A Good Question?

(Updated)

I was surprised to see this week that several prominent Conservatives floated the question of CBC funding. One survey asked whether the money Ottawa spends on CBC was "good"or"bad" value. It's a troubling question for anyone who supports public broadcasting. Small surveys by renegade politicians might not support the official party line, but when our office sent a questionnaire on support for the provincial public broadcasters TVO & TFO to candidates in the provincial election, the provincial Conservatives did not answer at all.

UPDATE: Last night we received a response from a single PC candidate, leader Tim Hudak, who sent a letter on Wednesday evening, just before he appeared on TVO's Agenda. Here's how he answered our ten questions:

Thank you for your survey about TVO and TFO and for the opportunity to tell you more about the change we’re proposing for Ontario families.
I have firsthand experience with TVO and the quality broadcasting you deliver. As you know, I have appeared on TVO programs many times, both before and after becoming Ontario PC Leader. I also enjoy watching TVO programming with my family.
In changebook, we’ve set three priorities: Change to put more money in your pocket, change to guarantee the services you need, and change to clean up government. These are difficult but important choices that we made only after listening to literally thousands of families from every corner of Ontario.
On October 6th, Ontario families will face a clear choice. They will choose four more years of Dalton McGuinty raising their taxes, wasting their money, and never standing up for the things we believe in; or they will choose change with an Ontario PC government.
To read more about the change we’re proposing for Ontario families, I encourage you to visit www.changebook.ca
Sincerely,
Tim Hudak

Liberal, NDP and Green party candidates have been supportive of funding for TVO and TFO. To quote a Green : "would love to see more of Ontario shown off". We agree. Just another reason to question your candidates before casting your vote.

CBC hits back on Quebecor bashing

Quebecor has been throwing $$ away for months foaming about the CBC's real and imagined slights, it has made an industry of rampant rivalry that rational minds try to ignore. This Monday a calm response from a CBC VP to a vexing Montreal Gazette editorial puts it in perspective.

Marvel at how much ink a jealous rival used to calling the shots can spill inventing a scandal just because he can. Quebecor's owner can afford to print whatever he likes in his newspapers (and he owns MANY). This is the dark side of letting anyone monopolize the media.

NDP drops ball on major cultural issue

While the Bloc and the Greens support increasing CBC’s funding considerably, the NDP merely vows to “maintain the CBC’s current levels of funding until Canada’s budgetary outlook improves.” The Liberals promise “stable and predictable funding” and the Conservatives didn’t even answer the Guild’s survey.

• Bloc: increase CBC/Radio-Canada funding to at least $40 per Canadian and Quebecker per year (some $230 million)
• The Greens: increase CBC/Radio Canada funding by $450 million over the next three years
• The NDP: stable funding until federal budget outlook improves
• The Libs: stable and predictable funding
• The Cons: NO ANSWER

In the last two elections, the NDP has promised an increase to CBC funding.

Click here for the full answers provided by the parties on the questionnaire the Guild submitted to them on April 5.

Who else can you count on to ask the tough questions?

This Election Vote CBC

The CBC (and its French services SRC) is the only national network devoted to promoting CANADIAN arts, culture, entertainment, sports and news. In every province, with services in isolated rural areas, the CBC/SRC brings Canadians together, reflects your community,(including in Aboriginal languages). Please ask politiicans if they support adequate funding.

http://www.cmg.ca/homepageEN.asp

watch our video!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD6HM159DYQ

A reminder about how dangerous our work can be

Being a news camera operator is one of the most physically demanding, and as we've been sadly reminded today, dangerous jobs in our industry.

Let's keep our fingers crossed for City-tv cameraman Bill Atanasoff who was hit by a car as he was shooting a separate police investigation in Toronto late last night. He had pulled up to the scene where other journalists were newsgathering, crossed the street to start shooting and was hit by the car.

Atanasoff was thrown several metres by the impact, in full view of the other media and police. He is in hospital in critical condition with injuries to his neck, skull and legs.

Police say they don't know if Bill's camera obscured his vision of the street or the oncoming car.

We know camera operators are incredibly vulnerable to injury. They are often looking through eyepieces and rushing to get to a scene at the same time -- meaning their own vision is obstructed and balance jeopardized. We know alot of shooting goes on in busy areas often at night and in bad weather. We know alot of news gathering takes place in unruly crowds and angry confrontations. And we know people are working longer hours, travelling further and doing more.

