Friends raise unlikely prospect of increasing public funding for CBC

The politically sensitive topic of the CBC’s public funding is again coming into question. In a pre-budget consultation submission to the House Standing Committee on Finance, broadcasting watchdog Friends of Canadian Broadcasting says the federal government should increase the CBC’s per-capita public funding to $40 per year. The group is rehashing a recommendation that the House Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage made in 2008 to increase the per-capita public funding grant to the CBC from $34 to $40 per year. “The idea comes back to what is wrong with the CBC,” Ian Morrison, a spokesman for the Friends, said in an interview. Morrison said the CBC’s greater dependence on commercial advertising for television has made the broadcaster less distinguishable from private broadcasters like CTV and Global. Morrison suggested that, to qualify for the funding increase, the CBC should have to submit to the government a detailed financial plan describing how they would use the money. “That plan, in our view, would reduce the commercial dependency of CBC Television,” Morrison said. “This government is not going to give the CBC any more money,” Christopher Waddell, a former CBC parliamentary bureau chief and now the Carty chair in business and financial journalism at Carleton University, told The Wire Report. “No politician has cared about public broadcasting in this country for more than a quarter century, so I can’t imagine anything is going to happen.” Waddell said there are other methods of public funding for the CBC to consider. The BBC, for example, receives funding from television licences, paid by consumers, costing about $124 per year each. In addition to government funding, PBS and NPR in the United States rely on direct donations from the public collected through telethons and funding drives. Waddell said the CBC would have to change its approach to broadcasting if it is to appeal for more public funds. “I don’t think you should give people more money without having a plan for what they’re going to do with it,” he said. “I would argue that public broadcasting should return to a role that was defined for it in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which is a focus primarily on news, information and current affairs.” In an email statement to The Wire Report, Angus McKinnon, a spokesman for the CBC, said any additional dollar put into Canadian broadcasting would be a good thing. McKinnon said a per-capita increase to $40 per year for the CBC would result in about an extra $200 million in public funding for the broadcaster per year. “It’s a fiscally responsible beginning to put public broadcasting in Canada on a more equal footing with public broadcasting in other Western democracies,” Morrison said. On average, Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) countries spend $76 per capita, per year, on their public broadcasters. The BBC has public funding of $7.5 billion per year, France Television and Radio France together receive $4 billion, and PBS and NPR in the United States receive $1.2 billion from their respective governments. The CBC received about $1.1 billion in public funding in 2008-2009. jmigneault@thewirereport.ca

Friends raise unlikely prospect of increasing public funding for CBC

Broadcast | September 3, 2010

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