Canadian Television Today

Front matter

CANADIAN TELEVISION TODAY

UNIVERSITY OF

CALGARY

Table Of Contents

PREFACE IX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS XI

INTRODUCTION: CANADIAN TELEVISION TODAY 1 THE

Chapter One: R

EGULATION n June 2004, in the midst of a federal election campaign, the

Conservative party and its leader, Stephen Harper, came un-

der fire for their stance on broadcasting issues. Although the

party’s official party platform had no mention of broadcasting,

briefing notes provided to Conservative candidates called for

opening Canadian airwaves to competition from American satellite companies, reducing the power of the CRTC, and relaxing foreign ownership regulations for media (“Tories would” 2004). These revelations followed comments made by Harper in May in which he speculated about placing the CBC on a “more commercial” footing (Friesen 2004). Now in power with a minority government, the Conservatives immediately stepped up these moves, causing consternation on Parliament Hill for Canadian cultural and communications sovereignty (Curry 2006, B6). While these policy moves are well in keeping with the Tory economic platform that has long promoted privatization and fiscal responsibility, they are totally at odds with the traditional culturally based arguments for a protectionist, quasi-public broadcasting system. The federal government has played a central role in the history of Canadian television, not simply because of the funding that it provides to the CBC, and which the Tories implicitly threatened to reduce even more drastically after years of similar Liberal budget-slashing, but through the protections offered to private broadcasters by the CRTC. In questioning these protections, the Conservatives are being accused by NDP critics and others of threatening the entire broadcasting model, and with it the idea of Canadian cultural sovereignty altogether. To counter criticisms that they are in effect killing national broadcasting, party spokesperson Andrew Skaling framed the issue as a matter of choice. He said, “The reality is it’s a 500-channel universe. It’s a question of Canadians having choice as to what they want to watch.” (Jack 2004). This invocation of the audience as the locus of their concerns failed to sway many commentators who observed that the proposals could “eliminate Canadian programming and make the broadcasters subsidiaries of American media giants” (Reguly 2004).

During the 2005 federal election that gave Harper’s Tories a minority government, cultural issues received even less debate than they had the year previous. The Tory platform for culture and media highlights several ideological conflicts that have plagued Canadian television since the earliest days of broadcasting. The first is the opposition between Canadian and foreign (really, American) media interests. The second is the invocation of “choice,” and its implied opposite, regulation, as marking a democratic, pluralistic broadcasting system. The third is the longstanding dilemma between public and private broadcasting in this country in which one network, the CBC, is effectively run on a hybrid model where it must simultaneously serve national interests as determined by the state and prove itself competitive with the private networks CTV and Global without relying (as its competitors do) on imported U.S. programs to inflate its ratings. And finally, there is the desire to somehow create a paternalistic policy for television that will reflect, if not outright enact, the principles of multiculturalism as they were enshrined in a parliamentary act since 1985. All these concerns have been invoked time and time again, particularly around moments of intense political upheaval like an election. The important thing about the Canadian experience, however, is the extent to which broadcasting is taken seriously as a national - and nationalist — concern. It is impossible to sever the development of television in this country from the expansion of the nation-state over the course of the twentieth century. The two are deeply enmeshed, as television has been an effective tool in cultural politics to justify the state through nationalist rhetoric and a claim to sovereign cultural identity.

A standard trope for analyzing Canadian broadcasting has been to look through the eyes of the government and regulatory agencies,

CHAPTER ONE: REGULATION 29 rather than at the screen or to the audience. While we would prefer to avoid that route, it is nonetheless necessary to provide some background to the current state of the broadcasting debate in this country in order to move the discussion forward. In general, the path of Canadian television can be marked by six major federal reports, all known colloquially by the names of their chairs: Aird (1929), Massey-Levesque (1949-51), Fowler (1956-7), Applebaum-Hébert (1981-2), Caplan- Sauvageau (1986), and Lincoln (2003). The Aird Commission, formally known as the Royal Commission on Radio Broadcasting, is perhaps best known for establishing the framework that led to the founding of the Canadian Radio-Broadcasting Corporation, which later dropped the term radio in order to encompass all forms of broadcasting, and is commonly known as the CBC. The vision laid out by Aird was to place broadcasting in the service of the state in order to promote a nationalist spirit and spread the word of federalism at a time when this country was barely out of its colonial crib (Gasher 1997, 16).

