Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Transport and Communications
Issue 4 - Evidence, April 1, 2014
OTTAWA, Tuesday, April 1, 2014
The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications met this day at 9:32 a.m. to continue its study into the challenges faced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in relation to the changing environment of broadcasting and communications.
Senator Dennis Dawson (Chair) in the chair.
[Translation]
The Chair: Honourable senators, I call this meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications to order.
Today we are continuing our study into the challenges faced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in relation to the changing environment of broadcasting and communications.
[English]
Our witness for today is Richard Stursberg. Between 2004 and 2010, he was Executive Vice-President, English TV at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Before that, he had extensive experience in broadcasting, telecommunications and cultural industries, including heading up the Canadian Cable Television Association and Telefilm Canada.
After leaving CBC, Mr. Stursberg published a memoir of his time at the CBC that you can get at Chapters-Indigo for a reasonable price. I encourage people who want to read it to do so. It's called The Tower of Babble: Sins, Secrets and Successes Inside the CBC. But today, we'll hear it directly from the author.
Mr. Stursberg, the floor is yours.
[Translation]
Richard Stursberg, as an individual: Thank you. I am pleased to testify before your committee.
[English]
I would like to begin by making a couple of observations. I know that you're going to hear a great deal about money, and you're going to hear that the CBC doesn't have enough money, which is true. You're going to hear that it should have multi-year funding, which is true. You'll hear that it has many technological challenges, which is all true. But I think the biggest problem facing the CBC is none of these. The biggest problem facing the CBC is that there is no consensus on what it is the organization should do.
This is not new. The CBC has been pulled in multiple directions for pretty much the entirety of its existence. People say, ``Oh, it should make high-level, elite programming and put ballet on TV,'' which is one school of thought. Then there's another school of thought that says, ``No, no, no; that's not right. It should be popular TV that's broadly attractive to large numbers of Canadians.'' Some people say it should go and serve little towns where there is nobody else serving them, and other people say, ``No, no, no; that's not right. It has to serve the big cities: Toronto, Vancouver and Winnipeg.''
These sets of contradictions or tensions, when they're left unresolved, create an enormous number of difficulties in terms of the governance of the corporation. These things are not resolved by the Broadcasting Act.
I will mention in passing that I was Assistant Deputy Minister of Culture and Broadcasting when the chairman was a member of Parliament, so I was quite involved in the drafting of the most recent Broadcasting Act and did clause by clause on it through the house. It doesn't help the problem, because the Broadcasting Act is so general with respect to what it is that it says about the CBC that you can really interpret it almost any way you want.
The other problem is that this lack of clarity with respect to what the CBC should do creates a couple of really serious and profound difficulties. First of all, these contradictory pressures play themselves out inside the corporation. As a result, it tries to do a little of this and a little of that to try to satisfy all these different constituencies, with the result being that its strategy is ultimately completely incoherent.
But it also means that it's very difficult to hold the corporation accountable, because you can't hold the CBC to account when there is no consensus on what it should do. If you don't know what it is that you're trying to do, it's hard to say whether you're succeeding or failing, and it's very difficult, therefore, to say, ``This has gone well'' or ``This has gone badly.''
In my view, the only people who can clarify what the mandate of the CBC should be are the government. The government are the only people who are actually elected to make these kinds of decisions, they represent the Canadian public at large, and so the government should do this.
I'm struck by the fact that I cannot recall any government having actually said clearly and simply, ``This is what we think the corporation should do,'' which would be a gift to the corporation. It would be a gift and it would make great sense of everything else that flows out of it.
You want the government to come down squarely, cleanly and simply on these kinds of contradictions. What kind of CBC do you want? A big popular CBC? A CBC for elites? Do you want one that focuses on unserved or underserved communities or one that focuses on where the largest parts of the population are?
I think the right way to approach this would be, in effect, for the Prime Minister to write the CBC a letter — write to the board of directors of the CBC a kind of mandate letter that says, ``Here is what the government thinks the CBC should do.'' In that way, it would be clear all around — and it would be an open letter — how these historic tensions and contradictions should be resolved.
So when I was coming here today, I thought, ``Well, maybe what I should do is just draft you what kind of a letter that letter would be.'' So I've drafted a letter that would be the sort of letter I think that the Prime Minister should write to the board of directors. Do we have some copies? I have a bunch of copies here. I thought I would read this letter. It's brief, but it will tell you also what my general view of affairs are.
This represents my view of what it should be. It's an open letter to the board of directors of the CBC from the Prime Minister of Canada.
It reads very simply:
Dear Board Member,
The CBC faces a challenging future. Recent changes in technology, the ongoing erosion of the television advertising markets, the loss of the NHL contract and the reductions in the corporation's parliamentary appropriation will require the creation of a new strategic plan for the broadcaster.
As you develop this plan, I hope that you will bear in mind the Government's views on the directions that CBC should pursue in the future.
There are a number of principles that should guide the Board's work.
1. CBC should offer - to the maximum extent possible - only Canadian programming.
2. The corporation should focus on making popular shows. It is financed by the taxes of all Canadians and should serve as many of them as it can.
3. CBC should not duplicate the work of the private sector. There is no point spending public money on things that are already being well done without it.
The application of these principles leads to some broad conclusions about programming strategy.
1. The Corporation should abandon local television newscasts. The private networks do this very well and the CBC is typically third in the markets it serves. It would be wiser to place greater emphasis on international news coverage to help Canadians better understand their place in the world.
It is, of course, essential that CBC maintain the highest standards of fairness, objectivity and balance in it's news coverage.
2. The Corporation — particularly in English — should focus it's prime-time strategy on the creation of popular, distinctively Canadian dramas, comedies, documentaries and reality shows. The private networks cannot do this because their deep prime-time schedules are inevitably dedicated to U.S. shows.
3. The CBC should be out of sports.
4. The CBC should reflect French Canada to English Canada and English Canada to French Canada, so that both linguistic communities can better understand each other. The CBC is the only broadcaster — public or private — able to do this.
Once the Board has prepared a plan that reflects these general principles and directions, the Government is prepared to discuss it's financing and negotiate a multi-year agreement. The agreement would be similar to The Royal Charter that the U.K. Government negotiates with the BBC.
As part of the Corporation's accountability to the Canadian public, it's Annual Report should explain how effectively it is executing it's plan. Particular emphasis should be placed on: how Canadian the schedules of the various services are; how popular the programs are with Canadians; and how well the News Departments are reporting fairly and accurately.
Finally, it needs to be emphasized that in discharging it's responsibilities, the Board needs to pay particular attention to safeguarding the CBC's ``arms length'' relationship to the Government. The Corporation's journalistic and programming independence is fundamental to the Mandate it enjoys from the Canadian public.
With Many Thanks for Your Service,
The Prime Minister of Canada.
That's all I wanted to say. Thank you very much. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.
[Translation]
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Stursberg. Your testimony will help the committee as it considers the matter in the coming weeks and months. If you have a colleague who could write the same letter for Radio-Canada, I would appreciate it if you could let us know.
Mr. Stursberg: The principles are more or less the same, I think. They are slightly different, but let us say that the principles are the same.
The Chair: Except that competition from TVA is stronger than from CTV.
Mr. Stursberg: Absolutely.
