THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORT AND COMMUNICATIONS
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Tuesday, November 26, 2024
The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications met with videoconference this day at 9:01 a.m. [ET] to study matters relating to transport and communications generally.
Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne (Deputy Chair) in the chair.
[Translation]
The Deputy Chair: Good morning, honourable senators. My name is Julie Miville-Dechêne. I’m a senator from Quebec and the deputy chair of this committee.
I would like to ask my colleagues to pay careful attention to their earpieces and to follow the rules so that our interpreters remain well protected.
[English]
I will now invite my colleagues to introduce themselves.
[Translation]
Senator Simons: Good morning. My name is Paula Simons. I’m from Alberta.
[English]
I come from Treaty 6 territory.
Senator Cuzner: Rodger Cuzner. I’m a senator from Nova Scotia.
Senator Quinn: Jim Quinn, New Brunswick.
[Translation]
Senator Clement: Bernadette Clement from Ontario.
[English]
Senator Dasko: Donna Dasko, a senator from Ontario.
[Translation]
The Deputy Chair: Thank you.
[English]
This morning we continue our study of the local and regional services provided by CBC/Radio-Canada, focused on Northern Canada.
Joining us this morning, I’m pleased to welcome on behalf of the committee the following witnesses: Manitok Thompson, Executive Director, and Karen Prentice, Director of Content and Communications, Inuit Broadcasting Corporation; Corey Larocque, Managing Editor, Nunatsiaq News; and joining us by video conference, Tamara Voudrach, Executive Director, Inuvialuit Communications Society.
We will first hear opening remarks of five minutes each, starting with Ms. Voudrach, followed by Ms. Thompson and then Mr. Larocque. We will then proceed to questions from senators. Ms. Voudrach, you have the floor for five minutes.
Tamara Voudrach, Executive Director, Inuvialuit Communications Society: [Indigenous language spoken.] I am the executive director for the Inuvialuit Communications Society here in Inuvik. I have been with the society since 2016.
I didn’t have much prepared for today, but I figured I would just share with you a little bit about our region, the work we do, what we see our needs are in terms of broadcast and communications from our region for Inuvialuit and a look into the future on how we can make those things happen.
We were established in the late 1970s, at a time when Inuvialuit required more communication amongst ourselves. There was a lot of oil and gas and economic development happening in our region, and at the same time, we were talking about what our modern governance would look like. The Committee for Original People’s Entitlement, or COPE, was formed, and the COPE negotiators negotiated our land claim around that time. We’re a little bit older than COPE. We were founded in 1974, I believe, and the Inuvialuit Final Agreement, or IFA, was signed in the early 1980s.
We became an official society to preserve and promote Inuvialuit language and culture and to enhance communications among Inuvialuit. Today, we have grown. We produce television, and we produce a biannual magazine called the Tusaayaksat Magazine, and “tusaayaksat” means “stories that need to be heard.” The magazine itself has undergone many changes, and I’m looking at the first edition on the wall. It was a newspaper called Inuvialuit. Today it is an anthology of stories by and for Inuvialuit. It is ever-evolving and ever-changing.
In our television department, we are a founding-member society of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, or APTN. We have strong ties to that broadcast entity as well and with Inuit TV and Uvagut TV. Our landscape has changed. The broadcast landscape is evolving. There has always been a need to promote northern broadcasting, and these additional creations of Inuit broadcasters have impacted the Inuvialuit Communications Society, or ICS, by allowing us to build relationships with other regions in the North and other regions in Inuit Nunangat, in Nunavut, and it has been mutually beneficial and rewarding for us to have these relationships. There is a lot of mutual support.
Our biggest priority going forward into the next few years is promoting our language — not just promoting and trying to preserve and document, but actually taking an active approach in how we support language learners through our media content, television series and hopefully online course materials. There has been a big demand for those kinds of things.
Relationships with other Inuit regions, whether it be through broadcasting or through print publications, have been important and crucial for us — to establish those relationships and to foster those partnerships, because when it comes time to roll out new content, the most important thing for us is that it is received by Inuvialuit beneficiaries quickly. Relationships with broadcasters are a top priority in that area as well.
Looking into the future and the local media landscape, when we talk about CBC North or Cabin Radio in Yellowknife and NNSL Media in the N.W.T., these organizations are very foundational to Northerners accessing news content and current events.
What we have seen in our region, especially in our smaller communities, is that a lot of information comes through Meta, social media platforms, through TikTok, now with Starlink. Within the last couple of years, a lot of Inuvialuit beneficiaries in the remote communities have Starlink over local internet providers because it is more cost-effective for them and they can access content quickly. We have learned that social media —
The Deputy Chair: I will ask you to wrap up soon, and I will let you answer questions. Since we don’t all know all the North as you do, I would like you to say exactly where your community resides. I think it is in the Northwest Territories, but are you all there? Just take a few seconds to wrap up, please.
Ms. Voudrach: Yes. The future of our media is that we have to maintain relationships with the northern broadcasters, the Inuit broadcasters and then social media across our own region.
The Inuvialuit settlement region is within the Northwest Territories and within the Beaufort Delta region of the N.W.T.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you for this geographic precision. It’s useful for all of us.
Now we will hear Ms. Manitok Thompson, for five minutes.
Manitok Thompson, Executive Director, Inuit Broadcasting Corporation: [Indigenous language spoken.] I will translate myself. [Indigenous language spoken.] Thank you. I’m very happy to be presenting to you today.
I am pleased to have this opportunity to address this committee. I am here today with Karen Prentice, the director of content and communication at IBC. I am the executive director of Inuit Broadcasting Corporation.
We have an office in Ottawa and an office with a studio in Iqaluit. We mainly produce for APTN.
All our productions are in Inuktitut and produced and filmed by Inuit. Sometimes, we hire non-Aboriginals as contractors. We are 70% Inuit-staffed.
We have a children’s show like Sesame Street, Takuginai, which is 30 years old, which is on DVD and sent to all communities each year.
We also have a phone-in show, Qanuq Isumavit, live on APTN starting in January until May. This is a political show. Sometimes we discuss COVID and other highlights in the political arena environment of the territory and the federal government, in Inuktitut.
Our production right now is Katijut, a youth show; Maqaitut, a hunting show; Archives, which is 40 years of archives being digitized — we’ve been filming since the 1970s in Inuktitut by Inuit; Ajungi, a mentoring show; and Ikparsaq, elders’ stories and family trees. Titaktut is a new music show coming up. All our shows are only in Inuktitut.
The history of the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation is a dramatic illustration of one such adaptation, and exemplifies both the capacity for creative change that is part of the Inuit heritage and the challenge faced by Indigenous peoples in the new millennium as they attempt to maintain and promote their languages and cultures.
In the 1970s, it was clear to the Inuit leadership that television, with its capacity to flood every living room in the Arctic with images from the consumer-driven South, represented a unique and potentially devastating threat to a culture already reeling from the impact of trade, education and religion.
When CBC introduced its Accelerated Coverage Plan, or ACP, in 1975, reaction from the Inuit community was swift and sharp. The ACP proposed to provide CBC television programming to all communities in Canada with populations of over 500. Since the objective of the ACP was to make “Canadian” programming — that is, a mixture of southern Canadian and American — available to all, no consideration was given to local access, programming in Aboriginal languages or a community’s right to control the local airwaves.
I just want to add that when we got television in my community in 1979, the local news on the TV was Detroit and Newfoundland.
Programming depicting southern attitudes, values, and behaviours proliferated in the North throughout the mid-1970s. Inuit and community leaders were quick to realize that this electronic tidal wave of alien images and information would lead to the deterioration of the Inuit language and culture and could disrupt the structures of traditional community life. We were very worried about that.
Inuit have successfully adapted to technological innovation several times throughout their history. Neither firearms nor snowmobiles are indigenous to the hunting culture. Clearly, television in the North was not going away; the challenge for the Inuit was to find a way of adapting this technology to their own ends, using television as a vehicle to protect their language rather than as an agent of its destruction.