The Aird vision was carried forward by the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, or the Massey Commission, in establishing other federalist cultural organizations like the National Film Board, and strengthening the CBC. A goal of the Massey Commission was to create a strongly public, not private, infrastructure for culture and communication that would be directly monitored by Parliament. In general, the consensus is that Massey shored up the nationalist barricades in order to “protect the nation from excessive commercialization and Americanization” (in Gasher 1997, 19). While there is certainly some truth to that statement, recent revisionist history by scholars like Zoé Druick have highlighted the internationalist sentiment embedded in the final report. Druick notes that underlying the more obvious nationalist rhetoric was a concern to bring Canada onto an international stage and to support efforts by the newly formed United Nations to make culture a wide-sweeping political concern that would both strengthen sovereign countries and provide conduits toward greater cooperation on a global stage (Druick 2006). In many ways, then, what the Massey Commission did was to lay the foundations for both a publicly driven cultural sector based on the federalist ideal of the establishment of a uniquely Canadian national character, and also for later developments in multiculturalism from a deliberately liberal perspective, that is one based on individualism, open markets, and freedom of choice.

Together, these two royal commissions laid a solid foundation for an idea of broadcasting as a federal initiative committed to the creation and maintenance of a shared sense of national identity and unity. This belief was only strengthened by the avidly nationalistic Royal Commission on Broadcasting, or the Fowler Commission, in 1956 (Gasher 1997, 23). Following it, the 1960s and 1970s were marked by heady patriotism spearheaded by the long-serving prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. In 1968, the Broadcasting Act came into law. Importantly, its drafting was framed around distinctly nationalistic ideals about how broadcasting should serve the cultural, social, and economic infrastructure of the country. To that end, it not only enshrined the CBC as the national broadcaster and implemented protectionist measures for an indigenous production industry, it also created a regulatory system that would maintain Canadian sovereignty over the airwaves. The Canadian Radio-television Commission, renamed in 1976 as the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, was launched as part of the mandate of the Broadcasting Act. Interestingly enough, despite the name change, the CRTC seems not to have incorporated telecommunications into its nationalist agenda. On its website it states clearly that the purpose of Canadian broadcasting is to serve as “a tool for protecting and promoting Canadian culture and achieving key social objectives. Legislators and regulatory bodies in Canada have acknowledged that Canadian broadcasting is essential to preserving our national sovereignty” (CRTC). However, there are no such lofty ambitions for telecommunications. Thus, a divide between cultural and economic drivers appears to have been embedded in the CRTC from its outset.

In 1982 the Cultural Policy Review Committee, chaired by Louis Applebaum and Jacques Hébert, detoured slightly from the cultural nationalist path forged by the royal commissions that preceded it, first by its refusal to invoke the spectre of American encroachment, and second by accepting some degree of privatization as inevitable, especially now that television was the ascendant medium. In the 1980s, the

CHAPTER ONE: REGULATION 31 cold water of economic realities began to drown out the voices of hardcore federalism. Furthermore, regional divisions in the country began to show themselves more visibly, most noticeably in Quebec, which held its first sovereignty referendum in 1980. However, even in English Canada, the regions became increasingly critical of a highly centrist — or, to be more exact, Torontocentric — perspective that seemed to dominate the CBC. As Serra Tinic argues, as national broadcasting policy evolved, it mimicked longstanding economic relationships between centres and peripheries on both national and global scales. The interesting outcome is that those regions marginalized on a national scale have found new and better markets by entering into a global television economy, undermining nationalist rhetoric about the power of television to forge a distinct Canadian identity (2005, 4). Confronted with economic and political resistance to federalism’s isolationist and paternalistic tendencies, the Applebaum-Hébert report embraced what would soon become the official federal policy of multiculturalism. It also softened the federal role in all forms of culture, encouraging the government to act as a facilitator for private enterprise (Gasher 1997, 25). That is not to say that the culturalists lost out completely to the economists, but that the arguments for national culture were softened in order to promote a more liberal economic agenda of choice, profit, and audience maximization.

