THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORT AND COMMUNICATIONS
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Tuesday, November 19, 2024
The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications met with videoconference this day at 9 a.m. [ET] to study matters relating to transport and communications generally.
Senator Leo Housakos (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Good morning, honourable senators. I am Leo Housakos, senator from Quebec and the chair of this committee.
I would like to invite my colleagues to briefly introduce themselves.
Senator Simons: Senator Paula Simons, Alberta, Treaty 6 territory.
Senator Cuzner: Rodger Cuzner, senator from Nova Scotia.
Senator Quinn: Jim Quinn, New Brunswick.
Senator Clement: Bernadette Clement, Ontario.
Senator Cardozo: Andrew Cardozo, Ontario.
[Translation]
Senator Miville-Dechêne: Julie Miville-Dechêne from Quebec.
[English]
Senator Dasko: Donna Dasko, senator from Ontario.
The Chair: We also have with us senator Clément Gignac from Quebec, who just joined us.
[Translation]
This morning, we continue our study of the local and regional services provided by CBC/Radio-Canada.
[English]
Joining us by video conference this morning, the committee welcomes David Clinton, publisher of The Audit; and Sue Gardner, former CBC executive, who is here with us.
Welcome and thank you both for joining us.
We will first hear opening remarks of five minutes each, and then we’ll turn it over to a Q & A. We’ll be starting with Mr. Clinton. Sir, you have the floor.
David Clinton, Publisher, The Audit: Thank you very much, chair. I’m honoured to be able to speak to the senators.
I publish The Audit. Its claim to fame is that I use data analytics to work with public-facing data, mostly from the federal government, to do policy analysis. In that capacity, I took a look in advance of this hearing at some data points I would like to share with you about the Ontario market in the local broadcast industry.
Specifically, I looked at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s, or CRTC’s, local broadcast markets data from 2011 to 2024. I saw that the Greater Toronto Area, or GTA, is doing fine. As far as media properties, there are at least as many now as there were in 2011. Outside the GTA, there has been a 25% drop in the number of media properties, which suggests that a number of companies have gone out of business. This is by media property; I don’t mean newspapers, just radio and TV. I think it is just traditional TV.
Oddly enough, I don’t think that’s a crisis. It’s not great for the companies that were lost, but I don’t believe that’s a crisis. I think it’s a natural evolution of the industry. To give that a bit of context, there are other CRTC data from their annual highlights of the broadcasting sector, which suggest that between 2015 and probably 2023 the annual compounded rate of decrease of radio listenership is 4.8%. That means that each year for the past eight or nine years the audience for traditional radio across Canada is 4.8% lower. That’s a catastrophic drop. That’s off a cliff. If it extends, of course, it means that there will be almost nothing left of its audience.
The corollary to that — as we are all aware — is that the internet has taken over a lot of the entertainment-information market. According to the same CRTC data source, the rates of increase of use of digital properties — that is, internet streaming of one type or other — in the audio sector is 9.3%. That means that far more people are jumping on the internet and getting their audio from the internet than there are leaving traditional radio.
Specifically to the CBC, their problem — and this may be no criticism of the CBC at all; it may not be their fault at all — is that they are losing, I would assume, 4.8% of their radio listenership every year, and they are not picking it up on the internet. For instance, among the Spotify rankings for the top 200 ranked podcasts in Canada, CBC has only four. Again, this may not be their fault. That’s not their primary focus. Nonetheless, those 9.3% of listeners who are adding themselves to internet properties each year are not going to CBC products.
Similarly, in the TV range, the CRTC data shows that between 2014 or so and now — I’ll get this exactly right; I want to quote this properly: “. . . English language CBC TV weekly viewing hours dropped from 35 million to 20 million.” People are watching the CBC an awful lot less than they were. It may not be CBC’s fault, but their consumption is not what they would like it to be. Their own annual report, the most recent report, tells us that the CBC News Network audience share is 2%; that is, 2% of people watching TV during a news broadcast are watching CBC channels. That’s across Canada and specifically, I believe, English language.
CBC consumption is down on every metric I have seen. Specifically, to the question of local programming — I did pay attention to the previous hearings in this series, and there was a lot of discussion of underfunded local programming. That’s possible within the context of the big picture of CBC funding. It’s hard for me to tell because the data that the CBC and the CRTC provide about their spending don’t break out local and national line items all that well. All I know is the big picture. I know, for instance, that between English and French, the CBC spends $195 million a year on drama and comedy production. That’s all national, I would imagine; that’s not local. They spend $207 million on news production and $237 million on radio production. Those are their big-ticket items. I don’t know how much of that is local and how much is national.
However, if there were a funding shortfall at the local level — the newsgathering level, for instance — I would imagine there is a lot of slack in the budget to take from some of the national programming that is not getting a whole lot of audience. As was mentioned correctly in a previous hearing, the Parliament has no right to tell the CBC how to spend their funding. That is an independent organization, and that’s correct. However, the CBC could take that under advisement themselves, or, alternatively, Parliament could amend the Broadcasting Act and share their views that way. As it stands, it would seem to me that the CBC is not consumed as much as they would like. It is not a resource having as much of an impact as they would like, and the funding keeps rising and perhaps is misallocated.
Thank you. That’s what I would like to start with.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Clinton. Now I turn the floor over to Ms. Gardner. You have the floor.
Sue Gardner, former CBC executive, as an individual: Hi. Thank you for inviting me here today.
My name is Sue Gardner. I worked at the CBC in English Services for 17 years. I started as an intern at “As It Happens”; I worked in radio and TV and then later on the internet. In 2000, I moved over to online, and my last position at the CBC was running CBC.ca. I left in 2007 to move to San Francisco to run the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the non-profit that operates Wikipedia.
I have spent the last 25 years of my career working in “internet stuff.” I make digital products and services, and I am an advocate for a free and open internet that operates in the public interest. I don’t make any money from the CBC these days, and I have no personal interest in what happens to it. It doesn’t affect me personally. That’s my experience, and those are the perspectives I bring to the table.
I’ll start by acknowledging that the CBC is in trouble. As we just heard, and as we all know, people are using CBC products and services less than they used to. People trust the CBC less than they used to, and they are more likely to think that it is biased than they used to think. The CBC is not as present, as central and doesn’t have as much power and influence in this country as it had 20 years ago.
I believe that most of that is not the CBC’s fault. You can attribute it to 34 years of financial cutbacks that were started in 1978 by Pierre Trudeau and continued until 2012 with Stephen Harper. You can’t cut hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars out of an organization’s budget and not have a suffering in quality.
The other big factor is, of course, the advent of the internet, and the internet has had a revolutionary effect on communications and on the landscape, and it has dethroned the previous media incumbents. So, in effect, we have traded in the CBC for YouTube, Netflix and Elon Musk.
The decline of the CBC is a problem, and the reason it’s a problem is because the CBC has a job to do in this country, and it can’t do its job if people aren’t using it and don’t like it.
A lot of people have come here — I think pretty much unanimously — and said that the CBC should invest in local; local is important. My instinct is to agree with that, and it’s because I think that being present at the local level is the path to increasing trust and closeness between the CBC and the people whom it is mandated to serve.
But I want to also urge some caution. The reason for that is because everybody is always very happy to add to the CBC’s task list, but nobody ever wants to take anything away, so the CBC is drowning in unfunded mandates. It has been for decades. That means that if you’re going to press the CBC to do more of something, you need to either give it more money, which we all know is not going to happen, or you need to let it take things off the table. Otherwise it gets stretched too thin and ends up doing everything poorly, and you can’t hold it accountable, because everybody knows that the job is impossible.
We are short on time, so I am going to quickly go through my three-point plan for the CBC because, like all Canadians, I think we have an obligation to have a three-point plan for the CBC.
First, I want to add my voice to the chorus of people who are saying that the CBC needs to get out of the business of commercial revenues. It is completely understandable why the CBC chose to go down that road — and I speak as the person who put advertising on CBC.ca, so I was very much part of this. But it does pull the CBC away from its public service mission. It’s not good for the CBC, and it’s time for it to get out of that.
Second point, CBC does need to reinvest in local news and information programming. But I want to say, importantly, any new emphasis on local programming needs to be focused on digital services, not on conventional, traditional radio and television. Money and energy need to move from services where audiences are declining into services where audiences are growing, especially when the size of the financial pie is fixed.
My third point is on people and culture. The CBC has been traumatized by 34 years of severe cuts, and that trauma is now part of its culture. It makes the CBC think of itself as a beleaguered underdog, and it makes it defensive. That’s not appropriate for an organization that gets $1.4 billion of public funding every year. So the CBC needs itself to develop a vision and a culture that do not centre it and its fears and its trauma and its past, but instead understand it to be a public service, working for the people of this country.
Thank you very much. I look forward to your questions.
The Chair: Thank you, Ms. Gardner. My first question to both of you is a very general question, and I think you brought it up in your opening statement as well — that there is an existential crisis going on across the board with traditional broadcasting. Yesterday, I was trying to get a hockey game on TV — Montreal Canadiens against the Edmonton Oilers — and I couldn’t find it on any channel. I turned to my son, who is the expert of all things when it comes to these types of things — Montreal Canadiens, yes — and he says, “Dad, they are trying something new. It is being streamed on I don’t know what.” I said, “What do you mean it’s being streamed?” So we went from “Hockey Night in Canada” being a religion in this country on CBC to find CBC botched that a number of years ago and lost the contract. Now, it seems Rogers will be out of that business in a very short time. I see the NFL is doing similar things, according to my son, who no longer watches TV and laughs at me every night when I turn on the television set.
How do we overcome this tremendous existential crisis with a whole generation of people who have abandoned traditional broadcasting? I know that’s not an easy question.
Mr. Clinton: Thank you. I would argue that it is not necessarily a crisis. It is a natural evolution of the consumer market to some degree. The internet, for better or worse, is the elephant in every room. It dominates all media, and it is a delivery mechanism, a delivery stream that is more economically persuasive. The economic argument for streaming over the internet is persuasive far beyond anything that traditional broadcasting can do. That’s where people are now. I’m not sure that while this obviously is disruptive for a lot of people and their careers and industries, and it is not something we should take lightly, but it’s not necessarily something we can fight. If that’s where people are, I’m not sure we are going to win that battle if we try to tell them they shouldn’t be where they want to be.
