The prospect of a severely slashed budget has emerged despite Conservative election promises to "maintain or increase" support for the public broadcaster, and amid fears now openly expressed by top executives that the coming cuts could be driven even deeper by relentless attacks from the CBC's competitor, Quebecor, and its conservative-minded network of television stations, websites and Sun newspapers.
After a Quebec arts-funding flap that may well have cost the federal Conservatives a majority government in 2008, Heritage Minister James Moore made it a mission to reassure anxiety-filled, culture-minded Canadians — right through the 2011 election campaign — that the CBC was in no danger of being de-funded or otherwise diminished.
It became Moore's mantra, a soothing message track replayed regularly in recent years despite the hopes nurtured in certain corners of his party's support base for some serious budget-slashing at the CBC, a public broadcaster generally seen as unsympathetic to the upper- and lowercase conservative causes.
So it was no great surprise when, the day after the May 2 election this year, Moore again offered comforting words that the new majority Conservative government was committed to maintaining — perhaps even bolstering — its support for the CBC.
"We believe in the national public broadcaster," he said in a post-victory interview with the CBC itself. "We have said that we will maintain or increase support for the CBC. That is our platform and we have said that before and we will commit to that."
Moore went on to praise the network as "the infrastructure around which Canadian arts and culture is built, so of course it is central and it is key."
But in the wake of Moore's acknowledgments in recent weeks that the CBC will face significant budget cuts after all — with scenarios of "at least five per cent" and "at least 10 per cent" in play — critics are wondering what happened to the minister's steady-as-she-goes campaign promise.
And with a Conservative-dominated House committee hearing testimony this fall about the access controversy, opposition MPs have warned that the parliamentary hearings amount to a CBC-bashing exercise and a possible prelude to an era of sustained and deeply damaging budget cuts at the Mothercorp.
"James Moore has been as articulate defending public broadcasting as anybody I know," says Ian Morrison, spokesman for Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, an advocacy group that calls itself a watchdog for Canadian programming.
But he quickly adds: "There's more than one James Moore. He's a hydra-headed creature."
At the same time, CBC bosses themselves are exhibiting increased anxiety about the potential impact of the access battle on the corporation's federal funding, amounts that ultimately will be determined by a government populated by numerous Conservative MPs who have been critical of CBC spending for years and, more recently, outspoken about its alleged secrecy.
"Quebecor's coverage of the public broadcaster includes repeated calls to cut CBC/Radio-Canada's funding, based on errors of fact on our accountability," CBC vice-president of communications and corporate affairs, Bill Chambers, told Postmedia News. "We hope that Canadians can see through this self-interested campaign of our vertically integrated and fully converged competitor."
CBC president Hubert Lacroix, who is scheduled to appear Nov. 1 before the Commons committee on Access-to-Information issues, has also aired concerns about the attacks by Quebecor media outlets, suggesting in an interview last week that "every time they create doubt about us" for "their advantage" it leads to a weakened CBC, and can "influence people" to shrink the public broadcaster's budget.
Quebecor has steadfastly denied such motives, justifying its campaign to open up CBC's internal files as an example of probing, taxpayer-conscious journalism that's shedding light on a cloistered, big-spending and insufficiently accountable public agency.
The CBC, in turn, has argued that, since coming under the provisions of access-to-Information rules in 2007, the corporation has responded reasonably promptly to many requests, but also has resisted others for fear of divulging potentially valuable commercial information to its competitors — principally Quebecor's television stations, which battle the CBC for viewers and advertising revenues.
Yet Canada's information commissioner, Suzanne Legault, also has pushed the CBC to release information that she insists is rightly in the public realm, even taking the dispute, still unresolved, to the Federal Court of Canada to safeguard her power to decide which documents deserve to be excluded from access requests.
Conservative MPs in the Commons committee sparked an uproar over judicial independence recently by seeking witness testimony from a federal judge who had ordered the broadcaster to comply with Legault's requests, an order that's now under appeal.
While the bid to summon the judge was later dropped, the episode was seen as further evidence that the Conservative government has overcome earlier, minority-era fears that the political costs of squeezing the CBC (financially and otherwise) were too high.
The first hint came in July that the "maintain or increase" promise might have an early expiry date. Moore stated then that it would be "silly" to imagine — at a time when the new Conservative government's election platform required some $4 billion in overall cost cuts by 2015 — that the CBC "can't find five-per-cent efficiencies" from somewhere within its $1.1-billion-a-year budget "to give back to the broader economic framework."
And now, like a fuzzy analog signal displaced by a high-def stream of digital data, Moore's message about coming cuts to the CBC has become crystal clear.
