MONTREAL – CBC President and CEO Hubert Lacroix isn’t sugar-coating the news. He isn’t going to pretend that the 657 full-time equivalent jobs being cut this month — and the 2,107 total since he started on Jan. 1, 2008 — won’t seriously damage the organization.
Nor does he pretend to have the answer for how to fix the public broadcaster while all the media world shifts around it. Which is why, during a speech at The Canadian Club in Montreal, Lacroix announced that he wanted to have a “conversation” with Canadians about the future of the public broadcaster, and invited Canadians to fill out a short survey on CBC’s website about what they believe is important.
“The stakes have never been higher,” Lacroix said, pointing out the usual talking points for why Canada needs a public broadcaster: its all-Canadian primetime TV lineup, its 23 foreign correspondents (compared to six for CTV and one for TVA), its presence in Canada’s north and serving francophones outside of Quebec. He also noted that on July 6, 2013, when a runaway train derailed and exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Que., CBC/Radio-Canada was the first one on the scene “because geographically, we have the presence and our commitment to the regions is second to none.”
But Lacroix wants to keep his eyes on the future, and threw out some questions that hint at other cuts likely on the table.
“At what point do we stop providing over-the-air distribution of our television services?” he asked, pointing out that only five percent of the population still receives television over the air, a number expected to drop to two or three per cent by 2020. The CBC shut down 607 analog television transmitters in 2012 to save $10 million a year in operating costs. That left it with only 27 digital transmitters, one for each of its CBC and Radio-Canada TV stations. Despite the high cost of buying and installing those transmitters, they could be rendered obsolete by 2020 if Canadians continue to move toward Internet-based methods of receiving television.
Lacroix even wondered aloud if the CBC should keep its television stations in Canada’s regions. He noted that with the elimination of the CRTC’s Local Programming Improvement Fund, local news loses money “except maybe in the most populated cities in the country” and that the private broadcasters will eventually decide to leave. “Should we exit now or be the last broadcaster offering local news? Can we fulfill our mandate in the regions differently?”
With broadcasting changing so rapidly, it’s hard to predict how exactly people will get information and entertainment in 2020. But Lacroix is preparing for a world in which getting bite-size chunks of information from a smartphone is more common than sitting down to a supper-hour newscast.
“Losing our young people like that immediately puts our future in jeopardy, and our transformation becomes that much harder for us to carry out.” – Hubert Lacroix
In a move you don’t see often from CEOs, Lacroix profiled one of the hundreds being let go. Élodie, he said, is 23 or 24 years old and had been with the company for three years, but despite her energy, engagement and creativity, she was let go because she didn’t have enough seniority. “Losing our young people like that immediately puts our future in jeopardy, and our transformation becomes that much harder for us to carry out,” he said.
Asked later if he wanted to renegotiate collective agreements to allow them to keep more young people, Lacroix said he respected the agreements and that both management and the union recognize the need for both respect of seniority and a desire for more fresh blood in the corporation.
Lacroix’s speech came a day after Radio-Canada’s Tout le monde en parle featured a segment in which the network’s anchors condemned the cuts to services. Lacroix said much of what those personalities said reflects what he has said. “I believe everyone has the right to their opinion,” he said of their decision to speak out.
“Never would I prevent a CBCer from expressing an opinion, whether I agree with it or not.”
The CBC plans to release its next five-year plan “early this summer,” he added.
Photo by Steve Faguy