Five years later the Caplan-Savageau Committee, officially the Task Force on Broadcasting Policy, tried to reinstate a protectionist model for national culture overseen by a benevolent but powerful state. By that time the Trudeau era had given way to a Conservative government headed by Brian Mulroney that famously sought closer ties to the United States and its own privatization agenda according to the principles of Reaganomics. Culture remained a passionately debated issue, especially during the protracted discussion that led to the Free Trade Agreement with the United States, and later the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Mexico. However, there was more howling in the wilderness than actual exchange of ideas. Ironically, it can be argued that it was the values of multiculturalism that allowed culture to become a secondary concern and established the rhetoric of choice for justifying economic encroachment on cultural issues. Multiculturalism within a liberal framework claimed that Canadian citizens chose the particular configuration of their national identity, but not in a way that would directly impact on the state’s fundamental identity. They were to do so through an invocation of their culture, divorced from a sense of politics or economics in such a way that turned history into the far less imposing idea of heritage. It is, therefore, not really a surprise that the federal Department of Communication was split in two by the mid-1990s so that communications networks fell under the jurisdiction of industry while a newly formed Department of Canadian Heritage took on the problems of culture as a separate concern. Form and content were effectively divorced from each other, but more importantly, culture was unmoored from the material conditions of its production and turned into little more than a nationalist form of piety. Heritage implies tradition and nostalgia, as if culture is something Canadians remember fondly from a time before more urgent concerns were pressed upon them.

In 2003, the first report on Canadian television in nearly twenty years was tabled by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Heritage, chaired by Clifford Lincoln. The interesting thing about this report is how much it was shaped by new technological and economic realities facing television, even though these telecommunication concerns are no longer a part of the jurisdiction of the Heritage Committee. At the turn of the century, the effects of cable, satellite, and digital technologies are beginning to be forcefully felt. However, what has also changed is the make-up of Canada, which is expanding through immigration, particularly from countries beyond Europe, including Africa, the Middle East, and South-East Asia. Interestingly, though, the final report did not directly address the changing ethnoscape of Canada beyond the usual platitudes regarding multiculturalism. Instead, it remained fixed on the technological and economic concerns for the Canadian television industry and the need to protect the industry from encroaching globalization. Two visions of television culture were presented as co-equivalents in the report. The first was a paternalistic claim to Canadian cultural sovereignty and the fostering of a distinct national identity that would best be realized through a strong, independent, mostly private media sector that is nonetheless

CHAPTER ONE: REGULATION 33 sheltered from foreign competition and bolstered by national subsidy programs, with the CBC providing a kind of moral counterweight. The second was the call for diversity and plurality on the airwaves in the form of consumer choice through expanded communications systems, in particular digital cable and satellite convergence. What both of these value statements share at the core, and what makes them mutually supportive, is the fact that both are geared toward a very narrow idea of Canadian television within a North American market. Thus, they are based upon assumptions of dominant anglocentrism that sees globalization as a process of cultural and economic homogenization (i.e., Americanization) rather than as a set of multicultural disjunctures.

Unfortunately for the authors of the Lincoln report, no sooner had it been tabled than the 2004 election was called. While culture barely registered on the political charts, it did occasionally surface as when Stephen Harper publicly mused about undoing the federalistpublic structure of broadcasting altogether. His party offered a very different vision of broadcasting than the dominant cultural rhetoric that was evident in the Lincoln report, stressing consumer choice and the elimination of the government’s role in culture, highlighting competition and greater integration with the American marketplace. The platforms offered by the Liberals, New Democratic Party, and the Bloc Québécois were far more in line with the standard federalist position, each calling for a healthy cultural sector reliant on government intervention and subsidy. The fact that the cultural platforms of the Bloc, NDP, and Liberals are only marginally differentiated demonstrates the high degree of consensus that has been achieved around cultural issues in Canada. In effect, it seems to be agreed by everyone but the Conservative party that Canadian culture is a fragile thing to be nurtured by nationalist-driven policies that want to achieve a balance between popularity and profitability while reflecting a sense of common Canadianness defined in distinction to the dominant modes of culture produced by American broadcasting.