"In the campaign, we said we're going to balance the budget and we're going to do so responsibly," Moore said recently during a Parliament Hill scrum. "We're going to keep our word and the CBC has to be part of that."
A CBC spokesman has disclosed precisely the budget-cutting scenarios being examined by the Crown corporation, which encompasses both English-language television, radio and Internet operations, as well as the French-language Radio-Canada.
"We've been asked to prepare two proposals: one to meet at least five per cent in reductions and the other at least 10 per cent in reductions," said the CBC's Marco Dub.
For Morrison — already haunted by visions of a multi-headed Moore and worried that Canadian-made news and entertainment programming is now in extreme jeopardy — the phrase "at least 10 per cent" sends a shiver up the spine.
He said, for example, if both CBC's Radio 2 music network and its Radio-Canada equivalent, Espace musique, were eliminated, that move would represent only about $20 million of the $100 million-plus in cuts required under the 10 per cent scenario.
Regional radio and television news programming also would be decimated, Morrison argues.
It would amount to "tearing the guts out of the institution," he says, insisting that even a "majority of Conservative supporters" are fans of CBC programming and would join in a national outcry over such deep cuts.
There are "a variety of scenarios," for how money would be saved, Morrison notes, "but they all involve taking things away that some Canadians depend on, and makes the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation more of a Toronto Broadcasting Corporation."
While Morrison argues the CBC has been the victim of a broken promise to sustain the broadcaster's funding, Moore's spokesman denies that charge.
"I would say that our government made a commitment in the 2006 and 2008 elections that we'd maintain funding for the CBC, and we kept our word," said Moore's director of communications, James Maunder. "In the recent election, we made a commitment to re-table the budget that was tabled prior the campaign, which maintained funding for the CBC, and we kept our word."
But Moore's chief critic in the House of Commons says the Conservatives have brazenly abandoned their status-quo-or-more pledge on CBC funding and appear to be poised to unleash a full-scale assault on the broadcaster, even as it celebrates its 75th anniversary this year.
"There's a pattern emerging here, where there's a lot of, 'Don't worry, don't worry, don't worry,' then the axe falls," says newly-elected NDP heritage critic Tyrone Benskin, a Montreal stage and screen actor who appeared in such CBC productions as Riverdale and The Newsroom. "I don't see how they're 'maintaining' the CBC by cutting."
In the Commons committee's access hearings last week, Benskin was cast in the role of a gallant knight riding to defend CBC's honour — as well as its budget needs and its right to resist Quebecor's Access campaign.
Meanwhile, Conservative MPs, led by Peterborough, Ont.'s Dean Del Mastro, parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, laced their questions to witnesses with criticisms of alleged secrecy and overspending at the CBC.
Lacroix's appearance at the committee in a few weeks may well take on the feel of a trial, with government and opposition members respectively performing the parts of prosecutors and defence counsel.
The NDP's concern, said Benskin, is that the Conservatives will seek budget savings "at any cost" to the CBC.
"If you destroy the infrastructure of an organization in trying to meet that (budget) goal," Benskin argues, "then you end up having to spend even more money later to rebuild."
Moore recently ruled out privatization of the CBC as an option being considered by the government. But Morrison, who notes that he's heard promises before from the minister, says the broadcaster's defenders are now bracing for a range of potential assaults that could include massive job losses, deep program cuts or even the scrapping of the TV advertising revenues that added more than $350 million last year to the CBC's revenues.
"I choose to believe that there are smart people at the top of the government who understand the popularity of public broadcasting, but I think there's a kind of war going on right now," he says, suggesting hard-line Conservative critics of the CBC and more moderate MPs are at odds inside the government caucus over how much to squeeze the public broadcaster.
"There are some people," Morrison contends, "who would like to do things for ideological reasons but using the cover of deficit reduction."
CBC by the numbers
- $1.16 billion — Federal funding for 2010/2011
- $650 million — Advertising and other revenues
- 64 % — Percentage of CBC revenues from taxpayers
- 7,285 — Full-time employees, CBC and Radio-Canada
- "At least 5%" and "at least 10 %" — two budget cut scenarios being prepared by CBC
- 7.5 million — Number of unique visitors, per month, to CBC and Radio-Canada websites
- 1 million — CBC audio podcasts downloaded per month
- 82 % — proportion of Canadian content on CBC and Radio-Canada prime-time schedule
- 9.3 % — CBC prime-time audience share, English Canada
- 20 % — Radio-Canada prime-time audience share, French Canada
- 75 — number of years, in 2011, since the creation of the CBC in 1936
- 14.7 % — CBC radio audience share (Radio 1 plus Radio 2)
- 19.5 % — Radio-Canada radio audience share (Premiere Chaine plus Espace musique)
Origin
Source: Vancouver Sun
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