by Suzanne Alyssa Andrew
This Magazine Jan/Feb 2006

Over a thousand Canadians have sent Canadian Broadcasting Corporation president Robert Rabinovitch emails asking him to resign. Thanks to an email initiative begun in November, part of advocacy group Our Public Airwaves’ (OPA) Campaign for a New CBC, you too can personally attack the CBC prez with one click of your mouse.

When Royal Canadian Mint president David Dingwall came under fire for what seemed to be questionable expenditures, including the infamous pack of gum, opposition parties had conniptions in the House of Commons. Dingwall resigned and the matter was investigated. But after an eight-week lockout and a low-profile Heritage Committee grilling in Ottawa, Rabinovitch has decided to stay at the helm of our problem-plagued public broadcaster.

Before its email campaign began, OPA’s executive director, Arthur Lewis, told me that he thinks Rabinovitch is a proud man who’s probably already looking for a new job to quietly slip away to in the private sector. But Lewis has since decided Rabinovitch needs to be pushed out, not by the government, but by people like you and me. And fast.

Either Lewis and OPA are too impatient to give Rabinovitch the dignity of a slow disappearing act, or else the CBC president is pumping dangerous hydrogen into the CBC as if it were the Hindenburg about to explode. Either way, the CBC is suffering from a series of serious internal mechanical failures. But are these the upshot of miserly funding shortfalls and decision-dithering under the Liberal government, or leadership problems? Or both?

The answer has been around for years, predating the lockout, in a report the Liberal government has largely ignored. In June 2003, the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage tabled Our Cultural Sovereignty, a.k.a. the Lincoln Report, an 871-page doorstop that included 97 recommendations for Canada’s communications industry. While it’s not a page-turning, scandal-driven potboiler like the Gomery Commission’s Who Is Responsible?, the Lincoln Report suggests the CBC’s local and regional broadcasting be restored, its patronage appointments be ended and it receive stable, long-term funding, among other things. Sensible, inarguable solutions that would—gasp!—actually work. You’d be forgiven for thinking this insomniac’s cure is now collecting dust in the basement of the Canadian Archives, but among cultural advocates it’s become a mechanic’s handbook. The Lincoln Report not only gave the CBC a reliably thorough inspection, it also detailed a plan to overhaul the old Mother Corp blimp.

Given the recent lockout and its resulting spotlight on the CBC’s importance and its management, you’d think that the Lincoln Report would finally be at the top of the inbox on Parliament Hill. But aside from a quick thank-you by then-Heritage Minister Sheila Copps and a follow-up with no follow-through by current culture-cop Liza Frulla in early 2005, nothing has happened. Former Liberal MP and committee chair Clifford Lincoln, who also wields expertise in environmental policy, remains frustrated that the recommendations he penned, the culmination of years of research, have yet to be acted upon. “It’s very hard to keep focus,” he blusters, with a long-term fighter’s mix of vim and resignation. “Issues that are ‘mission’ issues—environment, culture, aboriginal issues—are always far less in focus in the political context than the more visible trade, money and financial issues and the result is reflected in decisions.”

Lise Lareau, president of the Canadian Media Guild, the CBC’s largest union, believes that the Liberal government’s lack of initiative on the Lincoln Report is “an absolute shame. But it’s symbolic of the Liberal approach to culture and other big ticket issues, which is to commission a report, receive a report and then let the issue die.”

Well before the aftermath of the lockout, the Lincoln Report pointed out that the CBC’s biggest weakness is its executive structure. Traditional—often left-leaning—solutions for the CBC’s ills have been to toss more money at the institution, hoping that innovation will magically appear. But many, including those at OPA, would argue that such changes are impossible under the CBC’s current leadership.

Previous CBC president Perrin Beatty, whose tenure has been characterized by the media and advocates alike as well-meaning but weak in the face of massive ’90s-era budget cuts, failed to raise the kind of ire provoked by Robert Rabinovitch, who faced down a horde of angry MPs at the October 27 Heritage Committee hearing last year. While some MPs asked pointed questions about the lockout, others vented their accumulated frustrations at having to deal with hundreds of angry letters, emails and phone calls from their respective constituents. After further deliberations, the committee requested the federal government set up an independent task force to review the CBC’s mandate, role and services. More study instead of action.

Despite the MPs’ show of condemnation of Rabinovitch, short of not renewing his contract when it’s up in 2007, neither the Heritage Committee nor the CBC board of directors has the authority to fire, censure or discipline the CBC executive for anything, including the lockout. “It’s totally dysfunctional,” says Lareau, describing upper echelon patronage appointments at the CBC. “If he’d had his hand in the cookie jar, that’s straightforward, but there are real questions about how the board or the government can get rid of a Crown corporation head when their crime has been to grossly miscalculate on a significant file.” Such would not be the case if, like other corporations, the CBC president could be hired and fired by its board.

Ian Morrison, spokesperson for advocacy group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, believes the CBC’s top dog needs to be leashed: “The lockout occurred because Mr. Rabinovitch decided all by himself he wanted to do it,” he says. “He’s not accountable to anyone, and in our view, that’s an unhealthy way for an organization to be governed.”

