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by Geoff Olson
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Mothercorp. The Corpse. Whatever you call it, our public broadcaster elicits a wide range of responses from the public, from calculated contempt, to studied indifference, to impassioned support. But few Canadians can imagine living without it, even the majority who rarely tune in. We have sentimental attachments to Mothercorp, along with the predictable baggage of familial resentments.
Last month, former CBC broadcaster Knowlton Nash’s wife, Lorraine Thomson, read his acceptance speech for a lifetime achievement award from the Canadian Journalism Foundation. In his speech, Nash slammed his former employer for its decision to simulcast a US reality show for the first time in its history, bumping the evening news to a later time slot for viewers east of Manitoba. The ABC production in question, The One: Making a Music Star, is produced by the same people responsible for Fear Factor.
“If the CBC really wants reality TV, let people get the reality of what’s happening in the world by turning on The National at 10 pm every night,” Nash’s wife read to loud applause.
We all know the line between news and entertainment evaporated sometime between the trials of O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson. Yet the CBC news division has mostly resisted the descent into a mental Munchkinland. So it seems all wrong when the signal from our Eastern-based Oz turns to static, and the little man behind the curtain is revealed to be a faceless bean counter obsessed with ad revenue from American exports.
In an interview last month with Common Ground, former CBC chair Patrick Watson noted the dire effects of the corporation’s budgetary model. “Our public broadcaster has let us down terribly by conceiving, 24 years ago, that its morality should be the same as independent broadcasters, and that it should compete with them for audience numbers and revenue. That’s not what a public broadcaster is supposed to do.
“We have the obscenity of our public broadcaster, for which Canadian taxpayers are paying about a billion dollars a year, running American movies on Saturday night at eight o’clock.”
When it comes to American influence on Canadian culture, can’t our public broadcaster even put on a nominal show of resistance, even if it has to get Ben Mulroney to host it?
It’s all terribly ironic, when you consider the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was conceived by an Act of Parliament in 1933 to safeguard us against being overwhelmed by US culture. Call it the revenge of unintended consequences, but the parliamentary gnomes who midwived the CBC could never have predicted their child prodigy would one day grow up into a family embarrassment, miming show tunes and looking south of the border for quick cash and the casting couch.
While Radio Canada is commercial-free, 40 percent of CBC television is subsidized by advertising, which may have something to do with the relative quality of the two divisions. However, even that distinction is fading. As Canada is disassembled through deep integration, CBC Radio spends inordinate amounts of time fiddling with the “National Playlist,” a selection of listener’s pop music favourites. It’s meant to appeal to a younger audience and there’s nothing wrong with that, assuming management doesn’t start condescending to the audience with shock jocks and Morning Zoos. Yet on Saturday mornings, CBC Radio One is starting to sound more and more like the same sort of demographically driven drivel found across the radio band.
Last month, the senate standing committee on transport and communications released a report on the state of media in Canada. The report urges the CBC to abandon its pursuit of revenue via advertising, which largely translates into taxpayers subsidizing dubious fare like reruns of American sitcoms. The CBC must be properly funded, the senators insist, if it is to continue with its mandate.
Death and taxes aren’t the only certainties in life. “You get what you pay for” is a fairly reliable phenomenon too. From the ‘50s to the ‘70s, the CBC was considered one of the world’s great public broadcasters. You can trace today’s rot back to a set of severe cutbacks that began in the ‘80s. According to a Toronto Star editorial on the senate recommendations, the “… buying power of CBC’s government grant has fallen by 20 percent in the past 15 years, even as the CBC audience has been eroded by a wave of new specialty channels.”
Yet other nations’ public broadcasters have soldiered through the cable universe. Today, the BBC has seven and a half times the CBC budget, yet Britain has only twice the population of Canada. (Much of the BBC’s money comes directly through mandatory television licence fees.) Whereas Britain’s BBC receives $120 per capita in public subsidies, the CBC receives only $32.
According to Suzanne Alyssa Andrew of This Magazine, Canada has a ranking of 22 out of 26 among the Organization for Economic Co-operation Development countries. Yet, as Andrew notes, Canada “… spends less on public broadcasting than most countries in the rest of the western world.”
That is not some bureaucratic oversight or a minor issue for policy wonks. If an effective, committed public broadcaster degrades over time, as many neocon pundits would prefer, who will tell the people? Can we trust the private media, fixated on superstar CEOs, pregnant celebrities and the bread and circus of reality programming, to tell us what we need to know to govern ourselves effectively? Considering what the CBC could do, and doesn’t, and what it still does remarkably well against all odds, the continued erosion of our greatest public asset can only be described as a national disgrace.