So let's take a moment to think about what we do, remember to be careful in what is a stressful profession, and talk openly to one another when we think enough is enough.

Why Ottawa's museum workers need our support

About a month ago, four hundred employees who work at the Museum of Civilization and the War Museum in Ottawa went on strike.

Unless you live in Ottawa, you may not be aware of this. But we should be -- because the issues are remarkably similar to those at the centre of the CBC lockout in 2005 and those we continue to fight today.

The Public Service Alliance of Canada which represents the workers, says that only 6 out of 55 museum guides are permanent. Employees go from contract to contract and lose traction in seniority and wage advancement every time they do. Sound familiar?

Online comments to various news sites about the strike indicate that some members of the public may not take the museum workers’ issues seriously because they are seen to be transient – doing this work until they figure out their “real” future.

This is a really dangerous assumption to make, as anyone in our business knows. People in the culture industry are often taken less seriously than other workers because of the “glamorous” perception of this work and the availability of part-time cyclical work that tends to attract students. Of course, these views are exploited by managements who want to pay their workers less. And we’ve got to stop this, wherever and whenever it happens.

Then there’s the big issue of the public funding of our cultural sector. Last year, the Conservative government subjected the Museum of Civilization to the same “strategic review” that the CBC is undergoing this year. The Museum lost $400,000 in that process. The CBC stands to lose about $50 million.

The Museums’ CEO Victor Rabinovitch hasn’t been vocal about this cut – just like his brother, Robert Rabinovitch who as CEO of the CBC refused to ask the federal government for more money for the Corporation.

This is bigger than a single dispute in the nation’s capital. The strike highlights the need to pull all kinds of workers and citizens together to fight for the overall health of our culture industry. In fact, as I write this, I'm at a conference where people are discussing more unity among everyone in the broader knowledge industry -- which includes academics. That means working together to achieve collective agreements that make real careers possible, and proper funding for our cherished institutions so they can survive without undercutting their own employees.

CBC: Layoffs + News Renewal = Upheaval and Resignation

At CBC News, these may look like quiet summer days…but they are days of complete upheaval. As if the layoffs weren’t bad enough to implement, there’s the process known as News Renewal, a massive reorganization of how the work gets done, and who does what.

For dozens of people, both behind-the-scenes and on-air, News Renewal means being reassigned – sometimes to a job that seems reasonable and interesting, and other times, to a job that’s not any of those things. Sometimes by nice conversation and other times, through curt and dismissive meetings. It’s disorienting for many people to be told that their views of what constitutes career progression are an illusion.

News Renewal is supposed to be in the name of making CBC News truly 24/7 on television, radio and online, national and local. I think most people understand and laud that intent. But then it collided head-on with the financial shortfall and the layoffs, which, among other things, led to greater uncertainty and varying degrees of pressure on senior employees to take voluntary retirement packages or simply resign.

The result: a feeling of deep hurt and resentment by those who weren’t quite ready to go, those who dared ask questions about the “multi-platform” 24/7 universe. They weren’t "laid off", but found they had no choice. They are people who gave years of valuable service, but who couldn’t relate to what they were now being asked to do.

How they feel is well expressed in a goodbye note from Dave Anderson of CBC Radio – which is contained in Jeffrey Dvorkin’s blog. Dvorkin is the former chief journalist at CBC radio and now distinguished visiting professior at Ryerson University.

What about the loss of all this talent? How do we address that? Who’s taking stock of who’s gone, beyond name and position? One way is a new section of the Guild’s web site – where we’re asking for people laid off this year to post their profiles so we know more about those losing their jobs. I’ll write more about this project later. But it’s only a small way to start documenting all this.

In the meantime, there’s a lot of hurt, a lot of disillusionment and a lot of anger.

CBC local news: good idea, bad time

Check out this very interesting insider blog post about the CBC-TV schedule changes that are going to affect local news, and the "logic" behind them.

In case you haven't heard, local evening TV news is growing from 60 to 90 minutes. But there's a hitch. It'll start at 5 pm and be over by 6:30 pm to make way for the blockbuster lineup of Coronation Street, Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, a detail that was buried in the announcement touting the change.

