CBC-TV shuts down in-house design, lays off 79 people

(CBC) - CBC Television has sent layoff notices to 79 employees at its Toronto production centre and plans to stop all in-house design.

The CBC will shut down its Toronto design operations and lay off all the set design, set decoration, carpentry, paint shop, special effects, hair, costumes and props crew. Only graphic designers and makeup artists for in-house programs survived the cuts.

The cuts were made because costs keep rising annually, but CBC's allocation from the federal government has not risen in real terms in more than 20 years, said Fred Mattocks, executive director of regional programming and television production.

"It's necessary because English TV does not have enough money to meet all the needs of its schedule and programming," he said in an interview with CBC Arts Online on Thursday.

"We want to make much more Canadian drama," he said. "That requires money and that money has to come from somewhere."

Mattocks said the department costs $8 million a year to run and the layoffs will save about $1 million.

The affected employees work in design, studio and remote production, post-production and network presentation.

The CBC plans to contract out all these design positions on a project-by-project basis. CBC-TV has had an in-house design team for more than 50 years.

The Canadian Media Guild, the union representing 76 of the 79 employees affected, denounced the layoffs as another example of CBC retreating from its mandate as a public broadcaster.

"CBC is moving out of more and more facets of TV production," said Arnold Amber, president of the CBC branch of the CMG. "You have to ask at some point what they do consider to be programming."

"Maybe they'll save money, maybe they won't," he said. "They've been saying they'll put more money into programming for the last five or six years, but they never do it."

The jobs affected are creative jobs involving people who have built a relationship with producers and performers, he said. Eliminating them will hurt the quality of Canadian TV, Amber said.

Mattocks acknowledged that CBC will lose a lot of talented people with the layoffs.

"What we're doing is getting out of the business of in-house design altogether," he said. "We won't build sets for anything inside the CBC."

Independent producers and co-producers will have to take care of their own design needs in future. CBC says shows like Hatching, Matching and Dispatching and At the Hotel already have independent producers to provide these services.

"Few major public broadcasters around the world still maintain substantial in-house design capacity. Even BBC London stopped doing so some time ago," Mattocks said in an official statement about the layoffs Thursday.

The employees have been given 16 weeks notice.

Last year CBC laid off 30 in-house publicists and contracted out the work to a private company.

© the CBC, 2006