Speeches and Interviews

October 23, 2003

Speaking Notes for Claude Saint-Laurent to the Senate Committee on Transport and Communications

Speaking Notes for Claude Saint-Laurent, Special Advisor to the President and Chair, Journalistic Standards and Practices Committee, to the Senate Committee on Transport and Communications, Ottawa, Ontario

Madam President, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Senate,

I am here to talk to you about French Television's Information Service because I have held the post of Director General of News for 12 years. I am now Special Counsellor to the President and Chair of CBC/Radio-Canada's Journalistic Standards and Practices Committee. This Committee provides a special forum where the heads of news for English, French, Radio, Television and New Media can talk about our craft, our policies, specific cases which arise and any adjustments in our policies which may be necessary. It is a very important committee for CBC/Radio-Canada.

To follow up on what Tony has just told you, I have examined the qualitative part of the study, which by the way was one of the most thorough I've seen in several years, and compared the data to ours. I can report that viewers' observations are similar as regards news and information on the French Television service of Radio-Canada. The trends, needs, criticisms and wishes expressed, and the challenges that underlie them, are identical in nearly all respects.

Madam Fraser, at the start of your work this past May, you asked two questions in particular:

Whether Canadians continue to receive news and information with the quality and diversity they deserve; and How to ensure Canadians have access to news and information told from a Canadian perspective, as seen by Canadians.

These questions were asked in regard to citizens across all of Canada, but they are evenmore acutely relevant in the case of this country's Francophone populations.

This is why, at French TV, not a day goes by that we do not ask these very questions of ourselves.

Diversity in news and information is our daily bread. Diversity along with fairness and credibility is one of the basic principles guiding our journalistic standards and practices.

French Television offers nearly forty-three hours of news and public affairs programming every week. We produce four daily newscasts that keep Canadians informed of events from the Canadian perspectives, from our broadcast centre in Montréal and the forty affiliated stations and regional bureaus right across the country, with our network of foreign correspondents bringing them the news of the world.

We produce in-house eleven public affairs programs that cover such varied subjects as the judicial system (Justice), food (L'épicerie), consumer rights (La Facture), social issues (Enjeux), science and technology (Découverte), agriculture (La semaine verte), and spirituality (Second Regard). Zone libre brings us documentaries and features from all over the world; and Culture-choc, the perspectives of young videographers criss-crossing the country. Finally, two programs (5 sur 5 and Place publique) are designed specifically to respond to viewers' questions and sustain a daily dialogue with our viewers.

That, in our humble opinion, means diversity.

With our colleagues at CBC English Television, we have begun co-producing epic historical documentaries like Canada: A People's History - one of the finest projects it has ever been my pleasure to work on - and we are currently hard at work together on a twelve-hour production, of which six will be in English and six in French, devoted to the 1995 referendum on Quebec sovereignty. The plan is for mixed CBC/Radio-Canada crews to travel all across the country, and the working title is Le Jour où le Canada a tremblé, or One Day That Shook . With six months of initial research completed, this promises to be an uplifting, thrilling story told by Canadians of all origins and all social milieux. This history of the referendum, by those who lived it, is due to premiere in 2005.

Only CBC/Radio-Canada, with our journalistic rigour, our professionalism and the passion of our content creators, can deliver productions of such high calibre.

Since going on the air in 1995, RDI has become the most-watched French-language specialty channel among Francophones in Canada. More than 63 hours of its programming originates in regions outside Montreal. This does not include the special programs it regularly produces, like the one last Thursday devoted to the twenty-fifth anniversary of John Paul the Second's election to the papacy, aired out of Montreal with participants speaking live from Toronto, Moncton, Ottawa and Vancouver. On a personal note: it was while watching this program that I learned Toronto's Polish community is 200,000 strong!

Two years ago French TV inaugurated the Centre de l'information, or CDI. In doing so we achieved a twofold objective: first, unite all the main network news staff and all RDI personnel under one roof, thereby promoting versatility and eliminating redundancies, and second, make the shift to a fully digital newsgathering environment. This evolution brought with it a major culture change at Radio-Canada.

That digital environment enabled us to air reports by Luc Chartrand, embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq. He edited the stories on his notebook computer and transmitted them daily via telephone satellite uplink, at speeds and with a picture quality that were undreamt of even five years ago. By contrast, twelve years ago during the first Persian Gulf conflict, our correspondents required access to editing suites and conventional satellite transmission facilities to file reports. Not the kind of technology one is likely to find in the middle of the desert!

And yet in spite of the progress afforded by these and other technological innovations, in 2003 there are still regions of Canada that do not have access to locally produced news programming.

That is why I should like to conclude, Madam President and Ladies and Gentlemen of the Senate, by communicating to you the firm wishes of Francophone groups across the country that Radio-Canada's regional station signals be made accessible via satellite. Georges Arès, president of the Fédération des communautés francophones et acadiennes, said last week, as quoted in the Courrier de la Nouvelle-écosse, that "for most minority Francophones, the local Radio-Canada station is the only one they can rely on to produce a French-language newscast with a regional focus, broadcast a community events calendar, and generally play a part in community life."

The same holds true in certain regions of Quebec, for example Trois-Rivières, Saguenay and Rouyn-Noranda, where up to thirty per cent of citizens are satellite subscribers, yet cannot pick up the signal of their local Radio-Canada newsroom.

Thank you.