By Dan MacLeod
In 1994 I was in Berlin on a Goethe Institut language scholarship. I wanted to stay on in the fall to cover the German elections and the fifth anniversary of the Fall of the Wall for Radio-Canada, the French-language station of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). I was willing to do two radio-docs for a total of $800, and a network producer wanted them. But the executive producer — with whom I'd had problems — vetoed my participation and, instead, sent a staffer. This involved salary (well over $1,000 a week), airfare, hotels, the still healthy Radio-Canada per diem and ... a translator! It's not an exaggeration to say that, as more people were being laid off, this bit of personal enmity cost the CBC 10 times the $800. This kind of story isn't uncommon, and it usually isn't personal, just pig-headed.
The CBC cuts began in 1984, but even the journalists' unions admit it was only after a second round, in '88, that things began to get serious. Then there were three more waves of layoffs in the early '90s. Still, as late as November '96, a network department head told me that "up to now, we've managed to shift folks around, keep the ones we wanted. Next spring a lot of people are going to lose their jobs."
He might just as well have said "real people." And the way he gestured with his hands made it seem like a fairly amusing shell game. In fact, over 3,000 people were already gone from the CBC. Numbers are nebulous, and even the unions don't agree on just how many jobs have been lost in the past 12 years.
After the fifth or sixth wave of cuts, one would have expected freelancers to be in demand for basic economic reasons. Ironically, the contrary occurred. Shows become exec heavy, as freelancers, then contractual workers, were sacrificed. Broadcasts became studio-bound (even in radio, which is absurd). Yet the always expensive, and often poorly done, "special projects" continued on as if nothing was wrong.
In 1996, Radio-Canada did a summer series on "exclusion," the European buzzword for the nightmare effects of unemployment in the West (which, all the pundits agree, will only get worse). I'd guess it cost over $60,000, a lot of money in radio. Academics abounded in that series, which opened with a grad student assuring us that panhandlers made better than minimum wage. I knew trilingual translators, bilingual lawyers, research scientists with Ph.D.s who cashed welfare checks each month. In '96, one in four adults was without work in this city. But somehow — and I suffered through all of the 500-odd minutes of the series — every single clip from a "poor person" was about drug addiction or alcoholism or a welfare-family upbringing.
Over on the English side of the building, some 20 fulltime people were working on, or responsible for, Montreal's three daily radio shows. But only one of them was going outside to do any reporting. Then again, that may have been just as well; in this, the world's third-biggest francophone city, a surprising number of CBC staffers can barely speak French. Most live in an English enclave. And most of the younger ones who do speak French have accents that make paint peel.
Corporate Culture Vs. Culture
Between 1986 and 1993 the homeless population in Montreal nearly doubled, with more women and thousands more children out on the streets. There was a new "homeless paper," a concept that hadn't yet become commonplace across North America. I phoned the woman who ran L'Itinéraire and she sounded skeptical. I put it down to her being camera-shy; she was a former homeless person herself.
When I visited her at the drop-in center/newspaper office, she served me a coffee, then said: "I just had a real bad experience with TV. You said Radio-Canada?" I was on high ground here; compared to the commercial networks we were saints. If anything, we didn't sensationalize enough. She looked at her shoes and said: "That's what I thought you said on the phone ... It was that girl from your 6 o'clock news." I worked for the national magazine, on a whole different floor, but I still thought she had to be mistaken. She said, "I'm telling you because the people who help with the paper might be a bit rough on you."
A month or so earlier, Radio-Canada had swaggered in with a camera crew, an overdressed producer and a reporter who was "a real bitch," according to the woman. She told five or six homeless people sitting at the table that they should move around and "make it look like a real newsroom!" They revolted like Gandhi, simply going on with their story meeting.
"So the reporter stomps away, and the producer comes over, and she says 'Look, if you can't make this story exciting, there are plenty of other groups that need the exposure!'" In the civil-service mindset, you can act like a mogul even though nobody goes to your movies. You can play at Hollywood in a very small pond and with the taxpayers' money.
The corporate culture of cowardice and intimidation is probably why most younger researchers and journalists and production assistants — and many of the not-so-young — have adopted a self-deprecating attitude, doing what they're told, kissing up, watching their backs, going home the minute their shift is over. Public broadcasting is no longer a privilege but a way to make decent money, where the watchword is "don't get involved."
"Employees are creative, but management won't listen to us. They're close-minded," says CBC union rep Dan Oldfield. The new 30-somethings have come into the building with an intrinsic understanding of the way things work. They missed the '60s and '70s and look back on that festive egalitarian mindset as naïve. And they're arriving in a building which has been half-emptied; entire floors are rented out to private-sector companies. They also have absolutely no job security — in fact, quite the contrary.
