Because my purpose in writing Saving the CBC: Balancing Profit and Public Service has been to provoke an urgently needed public debate, I’m grateful for the extended review by Rudy Buttignol in the LRC.
I have one small correction to make: I did not suggest that the CBC “stop commissioning and acquiring independent programming,” as the review states; only that CBC television begin once again producing some programming on its own.
Buttignol wishes that the book had spent more time looking at the role of provincial public broadcasters (one of which he heads), and on the private production industry. But its purpose was to provide a concise, affordable, accessible introduction to the role of the CBC in the wider media ecology of this country, and at 40,000 words, sacrifices have to be made. There is indeed a place in the emerging debate for a similar book on the experience of provincial educational broadcasters, and perhaps Buttignol is the one to write it.
The important point the book attempts to make, and which the review generously acknowledges, is that the CBC is on the brink of a financial collapse that it is not in a position to survive in any recognizable form. Something has to be done. Either we allow the country’s most important cultural institution to disintegrate into irrelevance and ultimate oblivion, or we can pre-empt the collapse by carefully and purposefully dismantling both the CBC and the surrounding broadcast regulatory regime, with a view to reassembling both in a form that preserves the virtues of public broadcasting while at the same time allowing private broadcasters to do what they do best.
In short, we need to do a thorough review of our antiquated Broadcast Act (1991), before it’s too late. One thing that I’ve found very encouraging over the year or so that I have been engaged in researching and writing and eventually promoting Saving the CBC is the strong consensus among media watchers that the public broadcaster must get out of commercial sponsorship if it is to survive. (And that, inevitably, means dropping hockey.) That’s the essential first step—from there, necessary reform and realignment can follow naturally.
Unfortunately, the one place where this consensus is not shared is in the upper echelons of the CBC itself, where sales and marketing managers have come to have an inordinate influence on policy. This can only be changed by firm leadership from above—ultimately, from Parliament.
