OTTAWA – Speaking before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage in Ottawa, CBC President and CEO Catherine Tait said public and private broadcasters in Canada are seeing their territory invaded by multinational foreign giants that have disrupted the very nature of the country’s media landscape.
“We know that our industry is facing real challenges,” Tait said during the meeting where the committee is studying the mandate of CBC/Radio-Canada as it relates to the Broadcasting Act. “We want to work with Canadian partners, both public and private because today our competition is not with each other. Our competition is Google, Facebook, Amazon and other digital foreign giants that are now part of our lives. They’ve captured our attention as well as our personal information.”
According to Tait, Netflix, Apple and Amazon together will spend upwards of US$18 billion in original content over the next year, nearly 90 times what CBC and Radio-Canada are able to invest. The challenge, she says, is to ensure Canadian stories and shared experiences are both available and discoverable amid the sea of foreign content choices.
While admitting competition from the foreign media giants is fierce, Tait applauded Netflix for helping give Anne With An E and Kim’s Convenience a global audience, while also lauding Amazon’s distribution of Canadian-made kids show Annedroids. However, she added, “they are not devoted to supporting or nurturing the development of Canadian artists and creators, Canadian amateur athletes or Canadian perspectives. That’s our job. That is what our strategy is about,” Tait said.
“We want to build partnerships with media in local communities across the country to strengthen news and democracy. We want to deepen our engagement with Canadians and help them to connect with each other. We want to create more content for young Canadians across all platforms. And we want to broaden the programs we offer to reflect the richness of Canada.”
With upwards of 20 million Canadians using the CBC’s platforms each month, Tait says the broadcaster’s online platforms allow Canadians to not only reach more Canadians in new ways, it also allows viewers to consume content that is relevant to their Canadian identity.
At the heart of the CBC’s new three-year strategy, which the broadcaster revealed last week, is putting the audience at the heart of everything it does, Tait said.
“It’s about preserving the trust Canadians have in us. This is about deepening our engagement and is also about leadership and digital service delivery, all reinforced by commitment to showcase best Canadian stories.”
“We aim to grow social cohesion and pride in our nation." – Catherine Tait, CBC
Included in the new strategy’s priorities is offering increasingly customized digital services, which Tait says will allow the broadcaster to serve people more directly via its streaming and audio services. CBC is looking to build lifelong relationships with Canadians via children and youth engagement and creating content that connects them not only with one another, but also with their country.
“We aim to grow social cohesion and pride in our nation. We’ll strengthen our local connections. This is our core strength. Our proximity to Canadians is what sets the public broadcaster apart. We’ll do more to reflect the contemporary richness that is Canada: multicultural, Indigenous, urban, rural and regional. We’ll do this in the stories we share on our airwaves and on our digital services. And through our hiring, so that Canadians will see themselves in their public broadcaster.”
During the question and answer period, Saint John, N.B. MP Wayne Long asked Tait about the government’s role in saying what the public broadcaster should or shouldn’t be covering via its news outlets, to which Tait replied that premise would go against the very nature of what the CBC was established upon.
“The way the Canadian public broadcaster was founded was on a profound principle of independence. It’s enshrined in the Broadcasting Act and in the history of the organization. Maintaining that independence is fundamental to the difference between a public broadcaster and a state broadcaster. We lift that independence and protect [it] every day. To the point about political interference, we’re obviously respectful of the democratic process that we live within, but independence is core to providing Canadians with fair and balanced news and points of view.”
Conservative MP Earl Dreeshan challenged Tait’s CBC’s balanced news coverage claim, noting the broadcaster hasn’t given airtime to the fact Australia once had a carbon tax which they subsequently eliminated due to the competitive harm it was causing. He went on to cite other instances where he deems CBC failed to live up to its touted impartial, balanced news approach, including Prime Minister Trudeau’s ill-fated trip to India early in 2018.
“People are starting to see this as, ‘where is the reporting on that?’ We hear about Donald Trump and [U.S.] issues, but we need to be talking about how Canada ties into the world. And yes, the U.S. is a big part of it because they’re a major partner, but they’re not the only partner. We have to make sure that story is being told,” Dreeshan said.
Tait said the broadcaster routinely looks beyond Canada’s borders, saying the CBC is covering the planet with the relatively few resources it has available.
“We have eight foreign bureaus and are working with a budget of $10 million for the entire world. We are not in Africa; we are not in India. We are managing news coverage [in those areas] the very best we can, often times with what we call pop-up bureaus, where we’ll have our people in Paris or London fly in to try to cover a story,” Tait said.