The Future Is Past
The phone rings at 10 p.m. and it's Patrick Watson, who apologizes for calling so late. I'm amazed he's calling me at all. My message was along the lines of "you don't know me but I'm doing a story on the CBC." Patrick Watson was chairman of the board of the whole shebang — French, English and native, radio and TV — when all hell broke loose at the end of the '80s. From a Canadian perspective, it's like the ex-president of NBC is on the phone.
The story has been a real chore to do. I've been at it for two weeks; maybe 10 people have managed to duck any sort of conversation, others speak on condition of anonymity, and the deluge from Antonia Zerbisias — "But don't you think the CBC has a problem with elitism? _ Have you ever seen public broadcasting in other countries, Dan? Have you ever been to a foreign country?" — has left me feeling like people are going to be after me with hounds. Like I'll never work in that building again.
I say, "The CBC has been a big chunk of my professional life, of my adult life. It's a bitch to write about it, there's a lot of memories involved." That everyone's being so paranoid hasn't helped either.
Watson says, "You know how it was when I started out in the '50s? We used to bring bag lunches and all of us would sit on the floor in this one office and throw ideas around. We were creating something, and it was important. It was exciting, we were all in it together, we weren't trying to get ahead by screwing each other or any of that kind of shit. It was really wonderful ... convivial."
"My first summer, in '82," I tell him, "it was like almost everybody was unhappy, bitter, jealous of each other. And whether it was Moncton or Montreal, English or French, radio or TV, it's almost always been like that."
He sighs. "That's not the way it was when it all started."
When I got this assignment I sent e-mails off to journalists in South Africa, Egypt and Russia. What were the challenges public broadcasting faced in their countries and cultures? Nobody bothered to reply. So maybe this is a 1939 Poles-on-horseback-versus-Germans-in-tanks deal; maybe networks like the CBC are doomed, and the whole thing is a tremendous yawn.
Watson says, and it's obvious this is something he's said before, "A nation is defined by the extent to which its citizens use the word 'we.'" And that, he says, is what public broadcasting is all about. Watson has worked in the U.S — he hosted "Live at Lincoln Center" for eight years — but he tells me, "In Papua New Guinea they don't even have television. They know they can't compete with American culture, so they keep the pictures out." He says, "In rural Egypt I saw people watching "Dynasty." And a public broadcasting manager from Lesotho told me 95 percent of their programming came from either the United States or England."
In Canada, the saying goes, we "sleep next to the elephant." As Watson says, "That elephant farts and talks in a loud voice."
Mike Boone, TV critic of the Montreal Gazette, says, "I'm sorry Rabinovitch's first move was blocked." The new CBC president wanted to totally revamp the evening news, but, after protests in far-flung regions, his plan was watered down by half. Boone says, "I think he can give the CBC a fighting chance at survival in the 100-channel universe." Although CBC radio is commercial-free, its TV isn't. Rabinovitch wants to "reduce commercial presence and clutter," make watching the CBC as distinctive as listening to it. And he wants to get back to what was done well in the past: noncommercial children's programming and arts performances, more documentaries and "high-impact specials."
Boone doesn't think the CBC will ever be "privatized," something that's always being discussed in the papers. Like union guys Dan Oldfield and Gilles Provost, he asks who would come in and spend hundreds of millions a year to do all those things that simply don't pay. I ask Boone the other popular question: "What if we became like PBS, asked viewers to chip in?" Boone audibly snorts on the other end of the line. "Well, then you can put the key in the door."
Micheline Provost (no relation to Gilles), the new president of the Radio-Canada union, says, "You know the patio out back where we used to eat?" She means behind the 23-story Maison de Radio-Canada. "Well they're putting up a four- or five-story building back there; it's costing $44 million." Supposedly, all that equipment, bought 10 years ago when the two 24-hour TV networks took the air, is outdated. They're going to set it up in this new building behind the half-empty (of CBC-ers at least) skyscraper. Plus, archives will move there; they'll be renting more space in the old building to private production companies (which thus gain access to the National Broadcaster's fabled archives, "and this is our competition!").
I've known Micheline for a dozen years; she was the production-assistant on the majority of my French-radio docs. I say, "You think Radio-Canada" — by which I mean the CBC at-large — "will be gone in ten years?"
She says, "Try five?"
- Dan MacLeod left Boston after high school to play hockey in Canada and, 24 years later, still lives there. Apart from working at the CBC, he has written for a variety of papers, including La Presse, Le Devoir, the Toronto Globe and Mail and The Boston Globe.
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