Good on Howard Bernstein, a former Executive Producer of the Toronto CBC local TV news show in the 1980s, when local news was a serious commitment, for providing another forum for discussions like this.

Please feel free to submit comments or guest blogs here (anonymous or otherwise) about the changes coming to CBC and other media this fall.

Free TV: CTV gets it wrong

I shouldn't be, but I am surprised at how badly some journalists cover our own industry. I know some are "edited" by their corporate bosses. On Friday night, CTV got the story of the U-S transition from analog to digital TV all wrong. And in this case, you have to wonder if there's a reason why.

Reporter Tom Walters’ piece left people with the impression that the switch from analog to digital TV broadcasting in the United States means the end of antennas and over-the-air television. He called it the End of an Era.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth – at least in the United States. There, all the major broadcasters have invested in making the switch to digital, and signals are still being beamed to TV sets right across the country, for free. The only difference is they’re digital signals now, which means they’re clearer and sharper signals. All you need is a converter box to receive them (which the U-S government helped people buy, by handing out millions of dollars worth of coupons), or a new TV. And a good antenna really helps.

So, in the United States, you can still get a wide range of TV signals in most places, for free.

In this country, broadcasters are refusing to make the transition, which is due to take place officially in 2011. Only the biggest cities west of New Brunswick can get digital TV over the air. And broadcasters have no plans to change that.

There’s a great story on cbc.ca that gives an overview of the transition in the U-S and the lack of transition in this country. Now, any wonder why CTV, which has already written off the idea of providing free over-the-air digital TV, would air such an incomplete story?

By the way, my union, the Canadian Media Guild, thinks all Canadians should have access to free TV, even after the digital conversion in 2011 and has provided original research about this to the CRTC. It’s been an uphill struggle.

Walters ended his piece with the Canadian broadcasters’ line (read: excuse): that only 10% of Canadians rely on over-the-air signals for their television, while the rest get cable and satellite, so the digital conversion will mean nothing. He didn’t mention that up to 10 million Canadians will be cut off from having the option of getting free TV in Canada after 2011, because of decisions that CTV and other broadcasters are making now. Would have been a better story, don’t you think?

Another wedgie for the CBC

The CBC is a classic wedge issue for the Conservatives. Even talk of privatizing it is a morsel of red meat to throw to the hungry base. It's an easy stunt to try to shore up that deep blue Conservative brand in the heartland, especially when polling suggests the brand is starting to fade. It also deflects attention and energy from the growing national consensus that the public broadcaster is under-funded and should receive more money each year from Ottawa to provide the kinds of media services that simply don't get offered by commercial media.

So it's not that surprising that the National Post is reporting today that CBC is indeed on the list of assets the government might sell off:

CBC, Via Rail flagged for possible sale
The federal Department of Finance has flagged several prominent Crown corporations as "not self-sustaining," including the CBC, Via Rail and the National Arts Centre, and has identified them as entities that could be sold as part of the government's asset review, newly released documents show.
In its fiscal update last November, the government announced that it would launch a review of its Crown assets, including so-called nterprise Crown corporations, real estate and "other holdings." Finance Department documents, obtained by Canwest News Service under the Access to Information Act, reveal that the review will focus on enterprise Crown corporations, which are not financially dependent on parliamentary subsidies.
Such corporations include the Royal Canadian Mint and Ridley Terminals, which is a coal-shipping terminal in Prince Rupert, B. C.
But the documents also reveal that the government will consider privatizing Crown corporations that require public subsidies to stay afloat. "The reviews will also examine other holdings in which the government competes directly with private enterprises, earn income from property or performs a commercial activity," states a Finance briefing note dated Dec. 2, 2008. "It includes Crown corporations that are not self-sustaining even though they are of a commercial nature."
In the briefing note, the Finance Department identifies nine Crown corporations that fall in that category, including Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., the CBC and Via Rail.
[...]

What's not yet clear is if there's anything more to the story than the boost it provides for the Conservative fundraising machine. Has anyone heard anything more substantive

The CBC cuts are sinking in

Today’s the day the impact is starting to sink in from one of the biggest round of job losses in the media in this country. It’s the day people at the public broadcaster have been dreading since CBC president Hubert Lacroix announced the cut in March. Now we know there’s going to be a total of 350 frontline CBC and Radio-Canada positions eliminated outside Quebec (the people represented by my union) and another roughly equal number lost in Quebec.