In this sense, it can be said that the health of Canadian culture is measured according to two very different criteria. The first, the economic yardstick, favours competitiveness, an open marketplace, and technological innovation. The profitability of the broadcasting sector is the key metric here. The second, the cultural yardstick, clings to a belief that culture can be somehow contained and artificially propped up under the guise of authentic national experience. The “quality,” however defined, of the Canadian cultural experience is the gauge in this instance. The central issue is that both of these yardsticks take as their point of comparison the American cultural experience. In that sense, then, Canada is automatically set up for failure in the eyes of its own cultural mavens.

Television, as the most ubiquitous cultural medium, is emblematic of an anti-triumphalist discourse. Its cultural, economic, and technological form makes the kind of gatekeeping that cultural elites prefer difficult. Television is a democratic mass medium, open and easily available to everyone in a variety of forms. In the private model of broadcasting, this results in a rhetoric of consumer choice based on ratings-driven programming. Public models are more concerned with providing access across the spectrum of populations, serving disparate communities, and providing an array of images and narratives that everyone can cleave to as a nation. The Canadian system, however, is almost an exact balance of these two very distinct models and is therefore caught in a schizophrenic position of serving opposing goals. Stakeholders in broadcasting have very different ideas about how to solve this dual dilemma of economic and cultural marginalization in their own country. Their battleground is the CRTC. It is before this commission that signal providers (cable and satellite companies), cultural producers, and networks battle to secure their own particular visions of Canadian television. The Canadian public plays a tangential, but frequently invoked, role in these debates, framed as both consumers — most often defined around individual choice - and as citizens - defined through notions of common nationalist identity.

Of these stakeholder groups, the cable industry is the most closely aligned with the Conservative party’s interest in consumer choice, although it would balk at increased competition from American signal providers. Its version of open markets extends only so far as its own ability to broadcast American channels on its systems to Canadians, but not so far as to allow Canadians direct access to American cable or

CHAPTER ONE: REGULATION 35 satellite systems. Artists and television producers are quicker to embrace increased funding and tighter regulations on Canadian content, as these mean more jobs for Canadian cultural producers and more likelihood that their shows will be bought by Canadian networks. For their part, the broadcast networks range between the two poles, depending on the individual issue and their own particular financial stake in it. At the most basic level, of course, all three groups demand the same thing: more of what benefits their shareholders. While each frames their discussion in terms of what is best for Canadian viewers, self-interest is clearly the primary driver in any debate on the future of television. That, in and of itself, is not particularly revelatory. What is important is the way that individual stakeholder groups mobilize arguments in order to present their interests as equivalent to the interests of Canadians as citizens, and, further, how this self-presentation in turn frames the regulatory context for television in this country. By examining the way that the television industry, working in tandem with governmental agencies like the CRTC, has justified their economic interests we can see how television has come to be understood as a unique manifestation of the Canadian public sphere in need of protection. Furthermore, in deconstructing these arguments, an alternative path for television can be shown that critically re-evaluates the need for a single national rhetoric and opens up discussion for a more fluid and politically grounded sense of multiculturalism in lived practice.

THE PRODUCERS

In the midst of the 2004 federal election the Canadian actor Paul Gross spoke at a press conference announcing a campaign to bring culture to the forefront of political debate. It is somewhat fitting that Gross assumed this role since he is well knownasbotha stage and screen veteran — about as close to a celebrity as English Canada has. He was also the star of a failed Canadian television experiment in the mid-1990s when the short-lived program Due South, about a Canadian mountie working in Chicago, was picked up by CBS. This was the first Canadian dramatic series to land on the primetime schedule of a Big 3 American network, where it ran for a very shaky two seasons. At the beginning of June 2004, Gross addressed a gathering of the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA) in Toronto, telling them that Canada will never have a robust national culture on a purely volunteer basis and that candidates in the election campaign should be challenged as to where they stand (“Government must” 2004). Speaking specifically about the decision of Canadian mega-media company Alliance-Atlantis to withdraw from domestic cultural production, Gross argued that Alliance and Atlantis had become rich as a result of generous Canadian cultural policies, and that now they owed a debt to the Canadian people who had long subsidized them. While Gross was pleased with the CRTC’s offer of increased advertising opportunities for broadcasters who air additional Canadian drama, he argued that the carrot needed to be accompanied by a stick in order to deal with “the unholy mess we have found ourselves in.” (“Canadian TV” 2004). Later in the month, Gross and other ACTRA members hosted a news conference at CBC’s Barbara Frum Atrium in Toronto to draw attention to cuts in government funding to Canadian film and television, the increasing amount of American television on Canadian airwaves, and the avoidance of cultural issues in the campaign for the June 28 election (Quill 2004). Despite these efforts, cultural issues never became an important part of the election itself. What Gross and his colleagues did accomplish was a reassertion of nationalist sympathies without any change in the business of television. In fact, according toa CRTC study released in March 2006, broadcasters spend approximately four times as much on imported programs as they do on indigenous productions, even while profits continue to climb higher every year (CRTC 2006).