The Inuit Broadcasting Corporation was created from the Inukshuk Project, a federally sponsored experiment in the late 1970s. Rudimentary television production facilities were installed in six northern communities, and teams of newly recruited Inuit trainees began to learn the fundamentals of TV production. In 1980, the Inukshuk Project began broadcasting. The project demonstrated that Inuit could successfully manage complex broadcasting projects and adapt sophisticated communications technology to meet their needs. In 1981, the CRTC granted a network television licence to the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, which is now ITK, and the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation was formed. After an initial period of production and consolidation, IBC aired its first program, a 90-minute special introducing the new network, on January 11, 1982, at midnight.
IBC then proposed the creation of a dedicated northern TV channel. A consortium consisting of six Aboriginal broadcasters, the N.W.T. and Yukon governments, the National Aboriginal Communications Society and the CBC Northern Service was formed. In January 1992, Television Northern Canada was launched, a truly northern pan-Arctic channel. In June 1997, the TVNC Board of Directors voted to establish a national Aboriginal television network. On September 1, 1999, the Aboriginal People’s Television Network, or APTN, signed on.
Since then, the amount of Inuit programming on APTN has declined, and IBC has struggled financially year after year to continue to produce high-quality television programming in all regions in the Inuktitut language. Problems caused by underfunding are staff turnover, no housing available, no subsidies, low wages, lack of training, lack of Inuktitut language skills, travel costs, resulting in lower quality and less programming and competition for skilled Inuit staff.
For my last little bit here, this message is from the elders that I talked to. I talked to a lot of elders before I came here to this table. They are telling me to tell you that CBC Radio in Inuktitut is their only source to hear what the world is doing or what the politics are about. There are no other news media for them to listen to in their language. This is from the unilingual elders.
Thank you very much for your time. I fumbled a bit. English is not my language.
The Deputy Chair: No, it was very clear. Thank you very much for your testimony.
Now we will hear Mr. Corey Larocque.
Corey Larocque, Managing Editor, Nunatsiaq News: Good morning, honourable senators.
Nunatsiaq News is the leading news source in Nunavut and the Nunavik region of northern Quebec. Nunatsiaq News is owned by Nortext Publishing, a private-sector family business. Nunatsiaq News publishes in English and Inuktitut. We often hear from our unilingual Inuit elders that they appreciate that our articles are published in Inuktitut.
Nunatsiaq News is an independent newspaper, which is part of a dying breed in Canada because of the challenges of a constantly shifting industry. That’s why I’m happy to share our story with you.
Nunatsiaq News celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2023. While our focus is increasingly online, we still publish a weekly print edition. In March 2020, we temporarily stopped the presses; more accurately, COVID-19 stopped the presses for us. We paused our print edition for three years, but I’m pleased to say that we revived it in January 2023.
Nunatsiaq News has a staff of 10 journalists in Iqaluit, Kuujjuaq, Ottawa and other parts of Canada. This year, we added a position in Kuujjuaq, Quebec, with funding from the Local Journalism Initiative. Support from the Local Journalism Initiative helps us with two reporter positions, so Parliament should be aware of how important this program is to us and many other Canadian newspapers.
While many newspapers are abandoning their bricks-and-mortar newsrooms, a physical newsroom is still part of our business plan. A fire destroyed our Iqaluit office in March of this year, but in October, we secured a temporary location in Iqaluit, a city where commercial and residential space is hard to find. The search for a permanent home in Iqaluit continues. We have an office here in Ottawa, and in Kuujjuaq, our Nunavik reporter works from a home office.
As our readers become more and more comfortable getting their news on their phones, tablets or laptops, our website is increasingly at the heart of what we do. The opportunities created by digital news mean there really isn’t the distinction between daily papers and weekly papers that was so clear just 20 years ago. Today, in 2024, Nunatsiaq News is essentially an online news service that also publishes a weekly digest of its stories in print. Digital news is our future.
We’re pleased that this committee is studying the local services provided by CBC and Radio-Canada. We are most affected by CBC in the online news environment, where CBC is a publicly funded direct competitor to our private-sector business. We’re eager to learn what this committee will recommend about how CBC can continue to explain Canada to Canadians as a broadcaster but leave room for private companies to thrive in the online news environment. We understand and support CBC’s role as the national public broadcaster. However, online, its local northern operation is our competition. We find competition for advertisers, news stories, readers and journalists.
Across Canada, the media landscape is perilous, and it’s getting more perilous. New challenges posed by online giants Facebook and Google make it even harder because they are siphoning off advertising from the federal, territorial and provincial governments. We know readers’ habits are changing. We’re doing what we can to hold on to readers and to grow readership.
We also compete with CBC when it comes to recruiting and retaining journalists. With its massive federal government support, CBC can offer compensation that exceeds ours. It routinely poaches employees from private-sector news organizations, including ours.
CBC’s newly self-defined mandate to be an online news source, in addition to being a radio and TV broadcaster, means it is pouring resources into bringing readers to its website. That takes readership away from private-sector news providers. It feels a bit like a predatory business practice, funded by the federal government.
In the North, newspapers are almost entirely online. The advertising revenue that supports them is based on readership numbers. The more people who read us, the more we can charge for ads and the healthier our business is. The more we have to compete with CBC’s online presence, the harder it is for us to get those readers and, as a result, the harder it is to generate revenue.
Like other newspapers, we don’t mind competition. There are other private-sector news organizations we compete with in the North. Competition is good for journalism. Canada’s newspaper industry needs more of it, not less. But CBC’s massive government support — $1.4 billion — means there isn’t a level playing field.
The question I hope this committee is considering is this: How much money should the federal government spend to support a national public broadcaster that competes with private-sector news organizations in local regional markets?
Thank you.
[Translation]
The Deputy Chair: I want to thank you all for your remarks. We’ll now open the floor to questions from the senators.
[English]
Senator Simons: Thank you all very much for your testimonies and, for those of you who travelled, for travelling to Ottawa to be with us.
I want to start with something Ms. Thompson said that caught my attention. It was about sending children’s programming out via DVD. I want to start by asking this so we understand. Although I will start with Ms. Thompson, I would like an answer from all three of you. What percentage of your audience has access to broadband and television, and what percentage is only served by radio or short-wave radio? Do people have access to functional internet, or is the reason you are sending out the DVDs because that’s the best way to get the information to people?
Karen Prentice, Director of Content and Communications, Inuit Broadcasting Corporation: We have been sending those out for a while now, and that is because the internet is not great up there. We’re leaning to USBs now because fewer people have DVD players, but that was the reason.
Since Starlink has come to the North, it has changed things, but that’s only been in the last few years. More and more families are getting Starlink, though, and that is making a difference. That is the current situation, which is changing really rapidly.
In the last five years, not a very high percentage would have had reliable internet, and it is still a problem. We rely upon the internet for our live show. We broadcast it on Facebook Live as well. We have problems with it sometimes.
Starlink has made a very big impact on that. It’s gotten a lot better, actually, and it is apparently fairly affordable. I wouldn’t have the percentage exactly. In elders’ homes, what percentage of them have the internet? Quite a few of them now, do you think?
Ms. Thompson: Yes, every home has some internet, because they have youth in the house. We have a lot of unilingual elders who don’t use the internet, but I know the young people will translate to the elders what is happening.
Senator Simons: I am trying to understand to what extent people still watch television in the North, to what extent people are using radio and to what extent the internet is prevalent.
Ms. Prentice: As Manitok has mentioned, television and radio are definitely more prevalent for the older population.
Ms. Thompson: I’m a lip reader. That’s why I’m not understanding.
Senator Simons: I’m sorry, I’m wearing a mask. My apologies.
Ms. Prentice: The question was this: In the house, what is the main mode of communication — TV, radio or internet?
Ms. Thompson: When the elders listen to the news, it is from CBC, but it is one-sided. We all know that. That’s a problem.
CBC Radio is the vehicle for elders to listen to the news, as is Nunatsiaq News, which is a very good paper to read. We have elders who are reading the newspaper in Inuktut, but a lot of them are listening to the radio to hear what is happening, as well as the TV. CBC has a little news channel for what is happening around the world, and local news and stuff called CBC Igalaaq. My brother, who lives in Coral Harbour, is 77 years old. He doesn’t like the CBC because he likes to know what is happening in the real world from different journalists, so he tends to read Nunatsiaq News, which is more open in their opinions.
