Is the CBC Still Relevant?

The National Post had an article today about troubles at the CBC. I mentioned it in my article on the CRTC. As I noted, it was originally created as a counter to "low brow" American radio content, which during the 1930s was all that was available to Canadians. In fact, up until about the 70s, it was the only truly nation wide network available to the majority of Canadians. However, technology marches on and when it evolves, many get left in the dust, obsolete and destined for obscurity. The change that marked the slow demise for the CBC was the advent of cable and satellite television. Hundreds of stations from all over Canada, the US, and the world were now available to Canadians. Around the same time, Pierre Trudeau gave the CRTC the mandate to control the minimum amount of Canadian content the new mediums had to broadcast. When that happened, the CBC was officially put on life support. The next blow was the growth of Web 2.0, which allowed a previously unimaginable amount Canadian content to be broadcast world wide at very little cost. Thanks to YouTube and better, cheaper camcorders, anybody can make their own TV show or movie and upload it to the Internet. Despite a massive number of Canadians logging on and producing content for the web, the CRTC is mulling over whether it needs to be regulated as part of Trudeau's Canadian content mandate. What is the CRTC protecting though? As they did with cable, satellite TV, and satellite radio, the sole reason for trying to regulate the Internet is, once again, to keep the CBC on life support.

How much trouble is the CBC in anyway. Without even reading into it too much, you can gauge it by just asking ordinary Canadians what they watch on the network. The vast majority will say Hockey Night in Canada, but nothing else. That's not to say the CBC hasn't produced some good shows. Obviously This Hour Has 22 Minutes must have something to it regardless of it's recent gaffes. After all, John Stewart thought it was good enough to rip off. The now cancelled Red Green Show is a cult classic in the US, though it's important to note it started life on Global. Other shows were allowed to go from Canadian classics to downright embarrassments, such as Air Farce. After John Morgan died, the show should have ended. However, the CBC let it keep going to preserve Canadian content, even after it devolved to a half hour of Bush bashing ever Friday, and it's cast ballooned to a whole host of unfunny actors. Shows like jPod were quickly cancelled and nobody stands around the water cooler discussing what happened on Being Erika, Heartland, or Little Mosque on the Prairie. By contrast, both CTV and Global recently scored huge US deals with CBS and NBC to air all-Canadian shows Flashpoint and Howie Do It respectively. If CBC shows do end up shown in the US, it's usually on backwater PBS affiliates. In an ironic twist, the CBC seems to air an awful lot of American content, such as Martha Steward, Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, and The Simpsons. Irritating British soap Coronation Street also airs on the network.

The debate regarding the relevance of the CBC has been going on for as long as I can remember. The problem is that the network receives tax dollars from the government to fund it. People are upset due to this because it does air American content, while others see the supposedly neutral network as having a pro-Liberal bias. The CBC has now come to describe itself as a government subsidized commercial network. Indeed, that is what it has always been. The CBC was never a public broadcaster. It continued to receive most of it's revenue from advertising, just as all other commercial networks do. It is also the quintessential example of what goes wrong when governments subsidize "critical" private enterprises. Take the Hockey Night in Canada fiasco for example. It's the most popular show by far on the network. Last year, the CBC dumped it's world famous theme song, often jokingly called Canada's second national anthem, because it didn't want to pay $500 in royalties to its composer each time it was played. The cost spent on that probably works out to around $100,000 per year, which is peanuts relatively speaking for such a big organization. Loud mouthed hockey twit Don Cherry makes several times that in salary. Then they ran a contest to find a new theme song, where the winner would get something like $10,000. I'm curious how much they spent on running the contest, because I can guarantee it was a lot more than they were paying to use the Hockey Night theme. What about the money wasted on unpopular shows, such as Air Farce, that ran well past their best before date. This is the same network that gave David Suzuki a job, and a soap box for his eco-fascism, so should we really be surprised by this idiocy? The CBC knows if it screws up, the government will just rescue it. Insert tongue-in-cheek reference to General Motors and Chrysler here.

However, the National Post claims the CBC's national per capita subsidy is actually quite low. Just $33 per person compared to $77 average in France for it's counterpart broadcaster. The BBC by contrast uses a TV licensing scheme. I have always thought this to be unfair though. While the BBC does provide high quality, commerical free programming, I don't like the idea of being forced to pay for services you don't use or approve of. The BBC is hardly the politically unbiased entity it claims to be. Just type "Global Warming" on the BBC News Online search box to find out why. The question still is whether the CBC should get any government funding at all. I say no. The network has outlived it's original purpose and has actually gotten to the point where it has betrayed it. If the CBC is to survive in the digital age without Canadian content intrusion from the CRTC, it needs to start producing higher quality programming that people actually want to watch, not what they think people should watch. CTV has done vary well for itself after recent changes and has proven it can viably go up against the big American networks. Canada should follow a US model when it comes to public TV. The vary same model that networks such as PBS and TVO follow. Privately owned and funded entirely by donations. This model maximizes consumer choice, rather than forcing things nobody wants down people's throats. The CBC is not needed to preserve Canadian content anymore. Right now, most TV networks are deep in the red due to the recession. The CBC is currently at an unfair advantage when it should not be. If the CBC can't survive, innovate, and thrive under this proposed system, then it should be allowed to fail.