[English]
Senator Eggleton: Thank you for your submission, Mr. Stursberg. The letter that you suggest come from the PM is a good way of expressing how you feel this mandate should be made. I don't know that we should be leaving it in the hands of one person to decide the mandate or the direction of the CBC. That's part of the problem, because too many people have too many different ideas, as you point out, too many different directions and contradictions, et cetera, but by the same token we should not put that much power in the hands of one person here, the Prime Minister.
You say the corporation should focus on making popular shows and you have, in your book, talked about audience ratings being important, and the two would appear to be linked. I know my colleagues have been asking questions about how the audience ratings are not very good for the CBC. How do we counteract this, though?
How do we make them popular in an environment where the American entertainment industry really is hard to compete with? They've got tons of money. You point out they put them on the private networks, and they seem to be popular shows.
How do we do that? The other thing you say in your draft letter is the corporation should abandon local television newscasts, but aren't there some local stations in some parts of Canada where they might not have the kind of private- market involvement in local television newscasts that we would still need? It's the old question of there are remote areas and there is nobody else there. I would like your answer on that one.
Finally, I sense in reading the letter, you say CBC should get out of sports, et cetera. This is going to cost a fair bit more money, and perhaps it also would relate to a loss of revenues. They're going to obviously have loss of revenues from the NHL contract going over to Rogers. In this atmosphere where the government still seems to be stuck in austerity, unfortunately, how is the money going to be found to do all of this, to provide the kind of popular shows that will attract an audience and do all the other things that you've suggested here?
Mr. Stursberg: I have a couple of comments. First, I didn't intend that it should be the Prime Minister only, but really the Prime Minister writing on behalf of the Government of Canada, as it were.
Senator Eggleton: Or the Parliament.
Mr. Stursberg: I don't know if he represents the Parliament, but he can certainly represent the government itself.
As far as popular shows are concerned, when I came to CBC in 2004, one of the things that I wanted very much to do was to see whether we could build shows that Canadians would actually like to watch. At that time, CBC had lost share consistently, I think it's fair to say, for almost 35 to 40 years. Every year its share of viewing by Canadians had gone down, and it's fair to say people were very doubtful as to whether this was a sensible proposition to say that we were going to try to make shows that Canadians would actually like to watch.
So we set to work to do that, but that required that we change, in some fundamental ways, our approach to developing and commissioning TV shows. The result was that, when I got there, I think the CBC had its smallest share in prime time in its history. Its share was about 6.3. By the time I left, its share was about 9.5, so we increased its share by almost 50 per cent. Indeed, we actually managed, for three years in a row, to beat Global's all-U.S. prime-time offer with a prime-time Canadian offer.
So the truth of the matter is that this can actually be done, and the kinds of shows that you do it with are shows that are made within the conventions of television that Canadians already like. So big shows like ``Battle of the Blades'' would get 3 million viewers, it would blow down the house and be on the front pages of all the papers and everybody would talk about it. ``Little Mosque on the Prairie,'' when we opened it up, did over 2 million viewers.
We had lots of shows that were going in excess of a million viewers, so it can absolutely be done. It's expensive, that's true. It is expensive to do it, but the first thing is that you have to actually want to do it and you have to be completely clear that things will live and die on the basis of whether the Canadian public likes them.
The interesting thing to me as well, we would survey the public to try to find out what it thought about the CBC. Did it think the CBC was important to their lives? Did they think it was distinctive from the other networks? What was fascinating was that, as the audience numbers went up, the overall confidence of the Canadian public in the corporation, i.e., its distinctiveness and its importance to their own lives, went up as well. Indeed, their perception of the quality of the shows increased.
As far as the local markets for news are concerned, of all the local markets that CBC English services there's only one that I can think of that doesn't have a private competitor, which is Charlottetown. Every other one has at least one private competitor. In the case of Toronto, depending on how you count, maybe four other competitors, but in every other market there will be at least two, both CTV and Global.
I thought it was very important at the time — and I was mistaken, as it turned out — to try to revive the local news shows. Part of the reason for that is that two thirds of all viewing of news goes to local news. We tried to do it.
There's an interest thing. There's a fascinating correlation in radio. If you have a local radio service, then the people in that area will listen to ``The National'' shows with much greater frequency.
For example, in Toronto, local radio is number one; whereas if I were to go to Hamilton, where there is no local radio station, people listen to the national shows only half as much as they do in Toronto. There is a slight correlation too between local television news and national television news.
In any event, it turns out that trying to build these shows within those markets, where CTV and Global are already extraordinarily dominant, was very difficult, indeed impossible. My view would be: Why spend money on things that others are doing extremely well already? Why not put it into things that the others are not doing, which is in large measure international news?
Finally, on the question of money, you're absolutely right that the loss of hockey is going to have serious financial consequences for the corporation. It has consequences in two ways. Not only will you lose the money that you made on the profits from hockey; you also lose your capacity to sell the rest of your advertising at reasonable prices. The way you do it is you would say, ``If you would like to have hockey, then you have to buy this dog over here that nobody wants.'' I would say, ``But I don't want the dog,'' and you would say, ``I'm sorry. You have to take the dog if you want the hockey.'' So hockey is not only important in its own right; it's important because it props up the rest of the advertising sales.
But the really big problem about losing hockey is that hockey constitutes about 400 to 450 hours of prime-time Canadian programming. When you lose that, you have to replace it with something. You're quite right to say that to replace it with drama, for example, would be very expensive.
There is a big financial challenge. Under all circumstances, whether you say this letter makes sense or it doesn't make sense, they're already into that financial challenge because they have already lost 400 to 450 hours.
Senator Eggleton: Thank you for those answers. In your time at the CBC, you were also a member of the executive committee of the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association. Are there any lessons to be learned there that could be helpful in terms of meeting the kind of mandate you suggest for the CBC, and any in terms of financing options?
Mr. Stursberg: No financing options there. The Commonwealth broadcasters are even more broke than the CBC, with the exception of the BBC.
Canada is in a unique situation, for the reasons you mention. We are completely flooded with U.S. shows in English Canada. These are not lousy shows. These are fabulous shows. These are beautifully made, extremely expensive, very compelling shows, so to put up credible Canadian shows against those U.S. shows is tough. It's tough, and it's expensive. The truth of the matter is that there is no other country in the world that confronts that kind of a cultural challenge; nobody. So the challenge for a Canadian public broadcaster in English is very different from any other public broadcaster.
The other thing that's interesting is that the CBC, despite the fact that it faces, arguably, the largest cultural challenge, is the worst financed public broadcaster. If I were to compare it to the BBC, for example, which of course operates only in one language — well, they do a little Welsh and Gaelic, but really only in one language — and only in one time zone, it gets about seven times as much money per capita as the CBC. When you look at these comparisons, they're difficult, because the cultural challenge is so much greater here and yet the money available to try to address it is so much less.
Senator Eggleton: The former chairman of the CRTC, at one of our previous meetings, on video conference, stated that ``Internet and wireless technology has disarmed federal regulators of their weapons to protect cultural identity.'' We've had some discussions about Netflix and others in terms of being outside the system. Do you agree or disagree with that? If we need new weapons, what should they be?
Mr. Stursberg: I think it's true that what's happening right now is that many of the traditional regulatory supports for Canadian content are eroding. When Netflix essentially can set up in Canada and offer broadcast shows without being Canadian owned or having to respect any of the rules of the commission, it falls to pieces.