“Hockey Night in Canada” is an example. I grew up with it. I am from Toronto, so that would have made me a Leafs fan had the Leafs done anything significant in the last 60 years, but I will leave that out.
If that’s where people are now, I don’t see why we should try to fight it. We should redirect our energies toward the internet, where the audience is.
Ms. Gardner: I completely agree with David. I would say, number one, I’m not sure it is a problem, and if it is a problem, it doesn’t matter because you can’t turn back the clock anyway. We’re headed where we’re headed. But I’m not saying that there aren’t also downsides to it. I think what you mentioned is one of the big downsides — that we used to have a media landscape where there were big shared, common experiences that everybody joined into. “Hockey Night in Canada” was one of them. The Olympics was another one. Election nights were others. There were lots of entertainment events: the finale of “Seinfeld,” whatever. We don’t have those as much anymore because everything has fragmented and become decentralized.
There are really good aspects of that. I don’t like hockey. Sorry, I don’t. So for me, the fact that there is something else to do other than watch the hockey game is really great. But it does have a downside to it, and the downside is that we don’t have those shared, common experiences, and those shared, common experiences and that shared sense of ourselves were among the reasons that the CBC was created. So it is a challenge for the CBC to imagine for itself how it is going to reflect the stories of the country back to itself. How is it going to explain regions to other regions, et cetera, if there isn’t a big mass audience in the way that there used to be? But it’s a question it has to answer because that is the way that the world is changing.
The Chair: My last question is in regards to your comment about there being cuts for an extended period of time that have affected the organization. Since 2015, there has been an injection of an enormous amount of taxpayer dollars. They went from $950 million back in 2015 to over $1.4 billion. It seems over the last nine years, despite that huge injection, ratings are getting worse, ad dollars are getting worse, and they are cutting. The more money they get, the more they are cutting services on their own accord. How do we explain that to taxpayers?
Ms. Gardner: I think that’s understandable. I think it is in part what I was talking about before, which was the cultural thing that has happened to the CBC where it sees itself as beleaguered and as never having enough money. Part of that is culture. It is intergenerational trauma passed on. People who work at the CBC today who didn’t personally experience the cuts still see themselves as constrained and really limited financially in what they can do. The CBC doesn’t see itself as something with agency, as something with optimism that looks to the future with an expansive kind of view.
I would also say that part of it is mandate. Because when those cuts happened, nothing came off the plate of the CBC. So it is and has been overstretched because it is required to do so many things and be all the things to all the people. I was there when the internet was added to its plate. That didn’t come with any more money. A plethora of platforms, many more things that we wanted to be able to do, a whole online news operation, podcasts, all manner of things, CBC Gem now — all of that is on top of what it has always been required to do.
Especially in today’s media context, I don’t think that very many people are arguing that the CBC should be further invested and should get a larger amount of dollars to do its work. However, I do think there are people — and I’m among them — who think that some things’ coming off the table would enable the CBC to achieve more excellence in what it does do.
The Chair: Mr. Clinton, would you like to add something?
Mr. Clinton: First, the $1.4-billion allocation that we talk about is actually not the whole story. There have been ups and downs in CBC funding over the years, but it is never just the parliamentary allocation. I discovered recently that the Canada Media Fund, or CMF, which is a federal program to subsidize media production — the way they work is there are individual media producers who submit applications, and if their applications are accepted, then the Canada Media Fund will provide them with funding, but through a specific envelope. For each production company, the money comes through a specific envelope. The CBC/RC envelope in the 2023-24 fiscal year was worth $97 million. There was actually $97 million more in federal funding to the CBC in addition to the parliamentary allocation. That’s not the only one; I’m sure there are others. That’s all legal, and that’s what the Government of Canada is doing upfront, and they are not hiding it.
However, to the point of funding levels themselves, I am of the opinion that money doesn’t solve all problems. It certainly can be critically useful in some contexts, but some big systemic problems, for whatever reason, some external, can’t be solved by more funding. I used an example in my writing recently of health care in Canada. If the federal transfers to the provinces for health care were doubled tomorrow, I’m not sure many problems in health care would be solved. I’m not sure they would find twice as many doctors to provide primary family services than they have now. I believe 4 million people don’t have primary health care providers. I don’t think they would suddenly get health care providers. There are systemic issues that are probably more critical to solving that particular problem. For the CBC, for all the good will and the hard work that the people of the CBC do, I’m not sure they are positioned to solve many of the problems we are throwing at them.
The Chair: Thank you, sir. I’m well over my time.
Senator Simons: Ms. Gardner, one of the important things that I’m not sure people outside of Toronto and Montreal understand is how important CBC.ca is to local news coverage. When I think about the news environment in my city of Edmonton, as the Edmonton Journal, which is the major broadsheet daily, has wound down its operations, many of those people have moved to the CBC. You don’t see them on TV, and you don’t hear them on the radio. They are producing online news copy, which is functionally the paper of record for the community.
That would be the same in Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina and places like that. What concerns me a little bit, having come from print, is that those sites are competing for ad dollars as well as for talent. As the CBC becomes the functional daily newspaper in many mid-sized Canadian cities, how do we make sure that they are doing that without destroying what remains of print culture?
Ms. Gardner: That’s an excellent question. What’s the role of the CBC vis-à-vis the local journalism community? It warms my heart to hear you say that about local because I was there when we started it. We had 12 journalists across the country, mostly repurposing radio and TV news at that time. Obviously, it has grown enormously since then. You can look to the BBC, for example, which has done significant partnerships at the local level where it coordinates with newspapers and sometimes hires people together and shares positions.
I have been thinking how in Canada Village Media is an organization that is expanding at the local level. I don’t know how many sites they have, maybe 25 or 30. I could imagine the CBC partnering with some organization like that or multiple organizations. People have talked about the idea — and I think it is an interesting idea — that the CBC could freely license its news material so it could be used by other organizations. I think that makes sense for an organization like the CBC. What it creates was paid for by the people of Canada and therefore should belong to the country and should be used by people in the way they see fit.
I also think the CBC can and ought to serve as a training ground for journalists. The CBC used to send people out to the regions at the beginning of their career to be trained up. That’s what happened to me. That’s what we all did. It is the single biggest journalistic resource in the country, so it has a lot of expertise and ability to train, coach and nurture talent. I would like to see it function as a partner at the local level to other journalistic organizations. You have to have friendly competition too, but as a partner as opposed to purely as a competitor.
And, to conclude, yes, getting out of advertising — part of the reason to get out of advertising is because in a super healthy ecosystem that is awash in money, it might make sense to have the CBC be part of that, but in an ecosystem where ad dollars are pennies on what used to be dollars, it doesn’t make sense to have the CBC competing against local organizations that have such scarce resources.
Senator Simons: Mr. Clinton, you mentioned CBC not doing well in Spotify rankings. I listen to the CBC audio online all the time, but I never use Spotify because I can just download it directly without using Spotify as my agent.
There was a time — these are my war stories — I used to work as a producer on the CBC program “Ideas,” where I was the youngest producer. I remember suggesting at the time that we should take our most popular documentaries and put them on CDs and sell them at the CBC gift shop. This is before the internet. The established CBC producers were horrified that this kid from the West had this crazy commercial idea, and one of them said to me, “’Ideas’ is appointment radio. People sit down at nine o’clock and listen to it. We would never debase ourselves by selling.” Now, the CBC has not just purpose-built podcasts but the replays of its programming online. I don’t know how popular they are, but that’s certainly how I consume the CBC mostly these days: while walking my dog, listening on my phone. Presumably, the CBC tracks that. Ms. Gardner, it has been a long time since you worked there, but do you have a sense of how well that transition to audio online has worked for them?
Ms. Gardner: I do know that “Ideas” is keen on getting its material out there. Greg Kelly is very invested in that.
Senator Simons: They have a great podcast. I listen to it all the time now.
Ms. Gardner: They also have transcripts going back a thousand years, so there are many different ways to interact with that stuff. I don’t know how popular it is these days. I haven’t seen the data. Of course, that’s how people are getting their media, and there are many different ways they can get podcasts. They can download them from the CBC website or they can use Apple or whatever. I’m sure they track all that, but I don’t know the numbers.
Senator Simons: Mr. Clinton, apart from the Spotify data, which I don’t find very telling, do you have those numbers?
Mr. Clinton: As I noted before, the absolute overall radio listening numbers from the CRTC — not just for CBC but for all traditional radio — tell us that it is dropping off a cliff. You are not alone in listening to the CBC directly on the internet, but there are fewer and fewer of you. I’m not indicative, but I don’t even own a TV or a radio. I guess there’s one in my car, but I’m never in my car. Whatever media I consume — and it’s a lot — is always coming from the internet. Everybody has their own preferences, and all is good, but it does seem clear from CRTC data that the trend is away from traditional radio and TV and to the internet. I don’t see anything on the horizon that is going to stop that.
Senator Simons: Thank you both very much.
[Translation]
Senator Miville-Dechêne: Let me start by saying that I was a long-time employee of Radio-Canada. I also worked with the CBC at various times.
Ms. Gardner, I heard you say with some surprise that, yes, it’s true that the CBC is in trouble and is perceived as biased. Few people listen or watch. You concluded by saying:
[English]
“. . . most of that is not the CBC’s fault.”
[Translation]
Of course, I can’t help but make connections with Radio-Canada, which has suffered the same cuts and no doubt even greater cuts, because, as you know, the percentages are such that it probably has a greater impact. However, Radio-Canada is getting away with it. These budgets, which you say have been cut, are still much higher than what the competition often invests in public affairs and polished programs, so I have a hard time reconciling your observation with the Canadian reality.