Let’s keep in mind what the 350 represents: 100 of those are contract employees who’ve been “non-renewed” (one of the most bizarre of the CBC expressions). Many of them worked on Steven and Chris or the Living shows on TV. They’re also reporters, researchers, producers and administrative support staff on programs throughout the CBC. For the most part, there were no grand announcements about them because, by definition, contract employment allows for simple termination.

158 are permanent employees who will receive redundancy notices and they have rights, including bumping in certain cases. But that won’t ease the shock. Anyone who’s ever received a “redundancy notice” never forgets what it feels like.

Another 73 people are taking a voluntary retirement incentive (VRIP), and their positions are being abolished. Among that list are Newsworld’s Don Newman, John McGrath, the radio legislative reporter based in Toronto, and Steve Finkelman, the radio political reporter in Edmonton, and one of the six who will retire this summer in that city. There is producer Mark Bulgutch, a thirty-year veteran and dean of TV news specials at the CBC. There are long-time network cameramen Mark Parkman and Richard Furlong who’ve been everywhere and shot it all. Because of the nature of the VRIP approach, these 73 people are among the CBC’s most experienced, knowledgeable and recognizable employees.

And then there are the many, many people affected by this cut who are just starting careers at CBC. It is the loss of these people, and the work that they’ve been doing, that makes me anxious for the future of the public broadcaster. We know that half of the people creating radio programming in Sudbury are losing their jobs, for example. These are keen young journalists who should have had the opportunity to become the veterans of the future. We know there are people being cut from Radio 2 in locations big and small who do the type of work that doesn’t get done by any other radio station.

Overall, we are experiencing a huge loss of talent, energy and commitment from the CBC. It is a loss for the media industry as a whole. And in this climate, it’s possible it will be gone forever.

Please comment with your own sense of the impact of the cuts.

Petty media games in the hallways of power

There’s a lot going on in the broadcast industry these days: a crisis in local news, fights between broadcasters and cable and satellite providers about who’s going to pay to make sure local programming survives, the 800 job losses at the CBC and hundreds of other job losses at other media organizations.

So you have to wonder why the Quebecor-owned SunMedia chain ran a piece yesterday rehashing a month-old story. On March 25, CBC president Hubert Lacroix said Corporation managers are going to get their performance bonuses slashed by 20% to 50%, for a saving of $4 million, as part of his speech to staff about the 800 layoffs. All the information in the top three paragraphs of the SunMedia article was in Lacroix’s speech to staff that day; a speech that was heavily covered in the media.

The only new element is that two Conservative MPs, (Shelley Glover and Rod Bruinooge) used their time in a parliamentary committee meeting on the crisis in local television on Monday to grill Lacroix about the bonuses. And though nothing new was revealed by Lacroix that wasn’t known a month ago, the story ran today with a prominent headline (“CBC to give perks and pink slips” ) in the Edmonton Sun and under a variety of other headlines throughout the chain.

It goes without saying that I’m not a fan of every executive decision made at the CBC in the past few years. And I know that reading about money spent on hotels and dinners has a deflating effect on Guild members. But it’s no coincidence the story about expenses just happened to be filed days before Lacroix’s scheduled appearance before the committee and just as the government is weighing whether any program to help the broadcasters cope with the crisis in the industry will include the public broadcaster.

One thing is for sure: rehashing old bonus news, and celebrating expenses filed three years ago just doesn’t seem too relevant when people are talking about the very survival of the news business and the future of conventional television.

You’d think Glover and Bruinooge would be concerned about the bigger-picture stuff. Both happen to come from the Winnipeg area, home of Canwest, which is spending these days teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and in desperate need of government help.

CBC: Now more than ever

Canadians should be appalled at how the Harper government has handled the CBC file. It’s brought on a crisis in the media and culture industries that didn’t have to be. There’s not a lot of money at stake. In that way, it’s very similar to the furor caused by the $45M in arts cuts announced last summer.

In this case, the solutions are even there for all to see. They can be found in an all-party parliamentary committee report of last year. Let’s get Harper to listen to them.

The CMG and its allies are launching a campaign to help Canadians get the message to the leaders in Parliament that we need the CBC now more than ever.