There's a lot of conversation about unpicking all the rules with respect to how the television channels are packaged. These things erode the supports for Canadian television, the non-financial supports. What it leaves you with, really, is the only way you can then build Canadian shows and have successful Canadian television is by subsidizing it. I don't think there's any way around that. At the same time, if you're going to be successful with people like Netflix — because what you want is the CBC shows to be picked up by Netflix — you want the CBC to be in a position to negotiate great deals with Netflix, not only in terms of how much they pay for the shows but also in terms of their placement and marketing. You want to be able to say to Netflix, ``If somebody turns you on, I want to see the big Canadian shows on the front page and I want to see those big Canadian shows aggressively promoted by you.''
But that will only happen, of course, if you actually have big Canadian shows. If they're little, inconsequential Canadian shows, then you don't have any negotiating power either with respect to financial issues or with respect to placement and marketing issues. I do agree; these are going to be very challenging times and it will be very harder than ever — and God knows it has been hard enough in English Canada — to actually build great Canadian shows that Canadians are going to want to watch.
Senator Plett: Thank you, sir, for being here and giving us your expert insight. I did purchase your book yesterday, and I'm well on the way, and I certainly find it very interesting.
My first question is a very simple. I have a number of questions, but the first one is why the title, The Tower of Babble?
Mr. Stursberg: It is a pun, of course.
Senator Plett: Yes, I understand.
Mr. Stursberg: It's a pun that is designed to mention the very issue I've been talking about as being the core issue, i.e., let us get some consensus on what it should do. Right now, all the talk about the CBC amounts to a form of babble, in both senses, far too many different people talking about it from different perspectives, with nobody able to understand each other. So the title was supposed to be funny and at the same time reflect my fundamental preoccupation about being clear as to what it is it's trying to do.
Senator Plett: I read one quote and I see it's in our notes here. I'm going to read part of it. I found it very interesting — and I certainly agree — when you said, very early on in your time there:
Our job was simple. We should make great Canadian content for Canadians. Nothing more. We should know whether we had won or lost based on whether Canadians watched, listened or read what we made. They were the only judges who counted. . . .
I agree with that. You further go on to say — and I'm not saying this is a quote; this is what I remember — that CBC had a bit of a philosophy that it is better to be good than to be popular.
You also indicated that when you were there and you asked about ratings, everybody looked at you with a blank look and said, ``What ratings? We do not know what our ratings are,'' that there were only four or five people in the CBC who did know what the ratings were, and they did not pass that information on because they didn't want to depress the people they would pass it on to.
I agree with your comment here; maybe you have answered it; to what extent should the CBC sacrifice ratings because they want to produce something that is just simply good?
In your letter you say:
CBC should offer — to the maximum extent possible — only Canadian programming.
You believe that they should offer to the maximum extent only shows that Canadians want to watch. Now, there may be a difference there. That would be my first question. I have a few more.
Mr. Stursberg: As I was saying earlier to Senator Eggleton, you can make Canadian shows that Canadians want to watch, but you have to be really focused on it. You have to make sure that that will be the standard you will judge your shows by.
When I came to the CBC, I discovered there was a very interesting belief within the corporation, which was that you had to choose between making shows of high quality and shows that were popular. This is a peculiar kind of belief. It is one of those things that no matter which way you go on it, you lose. People would say, ``That's a popular show so it must be rubbish,'' or ``Nobody watched my show so it must be really good.''
Of course, this is not true. We live probably in the golden age of television. If you look at all the top shows that people are watching, they are fabulous; they are beautifully made. I mean by that the American shows that are very popular in Canada. They are beautifully made. There is no reason why people have to choose between what's good and what's popular. The real challenge in running a broadcasting company is to make things that are both good and popular. Indeed, I don't even believe that there is any room in the market. People won't watch shows unless they are really good.
When it comes to this kind of standard, it's more than just saying that they should be great Canadian shows. They should be that, but we also have a responsibility around this, which is that it must not be an organization of so-called elites.
We had a show, and they made beautiful shows; it was mostly about ballet dancing on television and that sort of thing. The fact of the matter is that absolutely nobody watched it. It was stone cold dead. It wasn't because the shows were bad shows. For what they were, they were lovely shows, but that is not what television is about. What television is about is drama, comedies, reality shows. That's what people watch on TV. If you want to respect the medium, so to speak, you should work within the conventions of the medium to make things that people would like.
Senator Plett: In your book, again, you state that Mark Dillon said CBC cannot go head-to-head with either CTV or Global. Should they be able to go head-to-head with CTV or Global?
Mr. Stursberg: It depends on what you mean by ``going head-to-head.'' If it means that we will try to get more audiences for Canadian shows in prime time than Global or CTV can get for their American shows, I'd say absolutely, let's go do that. I would treat that as being the measure of whether or not the place is successful.
The extent to which Canadians and Canadian young people understand who they are is the extent to which we can actually make great Canadian content. It's of no value if nobody is watching it. We might as well be shouting in a place where nobody can hear.
The truth of the matter is, as I was saying earlier on to Senator Eggleton, we actually did it. We beat Global three years in a row. We beat them in deep prime time with Canadian shows, and they were very distinctively Canadian. I don't think anybody is going to say that shows like ``The Border'' or ``Doyle'' or ``Dragons' Den'' or ``Battle of the Blades'' — nobody on earth is ever going to make ``Battle of the Blades'' except in Canada. I think it can be done and I think it should be done.
Senator Plett: A few of us just came back from doing a swing through Winnipeg, Edmonton and Yellowknife and visited CBC studios as well as those of competitors. Something I found interesting when I asked about budgets was that we were told that CBC — and I know that you went through a very difficult period there for a while with the lockout and discussing different things about the CBC and budgets, and so on — pays approximately 87 per cent of their budget to salaries. I think in your book, which was a few years earlier, you say 80 per cent, but they said 87 per cent, although you might have said on the radio 80 per cent.
The private corporations that we talk to say they pay about 60 per cent to salaries. That is a fairly significant difference. Having been the head of CBC English, can you comment on whether you would agree with those numbers and why that is the case that CBC does that?
We were also told about some of the difficulties private broadcasters had with CBC taking good journalists away from them and they couldn't compete because of the wages. I would like your comment on whether it is fair that CBC can compete to the point where they can simply pay more money using subsidized dollars and whether you agree with those numbers.
Mr. Stursberg: I don't know; those numbers sound very high, that the CBC should be 87 per cent of salaries. Obviously, salaries are a big component because radio is almost nothing but salaries and the costs for making radio are very low. You just have to have a microphone and a small studio, whereas the costs for making television are quite different. You have to have big studios and you have to have cameras, edit suites and all this other stuff. At the same time, you have to buy rights. Sports rights, for example, when we negotiated the last NHL contract, these are very expensive rights. The rights for drama and comedy shows, because they are all made by independent producers, are also very expensive; in other words, the shows are not made internally to the CBC. I think those numbers in terms of labour costs are high. I would be surprised if it were that percentage.
