What can we do? Future directions for Canadian broadcasting
Canadian Content and Cultural Diversity
The Broadcasting Act should be changed to safeguard and broaden the carriage of
the public component of its public/private model. Bona fide educational broadcasters,
and not for profit channels such as CPAC and APTN, the public broadcaster and
the public producer should be reserved an appropriate space on the spectrum, available
to all Canadians via cable or satellite, to ensure that the public interest is
served.
Cultural or industrial objectives?
Although cultural industries were exempted from the North American Free Trade
Agreement, cultural funding/tax credits for domestic producers and broadcasters
have been under near-constant attack by American trade associations (actors, directors,
film craftspeople) as unfair trade practices.
Nevertheless, domestic cultural policy must continue to support financial incentives for production and distribution systems that help reflect Canada's society, arts, politics, science and other elements to Canadians in order that we not drown in Americana or global culture.
The Broadcasting Act of 1991 should have been adequate to meet the government's stated Canadian content objectives without any significant changes. However, years of practice, and a tendency to interpret the Act to enable the pursuit of primarily industrial policies, have weakened the Broadcasting Act as a major instrument of cultural determination. The primacy of the cultural objectives over trade and industry issues has to be restated, to ensure that Canada has an effective and powerful voice in the age of globalization.
Studies of broadcasting systems around the world (3) have shown that a secure, well-funded public broadcaster increases the quality of all players within the system. The 1991 Broadcasting Act restated the importance of the public broadcaster's role in our public/private system.
But policies and programs seem sometimes to be diametrically opposed - starting with the first budget cuts in 1993 through to the CRTC's 1999 refusal to grant the CBC/Radio-Canada a licence for a French-language arts specialty channel. The CRTC has, in its 1999 Television Policy, removed minimum spending requirements for Canadian content.
Re-emphasis of stable support for the public broadcaster and, secondarily, the public producer, is key at this juncture. So much more can be accomplished. Consider that, despite major budget cuts beginning in 1996, the NFB has provided broadcasters in Canada and around the world with programming with a truly Canadian perspective. From The Boys of St Vincent, to Just Watch Me, and not forgetting Enfer et contre tous! and Traître ou Patriote. The NFB produces about 60 documentary and animation films per year that are appropriate for TV audiences. (This is on top of its catalogue of more than 9,000 productions.)
Of course, cultural objectives cannot be fulfilled simply because content exists. Programmers still have to find and keep sizable audiences. In the case of NFB productions, despite the myriad channels available, the good intentions of the Broadcasting Act, the regulations on Canadian content, the efforts to sell these works to broadcasters, and despite the numerous prizes won by NFB productions, too few Canadians are seeing them.
The NFB is trying new means to ensure regular and consistent exposure to audiences. While remaining a broadcast supplier, we have also become a partner, as in the new tier one (guaranteed carriage) digital channel The Documentary Channel, and we are aggressively testing the Internet as an alternative form of delivery.
The Doc Channel will provide the NFB two regularly scheduled branded hours per week, on top of other NFB productions broadcast at different times. But the Documentary Channel is an English-only service. A French- equivalent is needed, perhaps rising from the ashes of TV5, to satisfy the needs of Francophone documentary viewers in all parts of Canada.
Digitals will commence with a small viewer "universe" - about 2.1 million digital-ready households at launch. Therefore, the NFB, as with other supplier/partners, must pursue partnerships with broadcasters, the most natural being CBC/Radio-Canada for the NFB. As the NFB continues to pursue its public policy objectives and the CBC tries to create a distinct, "pubcaster" space for itself amid its commercial competitors, the NFB can help CBC fulfill its own public service mandate.
Is the method of determining Canadian content still appropriate in relation
to new media?
The point system is an artificial construct that bears little relevance to its
ultimate objective, to ensure that distinctively Canadian content is offered to
the Canadian public. The problem, as noted in a submission to this committee in
1998 (4) , is that the points measure
"who makes it rather than what it says."
Not only does this system need to change to allow it to assess the cultural import of productions and TV content, but, no matter how we change the measurement scale, it would remain inappropriate for an unregulated medium such as the Internet and serve as a disincentive relative to the objective of having more Canadian content on the Internet.
Distinctively Canadian content in the multi-channel/alternative media universe
- is it possible?
As more foreign channels become available, Canadian material can only survive
if it can demonstrate its Canadian distinctiveness (branding) and high production
values in the space of a four-second zap. Alternatively, if Canadians were offered
true Canadian channels, where all the programming was at least 85% Canadian, then
Canadian productions could become destination programming as well. Canadian channels
do not currently have to compete with foreign undertakings for local and regional
news - they do for all other program types.
The NFB has done some instructive pioneering work in using alternative media to provide its own distinctively Canadian, culturally diverse content to university audiences. Our productions are now available full-length and full-screen at Canadian universities on the CA*Net3 high bandwidth network. Since November 1999, NFB documentaries and animated shorts have been streamed in near-broadcast quality, with the full agreement of rights-holders. With a widely available broadband backbone we can make the technology take our productions further, ideally to every citizen. Meantime, our strategies, research and lessons learned speak volumes on some of the challenges and opportunities in today's broadcasting landscape.
Enriching the cultural fabric of Canada - can content regulations add value?
The Broadcasting Act of 1991 commits to the whole broadcasting system,
not just the CBC, the responsibility of enriching and strengthening the cultural
fabric of Canada. As the safety in the number of voices erodes with the concentration
of media companies, so will the possibility of truly representing the cultural
diversity of this country.
Minimum content percentages, benefits, and targeted regulations have not completely answered the challenge of making the whole system work cohesively to strengthen Canada's fabric. The threads of this fabric are culturally diverse, French and English across the country, local, regional and national; the Canadian broadcasting system is primarily national in scope, but generally homogenous in terms of cultural diversity.
So it seems that content regulations must not be discarded but rather refined, since their existence has been critically important in creating a basis for a demonstrably Canadian TV culture.