Dan Macleod (not the Georgia Straight editor) worked as a producer and reporter at the CBC from the ‘80s through the ‘90s and witnessed plenty of dysfunctional behaviour from his colleagues. There have always been prima donnas and players among the troops – inevitable in any large organization – but Macleod also notes how CBC workers have been beset by the effects of chronic cutbacks.
“Some music producers double as hosts, for example,” writes Macleod in an article published at mediachannel.org in 2000. “In 1996, my last stint with CBC radio, the office secretary was failing to do two jobs at once, while the host of the noon show was coming in early to do the morning show’s press review.
“Shows become exec heavy, as freelancers, then contractual workers, were sacrificed. Broadcasts became studio-bound (even in radio, which is absurd). Yet the always expensive, and often poorly done, ‘special projects’ continued on as if nothing was wrong.”
Dan Oldfield, journalists’ union rep in Toronto, told Macleod, “Productivity is up nearly 50 percent from what it was a decade ago,” although this doesn’t necessarily mean the output reflects the input.
In the lead-up to last year’s lockout of workers, CBC management demanded greater “efficiency” from the company, meaning more outsourced jobs. Yet with a third of the workforce already part-time, the CBC employee of today performs multiple duties and has become “… as nimble as an East European gymnast,” according to reporter Anthony Germain.
During the lockout, I heard firsthand from local staffers how being bounced from one task to another made it difficult to complete quality material in a reasonable timeframe. The end result, from Vancouver to Montreal, is today’s shrunken, demoralized work force, with part-time workers performing multiple tasks, and those barely adequately, rather than doing a few tasks well.
Any answers to this systemic mess from the pundits? Commenting on the senate recommendations, Canadian media fixture Andrew Coyne suggests a middle path. Rather than eliminate the CBC entirely, Coyne offers a magnanimous solution: break up the broadcaster into separate fiefdoms competing for viewers, in the pay-per-view cable model of specialty broadcasters like Bravo or HBO. In addition to Newsworld, we’d have a Sportsworld, Scienceworld, Comedyworld and so on.
The trouble with Coyne’s argument is that the CBC is meant to serve ALL of the country. Private services would find no profit margin in servicing the far-flung communities of Canada with regional programming.
For example, The CBC Northern Service is a vital lifeline today for Inuit across the Arctic. “Radio continues to be king in the Arctic, the medium of choice for an oral culture,” notes Jose Kusugak, president of Canada’s national Inuit organization.
In a Toronto Star article, Kusugak stated that flight information, medivac flights, school closings, weather conditions, high tides, low tides, winds and sunrise and sunsets were part of the broadcast schedule. “Inuit hunters rely on this information before setting out,” Kusugak says.
These are people who need reliable information fast; the unlikely addition to their television cable package of a Toronto-based “First Nations World” probably wouldn’t cut it.
When the CBC supports the creative enterprises of its best and brightest, the results can be luminous. Consider CBC Newsworld’s Passionate Eye, a documentary series, which not only features films from US public broadcaster PBS and England’s BBC, but also some splendid in-house productions like Bruce McKenna’s Big Sugar, which examined the predations of the sugar industry around the world. Yet inexplicably, the CBC barely promotes the Passionate Eye, even on its own network or its online web site. (To get regular updates on upcoming shows, I had to join an email listserve.)
A similar silence surrounds the superb evening radio series Ideas. Critics bemoan that only a small fraction of the Canadian public tunes into the CBC – less than five percent, according to one statistic – and they question why the many should subsidize something enjoyed by the few. Yet if the CBC itself can’t inform the public as to what’s on, and when, then the critics are right in one sense: the problem does indeed originate at the source. But the problem isn’t one of excellence per se; it’s management’s poor promotion of the best output from its workforce.
The promotional angle is especially important, given that the CBC is one of the few venues that can effectively showcase Canadian talent. Dan Macleod notes that the CBC makes it possible for musicians to get heard. Especially in French. “They’re paid for a radio or TV broadcast and walk away with a demo with which to get more work. Young filmmakers often get their first shot on CBC, and little-known Canadian writers sometimes find themselves semi-famous,” says Macleod.