But if you go into an Inuit home, the CBC Radio is on early in the morning and all day until 5 in the evening. I know it’s in the Inuvialuit language in the western Arctic. They have a channel for their CBC News in the evening. That’s where they get the news.
For people who are like my brother who are more political — and my uncle who is 80 years old — they know that CBC is biased or is controlled by the government, whoever has the money. They are aware of that, so a lot of them turn from CBC to Nunatsiaq News to see what other opinions are out there.
I don’t have a filter. I’ll just say what I want to say.
The Deputy Chair: Mr. Larocque and Ms. Voudrach, if you can briefly answer Senator Simons about who is watching what and the internet penetration in the North.
Mr. Larocque: I don’t have a specific percentage. I would be guessing what percentage of homes have the internet, but I think it’s very high.
When I took over four years ago, I was surprised by how connected Northerners were and how much they’re using the internet to get their information in all forms — streamed TV and online news. They’re very internet savvy, and like Manitok said, because of intergenerational households, one person with a phone feeds the entire house.
Facebook, we’ve discovered, has been the big thing. That’s where Inuit and Northerners talk to each other. Each community has a Facebook page. The stuff they share on their Facebook page is showing that a lot of people are engaged that way.
The Deputy Chair: What about the situation in your community regarding internet access? Ms. Voudrach, maybe a few remarks on the internet access to your region.
Ms. Voudrach: In our region, yes, Starlink is making a lot of changes, and it’s improving a lot of people’s access.
I still get a lot of feedback from elders in the communities. In this community, especially here in Inuvik, it’s more of the hub community for Inuvialuit. It’s the largest population in our region, so they still want to see our language and our programming on local cable television. I think a lot of people miss that.
We do have a radio show, Tusaavik, that’s from Dodie Malegana, who is an Inuvialuit speaker. She has her radio that comes on in the afternoon. She’s been able to broadcast a lot of our archives. We have hundreds of hours of raw tape and audio archives. A lot of it is in the language. We’re trying to find new ways to bring those archives out and have them accessible. The internet is improving in our region, so our goals in the next while are going to be to create an online database for those archives to live so that Inuvialuit can have access to them whenever they want.
We usually do have a local CBC reporter stationed here in Inuvik, and then, sometimes, if there’s funding from them and they initiate it, APTN will also have one. I believe the only APTN reporter, a video journalist, is stationed in Yellowknife right now. They’re meant to cover the entire Northwest Territories. It makes it hard to build relationships with local video journalists, especially CBC reporters.
Right now, we have a local Inuvialuit CBC video journalist, which has been really cool. His name is Dez Loreen, and he used to manage here at ICS as well. That was very good for representation.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much, Ms. Voudrach.
Senator Quinn: Thank you for being here this morning, and thank you for joining us by video.
I’m trying to get a feel for CBC and its reach in the North. Is CBC Northern Service throughout the entire Arctic area? I’m seeing nods.
It’s really interesting to hear the specific services that are there for the local communities and the issue of language, et cetera. Are there partnerships that the CBC Northern Service needs to tap into to extract the stories and participation of those people who are involved in the news? How do we leverage that CBC Northern Service reach by accelerating the participation of Northerners in the actual broadcasts that are provided by the CBC?
Ms. Thompson: I don’t know if this answers your question, but I do know that, in each community, there is a CBC reporter. This person is a unilingual person a lot of times, and they just report on the community news. Each community has news or highlights or something, so they put this person on. They have a contact person in each community. I know in Nunavik, northern Quebec, they have that, probably. In the west and Arctic, I don’t know, but I do know that, in our territory, there are people who are reporting through CBC from their communities.
Mr. Larocque: I don’t know if there are possibilities for partnerships between CBC and private-sector news organizations. In the North, the landscape is very similar to what it would be in the urban South. CBC is in competition with the private-sector news organizations, including their broadcast competitors, CTV or Global, but also with the newspapers and radio stations. You wouldn’t expect the CBC and The Globe and Mail to form partnerships to cover news in Toronto. Similarly, I don’t see a way to form partnerships between CBC and Nunatsiaq News. They’re separate entities, and they obviously have separate budgets and different resources. They have their way of doing things, and other organizations have their ways of doing things. I don’t know how you would find room for partnerships.
Senator Quinn: Ms. Voudrach, do you have any input?
Ms. Voudrach: I think the key word there that was used a few times was “extract.”
I also agree with Mr. Larocque that it’s hard to see how the CBC could partner with organizations like us. ICS is a non-profit organization. We don’t just focus on news and current events but also cultural promotion, preservation, documentation and just sharing content between Inuvialuit. The things that Inuvialuit are interested in about hearing about might not match up with what CBC is reporting. That’s where we kind of come in. We fill that gap.
We have had times when other private, organizations like Cabin Radio — they are coming up in a couple of weeks to sit with us and look through our archives and bureau because they’re working with the N.W.T. government on a documentary film about child and family services and things like that, so they’re going to come and check out our archives. We can consult with them on important people within our Inuvialuit organizations, like our leadership — who they should talk to about the state of child and family services in our region.
We can consult with those who are looking to tell stories, but I don’t think it would be wise for us — and I don’t think our people would be very happy — if we were to basically provide resources to the CBC to help them tell our stories. It’s backwards. It’s not what we’re here for.
Senator Quinn: Let me come at it slightly differently then. You mentioned that the CBC is publicly funded with a lot of money. We have the biggest area of our country — the North — that has a presence of the CBC. Should we rethink this? This committee is looking at regional services of the CBC. If we looked at the North as a special segment of our country, should the mandate of the CBC be changed so that they become a facilitator feed, if you will, and get out of the competitor thing, but be a conveyor of information that’s generated at those local levels so there’s a broader exposure of that information, or should we simply say to the CBC Northern Service, “You’re no longer in the game, and the local people will provide the information.” You have a network of the CBC, and is it better to rethink how they operate, what they do, and get them out of the competitive game and be a facilitator of information sharing?
The Deputy Chair: I will ask you to answer briefly, because we still have three people who want to ask questions. Please answer the second question briefly, which is quite relevant.
Ms. Thompson: I’m speaking for that Inuit population that is unilingual, our elders. They have been receiving one-sided stories from the CBC for years. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the way it is. If they had a choice of a different TV channel or a radio channel that was in their language, they would be switching channels pretty fast.
The CBC can be funded by advertisements — why isn’t it? — like CTV, or other channels that give you broader broadcasting.
I know that when Pierre Poilievre went to visit my territory, the CBC did not announce his visit to the territory, nor did they interview him. The elders didn’t know what he said, and that’s discrimination. It is. They were not allowed to hear one of the leaders of Canada who visited the territory just because he was of a different party.
Inuit want to be part of Canada and want to hear everything too, but right now, their only choice is CBC Radio, and they don’t want to lose it. At least, they get some news through it. The CBC should be like other TV channels in Canada and be funded by advertisements so that they’re not just telling one-sided stories to the public.
Mr. Larocque: I would agree with that. Making the CBC more reliant on advertising funding and less reliant on public money might change the approach.
I don’t like the idea of telling the CBC to get out of the game in the North. I don’t think we should be telling anybody to get out of the game. We need more people in the game, but we need to have a level playing field, and right now, the thing that’s hurting us is $1.4 billion going into one organization while the rest of us are scrambling to find the revenue that we need to do our work.
Ms. Voudrach: I agree with the funding. I think that a lot of the northern production organizations and media organizations rely on the Northern Aboriginal Broadcasting fund from Canadian Heritage, federal money, as well as territorial and our local Inuvialuit government. Canadian Heritage has said for years that the pool of applicants and people they fund is getting bigger while the pot is getting smaller. Whereas we used to receive over $300,000 a year from Canadian Heritage — several years ago, I would say maybe ten years ago — now, it’s $190,000. So it has been significantly reduced, and it’s been that way as long as I’ve been here, since 2016, and probably longer. That number has not changed. If anything, it has been reduced. It’s not allowing for us to plan for the future, grow or invest in capacity building in the media. For our people to hear our stories from our voice and interpret it our way, we need more Inuit Inuvialuit in media. They need to be trained, and that takes money and time. The CBC has a lot of money and a lot of time on the air, so I hope to see that become balanced out.
