing as a spectator and be exposed to Senate hearings. You probably have numbers on that, I would think. The Nielsen meter system is saying that, over the last year, a year in which a number of Senate committee hearings did not air, the audience reach defined in a specific way — and I can go into had a detail if you like — was almost half a million Canadians. I would imagine that your internal numbers would not equate to that. That is, the number citizens that have come to hear Senate hearings would be somewhat less than half a million people. You have a very large audience relative to the audience that you have in person.
The Chairman: Thank you. I appreciate that.
Senator Andreychuk: As the new-wave technologies are hitting, I am getting almost instant feedback, including comments, from people who are reading Hansard, whereas five years ago they would have to wait for a print copy and probably would not go through it. They are now doing interesting things. When you carried the NATO Parliamentary Association's annual meeting in Quebec City, which Senator Cordy and I attended, I got emails from people commenting on things I was saying, instantly. The new technology has not been factored in by this chamber fully yet.
The Chairman: Any other colleagues who would like to ask a question of our other guest, Mr. Kiefl?
Senator Robichaud: I think I would drive that Nielsen computer crazy, because I surf a lot and it would burn the lines up. You are saying that it is about the best system that exists.
Mr. Kiefl: It is the gold standard in terms of audience measurement. I have visited a number of countries and participated in a number of international committees looking at different ways of measuring the television audience. Worldwide, this is considered to be the best methodology that one could have. It satisfies a lot of different needs. It means than an advertiser, for example, in the commercial television world, can determine the size of an audience to an individual commercial. This is part and parcel of what this system does.
Mr. Lind: I want to add, on reach, when you are surfing, if you just dial a channel for a second and move on, that channel is recorded — and that is one of the 225,000. You should not be satisfied that people are watching just because they went through quickly.
The Chairman: But it clicks in anyway, right? I have a question that Ms. Watson and I were talking about when we had an opportunity to say hello. Have you seen any substantive change in the behaviour of the members of the House of Commons since the proceedings have been televised? Would you give us your opinion on that?
Ms. Watson: I cannot comment back on 1977.
The Chairman: You are too young for that, we understand that.
Ms. Watson: I was born, but I was still in high school then, I am sorry.
The Chairman: Do not be sorry.
Ms. Watson: Over the last few years, we have noticed a big decline in viewership, particularly Question Period. We wondered why that was. Typically, we get a high audience. We wondered why the audience for that was going down.
It could have been that CBC Newsworld and CTV Newsnet were also distributing it. They could have been picking up some of the audience because they were explaining it a little better. Then people started calling and emailing.
I should preface this by saying that 50 per cent of Canadians think CPAC is a government channel, that it is paid for and owned by the government. We have made a concerted effort to educate Canadians with respect to that, and we are making headway, but many people still believe it is a government channel. This was particularly the case when the Gomery commission was on.
Then, in 2004, when the minority government was teetering and the atmosphere in the House of Commons was very acrimonious, we received emails, voice mails and letters asking us to tell these people to stop fighting. Viewers would tell us: ``If I wanted to watch kids fight, I would stay at home. I tune my kids out when they fight, why would I tune this in? When is someone going to get down to the business of running the country?''
People were tuning out when it became too acrimonious. They were not interested in watching ``grown men'' fight — that was their term. They were interested in understanding that they are taking care of the issues. We relayed that to the chamber, to the clerk of the House of Commons, to PMO, to let them know that maybe the strategy and the tactics of Question Period were actually backfiring as opposed to achieving a means to an end.
I still do not think that we have recovered with respect to those viewership numbers. The fact that you do not engage in partisan jibes might benefit you. I do not know. Just so you know, in general, Canadians are not interested in watching parliamentarians argue. They would much prefer a fruitful debate on an issue as opposed to what can be seen as sometimes personal attacks.
The Chairman: That is an awfully encouraging statement, although it seems to me that when we, as parliamentarians, are portrayed in the media, more often than not we are portrayed when we are fighting and yelling at one another, as opposed to when we are making some reasoned argument on an issue. I will leave the comment at that.
Does anybody else wish to make any further comments? We have a few minutes.
Mr. Stein: On that topic, when people find out that I am chairman of CPAC, the comment I usually get is why cannot you get those people to behave better?
When I ask what they would like to see on CPAC, they would say, ``Remember that commission of inquiry, or that particular hearing on health care or that stuff on security intelligence...'' That is the kind of thing people are looking for.
We react to what we see on the news as reporting the battles and the acrimony because that goes to the news of things, but people have a real thirst for information. We are finding that on the Internet. On the Internet, people are going to get information; Wikipedia and those kinds of efforts are very strong.
If we did more work with the work of committees, taking efforts to use the technology to our advantage to inform in a reasoned way, we would get much better ratings and we would get a better response from the public.
The Chairman: I will give Senator Robichaud the last question.
Senator Robichaud: Mr. Stein made the point that when they fight in the House of Commons, usually if you want to be on the CBC or CTV national news, you have to make a point. I remember the 20-second clip from being in the House of Commons; you just had to have that clip, and then at night you would look to see if you made it. The next day, you were trying to build on that.
I agree there is probably a different viewership on CPAC than there would be with Newsworld or those channels that broadcast the news.
Mr. Kiefl: I wanted to pick up on what Mr. Lind was saying in respect to audience reach. While the total audience reach of the Senate hearings last year was just under half a million people, three years ago it was three-quarters of a million people. In other words, it has declined over the course of the last three years; so there is obviously room for rebounding and getting that lost audience back.
The Chairman: Unless our guests wish to make a final comment, I will adjourn the meeting at the call of the chair. I want to thank our guests for taking the time to be here. We will likely see you again, before this debate is over, I would hope.
The committee adjourned.