Committee reviews CBC mandate

GUY DIXON
Globe and Mail

It's a decidedly unusual issue to be discussing in 2007, so far into the digital era, but for the next few months Parliament's heritage committee will be tackling the CBC's role in new media as part of its review of the broadcaster's mandate.

The hearings, which will likely continue into May or June, are looking at “the role of a public broadcaster in the 21st century.” The role of the Internet and the CBC's online arm – cbc.ca – will be a pivotal part of the discussion.

That's because despite the fact that cbc.ca has been busily expanding and innovating for more than 10 years, there's no mention of it in the legislation from which the CBC takes its mandate. That Broadcasting Act was passed in 1991 – 16 years ago, when websites weren't really a factor for broadcasters.

But talk to anyone in the industry today and they'll say that every broadcaster and news organization must focus on exploiting its Internet presence if it hopes to compete for public attention. That's the underlying reality. “If you're going to be a media company, how can you limit yourself?” said the head of a broadcaster's website that competes directly against cbc.ca.

Despite that, you still hear offhand, off-the-record murmurs from competing media companies about whether the CBC as a broadcaster has a mandate to beef up its online services. Others argue, though, that these murmurs blur CBC mandate issues with private media companies' competitive interests. The question now is whether that confusion will make its way into the heritage-committee hearings.

Regulators and policy experts are clear when it comes to the 1991 Broadcasting Act.

“The legislative mandate requires that they [the CBC] operate radio and television services,” said Helen Kennedy, a director of programming-services policy in the Department of Canadian Heritage's broadcasting-policy branch.

“Now that said, it doesn't preclude them from exploiting other platforms in the attainment of their mandate,” she added.

The act was written at a time when cable and satellite broadcasting were seen as a vast unknown, so the act was created with a certain built-in platform agnosticism.

“The act is specifically designed to be technology-neutral,” said Richard Stursberg, the current head of CBC Television, but an official during the 1980s at the Department of Communications (now part of the Heritage Department), where he helped to draft the act.

He added: “If any media company wants to continue to be relevant and offer a good service, then you must evolve as people's habits and methods of consuming culture change. What it means conceptually – and this is true of everybody – you have to stop thinking of yourself as being a television company or a radio company.

“You have to understand that what you are at [the] roots is a content company, and that you have to change your strategy so you ensure that the content you produce reflects whatever manner it is that Canadians want to consume it,” he said in an interview.

The act specifies that CBC content should be made available “by the most appropriate and efficient means.”

The 2003 Lincoln Report, a massive 727-page report by a previous heritage committee, also addressed this by finding that various CBC online initiatives were “an appropriate and cost-effective use of the Corporation's revenues” and that “the future of communications, both in Canada and throughout the world, will be dependent on cross-platform strategies in which online content is used to supplement radio and television programming.”

In fact, the Lincoln committee (named after Clifford Lincoln, the heritage committee's chair at the time) was so persuaded by what it saw that it recommended that not only should the Broadcasting Act be amended to include new-media services for the purpose of greater clarity, but that new media be made a central part of the CBC's strategic plan.

When public broadcasters innovate, expand and encroach on private media, controversy can occur. Newspaper and online publishers in Britain claimed unfair competition from BBC Online during the BBC's recent 10-year mandate renewal.

However, the National Union of Journalists, Britain's largest newspaper union, argued against what it saw as unfair moves by private business against the BBC. This argument brought up a key distinction between public interests and business interests.

The situation is very different in Canada. Instead of Britain's highly fragmented media and newspaper industries, Canada's sector has consolidated to the point where there are now only a small number of private media companies. Yet most of these private companies have had little to say publicly about the heritage committee's CBC review.

Instead, the private companies leave these issues to their professional associations. However, the Canadian Newspaper Association is not making a submission to the mandate-review process. The organization's president said the CNA has “bigger fish to fry,” such as access-to-information legislation and other broad public issues.

The Canadian Association of Broadcasters, which represents private broadcasters, will be making a submission on March 27. Its emphasis will likely be on traditional broadcasting issues and the potential of new media. Its submission won't be made public until that hearing date.

There is a clause in the 1991 Broadcasting Act that address competition issues. Private companies have always questioned why the CBC should be competing against them. An oft-heard gripe today is the competition for ad revenue from CBC-TV's sports programming.

But the Broadcasting Act stipulates that if there is a conflict between the CBC's mandate and the interests of other broadcasters, the matter is to be resolved in the public interest. And the public interest, according to the Act, is to allow the CBC to carry on with its mandate – in other words, to allow the CBC to be free to go about its business.