Senator Cardozo: Thank you to all our witnesses for being part of this. There are a number of interesting issues that you’ve raised.
First, Ms. Thompson, could you share a little more with us about your experience with the CBC and other news? I understand you’ve been a Member of the Legislative Assembly, or MLA, and minister in the N.W.T. and Nunavut. How did you find the coverage? As a politician getting your views out to the public, how did you find it with the CBC and other media?
Ms. Thompson: My father was unilingual. He passed away at the age of 92. He was a loyal person to the Nunatsiaq News and he read it a lot because I was in politics and he was not receiving the information he needed on a broader opinion with politics. He would turn to Nunatsiaq News as a unilingual person.
The CBC has always been very liberal in their views, promoting liberal politicians. I don’t mean the Liberal Party; I mean liberally minded people. My family, before colonization and in colonization, have been more conservative-minded people. I’m not talking about party politics. We follow the consensus style. We don’t have the party system in our blood. We don’t appreciate a news reporter telling us just one-sided stories. We don’t appreciate that. We would like to hear both sides.
Over the years, as a politician, I sometimes felt that what I wanted to say was filtered out or censored just because I had a different opinion than that of the broadcaster. I have been in politics before division, after division, and I’m still involved with Nunavut politics, very much so. The people that I talk to are 80 years old, 82 years old, 65, 70. They’re unilingual people, and it is a shame that the only news that they’re getting is what the broadcaster wants you to hear. It’s a discrimination to my race. We want to be like any person in the world and be able to hear other opinions, and for that reason, we are very happy to have Nunatsiaq News in our territory.
But, right now, CBC Radio is the only voice that speaks the news to the elders, and that’s what they have. Maybe if they were funded differently, maybe they would broaden their views and start introducing us to the rest of the world that has different views. It’s been very censored.
Senator Cardozo: You don’t feel they bring on enough people of various views to their radio shows to give full voice to the variety of views.
Ms. Thompson: They select who they want to hear, who they want speaking on the radio. That’s a fact. They select what they want the public to hear, and that’s why I feel that CBC television should be able to survive with advertisements. We’re suffering as a non-profit for IBC funding. Canadian Heritage has steadily decreased since 1990, and with a 124.28% inflation rate, IBC now receives less than what they did in 1990. We’ve never had a raise with inflation. It never changed for 30 years. And here is CBC, funded fully. We’re suffering as non-profits.
Senator Cuzner: If I could step back just a bit, with our local CBC Radio station, we start the morning off at 6:00 to 8:30 with a local broadcast, very much connected with the community. From 8:30 to noon, we go to the national programming, Matt Galloway, Tom Power, what have you. From noon to one is provincial; there’s a provincial show. Then we go back to national, and then back to local again. What would the CBC sound like in your communities? Does it follow a similar format with local and then back and forth with national programming? Is that sort of what takes place?
Ms. Thompson: In the morning, CBC reports more national stuff, and then they have across-the-territory highlights of news. I think it’s at twelve o’clock and six o’clock or something. The morning show is different topics. It might be a bill that’s coming forward in the federal government, or the MP might say something or MLAs or premier, territorial news in the morning.
Senator Cuzner: Is that local or national?
Ms. Thompson: It’s mostly Nunavut news that affects Nunavut. But for the war in Ukraine, Russia, Israel and stuff, they have that section in the morning news.
In the afternoon, they have more stories, hunting stories and stuff. Around three o’clock, it’s northern Quebec news, and they interview different people. They are very good at national news and international news in Inuktitut. Northern Quebec is very good with that.
Around four or five o’clock is Kivalliq news, which is my region, and it’s mostly local hunters and seamstresses, and what’s happening, workshops and stuff. And then they have Inuvialuit, western Arctic, later after that, because their hours are different from ours. They have it in their language, which is their news.
There is coverage of international news and national news from CBC TV Igalaaq and radio that you will see on TV and listen on radio.
Senator Cuzner: Do they access the national programs like The Current in the morning, and Q? Do they broadcast those as well?
Ms. Thompson: We hear that. We hear the English radio, because it’s not Inuktitut all day. There’s Inuktitut for this section, and then they have English, The Current. They do have that on the radio.
Senator Cuzner: You shared your concern about their lack of diversity of opinion. Would most of that come from the national programming, or would it come from those regional programs as well?
Ms. Thompson: Those would be interpreted on what is happening on national news. It would be an interpretation in our language. A lot of times, CBC will call me, if there’s a bill coming forward from the federal government, gun legislation, whatever you guys have, to tell the public what it means. So, yes, they do have that.
Senator Cuzner: Mr. Larocque, in response to Senator Quinn’s question, you said that CBC should rely more on advertising, but in your opening comments, you said that CBC is a competitor and hurting your publication because they’re taking monies from your online. Could you square that for the committee?
Mr. Larocque: Yes, I’ll try. I’m imagining where they would be going after advertising, like a private enterprise. We compete with other private sector news organizations that don’t have $1.4 billion backing. If they had less government backing, you would see a reliance on advertising in the conventional private sector sense, and I think we would welcome that because we already face that. I think that’s the way to square it, is if they were to shift their revenue generation to more of an advertising base.
Senator Cuzner: Not be a public broadcaster, jump right into being a private broadcaster.
Mr. Larocque: I don’t know. With the mandate that it has — and this is for people like you to decide — I think that they probably need some kind of public support. If it was privatized or defunded completely, they wouldn’t be able to fulfill the mandate that they’ve got, and that is an important mandate. In my remarks, I said that we support that idea as a national broadcaster. It’s at the local level that we’re worried. Maybe I’m suggesting a hybrid system where they could apply that $1.4 billion to just their national mandate, explaining Canada to Canadians, and leave the local markets or compete in the local markets with the other private sector players.
Senator Cuzner: But you said that is hurting you now because they are competing in the local markets. You said that is hurting now.
Mr. Larocque: That’s one of the things that’s hurting us. In that their local news — in preparing for this presentation, I went through their website and looked at the advertisers. If those advertisers weren’t advertising with CBC, we might have a shot at them.
The Deputy Chair: Senator Cuzner, I’m sorry, but I have to cut you off. We will extend the first hour a bit so that Senator Dasko can ask a question. Thank you, everybody, and I’m sorry we’re short of time. It is very interesting.
Senator Dasko: I had several questions, but one of them was just asked by Senator Cuzner with respect to the competition for advertising, and I think you have explained that.
My first question has to do with some of the operations of IBC. I’m wondering if you could clarify your relationship with APTN. Do they take all of your products and services, or some, or how does that relationship operate? I’m really not quite sure.
Ms. Prentice: Currently, we have three shows. We’re a television producer. We, like the Inuvialuit Communications Society, were one of the ones that helped form APTN. APTN is now its own entity, and we have a seat on the board, basically. We sell licences to our products to APTN. We’re a broadcaster, and then they buy our product, basically, and put it on the television. So it goes on APTN.
We are also in talks with the new Uvagut TV, which is an Inuit television station. We produce content and sell it to them. They don’t really have an obligation to put our television shows on their station. They have done so, but they also tell us that they will no longer broadcast our children’s show, for example. We have had it for many years, and they only want shows for a maximum of five years. That is an example. It is that type of thing.
So we’re competing with other broadcasters. As my colleague said, there is a lot more of them now, so we are trying to compete and have the best products so we can basically sell the licences to APTN and other broadcasters.
Senator Dasko: You are operating outside of the APTN arrangement. You have programs and services independent of your relationship with them.
Ms. Prentice: Exactly. Most of our products do go to APTN. Basically, they need our language content because we produce only in Inuktitut, and they have a high threshold for content in Indigenous languages. However, they have no direct obligation to even take our programs.
Senator Dasko: Right. So you are never competing with them. You are operating independently.