Click here to send a letter to the Prime Minister and the leaders of the opposition parties urging them to:
§ increase CBC's annual parliamentary allocation by $7 per Canadian by the end of this year;
§ develop a 7-year contract with the CBC that sets expectations and guarantees funding indexed to inflation; and
§ provide immediate bridge financing to reduce the cuts this spring.

Click here to find out more about the campaign.

Let's consider this the Arts Cuts, Round 2.

The CBC cuts and the $1.1B: one has real impact and the other is meaningless

It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly two weeks since the first word of the cut at the CBC…and my last post. Most days I felt so overwhelmed and saddened by the news it was hard to know where to start … so I stopped (for a while).

The more we learn, the more about this CBC cut is just wrong. The degree of impact on communities across the country is so much greater than the relatively small amount of money it would cost to prevent the cut. Take Sudbury as an example, where hundreds of people turned up at a rally Sunday. It’s about to lose half its radio staff. Less than half a million dollars would save these jobs. But without them, places such as North Bay, Sault Ste. Marie, Timmins -- not to mention the entire James Bay coast won’t get covered.

The sheer value of information and culture the CBC provides in places like Sudbury are impossible to measure and track and that applying dollar signs to this type of public service is simply impossible and meaningless.

That’s what irks me so much about the way the Harper government, through Heritage Minister James Moore, has responded to this cut. His approach has been all about placing a distorted value on a single dollar figure by suggesting the $1.1B that has been budgeted for the CBC is some crazy amount of money, that’s it’s even a mark of generosity, a financial line in the sand. It's even unprecedented, according to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

The truth is the CBC got $1.1B as far back as 1992. The figure dipped down in the late 90s, and was up over $1B every year since 2002. The CBC’s budget has had no increase for inflation in all that time. Put another way, if the CBC was granted the budget it got in 1992 in real dollars today…that would be $1.5B (and it would mean none of these cuts would be necessary and CBC radio could move into under-served areas such as Hamilton, Red Deer and Kelowna).

To further put the $1.1B figure in context, take a look at Canwest Global’s operating budget for 2008. It’s $1.7B. That pays for newspapers, television and the Canada.com web site --in one language. Compare that to CBC’s radio, TV and internet programming of nearly all Canadian original material in both languages, the Northern radio service in 8 Aboriginal languages and the international service. Does $1.1B for all that seem as “substantial” as Moore would have you believe?

Another layoff day at CBC: so sad and so inconclusive

It all seems so familiar. Waiting for the CBC job cut announcement that’s been looming for weeks, and then hearing it, for yet another time, another year. But this year's version somehow seems so ... hollow.

We know that taking 800 jobs out of the CBC will have immense consequences, yet we have no faces or programs to attach to those job losses. In most cases, people are going home tonight not knowing how or if their own show or their own workplace will be affected. At Radio-Canada, we did learn that weekend news shows are being scrapped except for the one in Ottawa, the TV noon shows in Ottawa, Quebec and Moncton are gone, and the morning radio show in Windsor is being cancelled. But the details are coming out painfully, one piece at a time.

We don’t who will leave or even whether it will be by their choice or by layoff. Will the CBC be permitted to offer voluntary incentive packages to people who have the so-called 85 formula (years of service plus the years of age equaling 85 or more)? It’s up to the Heritage Minister to grant permission for that, according to CBC CEO Hubert Lacroix. And we don’t know when that permission may or may not come.

It was a day all about numbers; the $171 million needed to balance the budget, the $125 million that may come from a sale of assets, TV’s share of the cut (83%), radio’s share of the cut (17%). A lot of numbers, dissected many ways.

Yet at the end of the day, we know very little except the CBC is once again not being supported by the government, for no reason other than straight politics being played by Harper’s PMO. Stephen Harper mused about privatizing English TV as far back as 2004 and we all know about last year’s culture cuts. He’s been able to defend not providing the bridge financing by calling the base $1.1B allocation “record financing”, when even his Heritage Minister James Moore has acknowledged it’s not actually the most ever. On Friday, Moore more properly used the word “straight financing”. (As far back as 1990-91, the CBC was getting just under $1.1B which in today’s dollars would be $1.5B. So much for record financing.)

The numbers obfuscate so much. Tomorrow, we will learn details about program cuts. We are sad tonight, but I know we'll get mad tomorrow.

