OTTAWA - There were bouquets and brickbats Thursday for a sweeping report by MPs of all stripes calling for stable, multi-year funding to help the CBC survive a fast-changing media climate.
The House of Commons heritage committee split along party lines over the future of the public broadcaster, with members of the minority Conservative government writing their own dissenting report.
But MPs on all sides agreed the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. should be able to depend on longer-term funding as it uses new technology to satisfy ever-evolving consumer tastes. They say Ottawa should commit to the CBC for at least seven years, and budget amounts should be indexed to the cost of living.
"CBC/Radio-Canada must have access to the resources it needs to remain a service accessible to the vast majority of Canadians," said Conservative committee chairman Gary Schellenberger.
The actual cost of ensuring that access, however, was a point of divergence. Tory MPs rejected the majority recommendation that per capita funding should increase to at least $40 from $33.
"We cannot support inflexible recommendations that arbitrarily assign figures to the funding of CBC/Radio-Canada," says the Conservative dissenting report.
The proposed hike would boost the public portion of the broadcaster's yearly budget to about $1.35 billion a year from the current $1.1 billion, which itself is up $71 million from last year.
Another $400 million comes from advertising. The Conservatives agreed last year to add $60 million more this year and next.
The Tory refusal to commit to actual multi-year increases "has smoked out somewhat the Conservative government's position on public broadcasting," says Ian Morrison, a spokesman for the watchdog group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting.
"The Conservatives in their minority report are effectively setting the CBC up to fail by agreeing rhetorically with almost all of the words about what the CBC should be doing, but refusing to commit the resources that would be required to make that happen.
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http://money.canoe.ca/News/Sectors/Entertainment/2008/02/28/4883040-cp.html
Stumble It!
Out of all the media in Canada (except for news gathered up through the Internet), and despite its shortcomings and bias, the CBC easily has the very best news coverage second to none, and that's what the spin doctors in power hate the most. What they want is ignorance and lies to be propagated through the airwaves. Thank goodness for the unregulated Internet or we'd be thinking that 9/11 was done by cave dwelling terrorists in Afghanistan, and that those fake Osama bin Laden tapes were real, and that Canadian troops were actually building schools and roads in Afghanistan because we're so darn nice, or that those rock throwing protesters at the secret SPP meetings were really protesters instead of cops ...