For artists, actors, writers, directors, and other cultural producers involved in the creation of television, the government is an incredibly powerful force. Among the key issues for cultural producers are funding, access, and autonomy - each of which is variously guaranteed or

CHAPTER ONE: REGULATION 37 threatened by the government on a regular basis. It is widely assumed by cultural producers, Gross among them, that without government subsidies for the cultural arena, Canada’s television culture would simply evaporate. The assumption, created over the course of a halfcentury of experience, is that private broadcasters in Canada, despite their rapid proliferation in the digital age, will always opt for low-cost imported programming over original Canadian content unless they are required to air made-in-Canada material. This assumption seems accurate in light of broadcasters’ expenditures, and it becomes more obvious at a glance at the primetime program listings on CTV, Global or CHUM-owned channels, which are replete with imported programming. For cultural producers, it is incumbent on the government to provide access by requiring private broadcasters to carry Canadian shows, and to finance the shows that they require those networks to deliver.

In an effort to bridge the divide between public and private broadcasting, or between artistic and industrial imperatives, the Canadian Television Fund was created in 1996. This is a joint enterprise between the Department of Canadian Heritage, Telefilm Canada, acrown corporation providing grants for film production, and the Cable Production Fund, operated by the cable industry. As it attests on its website, the goal of the CTF is to “encourage the financing and broadcasting of high-quality Canadian television productions” as well as to “reflect Canada to Canadians.” While the CTF should be seen as an example of successful partnering between the public and private sector, it has been under the constant cloud of cutbacks since 2003, sometimes forcing the abrupt cancellation of Canadian shows that are otherwise perceived to be doing well. The leading private networks have become so reliant on the CTF that cuts to its budget are taken as an excuse to move away from their commitment to air Canadian content. In the words of CTV senior vice-president Bill Mustos, “We are facing a year where our federal funding is sharply reduced. In that context, we have to really be prudent about which shows we put forward for that funding” (“Canadian dramas axed” 2004). After a great deal of lobbying, and facing a general concern that Canadian television would surely die without a fully funded CTF, the Liberal government did not follow through on its threats to reduce the CTF budget to $62.5 million but instead returned it to its pre-cut level of $100 million. This change of heart came with stipulations, however, some of which did not sit well with some cultural producers. After using the nationalist argument to win back their funding, they seemed shocked that the Canadian government would tighten legislation around what counts as “Canadian stories.”

In February 2005, The Globe and Mail reported that many Canadian documentary filmmakers were complaining that the CTF’s focus on Canadian-themed programming made it “Orwellian.” Comparing the subsidy system to political pressures that existed in the Soviet Union, Simcha Jacobovici argued that the lack of guaranteed funding for documentary filmmakers meant, “You're editing with the knowledge that they can pull the rug out from under you at any time. That’s a terrible threat. It can bankrupt you” (Posner 2005). While Jacobovici’s comparison of Canadian subsidies to filmmakers and television producers to the Soviet system may seem absurd, it highlights a difficult tension between culture as national heritage and culture as aesthetic production. It also raises questions about the very idea of a distinct national identity, even as artists themselves raise it to secure their own funding base. Less than a year after ACTRA intervened in the federal election to insist upon a strong, nationalist program that would create a distinct and identifiable Canadian culture, members of its association complained about the fact that the program was designed specifically to ensure Canadian distinctiveness.