Of course, there’s a language issue, but beyond that, the CBC could choose what it does and what it does better. If it is doing podcasts, as Mr. Clinton said, and only 2% of CBC’s podcasts are being listened to, there is a problem. It’s true that we can’t do everything. Try to reconcile that, because I’m a big believer in public television and public radio — I think that’s very important — but I also think it’s a bit radical to say that nothing that happens to the CBC is its fault or due to its own choices.
[English]
Ms. Gardner: If I left you with the impression — which I clearly did — that I felt the CBC has no agency, plays no role and isn’t the master of its own path, I didn’t mean to do that. I was trying to say that there are two big external factors: The funding is a big factor, and the advent of the internet is an enormous factor. They are what has made the biggest difference in terms of the place that the CBC occupies in the cultural landscape of the country.
I take your point about Radio-Canada. I can’t speak to it, but I understand that —
Senator Miville-Dechêne: The ratings are much better.
Ms. Gardner: Yes, I know that. My understanding is that it is because of the unique context for it. It’s the language, and the competitive environment is somewhat different. I think Radio-Canada has a different relationship with francophones in Canada than CBC English has with anglophones in Canada. There are probably lots of contributing factors to that, some of which are inside its authority to control, and some of which aren’t.
But I did not mean to say that the CBC doesn’t bear responsibility for where it finds itself. It does, but it is also acted upon by external forces.
Senator Miville-Dechêne: You have worked at the CBC a long time. Isn’t there a difficulty to shift to less costly methods? I’m speaking about Toronto and Montreal, which are the head offices and which work in a certain fashion, with a lot of resources, versus what they give out to regions, which are much more agile doing, for example, editing, reporting — a lot of stuff. Isn’t there some slowness in moving to a more agile television and radio?
Ms. Gardner: I think there is inherently going to be a lack of agility in any organization of the CBC’s size and its complexity with the many stakeholders and the many different players involved.
I had what I found to be a surprising experience about 18 months ago, I think. I was called by the CBC. They did a pre-interview with me for something they were doing. The person doing the pre-interview with me — we had to change the time, and they told me they couldn’t change it to a particular time because they had to book the “Zoom room.” I just thought that was so odd — a world in which Zoom is a special room in the organization that you have to book in advance. That doesn’t feel nimble or flexible. It doesn’t feel like an organization that is really moving quickly relative to everybody else.
There are real reasons for that. I don’t like to make fun of the CBC for things like that, because there are real reasons and contributing factors for them. But it is very hard for them to be responsive. That’s a challenge because one of the things that has happened in the media landscape is that it’s a lot cheaper now to do certain kinds of things. The real argument for the internet is that it is where the people are, but another great thing about the internet is that it is significantly cheaper. People’s understanding of what professional broadcast quality looks like is a lot more relaxed now. Technology also just makes it possible to do a lot more with a lot less. It’s probably the case that the CBC is not fully benefiting from that for many different reasons.
Senator Miville-Dechêne: Thank you. Did you have anything to add, Mr. Clinton?
Mr. Clinton: I would go back to something you said before, which I very much agree with: The CBC should and perhaps could step back and take a look at everything they do and decide to focus on what they do well and what is successful. Parts of the CBC’s Broadcasting Act mandate are very old — 30 or 40 years; I’m not sure exactly — and things change. Large companies and organizations don’t change that nimbly, as you said.
I definitely agree that a solution to many of the problems we are discussing might be found in rationalization, which doesn’t mean cutting, necessarily, but it does mean reassessing what they do well and focusing on just that and those platforms where they are doing well. So I agree with that completely.
Another small side point is whether things can be done more efficiently and more cost-effectively now because we have the internet. I would say absolutely, 100%.
What I do, which is take public-facing data and use data-analytics tools to build stories, is something that perhaps in a different time a team of reporters would have done and been stressed to do it.
And I’m not the only person doing it. This model is not mine; I didn’t make it up or come up with it. There is an organization in Toronto called City Hall Watcher. They have a very popular Substack with 8,000 subscribers, I see. As far as I can tell — I have no contact with them inside — they use internal data that Toronto produces. For transparency, they make a lot of their data available for free. They build a really excellent, distilled picture of everything Toronto City Hall does. Now, the Toronto City Council has a budget larger than many countries. It’s a huge organization. City Hall Watcher makes it understandable. They bring it into context, and you feel you’re not missing anything from City Hall. You can just pick it up in 15 minutes a week via a fantastic summary.
That kind of thing is something anyone who loves data — I have Statistics Canada so ingrained in my browser that I don’t need a bookmark; it goes naturally to Statistics Canada website — people like that can build interfaces with public life, with government and with other things going on in the world very inexpensively and very efficiently.
Senator Miville-Dechêne: Thank you.
The Chair: Ms. Gardner, you have 30 seconds, because the senator’s time has elapsed.
Ms. Gardner: I will speak quickly, just to say that, yes, the CBC should take things off the table, but it’s important to acknowledge that the CBC is not the master of its own ship. It has the CRTC, Canadian Heritage, Parliament, the Treasury Board, unions and its own board of directors. I think you have to acknowledge that complexity when you think about it taking things off the table and focusing on what it can do well.
The Chair: Thank you.
I can say, though, that when it comes to the CRTC and Canadian Heritage before this committee, they seem to think they have no influence over them whatsoever. You can listen to the testimony.
Senator Quinn: Thank you, witnesses, for being here today. I agree with the chair’s opening remarks about the frustration of not being able to watch a hockey game, although I’m a hockey fan. To the chagrin of at least one of my colleagues in this room, the outcome was the right outcome.
In any case, I have never worked for the CBC or any media outlet. I’m a heavy consumer of things.
The Chair: You’re in the minority.
Senator Quinn: I’m a minority. I must admit that in order to get the result of the hockey game last night, if you miss that five minutes of sports in the morning at 6:55, you don’t hear anything else for the rest of the day about sports on CBC Radio, of which I’m a heavy consumer.
In any case, my question is about the Broadcasting Act. As I understand it, there are seven mandates, seven things the CBC is supposed to do. One of these is to “reflect Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences, while serving the special needs of those regions.” I’m from New Brunswick. When you look at the budget distribution of the CBC, we’re told that 84% goes to Quebec and Ontario, and 16% to the rest of Canada. Most of that money goes to TV. A little goes to radio. It seems that the CBC has lost its way in terms of promoting the regional aspects of its business.
I agree with what you said about the commercial revenue streams, by the way. I think that’s probably driving a lot of that in the big, populated marketplace.
If the CBC is to survive at all, are we looking at a fundamental review of the Broadcasting Act and its mandate and force the cultural change? One of my colleagues talked about culture. Does that cultural change have to be forced by the government? If the government is going to be the principal funder, shouldn’t they have a say in how that organization needs to change to serve Canadians, particularly in the regions where sometimes it’s the only act in town? CBC is the only coverage people can receive. Is that something that needs to be done? Does government need to rethink this whole thing and force the CBC into a different space?
Ms. Gardner: Yes, I think so. The Broadcasting Act needs to be revised in light of the changes in the landscape, in light of the internet and the way that things are different from how they used to be. That’s part of taking things off the table.
I don’t think the government should be overly directive for many different reasons. It’s not an expert in media, but also it is supposed to have an arm’s-length relationships with the CBC. At a high level, laying out a mandate that makes sense in today’s context, I think that is the right thing to do.
I’ll just say quickly that when it comes to spending on local, especially in financially difficult times — when the CBC spends money locally, if you spend a dollar in every region, that’s $12 or $14; if you spend a dollar nationally, that’s a dollar. So it’s cheaper to spend money nationally. That’s just a reality when you’re looking at budgets.
Senator Quinn: I understand that, but it’s at the expense of having regional coverage.
Ms. Gardner: Yes.
Mr. Clinton: I would agree that the Broadcasting Act is a blunt object. There are conflicting streams in it. Some of the more recent amendments almost sound at odds to other parts of the act. The CBC itself may be receiving mixed messages from that. I think they are trying to faithfully fulfill their obligations under the act, but I would agree that a revisit of the Broadcasting Act would be useful, in part, to remove some fads, some trendy language and requirements in the act that come in and out of fashion rather quickly. Perhaps make it more universalist in a way, more in absolute terms rather than in subjective terms. That’s what I would suggest.
I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t speak to the value of the Broadcasting Act internally.
Senator Quinn: In the interests of time, because I want to let my other colleagues speak who have expertise in this area, why don’t we let the marketplace determine the fate of the CBC? If this were the private sector, the CBC would die. Should we allow the CBC to die?
Mr. Clinton: I’ll start. By inclination, I’m a free market adherent, and I guardedly welcome the idea of letting the market decide. I would add that the CBC’s funding is a distortion on the market in many ways — on the commercial market, of course; everyone agrees with that, but even taking the commercial angle out of it, it is a distortion. But there are some things the government is good at doing, and, perhaps on some level, a national broadcaster or provider of content is a valuable resource that we shouldn’t so quickly throw away. However, certainly a reassessment of what it can be and ensuring that you’re not distorting the market by destroying competition — those would be important elements of a reassessment.
Ms. Gardner: There is a school of thought that the CBC should do what the market does not do. If the market isn’t covering Sudbury, the CBC should go into Sudbury. I’m not of that school of thought. I think the CBC’s purpose is at a higher level. It’s a market corrective, certainly, but at a higher level.
Almost every democratic country has a public media organization, and they were all created in the 20th century, in the 30s, 40s and 50s, with the same motivation. The idea was that the market would not provide everything that was needed, especially in a country like Canada, with a tiny population and two languages, spread thinly across the country. The idea was that you needed to have somebody whose mandate was to tell the stories and reflect people to each other. Otherwise, it wasn’t going to happen. In this country, we would just drown in American content. That’s why the thing was made.
I do not see any argument today for that being less valid and less important than it was when the CBC was created in 1936.
Senator Quinn: Thank you.
Senator Dasko: Thank you to our witnesses for being here today. I first want to focus on Ms. Gardner. In the scenario of less funding, if the CBC is going to give up its revenues, obviously, the revenue that they are going to have is going to be considerably smaller. There may not be more government funding; in fact, there may be less. Therefore, what do you do in this scenario?