Ms. Prentice: That’s an interesting question too, because they do more and more in-house programming. Technically, we shouldn’t be, but they are not only a broadcaster but also a producer. So we compete with them, essentially, for their own shows that they are producing in-house.
Senator Dasko: And you are in the same markets as they are?
Ms. Prentice: Yes. There is only so much air time and only so many really good slots on television, so in a way. There is APTN North and there is APTN National. It is changing now because they have a language component as well, so there will be two different stations. The short answer is that, yes, in some ways, we are competing for what time our shows are on and things like that. The good thing we have is, again, the Inuktitut language, and a lot of their programs are in French and English, so we have a leg up in that sense.
Senator Dasko: I just want to get back to the topic of the CBC. It was mentioned — I’m not sure exactly by who — that the CBC has reporters in each community. I just wonder if you could expand on what that means. Are they reporters for radio or television? Which communities are they in? How does that operate?
Ms. Thompson: Most of these people are unilingual people who are just reporting about the hockey team that came into town or the polar bears in town. It is just specific to CBC Radio. It is just in Inuktitut. These are not people on TV or anything like that. These are just people who pick up their phone and report to CBC about the weather, the polar bears coming in, sports that are happening and what meeting happened in their town. It is at that level. I know one unilingual elder who is a reporter for CBC Radio, and he doesn’t report anywhere else. He just goes to CBC.
Senator Dasko: Are they freelancers? Is that the kind of status they have?
Ms. Thompson: They are not freelancers. They are just picked out of the community and given a little; I don’t know how much they make. It wouldn’t be much. They just report once every two weeks or so from their community on their community happenings. They are not writing anything.
Senator Dasko: They couldn’t be full-time staff if they are working once every two weeks, right?
Ms. Thompson: No, they are not staff. They are just selected from that community to hear what is happening in their communities.
Ms. Prentice: In contrast, the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation used to have five stations in the North throughout Nunavut, and we used to produce television from all of those places. It used to be broadcast on TVNC, which changed to APTN. We used to do news and had actual stations. There were about three to five people working for IBC at that time. As Manitok mentioned, that was back in the 1990s. It’s been reduced and reduced since then. We just don’t have the funding to do that as a non-profit. But it has happened in the past. But the reporters are just a little bit of community news that are updated like that. It is not investigative.
The Deputy Chair: We’ll have to interrupt and give the last word to Ms. Voudrach. I believe she wants to answer you, Senator Dasko. Then we have to stop, because we are past 10 o’clock.
Ms. Voudrach: I wanted to give a bit of context to our region, because out here in the N.W.T., we have CBC reporters in the larger communities. In Inuvik, we have a video journalist who is CBC staff, either part-time or full-time. In Yellowknife, they have multiple CBC staff members for radio and television, as does Hay River and Fort Smith, I think. Those are the larger centres in the different regions of the N.W.T.
Usually, the reporters we get have routinely been nonlocal. They have been sent up from Yellowknife, Fort Smith or even from the South, where they were trained in journalism. Right now, our video journalist is Inuvialuit from here, and that’s good, but this is the first of — I don’t know when the last time that was. Yellowknife — again, they are mainly all non-Indigenous, non-Inuvialuit or non-Northern, or they were raised in the more south of the North.
Senator Dasko: [Technical difficulties] television; is that what you said?
Ms. Voudrach: Television and radio.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much. That brings an end to our panel. Colleagues, please join me in thanking our witnesses for joining us and taking the time to share their perspectives with us this morning.
[Translation]
Honourable senators, we’re continuing the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications’ study of local services provided by CBC/Radio-Canada.
We’re joined by Christian Ouaka, Executive Director of the Association des francophones du Nunavut. He has just arrived from Northern Canada. By videoconference, we’re joined by Audrey Fournier, Executive Director of the Fédération franco-ténoise, which represents the francophones in the Northwest Territories.
[English]
We also welcome Jen Gerson an independent journalist at The Line. Welcome to all of you.
[Translation]
We’ll start with the five-minute opening remarks. Ms. Fournier will speak first, followed by Mr. Ouaka and then Ms. Gerson. We’ll then open the floor to questions.
Ms. Fournier, you have the floor.
Audrey Fournier, Executive Director, Fédération franco-ténoise: Good morning and thank you. Honourable senators, thank you for inviting us to speak today about Radio-Canada’s role in the Northwest Territories and its importance to the francophone community in the Northwest Territories. My name is Audrey Fournier. I’m the executive director of the Fédération franco-ténoise. As the deputy chair explained, our organization represents the francophone communities in the Northwest Territories. Since 1978, we’ve been advocating for the interests of francophones in the Northwest Territories and supporting the community’s development and vitality.
I’ll start with a quick overview of Radio-Canada’s coverage of the Northwest Territories.
Since 1991, Radio-Canada radio has been broadcast exclusively in Yellowknife, the capital. This has left around 25% of the francophone population without access to French-language content. For 30 years, residents tuned in to broadcasts from Montreal. They had access to content far removed from their reality, with no coverage of their local reality.
In 2022, the signal was changed. Yellowknife now receives broadcasts from Edmonton, Alberta. This change has significantly improved local coverage and the representation of our issues.
In 2018, the hiring of a video journalist in Yellowknife marked a turning point for French-language news in our area. This primarily web-based video journalist produces local content also shared across the country, giving new visibility to the realities of the Northwest Territories. Although the amount of content remains limited, this initiative has given our issues a greater voice.
In our opinion, Radio-Canada plays a crucial role in maintaining the vitality of our communities. By providing French-language content that captures our realities, it helps preserve our language and identity, especially among young people. Broadcasting local content also helps newcomers integrate into our communities by giving them a sense of belonging.
This local content is also crucial in emergencies. Yet a number of challenges remain in terms of access and the representation of our realities. First, seeing, hearing and getting exposed to relatable content that reflects our environment and key issues helps build a shared identity. As a result, our young people learn that French isn’t just a language learned at school or spoken at home. It’s also a language that provides information, entertainment, laughter, emotion and a way to live our daily lives.
The Deputy Chair: I’ll stop you there for a moment. We’re having Internet issues. It’s nothing new. I imagine that you’re in the Northwest Territories.
Ms. Fournier: Yes.
The Deputy Chair: For the translation, you gave us a document. This document is available. Sorry, but we’ll move on to the next witness and come back to you later. We did hear part of the beginning. However, after the video journalist, the situation went south. It isn’t you. This is one of the issues facing the North. We’re experiencing it right now.
Mr. Ouaka, I’ll ask you to proceed since you’re here. Normally, there aren’t any sound issues.
Christian Ouaka, Executive Director, Association des francophones du Nunavut: Thank you, Madam Deputy Chair. Honourable senators, on behalf of the board of directors of the Association des francophones du Nunavut, I’d like to thank you for giving us the opportunity to speak today on behalf of the Franco-Nunavois community about Radio-Canada services in our region.
For 43 years, the association has striven not only to defend the language rights of the territory’s francophones — who make up approximately 4% of Nunavut’s population and more than 15% of the population in the capital city of Iqaluit — but also to provide a wide range of community services in several areas, including French-language media and communications.
As a community development organization, the subject of this meeting is particularly close to our hearts, as it touches on both the defence of our language rights and the promotion of our cultural identity. In support of the Official Languages Act, the Broadcasting Act places Radio-Canada at the centre of the country’s media and cultural articulations, and in particular of our northern territories, which face very specific issues. In such a context, Radio-Canada represents an essential tool for linking francophone communities across the country.
We recognize its fundamental role as the guardian of Canadian cultural sovereignty, especially in the digital age, where the media universe is increasingly dominated by global players. For us francophones living in Nunavut, Radio-Canada is much more than just a source of information. It is, or should be, a bridge between our northern realities and the rest of the country. Yet, despite Radio-Canada’s mandate, which explicitly includes the obligation to respond to the needs of official language minority communities, we find that our realities and our voices are often absent from its programming. Simply put, we’re not seeing ourselves reflected.
Francophones in Nunavut do not have access to local French-language television on a daily basis. The digital platform ICI Grand Nord, which features news from the three territories and sometimes from the entire circumpolar region, only marginally reflects the specific concerns of our community. In fact, our issues are often drowned out by stories dominated by a Quebec-Ontario affinity.