The other cost that the CBC bears, which many of the others don't have to bear, is, it also owns the largest infrastructure I believe in the world in terms of transmission infrastructure. It has something like — I might have forgotten — 700 towers, so that it continues to transmit television and radio so everybody can get it free over the air. This is a gigantic expense. It's not clear to me that this expense makes any sense currently because everyone can get TV through cable or through satellite. There are costs that the private sector doesn't bear as well by way of the transmission infrastructure. Anyhow, I think those numbers are a little high.
I think what I might have been saying is that the CBC is heavily unionized. In fact, it was striking to me when I got there as to how high the level of unionization was because about 90 per cent of all the employees inside the CBC are in a union. I can't think of any other broadcaster, let alone any other company in the country, that has that level of unionization.
Senator Plett: For the record, chair, you were on the trip, as were Senators Mercer and Housakos. I asked that question in Yellowknife, and we thought maybe Yellowknife was high because of the location, and I further asked it in Edmonton and they told us in Edmonton that that was pretty much across the board, that Yellowknife would only get some component added to their salary for remote areas, but that the salaries were the same pretty much across the board.
Mr. Stursberg: If what they are speaking about is what percentage do salaries constitute of the local station in Yellowknife, then no doubt that would be a higher percentage than it would be for the CBC nationally because they don't bear any of the other costs that I mentioned. They don't bear the infrastructure costs; they don't bear the sports rights costs; they don't bear the drama rights costs. Certainly, all they do in local stations is the local radio and the local television, which, again, is made internal to the CBC and is very labour-intensive. Indeed, in Yellowknife they produce local television news in Inuit and they broadcast in seven native languages on radio.
It depends on what you're comparing. If you're comparing salaries as a percentage of total local costs, they would be much higher than they would be for the network as a whole.
Senator Housakos: Thank you for your presentation, Mr. Stursberg.
Your comments resonate pretty well with my experiences so far listening to the testimony of witnesses who have come before this committee. Your resumé of the situation was bang on from the brief experience on this first leg of travel we did in the field to visit the broadcasting facilities and friends and opponents of CBC in the sense that the message we hear universally is we need the CBC. We need a public broadcaster; it serves an important purpose. They go on to highlight a long list of all those purposes and what they should be.
Then, however, when you ask more pointed questions in terms of how successful they are in fulfilling each and every one of those mandates, they seem to be falling short in most cases. When you meet Canadian producers of Canadian content, they say that we need to do more of it; the CBC is the only one that does it. You ask how they have been faring in the last few years, and the argument is they are doing less and not producing good shows, and they don't have resources, and so on.
You meet local citizens like people in St. Boniface, francophone Manitobans, and they say, ``We need the CBC. If we don't have it, we will not have an opportunity as a minority language group to survive and to get our message and story across.'' Yet, when you delve a bit deeper into questioning of them, you find out they only get an hour a day of local broadcasting, for example. There seems to be discrepancies across the board.
This public corporation that has been granted billions of dollars by the government to promote Canadian culture offers a service, for example — and this is a pet peeve of mine — like CBC music online. You go online, and you have the opportunity to hear free streaming music online for citizens anywhere in the world. You just go on your laptop and there it is. But the music you have a choice of is not just Canadian music artists. You can listen to American and British artists and so on.
As a parliamentarian, I know we are spending billions of dollars on the CBC to promote Canadian culture, and I ask: Where is the promotion of Canadian culture in a service like this? I do get the sense that it is an entity that has lost its focus.
My specific question to you is the following: One thing that was resounding in all of the testimony of people was that what the CBC does better than anybody else is news. In our travels and in our questioning, we found out three- quarters of the resources that the CBC/Radio-Canada has goes into news. Is it unnecessary for an entity that gets so much funding to broadcast Canadian content instead of spending all that money on news, which every national broadcaster spends money on news, be it CTV, or Global, or TVA or LCN? They are all producing news, and it is all Canadian content.
Should CBC/Radio-Canada, as a strategy, be spending the vast majority of their funding on news, maybe at the expense of true Canadian culture, which is film, shows and so on? Maybe is it time to look at the focus and the mandate, the Broadcasting Act and say, ``Listen, the CBC should be doing this, this and that. You should be creating Canadian films. You should be working with Canadian producers to produce the best possible films and the best possible shows and the best possible reality television shows instead of offering ``The National,'' which is in competition with three other broadcasters, primarily regurgitating the same news every night with a different slant.
I went on a long preamble, but I think my question is specific in the end.
Mr. Stursberg: In general terms, I agree with you. One of the principles is that you shouldn't duplicate what the privates are already doing very well. That is why I do not think there is much point in the CBC doing local television news. If they are to do news, they should do the news that others will not do.
Increasingly, because the other private networks are under financial pressure, they are doing less and less international news. If the CBC were to refocus itself, put more emphasis on international and investigative news, I think that would be good, because it is expensive and difficult for the privates to do it, and simply get out of the local news.
As far as Canadian music is concerned, one of the things we did when I was there was we had two big radio networks such as CBC Radio One and CBC Radio 2. Radio 2, the FM network — they are both FM now — was a classical music network. I took a view that was not dissimilar to yours. It was not altogether clear to me how those great Canadians composers, Brahms, Beethoven and Mozart, are taking up all the airtime.
What we discovered is that it was overwhelmingly 19th century classical European music. We said that doesn't make much sense. When we looked into it, only 1 per cent or slightly less of all the Canadian music that was released commercially was actually available on private radio stations. We said that we should get rid of this classical music — besides, the audiences were dying out — and we should put on Canadian music and make it the biggest platform for the promotion of Canadian music.
Canadian music has been unbelievably successful internationally, so it seems a shame that there was no venue for that. So that is what we did with Radio 2. The truth of the matter was that we put up some of those streams because people would get upset and say, ``You are taking classical music off the radio station,'' so we put up a classical stream. The idea was to create a house that would attract people and allow them to hear more Canadian music.
As far as films are concerned, I totally agree with that as well. Right now, movies are in big trouble in Canada, because Canadian broadcasters don't buy them very much. They don't buy them very much, partly because by the time they get them, whatever juice was in them has been completely wrung out. They are windowed, which means they go theatrically first, then to home video or pay per view, and then to pay TV, and by the time they get to conventional television or any other kind of television, everybody who wants to see them has seen them.
One of the things we did when I was there, we asked ourselves the question: Is it possible to figure out a way to finance Canadian movies that will allow them to move ahead of the chain, so by the time the CBC would get them, they would get them before all the juice was wrung out of them, and also the CBC would participate in their development so that we would make movies Canadians would want to watch? We figured out a scheme to do this which combined the money from both Telefilm, which I used to run, and the Canadian Media Fund, and we financed some pretty interesting films.
We financed the Book of Negroes; Midnight's Children, a Salman Rushdie book that was made into a film by Deepa Mehta; and, if I am not mistaken, The Paper Bag Princess as well.
The idea behind this financing is that we would say that we will do this. It will cost us about the same as it would cost us to make a drama, but the way it will work is it will go to the scenes first, and then to pay per view, and then it will come to the CBC before the pay television stations for one big viewing. But what we said we will do at the same time, because it will be in our interest to do so, is we will help to promote the Canadian movie at the theatre, so that we would actively put CBC's promotional power behind making the movie a success at the cinemas as well as a success for us.
I thought that was a pretty good idea. Unfortunately, when I left, they canceled the program, but I totally agree with you that it is very important.