You suggested a number of things, such as reinvesting in digital. I’m trying to understand what a digital service would look like. What kind of programming would be on this service?
Also, what happens to television? I would like to get back to basics. You turn on the TV to a blank screen for 10 hours a day, and then it comes on at 7? What does this all look like? Help me to understand what stays, what is added to, what gets developed. What does digital look like? What does television look like?
Ms. Gardner: Before I speak to it, I will say again that my area is only English services, so I’m not speaking to Radio-Canada.
Senator Dasko: I would be happy to talk about the English services.
Ms. Gardner: On the English side, the question and the challenging area has always been English television. That was the case when Richard Stursberg came in and wanted the CBC to focus on being more popular on the English TV side. It has been the case throughout CBC’s history since the beginning.
English television is a nut that the CBC has never cracked. It has had quite a few successes, but it has never been able to create an extremely popular, distinctively Canadian schedule from beginning to end. The money isn’t there to do it, and the infrastructure in this country probably isn’t there to do it.
An increasing number of people are suggesting that the CBC should get out of the business of entertainment programming, given the upheavals. Should there be over-the-air broadcasting of drama and “Family Feud” reruns and things like that? It’s a question. It costs money to do that work, and it’s not clear whether it’s possible to win in this environment, with the competition that exists.
It also takes up a lot of the air in the room in terms of discussion. I would like to hear the CBC talk more about and focus more on the areas in which it can and should grow rather than focusing on fixing a problem that has been around for a long time and is not easy to fix.
When you think about what the CBC could look like in the digital space, we see a lot of it already. You can see a lot of what they have been doing. Online news makes a ton of sense because it’s very efficient to produce news in that way, and you can be across the country. That makes sense.
What has been mostly missed is the opportunity to get out of the way and facilitate discussion among Canadians: rather than speaking to Canadians, allowing Canadians to speak to each other. I used to sometimes use the example of Reddit. It is a place where people go, and they have all kinds of conversations about all kinds of things. The CBC should perform a function similar to that for Canadians. It should be a platform that allows people to talk directly to each other.
It used to be that you needed a journalistic or some form of intermediary, and now you don’t. To some degree, it should be providing the infrastructure for Canadians to have their own conversations.
Senator Dasko: Back to turning on the television, is there any television? Is it the blank screen? Is there a CBC network in the future of this — let’s talk about English-language television. Is there or not?
Ms. Gardner: One day there won’t be, right? One day there will not be. It’s just a question of what that day is. So few people are watching over the air television, like sitting down in the old way with appointment viewing. That’s not what people are doing. Decreasingly, people are doing that, so one day that will just not happen anymore.
Senator Dasko: Okay. I think that helps me. Is there any model of a foreign country, BBC or any other models, that you think are helpful for us understanding and dealing with the CBC?
Ms. Gardner: I think that everybody is having the same challenges. The BBC is always the gold standard, so it’s always what other public broadcasters look to, because it’s so successful, so incredibly successful.
But I think everybody is grappling with the exact same challenges everywhere around the world. That’s a thing that is important to acknowledge because, again, that suggests it’s external factors, it’s the external environment. All the public broadcasters used to have shares of 40%, 50%, 60%, depending on their environment, even 100%. They have all dropped off a cliff. It’s not just us; it’s a problem that everyone is engaged in trying to figure out.
Senator Dasko: Of course. Now my question is about radio. So many Canadians say that they love CBC Radio. It connects them with the country. They wake up to it or whatever. Can radio exist, especially English-language radio, without television?
Ms. Gardner: Why wouldn’t it be able to exist without television? Why wouldn’t it?
Senator Dasko: I’m just asking your opinion on whether it actually can continue to operate as a service, even if television is transformed.
Ms. Gardner: I think inside the CBC, they talk more now about audio and video than radio and television. So you always have to distinguish, right? Are you talking about the over-the-air, old-school broadcast model, or are you talking about the production of audio? Production of audio is something that the CBC has always been excellent at. It has always won international awards at all the festivals. Part of the reason for that is because audio is a more intimate medium. It feels more like somebody is talking to me as opposed to broadcast, which feels more top-down. So in some ways, it’s better suited to today as well. But yes, the CBC has always produced audio in a really solid way that is helpful to the country; we can see it in people’s connections to CBC Radio. I do not see any reason why that wouldn’t continue.
Senator Dasko: Thank you.
Senator Cardozo: We are having a really good discussion on viewer numbers and listener numbers. I want to ask you about the other major critique of the CBC, and that’s bias. I point you to the article by Harrison Lowman entitled “Why conservatives despise the CBC, why they can’t wait to tear it to shreds, and why they have a point.”
Do the numbers in a sense reflect bias or perceived bias by listeners and watchers? And what is the role of a public broadcaster in ensuring that it doesn’t have a reputation of bias? It portrays itself as this centre of bias-free or at least bringing all the voices together. I’ll stop there; you have heard the critique. What is your sense of the role going forward?
Ms. Gardner: It’s a serious problem. Tara Henley is a journalist who has written extensively about this. I think she has been invited, and I hope she comes and speaks with you. It’s a really important problem. There used to be a mass audience, and everybody sat down and consumed the same things. That is gone, and now it’s fragmented and dispersed and decentralized. So the centre hasn’t held.
One of the things that has meant is that you can’t speak to the fullness of the people in the same way that you used to be able to. The CBC has always been accused of bias, always, but I think more so today than it has been, and I think that there are lots of people who feel alienated, not reflected, not represented and patronized and talked down to by the CBC. That’s a huge problem because they pay for it. Your job is to meet the needs of everybody and represent faithfully their interests and what they want to talk about, what they think is important.
If you’re not doing that, at best, you will appear out of touch and irrelevant; at worst, you will appear arrogant. So it’s a big problem. This is why I make the argument that the CBC needs to focus itself more on the people, and it’s part of why local is so important. You can’t drift from them. You have to stay with them. You have to stay near them. Local is the least polarized and the least partisan, at the local level. It’s less divisive and less divided, right? It’s a good place for the CBC to be present and to make the kind of intimate bonds with people that it needs to be having.
Senator Cardozo: Mr. Clinton?
Mr. Clinton: I would agree with what Ms. Gardner just said. I would say that a lot of it comes down to editorial decisions. An editor — a newspaper editor, radio news editor, whatever — will choose five, six or seven stories to present a day, but on that day in their market, there are probably 1,000 or 10,000 stories to actually tell. Each might be as interesting as the ones that are chosen, so the editor has an enormous amount of power to set the narrative: This is what is important in our city or province or country.
The editorial — if you want to call it bias, and it probably is a bias; I would actually have some data to support the idea that there was a bias in the CBC and other media organizations — the editorial power is the lynchpin that can make or break any solution to the issue. Now, I’m not pointing to any one editor or one person playing the role of the editor, but whoever participates in that process, whether it’s people pressuring from the outside or insiders making the conscious choice, things can change there. When they choose the stories that they choose to highlight, that’s where I think the impressions are solidified among listeners and viewers.
Senator Cardozo: Are there things that the CBC can do to — well, there are things. What are some of the things they could do to have more diversity of views so they don’t have a sense of bias? I remember a show with Claire Hoy and Judy Rebick some years back named “Face Off” where they had a right-wing and a left-wing person; they would invite two guests and they would have this debate every night or whenever the show was on. There is not a lot of that kind of programming happening now.
Ms. Gardner: The classic example of that was Kierans, Camp and Lewis. Do you remember that, on “Morningside”?
Senator Cardozo: Yes.
Ms. Gardner: That was not a debate. They were not fighting with each other. They were finding common ground, and they were talking like real human beings to each other.
Yes, I think that solutions may not lie quite so much in terms of the official sort of party positions and the sort of political spectrum and that formal way, but more so in representing the diversity of real people — not that politicians aren’t real people.
I have developed a practice of asking average people I run into what they think of the CBC. I ask the guy who fixes my car and the guy who cuts my hair and my dental hygienist. They don’t feel close to it; they don’t. Finding out what interests those people, covering what interests those people — it doesn’t have to be capital-P politics is what I’m saying.
Senator Cardozo: Right.
Senator Cuzner: Just to push back on some opening comments from Mr. Clinton. He had said that it has been 60 years of futility for the Toronto Maple Leafs; it has only been 57. I’d like to be clear and concise here.
Mr. Clinton: I stand corrected.
Senator Cuzner: I take your point, Ms. Gardner, that things have been added on to the CBC. They have Gem and digital and what have you. It is obvious: In any organization, you have to weed that garden in order to let it flourish and grow. As the chair said in his opening question, there has been that increase in funding to the CBC. Was that not for the additional duties, or is there a disconnect there between the additional funding and the additional tasks? That’s what one would assume.
Ms. Gardner: I don’t know the exact numbers, but if you look at the math, the increases in funding offset some — not all — of the 34 years of cuts. None of that speaks to the proliferation of new platforms and new places where the CBC is required to be present.
When I was at CBC.ca, it was founded out of a 3% cut to radio and television budgets. There was no other money; it is a fixed pie. That came, therefore, at the expense of radio and TV, which was not good for our popularity inside the organization, but it also speaks to the fact that it is a fixed pie.
As the CBC became required — it is required; it must go where audiences are and must be where the people are — as it moves into those spaces, it doesn’t have any extra money to do that and isn’t allowed to raise money and get investors. That means it is doing more with less. How we used to talk about it when we were going through the cuts was “watering the wine,” doing more with less. We couldn’t take things off the table. We weren’t allowed to.
Senator Cuzner: I have one more comment. I think the vast majority of Canadians believe in a public broadcaster and support a public broadcaster. The fake news narrative has drifted into Canada, and it has been used politically to attack the CBC. I think they have been a victim of that fake news. If we leave it entirely to the free market, then you end up with the Fox News types of outlets and the Alex Joneses of the world who purposely try to sell false narratives.
We don’t see that locally. I don’t think we see it with the CBC; I’m a defender of the CBC. Certainly from a local perspective, you don’t see that drift into the narrative at all. It keeps us honest. It celebrates our culture. It continues to defend our democracy. It does those things. It is trying to take the battle to where the people are. I guess that is what we are trying to do with this study as well.
