Juno News - January 01, 2020


Trudeau wants more money and bigger role for CBC


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

165.59726

Word count

628

Sentence count

24


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Part of Justin Trudeau's priorities for the new Parliament is to give more responsibility to the CBC, and you better believe that also means more money for CBC Radio Canada. Andrew Lutton explains why the idea that CBC can become a local voice in communities is a bad idea.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Part of Justin Trudeau's list of priorities for the new Parliament is to
00:00:10.000 give more responsibility and you better believe that also means more money to CBC.
00:00:15.320 Laid out in Justin Trudeau's mandate letter to the new heritage minister Stephen Gilbo is a line
00:00:22.080 that calls on Minister Gilbo to quote strengthen the regional mandate of CBC Radio Canada to
00:00:28.440 broadcast more local news and require CBC Radio Canada to open up its digital platform.
00:00:35.220 Now whenever the government says it's to strengthen something and we see this in other parts of the
00:00:40.480 heritage mandate letter it ultimately means to give it more money. Strengthen means provide
00:00:46.460 more funding to this. CBC already gets upwards of 1.3 billion dollars a year. We know the government
00:00:52.960 has also put about 600 million dollars to bankrolling other aspects of the news and journalism
00:00:58.660 sectors in Canada and now CBC is supposed to apparently pick up the slack and be the larger
00:01:05.140 local news provider. An iPolitics piece picked up on this and in it it quoted Minister Gilbo as saying
00:01:13.440 that he's yet to have a conversation with CBC but would ensure they receive adequate funding for any
00:01:20.220 new mandates. The article also points out that Minister Gilbo plans to produce more regional
00:01:26.400 content by hiring more people, opening more offices or potentially having CBC partnerships
00:01:31.840 with existing media. Now the idea that CBC can be on the front lines of the local news battle
00:01:38.180 is a big concern here. The CBC mandate is supposed to be one that is delivering services that the private
00:01:44.700 sector cannot do. CBC has a track record of going into markets that already have successful private
00:01:50.660 sector operations and competing with them. This happened in my own city in London, Ontario and the
00:01:56.500 idea that CBC would become a local voice didn't end up happening because they filled the airwaves with
00:02:01.920 people that were imported from other parts of the country and we see this happen for CBC time and
00:02:07.180 time again. The CBC is not interested in doing the work that is less sexy, that's not competing with
00:02:13.920 the private sector like focusing on communities that don't have private journalism enterprises.
00:02:19.700 And one of the interesting things that Minister Gilbo said in this iPolitics piece is that CBC does not
00:02:26.080 compete with private sector business models. That's just not true. If it were true, CBC wouldn't be
00:02:31.460 broadcasting the Olympics, for example, or other reruns of sitcoms and movies and other things that
00:02:38.080 private sector media do focus on and do deliver and oftentimes do with a much smaller budget than CBC
00:02:45.160 has given thanks to the federal government. So let's dispense with this notion that CBC is a savior when
00:02:51.720 it arrives in communities. Oftentimes it's hurting the local companies that are trying to do the heavy
00:02:57.380 lifting on this and if we are going to have CBC moving forward, we either have to look at a model
00:03:03.040 where its funding comes privately or a model where its content is accessible publicly to all other
00:03:09.480 companies. Make it more like a wire service rather than a goliath of a competitor to them. But the reason
00:03:16.060 I find this so dangerous is that we've already seen Justin Trudeau promise time and time again that he will be
00:03:21.600 a friend of the CBC, even jokingly during the campaign when he handed a platter of poutine over
00:03:27.360 to a CBC reporter and said the liberals will always look out for CBC. Well, the reality is they're
00:03:33.000 looking out for CBC and that means that CBC is in many respects beholden to the government. Beholden
00:03:40.000 to the government who is assuring its longevity even at the expense of taxpayers. For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.