Although he had no previous hands-on broadcasting experience, Rabinovitch, a former Ottawa bureaucrat and Bronfman empire board member, was installed in 1999 as CBC president by then-Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. The political fiat of a patronage appointment to an arms-length corporation creates a catch-22, wherein any attempt by the Prime Minister’s Office to wrist-slap Rabinovitch could be seen as political interference.

Instead of merely calling for Rabinovitch’s head—which if nothing else makes great headlines—the entire structure of the CBC executive needs to change. “Without a revised governance model the CBC will stay the way it is,” explains Lincoln. “You won’t get the autonomy and the credibility that the CBC needs to influence the government to give it the funding that is required.”

One of Rabinovitch’s biggest failures is that he hasn’t fought for more CBC funding or made the case about what he could do with it—again a problem of the system. “He’s been the president for six years and for six years he’s been covering up for the government,” says Lewis. “He doesn’t want to embarrass his friends in the government and he doesn’t want to get turned down.”

Over in the UK, things are different. At the BBC—where director-general Mark Thompson was hired by the BBC board—the majority of its funding comes from licence fees collected from all TV buyers. With a much smaller percentage from government grants, the BBC is not as reliant on either the whims of a stingy government or advertising revenue. With the funding it gets directly from audiences, the BBC operates on a budget that is, according to Lewis, seven times that of the penny-pinching CBC! But even measured against countries that do get most of their public broadcasting funding directly from government, the CBC comes up short. With a ranking of 22 out of 26 Organisation for Economic Co-operation Development countries, Canada spends less on public broadcasting than most countries in the rest of the western world.

The CBC operates on an annual budget of roughly $1 billion. After $400 million in cuts (by then-Finance Minister Paul Martin in the ’90s), the CBC hasn’t received any new funding—not even to keep up with inflation costs of upwards of $12 million a year—in over 30 years. For the past five years the government has granted the CBC one-time parcels of $60 million, but it’s never guaranteed for next year.

Speaking on a post-lockout edition of CBC Radio’s The Current, Rabinovitch told host Anna Maria Tremonti, “My biggest problem is financing this organization.” Yet a few weeks later at the Heritage Committee hearing, he was unable to give MPs a solid dollar figure on what the CBC actually needs. If he’s not able to make the funding case to a Heritage Committee in crisis mode, no wonder he was unable to sell either the government or the Canadian public on an $83 million proposal pitched in February 2005 to address the Lincoln Report’s regional programming recommendation. That $83 million would have restored Canada’s local programming and brought CBC stations to medium-sized Canadian cities such as Hamilton, Ontario.

Instead, with Rabinovitch and his senior management team quietly focusing on making the CBC trim and efficient, the public broadcaster has begun to show the effects of government neglect. Programming is shabbier, increasingly commercialized and doesn’t always meet CBC’s official mandate. During last year’s hockey lockout, CBC TV ran American films it knew it could count on to generate ratings and ad revenue. “There are fine American films that would meet the public broadcasting mandate, but Happy Gilmore does not,” says Lewis of Our Public Airwaves. “This is unseemly for a public broadcaster, but it’s what the CBC has been reduced to because of its funding difficulties.”

Lincoln, whose report voiced the critical need for more stable, long-term CBC funding, asserts the money is there; there’s just no political will to dole it out. “The government denies the CBC and says it’s too much money. What is too much money?” he asks rhetorically, noting that the Liberals recently coughed up $4.6 million in funds for various programs as a result of a deal it made with the NDP. “The money is there when it’s needed for different things but it never seems to be there for the CBC.”

Yet the lockout got people talking about the CBC and why we need it—showing we don’t seem to know what we have until it’s taken away and replaced with movies we could just as easily rent at the corner store. A recent opinion poll conducted for Friends of Canadian Broadcasting by Ipsos Reid showed overwhelming support for the CBC, and indicated 90 percent of Canadians would advise their MP to vote to increase or maintain CBC funding.

That’s why Morrison stresses the old Corp is a valuable life worth saving: “This is a 70-year-old institution. What we need to do is analyze its weaknesses, develop priorities and make surgical improvements.”

The NDP, which supports the CBC in its election platform, now has an opportunity to leverage public scrutiny of the CBC before the lockout scars heal and push the Liberals to take action. But in the shadows of Gomery and government corruption, it seems unlikely that the CBC will be a hot-button issue in Question Period or the upcoming election.

During the lockout, impassioned letters, emails and phone calls rolled into MPs’ offices from Canadians across the country. Voicing their support and concern for the CBC, many citizens articulated more fire and vision for the future of public broadcasting than our politicians or the CBC management have in recent months.

Whether or not you agree with the finger-pointing style of Our Public Airwaves’ email campaign, they are pushing to keep the spotlight on the CBC over the long term by getting voters to make noise. After all, the CBC is a public broadcaster—it belongs to all of us. Advocates and those involved in the production of the Lincoln Report have provided us with valuable solutions to the CBC’s problems. But if the government isn’t going to act and opposition parties don’t raise the issues and the CBC management structure is flawed, then maybe it’s time for CBC audiences to cut through the static.