Senator Housakos: When we were in Western Canada meeting with private broadcasters, on two or three occasions, I hypothetically put a question to them. I said, ``Let us assume for a moment that the CBC doesn't exist anymore. Let us assume that the federal government can take that $1 billion-plus dollars a year, split it up into two or three and come to Global TV or Bell Media and say, `Here is $200 or $300 million. In your primetime, I want you to run Canadian content, Canadian films.' Would you guys find that appealing? Would that be a scenario that would be of interest, to switch your American content for Canadian content?'' Universally, the answer was: ``Not in its current form, because Canadian content, Canadian films, are not good and nobody will watch them.''
We were giving them money to run these shows, and they said, ``No, because right now it is about eyeballs, and the shows we are running are the ones getting the eyeballs, and once you get the eyeballs, you get the revenue, because you get the advertising dollars.''
It goes back to my original question: Is there a way to take the money that we spend right now in supporting a broadcaster and reroute that money and give that $1 billion-plus dollars to filmmakers and producers of Canadian content so they can make quality content and films? Once they make that quality Canadian content, wouldn't there be an easier appeal made to the private broadcasters to start running it more?
Mr. Stursberg: Absolutely. As I have been saying for some time, we can make Canadian shows that Canadians want to watch. There is it no doubt about that. It has been demonstrated. The privates make some shows that have done well with Canadian audiences, whether it is ``Canadian Idol'' or ``Saving Hope,'' which I think is doing 1.5 or 1.6 million viewers. That can be done; there is no doubt about that. However, if you say give the money directly to the producers, then the way they get recompensed from making it is through the fees that they realize from the production budget. They don't really care whether the show has a lot of viewers or not. That is not that important to them. What is important to them is the size of the budget and the percentage of the fees that they get out. If you leave them to their own devices, it is not clear to me that that will work. What you want is the way they are right now, tied into broadcasters who are committed to getting the largest possible audiences. The broadcasters will work with the producers to develop the shows to that end. I think you are more likely, under that structure, to get shows that actually connect with Canadian audiences.
The difficulty is that most Canadian shows, no matter how beautiful they are or how big the audiences get, have enormous difficulty and — in fact, in most cases never break even — they always run at a loss. That is because you can buy American shows very inexpensively compared to what it costs to make a Canadian show of comparable quality. If you were to say to private broadcasters, ``Let us take all that money and chop it all up and give it to you,'' from their economics it will still make it difficult for them to substitute Canadian shows in deep prime time, where they put their American shows on.
The CBC — and this is one of its great virtues and opportunities — is the only major broadcaster in English Canada that has prime time completely open or for Canadian shows. The others, Global and CTV, cannot open up prime time without completely crashing their own economics.
Senator Demers: This is my first time around on this committee and it is well run by the chair and Senator Housakos. We have had great guests and interest on both sides, and they were not afraid to ask the tough questions. I respect that very much. I tried to make my own opinion and look at the overall picture from Mr. Lacroix's observations and from everything people who have been here have said. As a result, there are a few questions, but I will go slowly.
As you mentioned, about a month ago now CNN's numbers were getting low. Unfortunately, this plane disappeared. You said we should have greater emphasis on greater international news coverage. Now that CNN has given the most hours ever on trying to find that flight, their ratings have skyrocketed. I agree with what you mentioned in that letter.
In sports, it is not every man or woman that likes sports or hockey. One of my assistants, who is sitting in the back, doesn't like hockey, but her boyfriend does. I am just saying that not everyone is really involved in sports.
When some of the people came here, they said that one of the biggest things this year was the Olympics. You indicated CBC should get out of sports. The Olympics was a huge venue for CBC and they did a great job. ``Hockey Night in Canada'' is an institution. Unfortunately, it was lost because CBC would not compete with the money that Rogers and company gave. There is so much competition, but competition is the best thing that could happen to any company. Is it possible that CBC/Radio-Canada is not geared enough to compete, or maybe moneywise, with what is going on right now? You have other stations, whatever, in Canada, and you are getting more and more products in Canada that are produced in the United States — good shows with ratings that are extremely high. ``The Voice,'' from the United States, comes to TVA; ``Battle of the Blades'' has been a good show.
Are we not able to compete — and I say ``we'' because we all pay for this — or are we not in a position to compete with the best? We were brought up with CBC. I am not speaking for anyone else but myself, but I see the CBC slipping in front of our own eyes.
Mr. Stursberg: I think it is slipping and I think that's unfortunate. But I don't see any reason why a CBC that is properly focused and properly funded can't compete. I am absolutely convinced that a properly focused CBC, which is quite clear in terms of what it is trying to do — that is, in which it is very clear that what we are trying to do is make big, popular, distinctively Canadian shows — and a properly financed CBC can do that. I don't doubt that for a second.
I don't see the point of them being in sports. The fact of the matter is other people will do it. The CBC did a beautiful job with the Olympics; others will do a beautiful job with the Olympics, right? I think it is important for the CBC to be focused and clear with what it is doing and then, absolutely, if it is financed properly, it can compete.
Senator Mercer: Thank you, Mr. Stursberg. I am sorry that I was late. I had other committee duties.
You said a couple of things that I found interesting. We can make popular prime-time television. You gave us several examples today, for example, ``Little Mosque on the Prairie,'' which has been syndicated and is doing well elsewhere. Is that our niche, namely doing popular shows differently? This was a sitcom that was extremely unusual and it was quite a risk in production because you were introducing a cultural cross-fertilization between Muslims and Christians in a small Prairie town. What happened in that show can happen in Canada. Is that our niche, namely, to try to find uniquely Canadian things? I think Americans who really like the show are surprised that that could actually happen.
Mr. Stursberg: Yes, I think that is right. The extent to which you simply ape American shows are you likely to be successful, because why would I watch a copy of an American show when I can watch the real thing? The other element is if you make distinctively Canadian shows that speak to us — that is, to our history, to our sense of humour, to our preoccupations of one variety or another — then inevitably they will likely be more attracted to a Canadian audience because it is made for that audience. They will be interesting internationally because they will show the nature of the country itself. That is not something you can see in a lot of places.
I think you are right. To the extent to which the shows are focused in the sense that they are designed to be popular but be distinctively Canadian, that is a recipe not only for doing well in Canada but also for doing well internationally.
Senator Mercer: You made a statement when you were talking about Canadian film that by the time it gets to television, everyone who wants to see them has seen them. I would challenge that. I think one of the real problems with Canadian film is that not enough people are seeing them. There are not enough avenues for viewing.
I think the CBC is a perfect place for many Canadian films. If Canadians take the time to watch Canadian films, they will be pleasantly surprised at the quality of the production and the quality of the storylines. All of us around this table travel so much that we get to watch a lot of movies on airplanes. There is a separate section for Canadian movies and I take the time to make sure that I am watching some of them. I am always amazed at the quality. Of course, it is based here at home and it gives you that other resonance. We really need to think about that.
The Canadian creative world could respond to a demand if CBC were in the business of wanting prime time for either short half-hour or hour shows, or for full-length films.
Mr. Stursberg: As I was saying earlier on, I completely agree with you. When I was at the CBC and Wayne Clarkson was running Telefilm, we worked out a structure that would allow us to do precisely that, to get movies made and put on to the CBC. At the same time, it would support these movies in terms of their release into cinemas by promoting them more effectively, putting the stars of the movies and directors onto the CBC's talk shows and a whole bunch of stuff that would have made the movies much more successful both in the cinemas and on television.