We therefore have the impression that our stories, our voices and our realities are often made invisible. This media marginalization is not without consequences. Access to relevant, localized news in French is essential to maintain social ties, nurture a sense of belonging and encourage active participation in community life. However, we’re still a long way from achieving that in Nunavut.
These challenges are anything but new, and generations of francophones before us have faced them too. To address these shortcomings, our association has had to organize itself over the years to fill the media void. With limited resources, we’ve developed two community media outlets that play an essential role in our daily lives. Our community radio station CFRT, which has been on the air in Iqaluit since 1994, is the third most listened to radio station in northern and western Canada, with an average audience of 3,000 listeners. Our bimonthly newspaper Le Nunavoix, which we’ve been publishing since 2002, manages to reach 500 subscribers with each printing.
While they are encouraging, these initiatives are not enough to fully meet the growing needs of our community. Active and diverse francophone immigration fuels the vitality of the territory, but it also requires inclusive media coverage that reflects the plurality of experiences and backgrounds.
The situation is made even more fragile by potential budget cuts at CBC/Radio-Canada. If these resource cuts affect Radio-Canada in the North, they risk further degrading access to relevant information for our community. Similarly, Radio-Canada’s consultations with francophone communities, while improving, often remain informative rather than participatory.
These consultations must change to become true spaces for dialogue with the communities. We believe it’s time to refocus Radio-Canada’s mandate to make it a true reflection of the Francophonie in all its diversity.
For Nunavut, we feel it’s imperative that Radio-Canada increase its human and technical resources in our territory. We have a single journalist covering 2 million square kilometres.
We insist on the crucial importance of strengthening our community media capacities, as they play a very important role in our community and already collaborate with Radio-Canada.
Finally, Radio-Canada has a national responsibility, which includes reflecting the diversity and richness of the Canadian Francophonie in all its forms and accents. It’s time to make it clear that Radio-Canada is a national institution serving all francophone communities, including our own in Nunavut and the Far North. Thank you.
[English]
Jen Gerson, Independent Journalist, The Line, as an individual: Thank you very much for having me. For those who may not be aware, I’m an independent journalist who co-founded an organization called The Line through Substack, and I provide commentary and also a platform for other people who wish to offer thoughtful commentary to Canadians. We’re generally perceived as being sort of centre, centre right, although we are certainly open to a wide variety of voices here.
I think that I have distinguished myself and put myself very much at odds with many other conservatives in this country in being a supporter of the CBC, perhaps because I’m based in Calgary, not Ontario. I have a slightly different perspective on the importance of the CBC, particularly to local markets in the country.
I have been a general assignment reporter at the Calgary Herald, and I have been working in media, usually as a reporter, for more than 20 years. One thing I have been able to see in my employment, particularly with PostMedia in the past, is my entire career has been marked by a collapse in reporting capability, a collapse in media coverage. Over the course of my relatively short career, I have watched as news deserts have grown and coverage areas have shrunk and shrunk and shrunk.
The CBC has an opportunity to respond to what I consider a market failure because of the unique cultural and economic layout of the country. I am not confident — in fact, I know that the private sector can no longer compete in the local news sphere of the economy, or it cannot compete at the rate that is necessary to create an informed populace across the country. I would say, as an independent media journalist, not a single independent media outlet has managed to figure out a way to function in these spaces. We have not been able to figure out a way to exist in the local media market in an economically sustainable way to an adequate degree.
There is an opportunity for an organization like the CBC to fill this space, and I think that there is an opportunity to examine the needs and seriously examine whether or not the CBC is fulfilling those needs. The answer at this point, I think is, broadly speaking, no, and there is an opportunity to seriously examine the CBC’s mandate and ask whether or not the CBC as an institution can be made fit for purpose in a radically new media environment than anything that has existed previously.
A slight aside: One thing that people have asked me a couple of times in the past is, how do you make a marriage work? The only answer that I have ever been able to come up with in terms of how to make a marriage work is alignment of values and goals. I think that that’s true in a lot of aspects of life, and when we’re talking about media coverage and the importance of journalism to local markets, I think it is more important than in marriages even. You need an alignment of values between the people covering a community and the outlooks of the people who live in the community, and you need an alignment of goals. You need a clear mandate, a clear expectation of what is being covered and why, and everybody needs to be kind of rowing in the same direction.
Right now, I think that we as taxpayers have failed to communicate to the CBC what we are expecting of it. We have given them a very over-broad and very vague mandate, which has led to a lot of dispersed energy and wasted energy on things that don’t matter a lot anymore but maybe mattered 20 years ago. I think we have been unclear with the CBC in terms of what kind of journalism and what kind of journalistic values we are expecting of it. As a result, you have a CBC that’s become a very massive, very bureaucratic organization, and a very centralized one.
The second thing I would say is that alignment of values matters. We need to be very clear about what the journalistic values we are expecting from a taxpayer-funded organization are. We don’t want those journalistic values dictated to us by Columbia University or New York University or whatever is coming out of California. We want journalistic values that are locally created and understood and in alignment with the communities that are being served. That also creates some openings and some opportunities for understanding that perhaps the journalistic values in Toronto are going to be slightly different than the journalistic values in Red Deer or Lethbridge. That is okay, but that means that you need to have a pretty decentralized organization where local organizations and local media have a lot of control over the types of shows they are producing, the types of people they are hiring and the types of content they are putting out into the world.
Looking at the current environment that we’re in, I don’t think the CBC is an institution that is fit for purpose, and it is an opportunity for a really significant overhaul and mandate review.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you so much.
I will give the floor to Senator Simons, who has to leave. She has a question to ask to you, Ms. Gerson. Then we’ll see how the communication is with the Northwest Territories, but I don’t think it has changed. I know we are doing a bit of a reversal here and changing, but we will give the floor to Senator Simons.
Senator Simons: Ms. Gerson, you testified before us — I think it was on Bill C-11 rather than Bill C-18 — and you, at that time, provided a prescription for what you would like to see the CBC doing in terms of helping local podcasters and helping local journalists. We just heard from a panel of witnesses from Nunavut and the Northwest Territories who were very dubious about the capacity of the CBC to function as a partner. I don’t think people in Toronto and Montreal understand the crisis of regional journalism, even in cities as large as Calgary or Vancouver. How do you think we could make that marriage work?
Ms. Gerson: I think it’s a hard process, and I think there has to be a process of rebuilding trust between the CBC and the local communities that they serve.
Again, I’m talking about this from an outsider’s perspective. I only know what I can see from the outside, and I can see, for example, that news coverage in Calgary has collapsed, even in the ten years that I’ve been working in journalism here. There is still some, but it is not what it was, and Calgary is a major city. It’s a city of more than a million people, and I’ve seen the collapse. I’m sure you, Ms. Simons, have seen the collapse, similarly, in Edmonton. This is no longer a Medicine Hat, Alberta, problem, or an interior B.C. problem. This is now coming into the major cities.
How are these people going to be informed if you don’t have something resembling some kind of journalistic outlet that has a professional standard? I think what you are going to see is a retreat of the populace into what I call “dark forests” — WhatsApp groups, closed and private Facebook groups, Discord channels and these sorts of things — people informed by gossip and people informed by a kind of mob mentality.
Sometimes that’s fine. If you’re just sharing the local sports scores on your WhatsApp group, who cares? But you don’t need to go back through history very long to see what happens to a population that is informed solely by the local gossip mill with no standard and with no expectation of clarity or accuracy. That leads to a very difficult and ungovernable population in very short order. I think it’s a major problem, and I think it’s a major problem for conservatives.
That doesn’t mean that the CBC as it exists now is fit for purpose or can serve as an effective buffer to that problem, but it does mean that you need to consider what you’re doing if you’re seriously talking about shutting that institution down.
My prescription for what I would like to see the CBC become is one that is not competitive with the private sector at all and does not see itself as competitive with the private sector. I would like the CBC to understand itself from top to bottom as a service, a service provider — not one that is imposing a value on Canada to Canadians but, rather, one that sees itself from the bottom up as a service provider to the local communities they’re in.