That is just a comment.
Senator Gignac: Welcome, witnesses. Just to follow up on what Senator Dasko has raised regarding what is going on with other countries, is there a way that CBC and Radio-Canada could innovate and think differently?
I will explain myself. In Canada — take Toronto, for example — we have close to a 50% foreign-born population. People want to have news from Asia, Europe, Africa, et cetera. Is that something to consider, since Canada is part of the Commonwealth or la Francophonie for Radio-Canada? People might want the “African hour,” the “European hour” or the “Asian hour” — something like that. I’m surprised that the public broadcaster does not have more alliances with other types of public in the country. Is that a way to consider to increase the ratings and impacts on people?
Ms. Gardner: I think so.
As part of the cuts, CBC ended up closing most of its international bureaus. I think there are now five. There are three in the United States, I think, and there is London and another place I can’t remember. So there is less presence internationally in that way, and that’s a concern because it means our Canadians are getting more and more of their international news from international sources, which means it’s not being seen through a Canadian lens.
But you are right about the opportunity there. I have not been involved in the space for a long time, but I do remember that when I was at CBC.ca, we were beginning to run experiments. For example, we did a collaboration with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation. I can’t remember why it was with them. We traded stories and gave each other the rights to use each other’s stories.
Senator Gignac: In a one-hour segment? Or share?
Ms. Gardner: We could freely share. It was frictionless because we could just take it; it was allowed. It wasn’t a formal part of our licensing, but we allowed each other to do it.
I think there is a lot of power and potential in public media organizations working together in that way. One of the principles that should underlie that is the principle that the people have paid for the stuff, so the stuff is public and should be accessible to everybody and able to be used by everybody in whatever way they want.
If public broadcasters were able to work together in that way internationally and give each other free access, that would amplify everybody’s power, influence and importance.
Senator Gignac: Thank you.
The Chair: On behalf of the committee I thank both witnesses for being with us this morning and sharing their views. It was very helpful for our study.
[Translation]
Honourable senators, we are now resuming to continue the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications study of local services provided by CBC/Radio-Canada. For our second panel this morning, the committee is joined in person by Annick Forest, President of the Canada Media Guild.
[English]
We also have with us Karim Bardeesy, Executive Director of The Dais at Toronto Metropolitan University; and Heather Bakken, President of World Press Freedom Canada, founding partner of Pendulum Group and former journalist and publisher.
Welcome to our witnesses this morning. Each of you will get five minutes for opening statements before we turn it over to my colleagues for Q & A.
[Translation]
We’ll begin with Ms. Forest. You have the floor.
Annick R. Forest, President, Canadian Media Guild: Good morning, everyone. I’m an Acadian and a Quebecer, and I grew up in Dieppe, New Brunswick. If I grew up in French in a francophone minority community, it’s largely thanks to Radio-Canada and its programs La souris verte, Bobino, Fanfreluche, Chez Denise and, of course, Téléjournal every evening after supper.
I hadn’t yet completed my journalism training at the Université de Moncton in 1992, but I was already working for Radio-Canada. My career with the French-language public broadcaster took place in a minority francophone region, first as a news reporter for Vancouver’s Téléjournal, then in Halifax, then again in Vancouver, on television and radio news, and finally for digital services, in the last 10 years of my career before taking up this position.
I’m familiar with Radio-Canada and CBC services in the regions. One thing is clear: The services offered by Radio-Canada outside Quebec and possibly Moncton, New Brunswick, will cease to exist if CBC funding is abolished. The sharing of information, equipment, visual materials, staff and interviews between Radio-Canada and CBC is essential to the services provided by the public broadcaster in the regions. Today, it has also become essential to the services provided by the public broadcaster in major centres.
On a day-to-day basis, the data collected by a journalist in the field can easily be found in four television services, two radio services and a dozen digital services.
[English]
The solution is not to defund the CBC. The solution is long-term, stable funding to enable the public broadcaster to fulfill the mandate it was given by Canadians.
[Translation]
CBC/Radio-Canada needs to be able to inform farmers on more than 34,000 farms in Saskatchewan that are helping to feed Canadians about the price of livestock and grain and new discoveries to improve their operations. Who will talk about the conditions of the ice roads, which is the only land link for dozens of communities in Ontario, Manitoba, and the Northwest Territories in the winter, and the impact of global warming on these vital links, if not the public broadcaster? Who will inform Franco-Ontarians about the new Indigenous pavilion at Collège Boréal in Sudbury or the impact of the spruce budworm on Thunder Bay’s cross-country ski trails, if not the public broadcaster? Private media won’t go into communities where the market doesn’t allow them to make a profit. When fires consumed Fort McMurray and Lytton, when southern Alberta was flooded, when hurricane Fiona hit the Atlantic, when Yellowknife was evacuated, the public broadcaster and its infrastructure were there to inform the victims and maintain their connection with the rest of the country.
For workers in New Brunswick and Newfoundland making their monthly migration to the Alberta oil sands, the public broadcaster allows them to continue to follow what’s going on in their communities. CBC/Radio-Canada employees have always adapted to new technologies. When I started in 1991, some of my colleagues were still typing their reports, and we were editing our radio reports with a blade. You had to book a satellite to send a TV report to Montreal or Toronto. Today, our members can write their reports on their laptops and, in most cases, send them by internet or cell phone. The tools for transmitting information are changing. What hasn’t changed is the need for journalists to go out and gather information, and, for example, to visit James Parker, a disaster victim from Glencoe, in southern Ontario, and tell the story of how his life and that of his neighbours came to a halt when 13 centimetres of rain fell over their neighbourhood in a few hours, flooding their basements.
[English]
How do we serve Canadians better? We improve CBC/Radio-Canada’s funding model so that the public broadcaster can put more journalists and the equipment they need in more communities across the country to give a voice to those who never get access to the microphone. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you, Ms. Forest. Now I turn it over to Mr. Karim Bardeesy. You have the floor, sir.
Karim Bardeesy, Executive Director, The Dais, Toronto Metropolitan University, as an individual: Thank you very much. My name is Karim Bardeesy. I am the Executive Director of The Dais, a policy and leadership think tank at Toronto Metropolitan University, or TMU. We look at the key digital drivers to Canada’s economy, education and democracy systems with a view toward building a more shared prosperity and shared citizenship for Canada.
Thank you for this invitation and opportunity to address you today and thank you for undertaking this critical study for our national unity and for our democracy.
[Translation]
Most of my opening remarks will be in English, but I will be available to answer your questions in English or French. I really enjoyed Heather’s testimony. I’m from Bathurst, New Brunswick, and I know the power of Radio-Canada from a different perspective, especially when it comes to radio, to create a community in our region of New Brunswick.
[English]
CBC/Radio-Canada is a vital and storied national institution, and it plays a special role in the province of Quebec and, as Ms. Forest indicated, for Canada’s francophone minorities. It is increasingly the main or only journalistic presence in communities across Canada. It is also a key force for connectivity of people and communities, but we need to understand its role in relation to the local services and local news through three lenses: One is the distinct features of the CBC. Second is its role in relation to other news providers. Third is its role more generally in this media/attention ecosystem.
Specifically, CBC/Radio-Canada, it is important to look at some of its key features. It is generally free. It exists both on over-the-air television and on radio. The Dais research on the digital divide shows that even in Toronto a small digital divide exists, and outside the city there is an even greater digital divide, so those services remain critical.
It operates in both official languages. It also has a brand and history that are distinct in Canada. Our research at The Dais shows that trust in CBC/Radio-Canada has been steady over the last few years — 48% of Canadians in a number of recent surveys say they trust the organization to act in the public interest. Of all the organizations we survey, private and public, the CBC is now the most highly trusted organization we survey. These features of the CBC are really important and allow it to step into communities to create local news.
I think one of the questions for policy-makers, though, is, what are the governance guardrails around which that happens? Does this body, does the House, does the government have sufficient governance oversight and direction to be able to direct it in some of its public interest? This is particularly important when we look at the CBC’s role in relation to other providers. As the CBC steps in and becomes more of a local news presence, in part because other news organizations are withdrawing — and my colleague April Lindgren at Toronto Metropolitan University has some very stark data on the hundreds of news organizations that have folded in Canada in the last 15 years — the CBC is often a dominant presence in communities. What we know about media and media ecosystems is to have only one voice, whether it is public or private, is not good for the longer-term health of the media ecosystem or for the accountability of that media organization.
So it is very important that you as policy-makers attempt to help build a strong and locally relevant CBC but not one that is so dominant that it doesn’t allow the emergence of other public or private sector players, who have an important role in the marketplace.
Finally, I’ll make a comment in relation to the larger media ecosystem in which this operates. There have been a few remarks in earlier testimony about the declining audiences, the decline of shared spaces. I’ll share some data from the recent Reuters Digital News Report 2024, with a survey of Canada. It shows that the CBC remains a trusted source for those who get their news from TV, radio and print. It is number 3 after CTV and Global News, but online, it is the number one news site in Canada.
However, what’s important is the proportion of Canadians, especially younger Canadians, who are seeking news from these sources in general is declining. This is also in the context of overall decline in trust in news generally, which is down to 39% this year compared to about 50% in 2016. We have a context of a decline in trust overall for news, although there are still strong trust scores for the CBC generally, and trends whereby more and more Canadians are getting their news from online platforms, including YouTube and — until the Meta news ban — Facebook and Instagram and other sources.
The CBC has an opportunity to go where the audiences already have their attention, in particular educational institutions and workplaces, and discover and pioneer new methods of reaching those audiences where the attention is gained and can be further used to help share its journalism. Thank you very much.
The Chair: Thank you, sir.
Heather Bakken, President, World Press Freedom Canada, as an individual: Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. I would like to make clear that my remarks today reflect my experience with the CBC’s English services only, particularly in news.
I am the President of World Press Freedom Canada, which has a mission to advocate for and defend our Charter right to a free press and issues that affect press freedom globally, because that is the world we live in now. My professional experience as a journalist included 16 years at CBC News on both sides of the camera and five years in the private sector, including as publisher for two political news sites.