Senator Mercer: You talked earlier about the infrastructure CBC has built up, over 700 towers?
Mr. Stursberg: Something like that.
Senator Mercer: It made me think back to studies this committee did over the last number of years into the lack of available of tower space for cellphone operators. CBC has 700 towers and probably doesn't need the 700 towers. Is there a market? Do you think we can market the use of these towers by private cellphones?
Mr. Stursberg: Right now the CBC does lease space on towers to other people, whether they are broadcasters or cellphone companies. At one point, we did look into selling the entire tower infrastructure, but the difficulty you run into is that the only parts of the infrastructure that tower operators want are the towers in the densely populated areas. They do not want to take the towers in the lesser places, which is obviously where the bulk of the costs lie. You would often find yourself in a situation where you were slightly worse off than you would be by maintaining the tower infrastructure. There is an opportunity, in large measure, to wind the tower infrastructure up completely and say we can rely on satellites and cable and save a lot of money.
Senator Mercer: You talked about emphasis on international news and doing things that other news outlets do not do. Would you not agree that one of the things that CBC can do well, and has done well in the past, is something that's missing in private sector newsrooms, investigative journalism? It is really taking the time to dig in and find out the true story, not just reporting what comes across the wire every day.
Mr. Stursberg: Absolutely, I think the focus should be on national news, international news and investigative news, including investigative current affairs like ``The Fifth Estate'' and ``Marketplace.'' I agree with that.
Senator Greene: Thank you for the very interesting presentation.
My friend here said that the CBC was slipping from the past. You agreed with that, and I agree with that. I think it's a shame in a certain context, but isn't all traditional television slipping? It seems to me that the only type of programming that has maintained their traditional audiences on traditional TV is basically live sports. Everything else is being shunted or adjusted to be found on Netflix, computers or various programming, which provides the viewer the option not only to look at the program whenever they want to look at it so they're not tied to a schedule, but if they want to see eight or nine of them in a row they can do that. You don't find live sports on Netflix or anything like that, but you do find live sports on your computer. You can watch a lot of hockey on your computer, which is what I've been doing.
It seems to me that we're in a period where we're undergoing tremendous change and what has been happening over the past decade will result in a very different entertainment landscape 10 years from now, or even five years from now. Shouldn't we be thinking about that as opposed to trying to figure out what we can fix that might change the landscape for the next year, which is what most of this discussion has been about?
If you could look into the future 10 years from now knowing where we are today, in terms of the electronic communications we have, the availability, the fast-changing landscape, the trend is more and more to have people not look at traditional television anymore for almost anything, except for the odd live sports event or maybe the national news if there is an issue they want to see. But even there you can find all that stuff on the Internet.
Mr. Stursberg: If you were to ask me, I don't know about 10 years, but maybe in five years I would say that what's happening is that all these screens are now the same screen. It's only a question of the size of the screen, whether you have a big screen or a little screen that you can carry in your pocket, your television set is a computer, your computer is a television set, your cellphone is a television set and a computer. I think that's absolutely true. The way in which people consume programming will break into two streams. As you say, one will be things that happen in real time. You have to watch sports in real time. Once the game is over, who cares? You have to watch news in real time. You have to watch reality eliminations when they finally say this skating pair is out; you've got to watch that in real time. You've got to watch game shows in real time. But for everything else — drama, comedies, documentaries and all that other stuff — you're absolutely right. People watch when it's convenient for them. They'll say, ``I want to watch it not Thursday at eight o'clock, but Monday at 2 and that will be fine.''
One of the things that is interesting to me is, within all that, the amount of time that people watch television — whether they're watching it on a screen like this or on a phone or whatever they're watching it on — is almost completely unchanged from what it was 40 years ago. The average number of hours that people spend watching television in Canada is about 26 to 28 hours a week. It hasn't changed. Whether it's sitting on a computer or on a cellphone I don't think materially matters.
Senator Greene: What is the role for the CBC in a situation like that?
Mr. Stursberg: In a situation like that, let me give you a couple of examples. When we did the last deal for ``Hockey Night in Canada,'' one of the things we said to the NHL is that we want all the rights. At that time I don't think people fully understood exactly how valuable some of these other rights were going to be. They said fine. What we meant by ``all the other rights'' was that we wanted all the rights for being able to stream it to computers, wireless devices, cellphones, et cetera, so we could do precisely that. We could say, wherever you are, however you want to see ``Hockey Night in Canada,'' which we control the rights to, you can see it. And more and more, that's what everybody does when they buy any kind of rights or shows.
They buy all the rights so they can make sure, whether they put it on TV or computer, that they can serve Canadians how they want to be served. That's why I think that the issue with respect to the CBC — this is not unique to CBC and all the other broadcasters do the same thing — is not going to be what kind of platforms. That's not going to be the fundamental question. The fundamental question is the content, because they're going to get all the rights to all platforms willy-nilly, and they'll be able to meet Canadians much more effectively as a result.
The focus is are they in sports, is it popular, is it drama, what is it? That's why I put more emphasis on what is the content strategy for the CBC than what is its technological strategy.
[Translation]
Senator Verner: Good morning, sir. Thank you for your presentation.
I am from Quebec, so I will speak in French. I would like to address the issue of the different situation that exists between CBC's French and English networks.
In April 2012, you gave an interview that appeared in the National Post. In it, you said that you were seeing a two- tier system emerging in public broadcasting, where the French network seemed to be better off than the English network, which was the target of more criticism and disappointment.
Among the solutions presented, you thought that perhaps a decrease in funding to the French network might make it possible to better respect the demographic representation of Canada's French-speaking population.
Do you still think that one solution would be to decrease funding to the French network?
Mr. Stursberg: First, it is important to understand that, culturally, it is my impression that everything is going well in French-speaking Canada, in the sense that the most popular programs are all Canadian. But in English-speaking Canada, it is exactly the opposite. This has been the case for as long as 30, 40 or 45 years.
Now, the breakdown of funding, meaning the famous $1 billion in public funding to CBC/Radio-Canada, is 40 per cent for French services and 60 per cent for English services.
My point of view is this: right now, approximately 24 or 25 per cent of the Canadian population is French-speaking, and 75 per cent is English-speaking. The cultural challenge is more difficult to resolve on the anglophone side for reasons we have already mentioned.
I wonder if it is a good idea to give more money to French services than to English services per capita if the cultural challenge is greater on the anglophone side than on the francophone side. That is my question.
Senator Verner: Are you still confident that it is possible to draft a new broadcasting policy for Canada that could accommodate these two differences throughout the country, with the same public broadcaster?
Mr. Stursberg: Absolutely. In the draft letter I wrote for the Prime Minister, I proposed that one of the main objectives of CBC/Radio-Canada could be to provide for exchange between French and English services so that francophones could better understand anglophone culture and vice versa. This is the only large cultural institution we have in Canada that could do this because it has two main components: a francophone wing and anglophone wing.
I tried to do that when I was there. We redid two Radio-Canada programs, ``Les hauts et les bas de Sophie Paquin'' and ``Rumeurs''. We did some documentary series together, one on World War II and another on the Cold War. I funded a cultural program for Mitsou Gélinas so that she could explain to anglophones what was going on culturally in Quebec. I think those are very important things.
