OTTAWA – It is often said that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
And as the clock ticks down on the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, some of its soon-to-be former members have begun to look ahead to the future while keeping those lessons firmly in mind.
Bill Roberts, who was the first senior vice-president of television at the CAB as well as a former board member, said that he first expressed concern for the association’s future when the Specialty and Pay TV Association was folded in to the CAB in 2000.
“I was worried, I think many of us were worried, that we wouldn’t be able to talk to and relate with Ottawa as pure broadcasters”, the president and CEO of independent broadcaster S-VOX (VisionTV, One: Body, Mind & Spirit) told Cartt.ca. “The overriding interests would be the larger BDU interests, and I think that’s in large part what precipitated the demise of the CAB.”
Most stakeholders agree that the 84 year-old lobby group began to falter as its members became increasing divided along company or industry lines. Some told Cartt.ca that radio interests were often forced to take a back seat to television, while others said that TV broadcasters like CTV and CanWest could no longer find common ground with BDU-affiliated broadcasters like Rogers Communications-owned Citytv and Corus Entertainment, where the Shaw family is the majority owner.
Jean LaRose, the CEO of Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) who also served on the CAB board of directors, said that issues specific to an organization, as opposed to the majority of members, increasingly dominated the agenda.
“We’ve seen an increasing polarization between broadcasters and BDUs the last few years”, he said in an interview with Cartt.ca. “It became impossible for (members) to look at the broader picture of what the industry needs to do and needs to focus on.”
But those needs still exist, Roberts and LaRose (and others) agree, and both confirmed that a new TV broadcasters group is in the works.
“There needs to be somebody there that will keep some of the issues that are common to all of us – like foreign ownership – front and centre so that the industry doesn’t wake up one day to realize that it’s about to be phased out of existence,” LaRose continued.
Roberts confirmed that he has already contacted many TV broadcasters to gauge interest and support.
“I think it becomes more important to engage not just the smaller independent channels, but the medium and large ones too, like Astral and CTV, but we already have something to work with and I’m hopeful that I can try and do that,” Roberts said. “I think it’s very difficult to influence policy makers with a fragmented and uncohesive presence. There’s something incumbent upon bringing people and entities of common voice and common vision together so that the policy process can be streamlined, the regulatory process can be efficient, and that Ottawa understands where the broadcasting community is coming from.”
CanWest declined to comment on its future plans in the absence of the CAB, and CTV did not return numerous interview requests on this topic.
CAB board chair Elmer Hildebrand told Cartt.ca that his efforts to spearhead a radio-only association are well underway, too. Using the working title of the Canadian Association of Radio Broadcasters, Hildebrand said that he has the support of many radio groups including “many majors” but declined to be more specific “until we’re ready to do something.”
“I’m working at it,” he said. “There’s a lot of support for it from across the country, but any time that you do this kind of thing, there’s also a lot of work involved. Hopefully, before too much longer, we can make some announcement.”
In the meantime, Hildebrand has his plate full with wrapping up matters at the CAB, not to mention his day job as chair of Golden West Broadcasting in Altona, MB.
Hildebrand confirmed that most of the CAB’s remaining 14 staff members will have left by the end of the month, but the future of the association’s active files is still being determined.
“Just because we say we’re shutting down doesn’t mean that the work stops”, he continued. “There are still files that need to be maintained and we’re doing that. We’ll finish as much as we can.”
While Roberts said that he’s “pretty upbeat” about the future of a new broadcasters organization, he also acknowledged that many will need time to digest, and “maybe even mourn a little, grieve a little before we can get re-energized.”
LaRose suspects that the closure of the CAB “is something that, in the long run, we will live to regret.
“Everybody should have spent a bit more time looking at some of these (common) issues instead of just the divisions that existed,” he added. “Maybe we should have spent more time looking at some of the positive things we were doing, institutions like the CBSC (Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, which will continue) that had a positive impact, that were the by-product of co-operative work.”