In this capacity, there are three points I would like to touch on today, and some have been already been talked about. One is the CBC’s position with its bureaucratic masters; the second is its broken business model; the final one is its role in preserving our sovereignty.
As the CBC stands today, we are dealing with a Frankenstein. One part is the CRTC, which determines licensing requirements for a five-year term. The other part is the government, which determines its mandate and annual budget. These mismatched parts put the corporation in the untenable position of being told what it must do without being told how to get there and not knowing what resources the following year will bring. Instability has an impact on morale and decisions on the programming and products that you read, see and hear as Canadians. This Frankenstein also includes a TV service that is commercial, a digital service that is largely commercial and a radio service that is a public broadcast model.
The CBC cannot be all of those things at once. It’s time to pick a lane, and the lane I think we need to pick is the CBC Radio model from the business side. CBC Radio One is still number one in many major markets, with a loyal audience that includes people of all political stripes. This is unifying for our country.
The corporation’s success overall requires a new mandate, one with stable, predictable long-term funding that allows it to function with neither fear nor favour — which is important for trust — and removes it from economic competition with private broadcasters and other digital platforms. In other words, it’s time for the CBC to get out of advertising and get back to public broadcasting. I believe this is fundamental to Canada’s future.
CBC North delivers news to remote northern communities in eight Indigenous languages. As in the case of many other places we have heard about today, it is the sole source of news and information. During an emergency, it provides a lifeline.
This service was created during the Cold War to provide Canadian content to radio listeners who could more readily hear broadcasts from Radio Moscow and the Voice of America. Today, that infrastructure plays a critical role in our sovereignty. Russia and the U.S. are currently making territorial claims in the Arctic, but CBC transmitters, which have been there for several decades, are among the pieces of evidence that bolster our claims.
While the border dispute is an attack on our sovereignty from the outside, on the inside we are being attacked by a global disinformation network that is polluting our information ecosystem with false flags and false promises. This could have a profound impact on public opinion and jeopardize our very democracy as we know it. While we are debating whether or not to defund the CBC, the Kremlin has doubled down on refunding propaganda campaigns. This coincides with the loss of local media, creating vast news deserts across the country. But nature abhors a vacuum. Online influence peddlers are being paid to “Astroturf” our people and our communities.
The information space has changed dramatically since the CBC was created in 1936, but it has evolved at warp speed since smartphones became ubiquitous. Without any guardrails, our adversaries are leveraging our openness and accessibility to individuals to define the narratives they want us to believe. In the absence of any substantive policy, they have found a way into the consciousness of Canadians.
We have our own story to tell. For national unity to prevail, we need a public broadcaster that serves as a bulwark against disinformation, one that will strengthen the democratic values and freedoms we have fought for, shed blood for and should continue to go to bat for. Our centre of gravity is local communities. We need to re-engage with people who have felt unheard, and CBC Town Halls are fit for purpose. Public broadcasting must be viewed as a reliable source of news as well as a platform for a national dialogue that keeps one end of the country informed about what the other end thinks and is doing.
The CBC is still Canada’s most trusted news source, as we have heard several times today. Canada needs a national network that is locally rooted in the regions, with stable funding, and is commercial free. The CBC is uniquely positioned to provide that service. It has the infrastructure, it has scale, and no other organization can do it. The CBC is worth saving. It is critical to our sovereignty, and we must find a way to make it work. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you. I have a short question for Mr. Bardeesy. You mentioned the trust factor with the CBC is high in terms of your study or your data, whereas I have seen a number of studies that have been made public about how the trust factor of the CBC right now has declined to as low as 17%. In the study you are referring to, is the polling sample composed of viewers of the CBC or Canadian taxpayers at large? And how do you address the discrepancy from previous studies and testimony before this committee that trust is down?
Mr. Bardeesy: This is a longitudinal study we have been running for five years now. It is called the Survey of Online Harms in Canada. It is of 2,000 Canadians, not just viewers. What we do is survey a common question across a series of organizations, asking, “Do you trust this organization to work in the best interests of the public?” It is that question to which we have had these consistently high responses in the 44% to 48% range. Maybe it is a different question than what others are being asked.
The Chair: Can you share that data with the clerk?
Mr. Bardeesy: Absolutely.
The Chair: Thank you so much.
[Translation]
Senator Miville-Dechêne: Thank you, Ms. Forest, for your opening remarks, which show just how interested and committed you are to the public broadcaster.
For the benefit of those who aren’t familiar with Radio-Canada, could you explain how much the small Radio-Canada newsrooms in the regions depend on the infrastructure and their CBC colleagues, because it’s not necessarily something that’s well known.
Ms. Forest: I’ll explain it to you as succinctly as possible by telling you a bit about my experience. I worked in Vancouver.
[English]
— maybe I can explain this in English so it is easier for everyone to understand.
When I arrived in Vancouver in 1990, one of the greatest things I could do for my colleagues in French is run over to the English side and borrow the video cassettes. In those days, you had to get the video cassettes and, in real time, dub it so both people could edit something different. The English and the French don’t cover the stories the same way, but they use the same materials. So that’s one of the things — now, things have changed, obviously. We now use computers. Everything is downloaded into a mainframe, and everybody uses the same pictures or the same videos.
In my days at the CBC, I have worked pretty much all the jobs. I’ve been a producer for radio and television. I have also done resources. For those of you who don’t know what “resources” means, it means you are the person sending out the videographers with the reporters to cover the stories.
When I started in 1990, and you would go cover a press conference, there would be four cameras: English national, French national, English local and French local when there wasn’t somebody else for some other show, like “Enquête” or “The Fifth Estate,” who wanted to shoot stuff.
Now we have one. On very important stories, we’ll send two. The first one is there to film you. The second one, so we don’t miss anything that you say or any clips, will be taking what we call “off shots” or the background image; “B roll,” we call it. That’s how things are done today.
One thing that I think is not clear to a lot of Canadians is how much information is shared among the two groups.
[Translation]
Senator Miville-Dechêne: Was it always with anglophones?
Ms. Forest: No.
[English]
Things have changed. It used to be that we were the “biggers.” We’d go and grab the tape, and that’s why you sent me — because I spoke English; I come from New Brunswick, eh? I could sweet-talk them into giving me the tape and promise to bring it back.
Nowadays, most people or a lot of people are able to go, and we’ll send a reporter out and say, “You speak French,” for example. “You’re going to go ask the questions of the farmer over there. I’m going to get the politician over there, and you’re going to get the organization over there, and we share that information.” It’s easier to cover more ground and get the information. Everything gets sent in.
The person who speaks French will ask the question in French and then say, “Can you say that to me in English now, please?” Same thing in English. The person in English will ask the question in English and say, “Can you say that in French for me now?”
[Translation]
Senator Miville-Dechêne: You’re a fascinating person. I do have another question for you, though.
Ms. Forest: Go ahead.
Senator Miville-Dechêne: Our study focuses more generally on local and regional coverage. You are the president of the union that works in every province except Quebec. What are your observations? Is there enough money and energy invested into news outside the major centres, or are the major centres still keeping too much for productions that often use resources that have nothing to do with those in the regions?
Ms. Forest: I think that in the regions, we have learned to operate with what we have. We had to cover what had to be covered with what we had.
For the future of CBC/Radio-Canada, it’s really necessary to go to the regions. Why are people abandoning CBC/Radio-Canada? Why aren’t they listening and watching? It’s because they aren’t hearing themselves. Why is that? Because CBC/Radio-Canada isn’t present in the region and doesn’t have a foothold in Prince George or Yarmouth.
When I worked out of Halifax, I’d drive five hours to cover a story in Yarmouth. Can you imagine that? I would drive five hours, ask my questions, write my report, do my live broadcast on the radio, return to Halifax to do my television report and send it. I’m not even talking about what it was like in the winter.
The idea would be to have more people on site in the regions to be able to do it. Some people talked about the ability to do the job today. Of course, it was cumbersome.
[English]
It was so hard in the past. You had to send a reporter, a camera and sometimes sound people or whatever. That was a lot. Now you send a person with a phone, right? I know, even for my members at the start, when the phones came in, it was like “ugh” because the reality is just because you’re a good journalist doesn’t mean you can frame a picture very well. The videographers are the ones who can give you a perfect picture.
We have to decide where we want to put our money, how we want to use it, and how much coverage we want to have.
Senator Miville-Dechêne: What do you want? What do you think? Telephone? Light stuff? Or let’s stay with a big, huge camera —
Ms. Forest: We need to step away from how we do the news and start thinking about why we do the news. The mandate of Radio-Canada is a message. It’s the message that we bring. That’s what it is. The tools that we use, they have changed so much over the years, and they will keep changing. And if we’re doing it on TV, or we’re doing it online — no, we just need to bring that message in the best place possible. We need to adapt.
When you say, “What are we going to do — turn on the TV, and it shuts off?” TV is digital now. We have smart TVs. When you turn on the TV, you go to CBC Gem on your television. I turn on my TV, I watch TOU.TV on my television. I don’t go to Radio-Canada; I go to TOU.TV because I can choose what I want to watch. That’s the difference with our audience now and the audience we had before.
Now, that’s the medium. What we’re concerned about is the message, talking about Canada to Canadians, giving a voice to everyone. When we say, “Oh, the internet is everywhere. You have to think about that.” No, it’s not. The witness we had before, half of his words were cut off. Why? Because he was over the internet. If you’re sending something in from Whitehorse — and I know because I worked resources, and I used to bring in reports and images from Whitehorse — it doesn’t always work. Do you know how often the line to Whitehorse gets cut off; how often they lose their phone services? They have one supplier, and sometimes it just doesn’t work. You lose connection.
That is why certain CBC infrastructure has to stay in place so we can keep communicating with all of Canada.
Senator Simons: I have to say, cards on the table, Ms. Bakken, I won one of your awards a few years back, so I have a fondness for your organization because they gave me a prize.
