CBC-ing is Believing

A more transparent public broadcaster is a desirable goal. It's too bad that the road there has been so unnecessarily rocky.

Last week, Tory MP Brent Rathgeber tabled questions in the House of Commons requiring the CBC to disclose how much it spends on salaries, expenses, foreign bureaus, imported programming, and more. It was the latest chapter in the ongoing feud over just what the CBC's role in Canada ought to be, and how much Canadians are willing to pay for it. Ezra Levant, of the Sun chain, demands that the government just sell the whole lot of it, as it did with Petro Canada, CN Rail, and Air Canada, arguing that it doesn't provide any services that the private sector doesn't already. "Today, 500 channels from the History Channel to A&E to Bravo clean the CBC’s clock. YouTube and Netflix are coming to finish it off. The CBC is reduced to airing Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune," says Levant. "We need a government broadcaster for that?" Well, only if you cherry pick just what it is that CBC does. Suffice it to say, there aren't exactly a whole lot of private broadcasters lining up to broadcast in indigenous languages to remote, Arctic communities. CBC picks up the slack there, as it does in broadcasting amateur sport (TSN and Sportsnet wouldn't go near most (off-ice) Canadian amateur sports); investigative reporting (Neil McDonald's work on Hezbollah's role in Lebanon is simply unparalleled); dedication to covering the country in both official languages; classical and Canadian music on the radio; etc., etc. We suppose it's just a shame that someone as rhetorically gifted as Levant obscures a wholly worthwhile point – that CBC needs to re-examine what it provides to Canadians – with such populist buffoonery.

The Globe and Mail's TV critic and in-house CBC defender, John Doyle, worries about what the Conservatives have in store once they've thoroughly ravaged the public broadcaster. Given Rathgeber's recent comments questioning why the federal government needs to help fund the Royal Alberta Museum, Doyle figures museums, arts groups, publishers, and television shows could soon face the same concentrated efforts that the broadcaster is now facing. "The justification for the attacks and the demand for information is that CBC is taxpayer-funded," says Doyle. "However, the real reason seems to be that CBC is perceived as not reflecting small “c” conservative values. A lot of what emanates from the arts in Canada does not reflect those values, and those artists and institutions receive taxpayer money. Remember that. Think about who’s next on the attack list." While Doyle's reasoning does smell of those "hidden agenda" arguments that the Liberals (unsuccessfully) deployed against the Tories, there is some precedent that hints at the party's less-than-generous attitude toward state-supported art – cutting funding for the Summerworks theatre festival, the fracas over the National Portrait Gallery, trying to revoke tax credits from film productions that are “contrary to public policy," and that whole arts galas not "resonating with ordinary people" thing. But we're not much for peering into crystal balls, so until the Tories demand, say, Toronto's Soulpepper Theatre to show the public how it spends its government funding, let's just focus on the CBC, thank you very much.

Maclean's typically great tech writer, Jesse Brown, strikes some reasonable middle ground over CBC transparency, noting that "you don’t have to be an enemy of the CBC to want them to comply with the law and open up their books." We agree. Sunlight, as they say, is the best disinfectant, and while we find Quebecor's motives and methods for getting CBC to comply more than a little distasteful, CBC should expect the same level of scrutiny as all other publicly funded properties. Preserving journalistic integrity, of course, ought to be sacrosanct, but as Brown notes, the CBC's argument that "disclos[ing] Strombo’s salary or the budget of their 75th anniversary self-promotion campaign would be a violation of journalistic sources ... is ridiculous." In fact, it cheapens a principle over which journalists have been imprisoned. Brown argues that more transparency at the CBC could lead to a much-needed period of renewal after a lost decade of terrible reality shows, American imports, refocusing radio programming, and, well, this. Opening CBC's books could even lead to Canadian audiences becoming more engaged with the broadcaster, as it will help viewers determine what programs are worth supporting, and which ones aren't. That, and it might just get the Sun chain to shut up and focus on other matters – something we can all be thankful for.