The CBC budget: a political show no one should have to watch

It’s budget time for the CBC --- and this year, it’s become so painful to watch that I’ve come to the conclusion that we don’t really have a public broadcaster. What we have is a broadcaster that is funded with taxpayer dollars in such a partisan and short-sighted way that the public aspect is missing entirely.

Every year we watch the same play. CBC executives are forced to make their case in serious meetings behind close doors, they wait, they are given vague promises. Then they wait some more. They want to be diplomatic and respectful of the process. Valuable planning time goes by. Decisions are delayed. As time goes by, more scenarios unfold in case the money is not granted and in some cases, the scenarios get worse as more time goes by. Then when the CBC seeks some conclusion to the whole thing – after all the new fiscal year begins in THREE weeks, it’s accused of “begging” or “whining “for money in public.

“The CBC cannot be insulated from all market realities,” said Kory Teneycke, a spokesperson for the prime minister, said last week. That was a cue things were not going well. This forced CBC CEO Hubert Lacroix to go to the public, make the case, and let it be known what’s at stake. Given what CBC does and where it spends its money, what’s at stake always comes down to programming. The made-in-Canada stuff – plus the news and information the CBC delivers in communities from coast to coast to coast. You know. The stuff the private sector is abandoning.

The truth is there’s not a lot of wiggle room in CBC budget setting, certainly not enough to justify all this hand-wringing.

It has been getting the same base parliamentary appropriation of just over $1B for the past 15 years or so. Sometimes there’s a discretionary $60M for programming that the government always calls “one-time” and dangles like a piece of red meat. And this year, the CBC is asking for bridge financing – a loan – to get it over this ad revenue freefall.

So why all the drama over a relatively small amount of money? The only answer is pure partisan politics. When Finance Minister Jim Flaherty tells reporters the CBC gets "substantial financing", he is inferring that $1B is overly generous. (It sounds like a lot until you learn that Canwest spent $1.7B last year.) He is doing this to play to his party’s base.

Last year, the parliamentary Heritage Committee recommended that the CBC and the government enter into a seven-year deal or “memorandum of understanding” so there would be more stability in decision-making and not so much room for political interference.

It’s time. The annual rerun of this show is destructive to the CBC and everything it stands for. It creates a nasty government-as-boss dynamic. Meanwhile, as employees, all we can do is watch…and wait.

The sands are shifting under our feet

It must be a relief for private media outlets to splash CBC’s troubles on the front page. There was an avalanche of news about the public broadcaster’s financial woes and the CMG officially responded to it here.

But it’s actually make or break day for Canwest. Today’s the day for the conglomerate’s creditors to decide whether they will continue to put up much-needed cash to continue operations at the TV stations and newspapers.

Torstar is going through an upheaval of its own.

And CTV, the author of some of Torstar’s despair, has taken the interesting step of making its licence renewal application public ahead of the CRTC making it public. Ivan Fecan sent a memo to staff today saying that “the situation with the CTV stations is alarming (and) the situation with the 'A's is grave.” And CHUM, which CTV owns, says it is eliminating 40 jobs.

In explaining the closing down of three stations and the abandoning of 45 rebroadcast transmitters that bring free access to CTV programming to dozens of communities, Fecan noted: “We are a private broadcaster. We are not the CBC. We are here because we make a profit from the service we provide.”

We who work on the front lines of this crisis probably have some of the best ideas to save the services we provide to our audiences and readers. That’s certainly true of the folks at Canwest’s CHCH Hamilton station, who are spearheading an effort to hold on to their station and provide even better local coverage.

If you have any ideas, or know of any that are floating around, please don’t be shy. Share.

I’m doing some research on the topic myself and hope to share what I find in future posts.

The failed local TV experiment and why it shouldn't be used to change the rules

By guest blogger karenatcmg

Le Devoir reported this week that Quebec private TV network TQS is cancelling the last of the three magazine-style (read: cheap and cheerful) shows launched after the new owners canned local news last summer. The report says ratings were hardly registering for morning show Deux Laits, Un Sucre. Turns out the weekend evening news that TQS buys from an outside company is pulling a respectable 223,000 or so. So guess what? The network’s owners are looking to get back into early evening news on weekdays.

Let’s just hope it’s not too late to make sure the failed experiment, green-lighted by the CRTC last year, doesn’t come back to haunt us during the round of TV licence renewals coming in April. That’s what Commissioner Michel Morin feared when he dissented on the decision to give TQS what it wanted. [Scroll down to find Morin’s dissenting opinion.]