Leaving that aside, I want to come back to the issue you raised about disinformation and the need to have a trusted news source. You mentioned Russian interference. I’m mindful of the fact that Elon Musk is nominated to be a member of President Trump’s cabinet. He runs X, which is still, somewhat to my distress, an important news vector in this country. The person who has been suggested as the new head of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, is somebody whose views may be antithetical to our ideas of a free press.
I wondered if you could explain from a local and regional context why it is so important to have a trusted news source in communities, not just a network voice, but those local, regional voices that are trusted.
Ms. Bakken: When you’re dealing in business, there is this expression: If you don’t understand people, you don’t understand business. That applies to the CBC as well.
The challenge that we have, if I can rein this in regarding the global network, when we compare ourselves to the BBC, that is a smaller geography that is more densely populated. As Ms. Forest said, when you’re sending resources out there, you can hop on a train and be anywhere in an hour or two. In Canada, that’s not the case, even if we go local. I have an idea of how we would create a mesh, but there are so many different things at play.
I would take your point here, but I believe the first thing we have to do is make broadband a utility. People are not willing to connect us across the country. In the North, because we were trying to get to remote regions, initially during the Cold War, I believe the CBC was the first place to connect the network with the low-orbiting satellite. We invented the instant replay with hockey. There was a lot of innovation here.
What the problem is now is we have no line of sight into these networks; in other words, it’s our inability as a democracy in the U.S. and Canada to get ahead of tech and understand what the algorithms were doing. I feel that horse has left the barn. You talk about Elon Musk. His market cap is bigger than the GDP of most developed nations. These technocrats are not accountable and don’t answer to anyone. They have found their way into the hearts and minds and the heads of our children.
Now, if we’re talking about trust in news, it starts as kids, right? My childhood companions were “Mr. Dressup” and “The Friendly Giant.” I’m dating myself. I was watching an alarming story yesterday about this metaverse for children, little kids, called Roblox. It reaches 60 million to 80 million kids, and, in that, their experience can be pornography, violence, grooming, Snapchat, grooming, violence, pornography. We’re talking about 5- and 6-year-olds seeing this stuff.
If we can start from the bottom up with the CBC and our kids’ programming, and parents know they can put their kids on their computer with CBC Kids, and they watch something that has been verified; there is accountability, and there is transparency, you can feel safe with your kids. Right now, this mentality of Musk and all the actors in the U.S. — by the way, the “Magnificent Seven” has been floating that economy, so the U.S. is between a rock and hard place. If they use antitrust and break down those companies, they no longer have an asymmetrical domination in the world, which means our adversaries have an advantage. So we are stuck with what they are doing.
We need to build trust early on because the mentality of “move fast and break it” has actually broken late Millennials and Gen X. They are the audience that need to grow into us. When I was a kid, CBC Radio was always on. I would roll my eyes at Gordon Lightfoot and Anne Murray because they flooded airwaves. Oh, my God. Thank God for them. They are storytellers. Think of the musical talent that came out of this country.
It goes back to a lot of people who say it’s about the values and what this means. We do have to take, as Sue Gardner said, stuff off the table. We are now a digital provider. We need to get broadband covering this country. We need to be able to provide a digital service because most of the stuff you see, even on the nightly newscast, has been clipped from a phone. We need to have some kind of stringers or some network of humans set up in local communities where they have professional training. They come into CBC for training. They go back into their community. They are building the relationships with the locals. This takes time.
I can tell you that as we have centralized — and it’s not just the CBC. All the privates have centralized into an urban centre that is the most expensive place to live in Canada. Who can afford to be a journalist there? Not the average person. So instead of driving down the highway and figuring out what we need to do to get from A to B the fastest, take a side trip on the back roads, calm down, chill out, get to know people, and then we can be that fit-for-purpose local broadcaster that sparks discussion, has special interest stories.
By the way, you put them in your region and maybe a few of them get through to the national level, but when we keep on in a content factory where you cannot nurture relationships because you have to file to multiple platforms — you’re doing online, you’re tweeting and doing clips — I just want to give one human example and then I’ll stop. I was producing a reporter once. She was doing a live hit. Something changed in the control room, so we had to delay it. I tried to phone her. She wasn’t answering her phone. This is not good. You have a reporter doing a live hit, and she’s not answering her phone. She didn’t answer it for 10 minutes. Then she phoned me and said, “What’s happening?” I said, “Well, they have changed the programming. There was breaking news that came. Why didn’t you answer your phone?” She said, “Oh, because it was on the tripod, and I had to turn my ringer off to do the hit.” So it is a very efficient organization. There is no fat to trim on some of these stories.
Again, we need to step back, re-evaluate, look at what our country needs, take things off the table, serve the people and make sure that our discussions are about people, by the people, for the people, and then we’re going to find levels of trust at the local level. Your experience in Edmonton is a great one. That will filter out in a province where people don’t trust news. By the way, when they don’t trust news, they don’t trust politicians.
Let’s all work together and try to restore the faith and trust in our institutions, and then we’ll be cooking with gas, as they say.
Senator Cardozo: Thank you, witnesses, for being here.
Ms. Bakken, you talked about CBC being fundamental to Canada’s future. Professor Bardeesy, you talked about it being the most trusted network. I want to ask about bias. There have always been accusations about bias over the years: too Central Canadian, too separatist, too Indigenous, too White, et cetera.
There is an issue now, and I mentioned an article by Harrison Lowman, who succinctly made the point about the concern that small-c conservatives across the country feel it’s missing their point of view. This time, there is a political party that is really serious about cutting a large part of the corporation. What are your views about bias? Is it too late to correct that? Can that be corrected? Does it start at the local level?
Ms. Forest, I want to add to that in terms of Radio-Canada. Can Radio-Canada exist or what is the future of Radio-Canada if you cut out CBC?
I’ll start with Ms. Bakken.
Ms. Bakken: There is always a way to turn it around. There is bias. I think if we magnify that, you take the U.S. example.
Think about who is going into journalism. Let’s put it this way: Our salaries flatlined for a few decades. We’ve been living under cuts since the 1980s. The only people who can afford the luxury of going into an industry where you are not well compensated compared to your peers and, over time, you get left behind are the people who already have money or are social justice warriors, and they find a way to live with less. They don’t reflect the average person.
You see it in academia. People aren’t going into journalism anymore. If I come from a small community, and I’m poor and super smart and get a scholarship, I’m not blowing that on a job that is not going to compensate me. I’m going to go to the private sector, go to Silicon Valley and look up to Elon Musk, not up to Adrienne Arsenault. That is, I think, one of the problems.
But we do need to decentralize, to democratize it. It’s not the CBC’s fault there is a bias. If you’re going to liberal arts in general, you’re probably not conservative-bent.
Senator Cardozo: Shouldn’t management see that bias and find a way to overcome it?
Ms. Bakken: Management is part of the issue. They are the people who have stayed in an industry that is attacking. Enterprise journalism has gone the way of the dodo bird. There is no time for it anymore. You need money for that. Think of the people who are trying to manage it under the dark clouds of not knowing if they will have a job next year, not knowing how many of their friends and colleagues they have to lay off.
This is not a money issue. This is an ingenuity issue. Everybody in here has the ability to create broadcast-quality product. I’m not saying it’s journalism. If we can find a way to train people and have stringers and a mesh system across the country, they will get to know the people they are talking about. Again, you need to go to the audience, not go where you want the audience to be.
We just saw the results of this in the U.S. election. All the major American networks missed this. It goes back to technology, too, as Sue was saying. When you think that Fox News has an outsized impact or influence on the people in the States, its audience is something like 3 million to 5 million. It’s chump change. But they clip stuff and put it on YouTube. Now you get former host Tucker Carlson not reaching an audience of 3 million to 5 million but 18 million to 20 million.
When I was a news anchor for Newsworld International, we served an American audience. We had international news from a Canadian perspective for an American audience. Our reach at the time was 22 million. This was 20 years ago. Donald Rumsfeld, during the Iraq war, had us on as one of three channels because he felt that Canada had an objective perspective. We have value in the global community, not just in Canada, but we cut that. We sold the property, and we cut the funding.
Senator Cardozo: Professor Bardeesy, could you comment briefly?
Mr. Bardeesy: Thank you, Senator Cardozo. Bias is a current topic and a really existential topic in newsrooms and in journalism schools. I teach at TMU, though not in the journalism school. I can tell you that questions about bias and whether it’s okay to be partial, to not be objective, is part of the current conversation among a lot of young journalists today.
I’ll endorse a lot of what Heather Bakken said, and I’ll just make a focus on the audience and accountability. At the CBC, it ought to be the editorial controls, and neither the CRTC nor the government overseers directly who are ensuring that there are strong editorial controls. It has to be at the editorial level to ensure that there is either minimal bias or, frankly, a reflection of the audience in the way that Heather reflected.
It’s important to have a voice at the CBC that is pluralistic and some leadership willing to take some hits when things are said that people in certain communities are upset about.
Senator Cardozo: Thank you. Ms. Forest?
Ms. Forest: I’m going to speak to bias a little bit. The first thing is this: We have in our contract something called “producer’s authority.” Producer’s authority means that the director of a station in Vancouver can’t tell me as a producer what I’m going to put online as news. That’s producer’s authority.
About bias, yes, we all have a penchant for one side or the other, but the reality is that our job as journalists is to give every side of the story. If you want to avoid bias, you have journalists who give every side of the story. I’m not talking about opinion pieces and editorials. As long as you’re transparent and make it clear that it’s an opinion piece or an editorial, it’s all good.
About bias, if we have people in the regions, we will have that. Look at a map of Canada and see who was elected where. Outside of the big cities, things change. Things shift. The reality is different. If we don’t have people in those areas, we won’t hear their ideas and opinions. They won’t have the microphone. That’s why we need to have CBC/Radio-Canada in as many communities as possible.
A journalist is not necessarily somebody who went through university. A journalist is someone who is able to read, understand an issue and give you all the different points of view about that issue whether they like the point of view or not.