What I would like to see a new mandate involve for the CBC would be — look, part of their job should be training. It’s going to have to be training if we want them to function in local news. It is going to have to be training. Part of the function should be doing workshops on how to do podcasts, workshops on how to help people report the news in a responsible manner, workshops on how to do fact checking so that the people going into their communities and starting their own blogs or starting their own podcasts or contributing to the local WhatsApp group can do so from a place of having some kind of institutional basis and knowledge.
I think that kind of a CBC that is deeply entrenched and enmeshed in their local communities — which is what the heart of local journalism should be about — is one that can rebuild trust with those local communities and function within those local communities. It requires not only a significant mandate shift, but it requires a mindset shift, and it’s going to require a training mandate.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you.
[Translation]
Senator Clement: Thank you to all the witnesses. I’m going to direct my question to Mr. Ouaka, but I thank Ms. Fournier for the meeting I had with her in Yellowknife this year, which really gave me a better perspective on the North.
We’ll now go even further north with Mr. Ouaka. You used the term “Quebec-Ontario.” I’m a senator from Ontario and for me those two things don’t go together, but I understand that the northern perspective is different.
You said that Radio-Canada’s programming doesn’t really reflect your voices, especially because of the plurality of them and because francophone immigration has taken place. Could you tell us a little more about that?
You talked about consultations not being adequate. Could you describe what real consultations would look like to you, in practical terms?
You said the cuts will affect you. Ideally, what would you like to see? You mentioned technical and human resources. What would a more perfect picture for the North look like?
Mr. Ouaka: Thank you, Senator. On the question of the Quebec-Ontario affinity, in Nunavut, the main points that connect us to the South are Quebec and Ontario. Generally speaking, we only get news from those regions. Take our community radio, for example, and the Radio-Canada newscast we get every morning. We have a partnership with Radio-Canada so we can receive the newscast on the radio. This newscast comes to us from Quebec, with news that is certainly national in scope but still anchored in Quebec. Other news also comes to us, and it’s about the Ottawa area, with everything that’s happening on the Hill.
Local news in French is definitely non-existent where we live. We have a TV newscast, but it’s not in French, it’s in Inuktitut. As Ms. Thompson said a little earlier, that’s a way to connect with unilingual people in the territory. However, for francophones in the territory, there’s a gap. We don’t get to see each other on TV or understand other people’s stories.
The other factor is immigration. Over the past five to 10 years, immigration to Nunavut has increased significantly. According to the latest census, immigration is on the rise. Many immigrants arriving in Nunavut are unable to obtain information directly in French. Certainly, our community media outlets, Le Nunavoix and CFRT, play a key role in the community. In addition to these, there is a gap with the national public broadcaster. A journalist arrived in the territory at the same time as I did. She tries to cover the news as best she can, but there is a gap, and that’s where the community media outlets come in supplement the information. They have created this complementarity with the national broadcaster, but there are still gaps being felt.
When it comes to human and technical resources, having a single journalist for a territory as large as Nunavut represents a Herculean task. She can’t travel to every community at the same time. She tries to cover as many communities as possible, but the coverage falls short. We experience that on a daily basis in the territory. We don’t have access to news. We take the news we do get and run with it. Other media, both private and community, can provide news. However, for francophones who speak French only as a working or spoken language, it’s not easy to read the news in English or Inuktitut.
Radio-Canada could certainly play a bigger role in that, or allow our community media outlets to top off its efforts.
Senator Clement: Have you said that to Radio-Canada?
Mr. Ouaka: We’ve had consultations with Radio-Canada. Personally, the last one we had with a Radio-Canada team was about two years ago. We gave them that information. Once again, to come back to the consultations, we very often get the impression that we’re just receiving information and that we have no say in decision-making about our communities. This has an impact on us. We don’t feel heard or included in the discussion. We just receive information.
Senator Clement: Thank you.
The Deputy Chair: Excellent. Ms. Fournier, if you have a more stable connection, you may continue.
Ms. Fournier: In 2018, Radio-Canada hired a videojournalist in Yellowknife, which marked a turning point for French-language news in our region. This person broadcasts primarily on the web and produces local content that’s also shared nationally, increasing visibility for us. Of course, the amount of content this individual is able to produce alone is limited, but the initiative has still helped to better reflect our issues.
In our opinion, Radio-Canada plays a crucial role in maintaining the vitality of our communities. By offering content in French that reflects our realities, it helps preserve our language and identity, especially among young people. Broadcasting local content also helps newcomers integrate into our community and creates a sense of belonging. Local content is also crucial in emergency situations.
That said, many challenges remain in terms of access to and representation of our realities. First of all, seeing and hearing ourselves, being exposed to content we can identify with, in which we recognize our environment and the issues we care about, all help to build and disseminate a shared identity. Among other things, this is how our young people see that French isn’t just a language to be learned at school or spoken at home, but that it’s also a useful language for our information and entertainment that can make us laugh and move us, and it can be part of our everyday lives. Access to local content also facilitates community integration and strengthens the sense of belonging to a community. In this sense, we applaud the Alberta station’s efforts to resonate with francophones in the Northwest Territories. We recognize, however, that a local station firmly rooted in the Northwest Territories francophone community would have a greater impact.
Radio-Canada is also an invaluable source of information in emergency situations. In fact, it played a very important role in relaying information during the recent wildfire and flood evacuations in our territory. Any cuts in access or in the amount of content broadcast could weaken our communities.
The work Radio-Canada does locally and regionally helps keep French central to our lives. Unfortunately, these gains seem fragile in the Northwest Territories, with only one videojournalist stationed in Yellowknife, a reliance on CBC and a signal restricted to the capital. As a result, a very large proportion of the territory remains unserved.
We also see challenges in national programming, which unfortunately remains largely Quebec-centric. Our northern realities, our artists and our experts are absent from cultural programs and national news. Entertainment programs, meanwhile, rarely reflect the particularities of communities outside Quebec, let alone northern ones. In short, we feel invisible.
However, it’s crucial that our communities find themselves in Radio-Canada’s representations of the Canadian Francophonie. This Quebec-centric bias raises questions about Radio-Canada’s understanding of its role with respect to francophone minority communities.
In conclusion, we’d like to reiterate that Radio-Canada plays a key role in keeping French alive across Canada, and we believe it’s the only institution with the mandate and the means to have an impact on the vitality of the French language right across the country. However, it needs to strengthen its local presence and diversify its content if it is to truly fulfill this mandate and meaningfully contribute to the vitality of francophone minority communities. We hope to see a strong and inclusive Crown corporation emerge, one that recognizes and values our realities and our contribution to the Canadian Francophonie.
Thank you.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you, Ms. Fournier. I’m relieved you were able to make your statement. We will now go to Senator Cardozo.
[English]
Senator Cardozo: I have two questions, and the first is to Jen Gerson. You talked about conservatives who are not in favour of the CBC. I would suggest that moderate and even further right conservatives generally might want to see the defunding of the CBC. My sense is that the biggest concern is bias, even more than the issues of competition with the private sector that you talked about. If the private sector broadcasters and newspapers seem to be falling away and we’re left with the CBC, and if they get defunded, what are we left with? How can the CBC tackle the bias question?
Ms. Gerson: I think the bias issue is real. I think the political bias concerns are not unfounded. There’s a reason why the conservatives are running on defunding the CBC and not losing any points in the polls over it. Whether or not you want to debate this point is irrelevant. I think it’s fair to point out at a minimum that there’s a fairly considerable perception that the CBC has taken on a kind of overview or a kind of journalistic position that is at odds with the communities that they serve, and this has led to a collapse in support for the CBC even outside of what I would call sort of narrow conservative bases, at a minimum. That’s a problem. The taxpayers need to feel connected to this institution for this institution to thrive. It’s just what it is.