During last year’s lockout, Allison Urowitz, sales director at the Vancouver-based publishing group Douglas & McIntyre, told me of the difficulty the company had promoting Canadian titles with its principal publicity outlet gone. Sharon Klein, the deputy director for publicity at Random House Canada, noted that the CBC accounts for 80 percent of her business.
Like it or not, the CBC is one of the central pegs supporting our cultural industries. It’s hardly a secret that Canada grew from a beaver pelt backwater to a world player through state support of the domestic economy. All industrial democracies, including the US, grew and flourished through similar state-supported startups. So it’s no coincidence that the first round of severe CBC cutbacks began in 1984, a time when the Darwinian vision of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan became the gleam in the eye of an Irish boyo named Brian Mulroney. The election of the former lawyer from Baie Comeau signalled the beginning of the end for Canada’s cultural Keynesianism.
Across the western world, we are seeing the rise of a kind of Stalinism for the wealthy and powerful, with public assets thrown into a geopolitical yard sale. In spite of what we’ve been told otherwise, domestic arts and culture are out on the lawn too. And what will replace them? Dumbed-down, one-size-fits-all news and entertainment shows, cooked up by a few borderless megacorporations.
In a regime of growing personal surveillance and weakening social bonds, we are defined, and data-mined, as consumers, rather than citizens. As democracy morphs into kleptocracy, policy makers in the Anglo-American empire see venues like PBS, the BBC and the CBC as quaint relics from the past, ready for the scrap heap, unless they can be hammered into compliant vehicles for corporatism. For now, the elliptical humour of a Lorne Elliot or the nuanced thoughts of an Eleanor Wachtel are useful only as long as the audience is kept distracted.
Looking over the CBC’s past 20 years of chronic cutbacks, one wonders how much of the pattern is by design rather than default, and what the end game is:
Underfund.
Underfund some more.
Repeat until it no longer effectively serves a now indifferent audience.
The promotion of privatization by private media.
Privatize and/or eliminate altogether.
I remain ambivalent about the CBC. But I’m also a romantic when it comes to our broadcaster, in the sense that most Canadians are, though we may find it hard to define. I think it’s because this public entity, with its bad, fractured plate of a logo, has some very real connections to our inner lives.
I can’t hear the old Hockey Night in Canada theme without some Proustian flashback to childhood winters in small town Ontario. I cannot see old episodes of SCTV without remembering my first days living away from home. The CBC, for good or bad, is a part of all our mental furniture. There are several generations of Canadians, who could no more dispense with it than they could their childhood memories. But that’s what I fear the most. Degrade our public broadcaster enough, and no one under a certain age will be able to tell the difference between the CBC, CBS, CTV or MTV. As cultural amnesia sets in, fewer and fewer will recall there was ever something worth defending.
Perhaps I’m biased. As a freelancer, I've done a few spots of commentary for both CBC Radio and CBC Newsworld, and found the experience seamless and professional. It was a thrill to sit for the first time in a local broadcast studio for CBC Radio One, a darkened grotto of blinking red lights resembling something between Admiral Nemo’s underwater lair and the bridge of the Enterprise. But that’s not my best memory of the CBC.
My most memorable moment was several years ago, driving along the Alaska Highway in 40-below weather. The radio band was a flat expanse of static, with the sole exception a clear signal from CBC Radio North. I listened as the host of Vinyl Café, Stuart McLean, dialed a home in Nova Scotia to tell a fan she had won tickets to the year-end show in Toronto. The line was busy and a daisy chain of calls along the East Coast followed, as Maclean enlisted operators to break through the busy signal. He went so far as to contact a pizza place in the winner’s hometown, asking the delivery guy to relay the message personally. The final attempt to call ended in success, with much excitement from the winning family.
What at first sounded like another quirky CBC bit, stretched past novelty, had become a celebratory shtick, funny and oddly moving at the same time. Through a simple radio signal on a godforsaken stretch of highway, I had been drawn into the lives of Canadians thousands of miles away. How many solitary wayfarers across this vast country were brought together in that moment – and so many others in so many other moments – by a radio signal from across the horizon?
That’s the moment when I really fell for the CBC. But more accurately, I fell for the idea behind it, the idealized vision of media bringing a nation’s people together, rather than amusing them to death.
For all its flaws and faults, our public broadcaster is our collective binding force. It’s our agora, our forum, our national assembly. As such, it’s the nation’s most important cultural institution, ever. If we don’t use it, we lose it. End of story.
mwiseguise@yahoo.com
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