I have young journalists who come and write stories, and they will write a story advocating that we save the trees and the forests. We’re in B.C., which is tree-hugger territory. I love trees; my last name is Forest. It is what it is. The reality is that in B.C. we still have to talk about the people who make their living from the forest. We have a big industry of harvesting wood in B.C. How does that affect the people in the different places where the entire city works at the lumber plant? However much we love the trees, we need to give both sides of the story and what it means economically to everyone who lives there. Then, Canadians will make up their mind. They will decide what they prefer. But our job is to give them all the information they need to make informed decisions. That’s how we avoid bias. We are where the people are.
You were asking me about the symbiosis. My understanding of how things work is that if the CBC disappears, Radio-Canada disappears. Let’s not fool ourselves. Right now, the whole organization is based on revenue. My members are not going to like this, but CBC/Radio-Canada shouldn’t be receiving any advertising revenue. Let’s cut that out. Let’s make sure that we are not in competition with the privates because we need the private. For us to have a good media ecosystem, we need multiple sources giving information to Canadians.
CBC/Radio-Canada has a mandate and a specific job that it needs to do. The privates do something else. Why don’t people tune into CBC television? If you are bilingual like I am, and you listen to both CBC and Radio-Canada, I can tell you why. I watch Radio-Canada. Why? Because they talk about us. There is a series right now called “Temps de Chien,” which is done in Îles de la Madeleine. Who will go there and talk about the people who are there? I can hear people talk with my accent from The Maritimes. I’m Acadian. I have an accent. Sometimes it doesn’t show, but sometimes it does.
It is what it is. We want to hear about ourselves. The shows coming out of Quebec are called, for example, “La Maison-Bleue.” It’s about the government in Quebec. Do you know how many shows I have watched about the White House? People talk about the Miranda rights in Canada. Why is that? Because they are watching American TV all the time. I’m bored with American TV. You go to the different providers online, and you watch shows that come from Spain, Brazil, Portugal, France and England. I watch various programs. I’m tired and fed up with American programs. I want to hear about Canadian stuff, but are there shows that talk about Canadian stuff? The ones that do, for example, “Schitt’s Creek,” go viral and do very well. But where do people watch them? Netflix. Do they know they are watching CBC? No.
One of my colleagues was talking to me about someone watching Olympic coverage. They are watching Olympic coverage on their phone. If they do like I do, in a meeting you have your phone, and you’re kind of watching because you want to see hockey or soccer — I don’t do that all the time. The idea is that they don’t know they are watching CBC coverage. “I’m watching it on my phone. I’m on my phone. This is TELUS or Prime.” No, in fact, it is CBC coverage.
What did Radio-Canada and CBC do for the last Olympics? I was able to watch surf competitions. Mind you, there was no commentary, but I was able to watch the surf competitions live.
The Chair: I hate to interrupt, but we have exceeded Senator Cardozo’s time.
Ms. Forest: I can talk forever.
The Chair: The chair is benevolent.
Senator Dasko: I want to focus on Senator Cardozo’s last question. Given the sharing of resources that you spoke about earlier, I just want to be clear that you don’t think that Radio-Canada can survive without English. Could you just focus on that?
Ms. Forest: I’ll give you the example of Vancouver. If CBC Vancouver disappears with all its equipment and everything else, and they sell off CBC Vancouver, where is Radio-Canada going to be? What camera will people use? How will they send the information? Where are they going to sit, Starbucks?
Senator Dasko: So it’s because of the sharing.
Ms. Forest: It’s the sharing of the equipment. Then there is the sharing of information. You will receive a lot less information.
Senator Dasko: What about in Quebec or Eastern Canada?
Ms. Forest: You have to look at the budgets. If the budgets disappear, then the CBC doesn’t have any money. You have shared services, and a lot of stuff is shared.
We have members who work for the French side and all of the English members except the ones in Quebec.
Senator Dasko: Thank you. That’s great. I have a question for the other two witnesses, Mr. Bardeesy and Ms. Bakken. We talked about fewer viewers for the CBC, especially CBC English television, and fewer listeners. We have also talked about funding caps down the road and the fact that many of us don’t think the resources will be there, whether it is because CBC will cut advertising revenues or because government funding will decline. These are the concerns.
Given this situation, what do you think will or should happen to CBC English television? How do you see the future of it? What should happen? What do you think will happen? Professor Bardeesy, I know you spoke about the trust data, which I really appreciated. You mentioned the Reuters survey, which is a good source. I have used that survey many times. That’s trust data. It’s important. What about the two conditions I just said? What does the future of English-language television look like?
Mr. Bardeesy: Perhaps we can distinguish between news and non-news content. It’s important, as I said earlier, to have a competitive marketplace for news content. CBC TV news exists in a competitive marketplace, in fact, in a marketplace where the private providers are scaling back significantly. I would assert that we need a strong English-language TV news presence, both nationally and in local communities.
With respect to non-news, I think Ms. Forest made a passionate case for the high-quality CBC-televised English-language content that can be produced. Again, it’s in a marketplace. At The Dais, we don’t have a policy view on the specific points that Ms. Bakken was making with regard to advertising, but it’s reasonable to expect the CBC, while having a very strong public mission, to not be immune to market or political preferences. It’s important that it not be seen as an island unto itself. What that means specifically on those policy questions regarding advertising, we haven’t yet formed our conclusions, but I wanted to identify that as an issue.
Senator Dasko: Ms. Bakken, you talked about disinformation as another important reason for the CBC to exist as a news source, a source of real information. In any case, back to my question, what do you think CBC English television will and should look like?
Ms. Bakken: Well, if they leverage their advantage, which is transparency of ownership, with stable funding, there is an opportunity to go out into the communities, so decentralize it to a certain degree. When you have reporters in local communities, their salaries don’t have to support living in a major urban centre, so you can ultimately have more content coming in at a lower cost. TV is irrelevant now. Digital means video. Everything has gone video. We are visually hard-wired, and we can now deliver those services digitally. We don’t need big TV studios.
If we look at where the market has headed, long-form podcasts are in today. I don’t know what will be in tomorrow. You can do that for nothing. Buy a $350 mic, sitting in a community of Fort McMurray, and have someone talking about their experience and bringing in people in the community. That is a very low-cost opportunity to appeal to that incoming audience. Instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and trying to figure out how to fix what we have, maybe “The National,” appointment television, one hour — I love the people on the show and what they are trying to do, but when your mandate says you have to cover certain things, and the first eight minutes of the show is about one thing that I am not really interested in, I’ve already turned to the privates. That was back in the day; now I watch everything online. Maybe have a 15-minute national newscast? That’s what Walter Cronkite used to have. Everybody watched it: 15 minutes, solid national interest. And then maybe that has universal appeal. We can all watch right now anything from the region, so why not have local communities that are a part of it with a big catchment area?
Senator Dasko: Are you talking about local and national public affairs and news, and not the drama and entertainment programming that the CBC does?
Ms. Bakken: Yes. My level of expertise is not there. That’s from a consumer’s point. That’s why I brought the kids’ television up. I think we have to look at the incoming audience with a different lens and protect them. Again, it goes back to ownership. The disinformation and the problem we have is in the private sector. When a company is privately owned, we don’t have a line of sight into who is influencing the decision making. So Canada will not have that problem with the public broadcaster.
The other thing I would say is when I worked there, what used to really bother me was we didn’t self-promote. When you think about journalism, we are supposed be the conduit for stories that other people want to tell and don’t have a platform to tell it. If we can get back to first principles and do that, I think people will want to tune in with us. So we have to understand what it is that people need to know.
The other thing I would say with the newspaper model, there used to be something called the “dull but necessary” section on page 5, things like Supreme Court appointments. Very few people read it, but the people who read it really understood and cared about it and often were decision makers. We have to find a way to weave in what people need to know to be informed in a way that disinformation is now providing for them. Again, nature abhors a vacuum. Where do we not have coverage? Where can we have coverage? Really, it takes a laptop and a cellphone, maybe a $300 microphone. You have got a studio. We can experiment without a lot of money. Does that answer your question?
Senator Dasko: Yes, thank you.
The Chair: As chair, I’ll take the liberty of asking the final question. I have listened carefully to the remarks and the responses from our witnesses. I think it was Ms. Bakken who mentioned how we are expecting the CBC to do so many things and that we need to figure out what it is.
I hear Ms. Forest talk about how there is such an intricate attachment between French services and English services, and one cannot survive without the other. I find it very difficult. One is a comment here to understand why something that is getting ratings, something that is successful, something that is offering a service, which is Radio-Canada, why they would have a hard time surviving without an entity right now that is their master, who takes all decisions in Toronto, who gets more and more money, yet they keep cutting in sectors where those sectors are getting ratings. They are being successful. There is an obvious need to grow.
When I was in business, I always believed you shut down the departments that cost you money, that don’t bring you anything, and you spend more on the departments that are making you money and promoting your business. That’s on the comment side.
On the question side to Ms. Bakken, what would you carve out? What is it that the CBC right now isn’t doing well in their mandate and is not redeemable and we can carve out in order to alleviate resources because they are getting scarcer and scarcer?
Ms. Bakken: That’s a really good question, Mr. Chair.
The Chair: If you had to pick one thing.
Ms. Bakken: It would take me a year to filter that. What I would say is the one thing we can do is get back to the local level. We have very few municipal reporters, like beat reporting. If we could get back to beat reporting and have people with expertise and then collaborate instead of having a behemoth in a few city centres with the overhead costs associated, I think we could reallocate those funds.
I will leave it to my colleagues here to talk about budget allocation. It is not equivalent. My understanding is if you take the news from the CBC’s English services’ budget, it is equivalent to one season of “The Crown.” The question would be this: What would you do if you had that much money to serve a country our size? Probably not a lot. I wish I could give you a definitive answer, but it is a tricky question.
The Chair: You have given a very good one, and you didn’t need a year to think about it, so I appreciate that. Unfortunately, we have run out of time. All three of our witnesses have been very helpful in this study. I think the committee will agree. We thank you.
[Translation]
Thank you very much for being here today. It was much appreciated.
[English]
Colleagues, I will see you at our next meeting.
(The committee adjourned.)