The bias thing is a problem, and the way you address that is you need to, again, have a significant mandate review, where you have a large number of people from a large number of political perspectives come in, contribute and say, “Look, this is the kind of journalism we’re expecting from you, and this is the kind of coverage we’re expecting from you,” and you have to build that into the mandate. You can’t have a vague mandate, which right now they have. If we’re expecting the CBC to cover the Supreme Court, we need to put that into the mandate. If we’re expecting the CBC to cover local news, well, okay, do you need one reporter per 100,000 people, per 25,000 people? Put that into the mandate. Make it explicit, make it unavoidable, and then build a budget up from that mandate. Right now, if you were to double the CBC’s budget, you wouldn’t get a better CBC; you will get a CBC trying to do more things poorly. You need to start from the mandate and build a budget from the mandate. If the money that they need to fulfill that mandate is twice what it is today, so be it, but the money has to be allocated in a way that everyone can agree makes sense.
Second, I think you need to address the CBC bias issue by radically decentralizing it. There are too many CBC reporters in Toronto and not enough in the rest of the country right now. A lot of that has to do with the culture of journalism, the culture of staffing and the way journalism schools operate. That’s a deeper problem that I can get into, but you need to have a CBC where the CBC Calgary is fully empowered to represent and speak to the people of Calgary. They’re not trying to be beholden to the executive directors in Toronto or Ottawa. You need to decentralize this pretty significantly.
When you have people working in the communities, being present in local communities, building human relationships with the people they’re serving, that is the most effective tool you have in terms of creating a healthy journalistic relationship between the journalists and the people they cover. You can’t have a healthy journalistic institution where the majority of your journalists are based in Toronto and then expect people in Lethbridge or the North to connect with that. They don’t see these people, they’re not in their communities, they’re not present in their communities and they’re not talking to people in the local communities about their local concerns. It starts to feel like a remote almost imperial power that’s imposing its values from high on above. That’s not how a healthy journalistic ecosystem is supposed to work.
Yes, I do think the conservatives are naive in what they think is going to happen here. I think there’s an assumption among the conservatives who I have talked to that we’ll kill the CBC and a thousand flowers will bloom, just like The Line. I am telling you as someone at The Line, I can’t replicate what the CBC is doing. I can’t fix the market failure that the CBC is trying to patch over right now. Don’t let your concerns with the bias problems overwhelm the fundamental need for the institutional capacity, which is what we’re risking getting rid of over our legitimate issues with bias.
Senator Cardozo: Thank you. It’s very helpful to deal with how we can correct the bias problem rather than, in this case, really throw the baby out with the bath water.
[Translation]
I have a question for you, Mr. Ouaka. You talked about the diversity of the francophone community. Tell us a bit about what you’d like to see as a better reflection of the community’s cultural and ethnic diversity on Radio-Canada.
Mr. Ouaka: Thank you for the question. I’ll give you an example from a few years ago. Canadian Heritage funded a project called WebOuest, which enabled us to produce videos and provide visibility for the communities of the West and the North in general. Thanks to WebOuest, we were able to capture a circus festival held in Iqaluit. We were able to capture recent immigrants. We were able to capture many aspects of our community that are thriving. Radio-Canada doesn’t have that kind of content. This content is absent for people in the community who have just moved to Iqaluit. It’s important to feel heard and seen on television, and to share your general experience with the community.
We are asking Radio-Canada to target these kinds of initiatives and make the community as a whole more visible, to ensure that an immigrant family who have just settled can be shown in the community. Two days ago, I was talking to the principal of École des Trois-Soleils, and she told me that this year she had enrolled over 35 children from immigrant families. We don’t know if the whole community is aware of that. It’s information that gets around by word of mouth, but it’s not shared with the rest of the country and the community.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you.
[English]
Senator Dasko: My questions are for Ms. Gerson. I want to pursue the topic of mandate a little bit more. Of course, you know we are looking at a scenario where CBC’s resources may be cut. A lot of people are talking about the fact that the CBC should cut advertising, and we hear that from a lot of people. Then, of course, there is the threat to the public purse that we are hearing about all the time.
In a scenario where resources don’t seem to be going up and, in fact, may go down, the question becomes, what should the CBC do? The CBC has many mandates, as you know. Many things are on the list of things that it’s supposed to do, and I would like to ask you what you think the CBC should do. In this scenario, should it do everything less well, or should it focus on particular activities? For example, we’ve got news and public affairs. There’s local news and local programming. There’s drama, culture and entertainment. These are among the big areas that the CBC pursues right now. What do you think the CBC should do in terms of these various scenarios? Should they do everything less well or focus? And if they should focus, what should the focus be on?
Ms. Gerson: Respectfully, I don’t think that’s a question for the CBC; that’s a question for the government and the people it represents. It’s not for the CBC to decide its mandate; it’s for us to tell the CBC what we’re expecting of it.
Senator Dasko: I’m asking what you think they should do.
Ms. Gerson: If I were on the mandate committee — oh, good, I’m volunteering myself — I would start from a position of taking a look at what the communities that we’re trying to serve need, and I would start by building up from that position.
Yes, I would say a CBC mandate should be hyper focused on news and information. I wouldn’t necessarily dictate how that news and information was distributed. I would be less concerned with the distribution part of that question and more concerned with the content production side of that distribution. I don’t care if the CBC is distributed on YouTube or Netflix, for example, or in local Facebook groups. That’s fine. I think you need to cleave off the entertainment side of this from the herd — what is left of it — and start hyper focusing on news and news coverage, particularly outside of the major cities, and try to make inroads into places that are currently news deserts.
I think that the way you deal with that in a mandate is that you have to explicitly state that you have a reporter per X number of people. Every community over 25,000 people gets a reporter who lives in and serves that community. I think that you put that in a mandate by saying we are expecting them to cover these beats. I would get as specific as that. I would say they need to cover your local city councils and local sports teams. They need to have a local education reporter. We need to lay it out so that when future iterations of managers take control of things, they aren’t tempted or able to retrench into urban centres that are already comparatively well served by the private sector.
Senator Dasko: I wanted to get into the topic of values and the way you discuss values. I know from studying Canadian values over many years that there is a diversity of values. I think you are suggesting that a particular community might have a value that the CBC should reflect, but the fact is that communities themselves have diverse values.
Ms. Gerson: Absolutely.
Senator Dasko: How are we supposed to deal with the diverse aspect of it if we’re looking for one value that the CBC is supposed to reflect?
Ms. Gerson: You have to decentralize control. You have to understand that the values coming out of downtown Toronto and the Annex are fine for Toronto and the Annex. There’s nothing wrong with that, and that’s great, but they’re not the same as the values in downtown Lethbridge. They’re not going to be the same as the values in Hanna. They’re not going to be the same, and that’s okay because we have a beautiful country with a wide variety of diverse values. That’s good. We all don’t have to agree on the same things, and we all don’t have to have the same priorities.
For journalism to work — and I can tell you this as someone who has worked in journalism for 20 years now — you have to connect with the constituency. You have to connect with people who understand that you are trying to serve them where they are, not trying to impose your viewpoints on them. I think that’s the heart of any kind of journalism. It is a relationship. It is not a dictatorial imposition of my values onto you; it is a relationship that you have with an audience.
When we are talking about local news, you only develop that relationship by being in that community and having that community see you struggling with the same problems, connecting with the same issues and feeling the same things they are feeling. When you get into a lot of the rural areas outside of Calgary and Edmonton, you have people talking about housing issues, the latest crop issues and drama in the farming community. People are talking about these day-to-day problems. And they are increasingly not seeing those values reflected in CBC Calgary. They are not seeing CBC Calgary present that.
Senator Dasko: What would be the main value? Is diversity the main value?
Ms. Gerson: It depends upon what you mean by diversity. What do you mean by diversity?
Senator Dasko: A diversity of points of view, of demographics, et cetera. Diversity has many dimensions.
Ms. Gerson: Sure. It’s a bit vague. Diversity can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, so it is a nonspecific word to use when you are trying to create a value set.
For me, it would be service. I prefer the term service. Your role as a journalist is to serve your community. To me, that means you have to reflect the values of your community —
The Deputy Chair: I’m sorry to interrupt, but we are over time.
Thank you for getting us to think about those difficult questions, Ms. Gerson, and thank you also to both of our other witnesses, Mr. Ouaka and Ms. Fournier. Thank you very much for your testimony.
(The committee adjourned.)