Following ACTRA’s logic, it seems that the position of television producers is that the government should finance Canada’s television producers and also provide a broadcast platform in order to ensure the continuation of high-quality Canadian alternatives to international programming. At the same time, however, the government should stay out of the decision-making process and simply allow cultural producers the freedom to produce works that they, and their broadcast partners, deem best. The assumption that enriching private broadcasters and individual private production companies is what is best for the nation should, it follows, be borne out by the high degree of satisfaction that Canadian viewers have with Canadian programming. Yet, given

CHAPTER ONE: REGULATION 39 the absence of that satisfaction, the conclusion among cultural producers is frequently to bemoan the poor viewing habits of Canadians while seeking out new funding opportunities. Cultural producers, the argument goes, serve the national good, even if the nation doesn’t always realize it, and they should be funded and left to do their own thing.

The problem with this “have our cake and eat it too” approach isn’t readily solved as long as Canadian television remains stuck in a nationalist sensibility that is rooted in protection from the monster to the south. However, the criticisms of the CTF’s policy of monitoring funded productions for their inclusion of distinct Canadian content is an important one both in terms of the federal government’s insistence on economic viability and in considering a more nuanced, political view of multiculturalism. Documentary filmmakers were especially vocal on this issue because of the restraints placed on the idea of what constitutes a matter of interest to Canadians. The other side of the argument is that they rightly criticized an outdated model of “hockey and doughnuts” in producing Canadian culture and challenged the essentialist argument about national identity in favour of a more compensatory model in which the definition of Canadianness in any cultural product isn’t based on content as much as on quality, edification, and openness toward other cultures. It is that latter notion that helps to reawaken the multiculturalism debate and place it within new political and economic realities.

The demographics of Canada are changing to such a degree that it is only a matter of a few years before “visible minorities” will become the majority in cities like Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Following from the principles of multiculturalism, how can such accelerated hybridity be reduced to a series of essentialist ideals for Canada that are based on Anglophone, northern, and Euro-western values? Second, as cultural producers are expected to prove their fiscal responsibility by selling their shows outside the Canadian market, the need for greater latitude in expressing alternative perspectives becomes more urgent. What is at stake for producers, then, is the degree to which the old models of Canadian protectionism are beginning to fail culturally, politically, and economically. Small-scale production companies cannot, and for the most part do not, try to compete directly in the American system. Instead, and echoing the economic policies of the former Liberal prime minister, Jean Chrétien, they feel they are better off seeking alliances with countries with similar political economies in which joint partnerships through co-productions, distribution deals, and the like expand the market for Canadian cultural goods. This process is about implicating Canadian cultural production within a global mediascape of shared cultural sectors, frameworks, networks, and finance schemes in order to create a greater sense of multiplicity and diversity on the airwaves. It is not clear that the artists who complained see this potential themselves, and certainly the position of ACTRA during the 2004 election suggests that they are still clinging tightly to the federal lifeline of essentialist Canadian culture. However, in taking their criticisms seriously and not just as the petulant whining of a pampered elite, there is the possibility of discovering promising new directions for re-thinking what Canadian culture can accomplish.

THE BROADCASTERS

Canada’s national broadcasters make similar claims as cultural producers about their own centrality to the project of building a nation-state, but clearly their arguments are more economically than artistically oriented. As such, they seem to always be working to expand their scope beyond the borders that they themselves have erected. Even more than artists, therefore, the broadcasting sector has tied its success and failures to a near exclusive relationship to the United States, both as a market of unlimited and cheap product and as an imminent competitor. As an advertising-based medium, television depends on gaining the largest possible share of audience to sell back to potential advertisers. However, as the broadcast spectrum expands and reorganizes itself into niche markets based on specialty or

CHAPTER ONE: REGULATION 41 subscription-based channels, the audience fragments and can no longer be as neatly packaged in large, homogenous groups. This is not to suggest that television viewing is necessarily declining to dangerously low levels, dragging profits down with them as some broadcasters may argue as they clamber to reduce restrictions on Canadian content requirements. Rather, revenue is increasing but it’s increasingly spread between individual stations, and viewership for specific programs is less stable.