I think senior executives at Radio-Canada and CBC should be able to speak both official languages and, if possible, be bi-cultural. At one point, I suggested to my counterpart, Sylvain Lafrance, that we switch. I would go to Montreal to run the French-language services, and he would go to Toronto to run the English-language services. It would be a symbolic gesture to show people working at Radio-Canada and at CBC how important it is that they have a very good understanding of what is going on on the other side. It would also give me the opportunity to better understand what was going on in Radio-Canada, and the same thing for Sylvain, so that we could create a strategy that would be a true strategy of exchange between the two cultures.
Senator Verner: On another note, in terms of local news, in francophone minority language communities throughout the country, how do you see the local content being delivered for them, content that affects them, in their language?
Mr. Stursberg: It is a little different in the sense that there are no other local news services, besides Radio-Canada, in all the major anglophone cities. Radio-Canada currently provides local services in French in Regina, Winnipeg and Vancouver, where the francophone population is very small.
This is the only service for francophones outside Quebec. The same is not true in English. Every major anglophone city has services in English, in addition to CBC. That is why I am making a distinction between the two. Radio-Canada must have a different strategy than CBC because they face completely different problems and serve completely different audiences.
Senator Verner: Thank you very much.
[English]
Senator MacDonald: When I see there are 700 towers around the country —
Mr. Stursberg: About, I think.
Senator MacDonald: — I think you should go into the cellphone business.
Mr. Stursberg: The problem is there aren't the towers.
Senator MacDonald: You could be self-sufficient financially and you could take on the cellphone cartel; all Canadians would appreciate it.
You mention that CBC should not duplicate the work of the private sector. You weren't really that specific; I want you to be more specific. When I look at the private sector and what they do with television media, what is it they don't do that CBC can specifically do?
Mr. Stursberg: I'm just speaking about English Canada. They are not focused on doing Canadian entertainment shows in the same way as the CBC can.
Senator MacDonald: What does Canadian entertainment mean?
Mr. Stursberg: What I mean is Canadian dramas, Canadian comedies. It's like ``The Rick Mercer Report,'' ``This Hour Has 22 Minutes,'' Canadian dramas like ``Doyle'' or ``The Border'' or even the shows I was mentioning that we remade in French — ``Rumours'' and ``Sophie'' — all these shows are television shows. They're entertainment where you know exactly where you are. They're built around our sense of humour, our sensibility and our history.
We even made a movie about the life of John A. Macdonald. We tried to make it a fun movie so it would be entertaining and people would learn about his life. Actually, we only made half of it because then I left and the other half never got financed. That's what I mean when I say ``distinctively Canadian'' — big, popular stuff.
Senator MacDonald: Are you talking about a movie that was produced out of Toronto by a private company?
Mr. Stursberg: No. The CBC commissioned that; so it was produced by an independent producer by the name of Bernie Zukerman.
Senator MacDonald: It was supposed to be a four-part series?
Mr. Stursberg: No, it was supposed to be a two-part series.
Senator MacDonald: I read it was initially four. Why did they only produce half? It was an excellent show. You showed it once at eleven o'clock at night.
Mr. Stursberg: You would have to ask the people who — a lot of things that I believed in were canned after I left. I believed in the John A. Macdonald project, and I thought it was really important. So we financed that. It was finished and put on after I left, although I had seen it in rushes and in rough cuts.
The same thing is true — we were talking about movies and putting movies on the CBC. The program we worked out with Telefilm was canned. I honestly don't know why some of these things were taken off the table.
Senator MacDonald: I watched it in Nova Scotia. It was on a Monday night at eleven o'clock.
Mr. Stursberg: You're right: It was terrific. It was fun and entertaining.
Senator MacDonald: The sets, actors, scripts and customs were great.
Mr. Stursberg: But that's what I mean. Nobody in the private sector is going to do that. They are not going to make things like ``Battle of the Blades,'' it's just not going to happen. That is the thing that the privates won't do that the CBC should do. That's all I'm saying.
Senator MacDonald: You mentioned here that you think the corporation should abandon local television newscasts. I'm not disagreeing with you, but why are local television newscasts best left in private hands but national newscasts — why would they be sacrificed to national newscasts?
Mr. Stursberg: First, as I mentioned earlier, we tried to revive the local supper-hour newscasts, and we put a lot of energy into it. We rebuilt them all, every single one. We grew them out to 90 minutes. We really wanted to do it. At that time, it looked like Global was going to collapse, because it was under severe financial pressure. You may remember that.
So I thought, ``Okay. Fine. We will see if we can rebuild these shows, because they are important to Canadians.'' It seemed the timing was right, because I was worried that they would no longer have two alternatives, CTV and Global, but one of them would go away when Global fell into insolvency. So it seemed like a good idea.
It turned out that the situation changed. Global was refinanced out of insolvency. The commission made it a condition of the agreement for Shaw to buy Global and also for Bell to buy CTV that they had to continue their local supper-hour newscasts, even in some of the marginal markets where that was difficult. So some of the assumptions behind what I had originally thought was a good idea turned out to be untrue.
Now when I look at it, I say, ``Why would the CBC continue to do what's being done extremely well by both CTV and Global?'' Their local newscasts are very good. Why not take the money and do things with news that they don't want to do, because they're focused locally, which is fine, and put a greater emphasis on investigative news and international news, which is very limited on television as it stands right now.
Senator MacDonald: I want to comment on that. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but there is a tendency in government — you go to any deputy minister and say, ``We want to cut back 10 per cent of the money.'' The first thing they'll do is go to the regions and cut. They will not cut here; they will not cut their own back office, but they will push the cuts down to the regions. There's an element of that in this, I believe, whether it's intentional or not.
Mr. Stursberg: If it was a zero-sum game, I still would say that you're better off putting your money — a lot of it is public money — into places where the privates aren't doing the work, because it's not as though people are going to be deprived of local news; they will still have two great local newscasts in practically every major market in English Canada. So give people something they're not getting so much of, which is more investigative and more international programming.
Senator Plett: I want to continue a little bit along Senator MacDonald's line of questioning. The abandoning of local television newscasts is a particular concern. I have a couple of points and then a question.
First, when you say the private networks do this well, I certainly agree. I live in Winnipeg and I have access to CTV and Global. People in Yellowknife and every northern community in Canada don't have access to CTV and Global. Would you make a distinction there that CBC should stay in the business because the private networks aren't going to go up to Yellowknife, because they won't make money?
I've always been a proponent of us needing to have a public broadcaster to broadcast in areas where the private broadcaster won't go. I had some reservations about subsidizing a public broadcaster where they do go. We've heard that in Quebec, for example, there are — and I stand to be corrected — three main broadcasters that are all getting a fairly equal share of the viewership. I question that we should subsidize a public broadcaster if they are getting a third of it and the other two are getting a third.
You say they should stay in national and international television. The fact of the matter is CTV and Global are doing as good a job in national and international broadcasting as the CBC — maybe better. More often than not I watch ``The National,'' but last night I watched CTV and will do so. I'm hearing that ``The National'' is definitely not the top-rated show.
