As Canadians, we are conditioned to have two jobs: the one we have, and the one running the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.
Everyone has a better idea of what the CBC can do than of what the CBC does.
What the CBC does, though, matters greatly to our region. Its radio service is a cultural backbone and the highest-rated, and its television production – even with low ratings – is the most extensive in this country at showing Vancouver to the wider world as a visual brochure.
But, no different than with many other media, money is a problem. The CBC was created 80 years ago under Conservatives, fuelled by consecutive governments for decades, slashed by one-third during Jean Chrétien’s Liberal term and cut again by about $115 million under Stephen Harper, but now is an imminent beneficiary. Most believe the Liberals will add $75 million this year and a further $75 million next year to its $1.04 billion appropriation as part of its $1.7 billion budget.
But the infusion won’t make up for the bleeding. The world of the 1936 creating, 1993-97 clobbering and 2010-11 curtailing is a different one in 2016, with players like Netflix, Amazon, YouTube and others taking over screen time. Copyright is under siege, territorial protection and licensing are rubbery or porous, and the advertising support of the television medium is atomizing.
This is not a problem confined to CBC.
The private television networks are bleeding viewers and revenue. An on-demand world is emerging. The federal broadcast regulator just concluded hearings to determine how it might support local TV news, whose finances are in a near free fall.
Advocacy group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting suggests half of all local TV newsrooms will close by 2020 otherwise.
But the CBC problem is a unique one: a gigantic mandate – English, French, TV, radio, digital, northern services – outsized by a gigantic headache in fulfilling it. Think the storm might be over if the Liberals add $150 million? Uh-uh.
Case in point: Rogers Broadcasting, the rights holder to national and many regional NHL games, now leases CBC for distribution and its technical crew for production for the venerable Hockey Night in Canada, and gets all of the advertising revenue in return. In two years it could bring the show to its own network, forcing CBC to create hundreds of hours of less popular and likely unprofitable Canadian programming it now could not possibly afford, Justin Trudeau or no Justin Trudeau.
CBC continues to sell and lease its real estate holdings – upgrades a few years ago to its Vancouver operations were achieved by selling adjacent space – but that strategy only bails water from a sprung ship.
The simplest solution is a revolution and it goes something like this:
1. Make the CBC a commercial-free, all-Canadian service. Kick Coronation Street to the curb, because there will be takers.
2. Let the private networks out of their requirements to broadcast Canadian content, but …
3. Hold the private networks to their requirements to direct 30% of their revenue to finance English Canadian content production.
4. Redirect that Canadian production money into a central fund whose productions would then be shown across CBC. Make CBC, over time, the uniquely Canadian Netflix-style distributor.
Here are the benefits of the plan:
1. A commercial-free CBC would send about $220 million back into the system, presumably to the private networks, quelling some of their qualms.
2. The private networks, unfettered in their programming, would likely generate more revenue through higher overall ratings in the short term to provide even more funds to domestic production.
3. Canadians would have a distinctly Canadian, public-minded broadcaster, more sustainably underwritten by the media ecology and appropriations, and the runway to move more gracefully to digital.
There, enough moonlighting. Now back to the job I hold. •
Kirk LaPointe is Business in Vancouver’s vice-president of audience and business development.