We have good reason to be fearful. After all, CTVglobemedia and Canwest are upping the ante ahead of those renewals by threatening to let their small market stations die.

CTV announced yesterday it wants to dump CKX-TV in Brandon, which has the only local TV news broadcast in the area. If CTV doesn’t find a buyer, the company will simply let the station go dark. CBC, which has an affiliation agreement with CKX until August 31, has already turned down the opportunity to buy it. Whether the station survives or not, it looks like local viewers will have to pay for cable or satellite to watch their public broadcaster starting in September.

Some analyst told The Canadian Press that small market TV stations “are costly to run and maintain and were having difficulty providing a decent return on investment even in good times."

Define decent. Apparently nobody but the networks themselves and (perhaps) the CRTC actually knows how individual TV stations are really doing. Have a read of the latest Canwest Global Communications earnings reports and you get the idea the newspaper and TV operations are doing ok. It’s the debt and the foreign exchange losses that are killing them. And yet four Canwest small market stations are also facing extinction in Hamilton, Red Deer, Kelowna and Victoria.

For the local viewers of any station that’s threatened, you’ve got to wonder if a small return on investment – or simply the ability to cover costs and pay decent wages – works just fine if it means putting some quality local news on the air.

And don’t worry … Lise will return.

Let’s hope there’s no devil in the details…whenever they come

I feel like I have federal budget hangover. I drank in all these numbers last night, and all I feel this morning is confused.

Why? The budget brew had a lot of stuff in it, but in the cold light of the day, nothing that really matters. And the people directly affected by the recession, the unemployed? They got nothing. It’s no easier today to qualify for employment insurance than it was yesterday. In our industry, that means all those people who are casually employed and, because of the recession, no longer get a call to come into work will likely get nothing.

I’m equally puzzled by the approach to the CBC. Canadians still don’t know what this government is going to set aside for our public broadcaster, the centerpiece of any national culture policy.

There are some signs that things are ok. Heritage minister James Moore promised there would be “no cuts” to the CBC’s allocation in an interview he gave to CBC radio. But that’s all we really have to go on.

As CBC president Hubert Lacroix wrote in a staff memo today: “The questions of our base parliamentary appropriation and the $60 million in non-recurring funding for programming initiatives, which we we’ve received each year since 2001, remain unanswered.” (CBC employees can find the full memo on iO!).

In my ten years of doing this job, this is what I’ve seen when it comes to the federal budget and CBC: sometimes the CBC is mentioned directly on budget day, sometimes it’s an item in the “main” line-by-line budget documents that come out weeks later, and sometimes it’s in the supplementary departmental estimates, the numbers that come out months later. And no one, outside of Finance, seems to know which it will be in any given year.

And there’s another trick. In 2001, the then-Liberal government recognized that mid-90s cuts went too deep and that the CBC needed more money if the country’s broadcast system was going to boost Canadian programming. As we know, none of the other broadcasters were going to do it. So, in the context of heady surpluses, they handed the CBC a “one-time” $60 million for Canadian programming. Now the $60 million has been there every year since, but you can never tell if, when and where you’re going to find it. Especially this year.

Here’s what someone on Parliament Hill told us last year about the history of the budget and the $60 million: “In 2001-02 it was in the ‘supps’ (the supplementary estimates), in 02-03 it was in the ‘mains’ (the main estimates), in 03-04 it was in the supps, in 04-05 it was in the mains, in 05-06 it would have been in the supps but there were special circumstances, I’m not sure but $10 million had to come out, but then in 06-07 it was in the mains but initially frozen, in 07-08 it will be in the supps.”

Ahh. Thank you. Much clearer now.

What’s even more disappointing is that the government missed an opportunity to take a pragmatic, bold and relatively cheap step to renewing culture right across the country. For less than $50 million this year, it could have enabled the opening of 12 new CBC radio stations in high-growth places like Barrie, Ontario, and Red Deer, Alberta. The stations would create good-paying jobs while providing a platform to promote what’s going on in those blossoming cities. Talk about win-win.

But the sad reality is that the CBC question was dodged and, given the rumours and the economic climate, a promise of “no cuts” is gratefully accepted, even if there’s nothing to back it up.