It's a fairly broad question but I would like your opinion. What do we do with local television in areas where the private guys don't go? Should we consider working out taxpayer subsidies for those areas and not in Toronto, Montreal or even Winnipeg? Outside of Quebec, we would still need some subsidies for the French language; I understand that, because Winnipeg doesn't make money in the French language.
Mr. Stursberg: Sure. I agree with you that the North is a different case. A lot of the focus on the North is not just on the French and English; it's also on native languages. So as I was saying earlier, there is a television broadcast in Inuktitut every night. They broadcast on radio a little bit in Gwich'in, Dogrib, Cree and so on.
For some reason, we cut off native language broadcasting when we get to Northern Canada. Now, CBC broadcasts in a lot of languages, like Gwich'in. There will be no more Gwich'in speakers in 30 years. But we do not broadcast in Ojibwa or in Cree, except a tiny bit.
What is the right strategy for CBC with respect to native language broadcasting? Clearly, everybody agrees that the Inuit will survive, the Cree will survive and the Ojibwa will survive. Gwich'in and Dogrib will not survive.
I would put the Northern question into the context of native language broadcasting and the role of the CBC with respect to that. Clearly none of the privates will ever do that. I totally agree with that.
As far as local markets are concerned, more generally, for the big English markets, it's important to distinguish between radio and television. In terms of the local talk radio and coverage of local events, there is very little all-news radio or any kind of talk radio that is local in character outside some of the big cities, and even then it's basically on a wheel. But there's not an exploration of the local community and what's going on. All that kind of stuff that the CBC does the privates don't do. For radio, I think it has a great role, locally. But I agree with you that, in television, I'm not sure why the CBC makes local television news in competition with the privates.
Senator Plett: Why does it do national?
Mr. Stursberg: That's a good question. The only reason they should be doing national newscasts is because they can offer something the privates can't or won't. I don't think that the international coverage — I think the CTV coverage is bad; Global coverage is pretty limited. International coverage for English Canadians generally is not as good as it should be. We live in a completely interconnected world. This is a trading country. We live in a world where every issue you touch turns back to an issue that is domestic. So it's very important that Canada have big-time international newsgathering operations.
As well, as we were saying earlier, the news should be more focused on investigative stuff and not simply covering what it is that it's supposed to do.
We redid the news and relaunched it in a big way. We relaunched everything, not only the local newscasts, but also the all-news network.
The all-news network is now doing well. It's completely the dominant news network, and clearly Canadians say this is the network they want to watch when they want to watch all news.
When we launched ``The National,'' the theory of the relaunch was to say that by the time you get to ``The National'' at ten o'clock, or nine o'clock, if you watch it on Newsworld, you already know the news. Everybody knows what the news is. Then the question for ``The National'' is: What do you bring to the party that's different? The answer, I had thought, should be that you bring to it context and background. You allow Canadians to see the stories, but now to make sense of them because you provide a broader context and background, you've done investigative work and you've done international work that sheds light on Canadian situations, whatever it happens to be.
I think if they can get to that then they would be doing something which would be quite different from what the privates are doing right now. I'm not disagreeing with you that a lot of what you see on ``The National'' or on the CTV late-night news is not terribly different.
Senator Plett: One of the concerns that we heard, again on our trip, from one CBC's competitors was not necessarily that CBC gets subsidized but that they are subsidized and then compete with them for advertising dollars.
I would like your opinion, first, on that and whether you think it's fair for taxpayers to give CBC $1.15 billion a year and then allow them to run in competition with Global, CTV, whoever. Clearly, you would think, they would be able to undercut them in advertising dollars. That seemed to be their bigger concern.
Could you comment on that? Then also comment on whether it would be your opinion that in areas where they are running competition — and I'm not talking about Yellowknife or French CBC in English Canada — part of the letter that the Prime Minister writes should allude to the fact that they need to make money in those areas if they want to continue to get taxpayer dollars, or should they be able to do business as usual? I'm speaking specifically about the areas where they are running head to head with CTV and Global.
Mr. Stursberg: Now that they've lost hockey, the amount of advertising revenue that the CBC will take out of the conventional market is really going to be a tiny percentage of it, a very small percentage of it. The problem is much less serious than it might have been in the past in terms of competing for advertising revenues.
If the CBC could get out of ads, I think that would be probably a good thing, so long as everybody was completely clear that the test of their success was how many Canadians were watching the shows that they commissioned. The one good thing about advertising is it forces you, at least in a limited way, to pay attention to the audiences. I would be afraid that if they got out of advertising they would lose that discipline unless — and I say this again — the government was very clear with them that the number one responsibility is to make shows that connect with Canadian audiences.
It's interesting, the BBC has no ads but they don't have this problem of trying to make shows that nobody wants to watch. In their offices all over the BBC they have a little slogan that says, ``Audiences are everything to us.'' I love that. I think you would be right. It wouldn't be a big deal now for the CBC to get out of ads in terms of the private sector because there's so little volume left. I think it would probably be a good idea. It would make the corporation more distinctive, so long as everybody's clear: the test is whether Canadians like what you're making.
Senator Plett: Making money.
Mr. Stursberg: Making shows Canadians want to watch.
Senator Plett: Fair enough.
Senator Housakos: You mentioned earlier that obviously if you don't have the pressure of ratings you disconnect yourself from your audience and then become irrelevant. After all, broadcasting is reaching people and getting information and giving information.
My sense, again from our limited travel so far — we went to local CBC/Radio-Canada studios — is they don't seem to have the same amount of emphasis on branding themselves as the private-sector radio stations or TV stations we saw. We walked into a private broadcaster's reception area and 15 members of the public were in the reception area waiting to get their gifts from shows and contests and so on.
Also from my personal experiences — and, again, maybe I am not the norm — when I get involved in my local hockey associations, community organizations or festivals, you rarely see the CBC peddling themselves the way the other local broadcasters do to create that connection with the local audience. Is that a cultural thing? I would like to have your opinion on the part of CBC/Radio-Canada. Is it maybe something they should start doing a bit more?
[Translation]
I am from Montreal, and the people in Montreal who listen to Radio-Canada always say that Radio-Canada is the broadcaster of the intellectual community and that ordinary people listen to LCN. But in business, you make your money from the ordinary people because there are more ordinary people than there are intellectuals.
Mr. Stursberg: I agree. I think it is more important to create programs for the ordinary people, if I can put it that way. Even with the people at CBC/Radio-Canada, I insisted when I was there that it was important to be present in the communities. By that I mean attending community events because it is a matter of the brand. If we are there, like the private companies are, it will strengthen the CBC/Radio-Canada brand.
[English]
At one point I thought one of the things we should say for all the hosts of all the local shows was you have a double responsibility: One is to host the show and the other is to host events in the community so you do outreach in the community. That was partly, as I say, to extend the brand but it was also partly to allow people to participate in the community, to hear what people were thinking and feeling.
It would inform better the shows themselves and make them more rooted.
[Translation]
As you say, it is very important that the program be deeply rooted in the community if you want to continue with local programming.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Stursberg. I encourage you to go and buy Mr. Stursberg's book at a private store near you; it is available at places like Chapters and Amazon.
[English]
Thank you very much for your letter, Mr. Stursberg. I think it will be useful to the committee. It was an inspiring presentation and I think people should reach for your book and know more about the CBC.
At our next meeting tomorrow night, our colleague Senator Housakos will be chairing.
(The committee adjourned.)