By Dan MacLeod

Tony Westell, who lives in Toronto, is the kind of guy you'd expect would watch the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). A retired reporter, he worked for two of Canada's best-known papers and has taught journalism at Ottawa's Carleton University. Although he arrived in Canada over 40 years ago, he still has that upper-class Brit accent. "I feel I SHOULD watch CBC, but for some reason I don't. I usually watch TVO [Ontario public TV] or American PBS."

Montreal-born Alistair Sutherland is the editor of The Mirror, an alternative weekly for which he writes a media column. He says, "It should be a pleasure to listen to CBC radio, but it's more like a chore. And there's obviously something wrong when countries like Holland produce quality TV series and we don't seem to be able to."

Science reporter Gilles Provost is ex-president of the Radio-Canada (French-language CBC) journalists' union. "The English side has a real problem," he says. "They've lost their viewers."

Which is what the new CBC president, Robert Rabinovitch, stated in May when he announced 670 layoffs and the closing of a dozen regional newsrooms. "CBC Television's share of the early-evening news audience is less than half of what it was a decade ago," he told a parliamentary committee. "During the 1990s it dropped from 28 percent to 13 percent." In Toronto, Canada's biggest city, the share was two percent. And it wasn't like everyone was watching U.S. stations on cable; Rabinovitch had a bar graph showing that 67 percent tune in to CTV, Canada's main commercial network. CTV makes a killing showing almost nothing but American shows, but their network and local newscasts aren't as glib or half as politically correct. Viewers see people who look and act a lot like themselves. (Although the local weather-lady says things like, "Now the storm has sweeped across Central Canada ...") Whereas, when I began at CBC radio in 1982 and mentioned how nobody I knew listened to our station, a reporter said: "It's good when our ratings are low. It means we're being intellectual."

Of Public Broadcasting and Canadian Culture

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was created by act of Parliament in 1933 to provide national radio in both French and English, the country's two official languages. It was specifically set up to safeguard against Canada's being overrun by U.S. culture (to paraphrase a government minister). When television came of age a generation later, that sentiment seemed all the more clairvoyant.

In fact, from the '50s through the '70s, the CBC was one of the world's great public broadcasters. But the Corporation was also evolving into its own self-contained world of bigger budgets, exploding infrastructure, myriad administrators and, ultimately, a kind of on-air arrogance. By 1984 a memo was pinned up in CBC newsrooms across the country: "Don't wear your fur coat in the studio." Now, after 16 years of government cuts coupled with a stubborn in-house refusal to change, the Corporation is an object of derision for stand-up comics and columnists alike. What's left of the "people's network" remains out of touch, and the citizens who pay the bill are staying away in droves. The CBC is well on the road to oblivion.

In the native communities of the far north, in the small fishing villages around coastal Newfoundland and the small towns that dot the prairies, people have been listening to news of the outside world on CBC radio for over half a century. A lot of Canadian novels describe dad sitting in front of the old set on Saturday night listening to the hockey game from faraway Montreal or Toronto.

With the advent of television came CBC programs celebrating the good old days in Prince Edward Island or life as a beach bum in British Columbia. Radio-Canada produced dramas that resembled theater and were watched by millions of people week after week. The CBC can rightly boast of an uninterrupted tradition of excellent sketch-comedy from "Wayne and Schuster" to "SCTV" to "The Kids in the Hall" to the present, and brilliant, "This Hour Has 22 Minutes."

Unlike the States' PBS, the CBC is mainstream: from the '50s on, it was the news channel, the sports channel, the concert channel, the made-in-Canada sitcom and drama channel. Canadians, and especially Quebecers, constantly refer to the shows they watched as children, and it's much more Ed Murrow's "greatest classroom in the world" than my American memories of "Gilligan's Island" and "I Dream of Jeannie."

But sometime during the '70s, a lot of the people who worked at the CBC began to confuse it with the post office. These employees had "permanent status"; once they got "inside the building," they had a job for life. The government wasn't supposed to interfere with editorial content or day-to-day operations, but CBC staff were de facto civil servants. After the recession of 1971, that kind of position became very attractive indeed.

Fill disclosure: I worked for both Radio-Canada and the CBC from 1982 to 1996 (a total of seven years full-time) as a reporter-producer. As critical as I am of the way things are, I also believe in the importance of the CBC in a country that is fast becoming a mere extension of the United States, thanks to the new world order of free trade and multinational corporations. And I truly feel that most of the problems at the CBC are not due to government cutbacks but are the result of the stubborn arrogance of the Corporation itself. From what I've witnessed, an incredible number of employees (from hierarchical bottom all the way to the top) don't care all that much about the institution that employs them. It was one of the first things that struck me as a college-kid freelancer 18 years ago, back when I thought it was pretty much an honor to be allowed to run around Moncton, New Brunswick, with a tape recorder.

The BBC has seven and a half times the CBC budget, and although the U.K. has double the population and that empire image to keep up, the CBC covers a lot of territory. Beginning with Northern Services, which provides native-language radio "from sea to sea to [Arctic] sea," as we say in Canada, there are four national radio networks, two in French and two in English, as well as national TV in both languages. All this costs $670 million. (A 24-hour news channel in each language is paid for via cable fees.)

Since 1988, the CBC has seen its budget chopped by around a third and its workforce by nearly half. However, in addition to news, current affairs magazines, children's programs and "Hockey Night in Canada," the CBC makes it possible for musicians to get heard (especially in French). They're paid for a radio or TV broadcast and walk away with a demo with which to get more work. Young filmmakers often get their first shot on CBC, and little-known Canadian writers sometimes find themselves semi-famous. Montreal Gazette TV critic Mike Boone says, "The CBC is Canada's most important cultural institution, bar none." He pauses, adds: "By far."

Everyone I spoke to — including people who've lost their jobs in the topsy-turvy world of Canada's Public Broadcaster over the past decade — went to great lengths to say they didn't want to see the CBC disappear. And people who "hardly ever watch," who "don't know where it is on the [radio] dial" — Francos and Anglos alike — say it's "important for the kids." Even if it costs a billion bucks a year, most everyone agrees it's worth it.

Inside-Outside

Unfortunately, as sincere as those ex-CBC employees may want to be, they exhibit the opposite of "an axe to grind" when they speak of the corporation where they used to work. In both French and English, both radio and TV, the CBC is the only game in town. My colleagues may be "outside the building" now but they hope against hope they'll find their way back inside someday.

There are four commercial TV networks in Canada — two in French and two in English — and, for the most part, they're a joke. They exist to make money for shareholders; they spend virtually nothing on current affairs, arts and culture, or Canadian programming in general. The Global network's Montreal "newsroom" is closed from Friday night to Monday morning.

Anyone interested in serious broadcast journalism doesn't think of a career outside the CBC or, if they're French, Radio-Canada. Which goes a long way toward explaining why a good number of people haven't returned my calls on this story. Some are still inside the building, some not, but everyone seems worried at the idea of going public with the horror stories they routinely tell their friends.

Two news items in the past month help explain this. First, Radio-Canada TV reporter Normand Lester reported that the one-minute bits of Canadian history that run on the CBC and Radio-Canada, which everyone thought were privately funded, were in fact cofinanced by the federal government. Seeing as how 49 percent of the Quebec population wants to separate from Canada, this can be seen as blatant federalist propaganda. Lester was immediately moved to the international desk and now voices stories over foreign tape.

Then, a couple of weeks later, a CBC reporter was suspended without pay for defending, in two letters-to-the-editor published in the Ottawa Citizen, the regional newsrooms that were scheduled to be closed. According to the Canadian Press wire service, Peter McKinnon "didn't want to comment [on his suspension] as he claims he was threatened with being fired ... if he talked to other media."

But if CBC management hates being criticized or embarrassed, so do its employees. A third story, which made front pages in Montreal on June 21, is exemplary. Radio-Canada has just been condemned to pay nearly a million dollars for destroying the career of a local public-relations person. After a TV report concerning one of his clients, Gilles Néron asked to meet with the journalist, claiming she made five errors. When she didn't return his call, he wrote a letter asking, again, to discuss the report. However, his letter contained a couple of its own errors and, instead of getting the chance to sit down and chat with the reporter, Johanne Faucher, Mr. Néron became the subject of her next report. According to Superior Court judge Claude Tellier, the reporter and her producer were angry that Mr. Néron dared to question them and wanted "to show the author [of the letter] that you don't go after journalists like that."

Antonia Zerbisias, a TV critic I'm talking to on the phone from Toronto, sounds increasingly upset. What was supposed to be an interview has turned into a debate. I say, "But, geez, with all the budget cuts and layoffs, the CBC keeps spending money to develop these new TV series and none of them ever work." The shows appear out of nowhere, often in the middle of the season; they're heavily promoted, then they disappear. I list half a dozen.

"What about the Americans?!" She says 200 pilots gave birth to around 40 shows of which maybe 10 succeed in the United States each year. She says: "I'm really worried, Dan ...You could do real damage." If I can do serious damage to the CBC, then something is seriously wrong.

Last Call?

For all the changes, the job-loss, the half a billion Canadian dollars gone from the budget, nothing much has changed. One of the nearly 5,000 people who've "disappeared" in the '90s, a journalist I used to work with, says, "The bosses still have money to decorate their offices. And reporters still go to Paris and London and interview the same academics and politicians and journalists we always interview."

"Field reporting" at the CBC usually means a conversation with the kind of people who write op-ed pieces and appear in round-table discussions on TV. A good interview is one where, at the end, the interviewee invites the reporter out for drinks at the kind of café where famous people are sometimes seen.

More surprisingly, all those bosses who took $100,000 buyouts (and get partial pensions as early retirees) are "still in charge. Except now they run private production companies, usually with their wives as vice presidents, and they cut deals with their friends at Radio-Canada," says a person who used to work inside the building and now works for those very production companies.

"Actually," says Dan Oldfield, a journalists' union rep in Toronto, "productivity is up nearly 50 percent from what it was a decade ago." He talks about how hard staffers work these days. Some music producers double as hosts, for example. In 1996 — my last stint with CBC radio — the office secretary was failing to do two jobs at once, while the host of the noon show was coming in early to do the morning show's press review.

But in the upper echelons, life goes on much as before; indeed, sometimes it's easier. One result of all the confusion is that nothing is done that bosses or producers don't want to do. Anything pitched from outside a very limited circle has little chance of happening. The reason is always: "There just isn't any money!"

It used to be easy to go in and pitch ideas: you said hi to the old guy in the uniform, you signed the book and took the elevator. A lifelong freelancer tells me, "It's humiliating these days." As its buildings have emptied, the CBC has spent millions of dollars on sliding Plexiglass barriers operated by computer card. Those without cards, even if they have a meeting, stand around looking embarrassed while security confirms the meeting by phone. Those who still work inside the building come and go, and gawk at those who don't.

Next Week
Part II: The "People's Network"— Whose Money Is It Anyway?

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