Speeches and Interviews

November 8, 2006

Whose Story? Storytelling as Nation-building

Mark Starowicz, at the The Symons Lecture on the State of Canadian Confederation, Mainstage Theatre, the Confederation Centre Charlottetown, P.E.I.

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I'm deeply touched to be part of a lecture series that honours one of the greatest living Canadians, Professor Tom Symons, whose contribution to the cultural, educational and civic wealth of our nation is unsurpassed by anyone I know.

I'm honoured to be here, in the place where our Confederation was born, and to be invited to speak about the state of that Confederation, as it pertains to our national culture and our collective story. It's hard to imagine a more appropriate place, not only because it is the birthplace of Confederation, but because this island's formation and history spans the entire spectrum of the Canadian experience. An island with ancient roots in the First Nations, an island shaped by the story of the Acadian people, by the great migration of the Scottish settlers, and the waves of Irish and European immigration that followed them.

I've also been asked to share with you the story of Canada: A People's History, and what I learned about Canada through that television project. Later, I want to talk to you about television again; this time, how it will affect our future.

The project to make the first history of Canada for the television age was a six-year expedition into the past — a sometimes harrowing expedition that brought together 60 producers, historians, actors, and camera operators, from the French and the English sides of CBC/Radio-Canada, to produce 32 hours of television each in both French and English, two books, home videos, a large website, and an entire curriculum guide for schools.

We had modest audience expectations — it was Canadian history, after all, and the conventional wisdom was that Canadians thought their history was boring. So we weren't expecting what happened when the series aired.

Those 32 hours became the most-viewed documentary in the 50 years of Canadian television, matching the ratings for the Olympics and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. The two-volume books became the best-selling non-fiction books of the year in Canada, selling more than the Beatles Anthology and the Guinness Book of Records at Christmas; the video sets became the best-selling videos in Canada. In our wildest of dreams, we did not expect this. It seemed as if we had been prospecting in the fields of Canadian identity and memory when we unconsciously drilled into a pressure dome that blew us away with its intensity.

That was the first — and most important — lesson we learned: there is a profound and powerful yearning in the Canadian people to understand our identity and our collective experience. This is not a search for nostalgia; this is a search to understand who we are, and what we represent, and what our place in the world is. When you're reading everywhere that borders are disappearing, that nations are obsolete concepts, that we are entering new hemispheric and global constellations, that we should adopt the American dollar, forget about Medicare — then a sense of loss develops, and you think about your identity. If you're going on an uncertain voyage, you pack the essentials. On the verge of Canada's global journey in the new millennium, what are the essentials? Who are we? What values do we represent? What makes us particular on earth — not better than anyone — just particular? In 2000 and 2001, when the series aired, I think we were in an introspective mood. I think we still are.

There was one moment during the production of the series — a small moment — that particularly stands out for me.

Most of you know what "rushes" are — they are the first, rough assemblies of whatever you shot that day, which you watch in a small screening theatre to make sure the sound and images you recorded turned out well. The rushes we were watching one afternoon were of the reconstruction of the landing of the Loyalists in Nova Scotia, as transport ships from New York dropped thousands of families onto the rocky beaches to face the impending winter. It looked identical to the scenes of Kosovo, which was on the news at the time we were filming. Then we heard these quotes from two different women over the achingly lonely scene of huge ships departing on the horizon:

Sarah Frost: "It is, I think, the roughest land I ever saw. But this is to be our city they say."

Then there was the voice of another refugee, Sarah Tilley: "I climbed to the top of Chipman's Hill and watched the sails disappear. Although I had not shed a tear throughout all the War, I sat down on the damp moss, with my baby in my lap, and cried."

There was, at the end of the scene, an emotional stillness in the theatre. Yet there wasn't a descendant of a Loyalist in the room. We had names like Demianchuk, Starowicz, Gendron, and Chong. And yet, as the house lights went back on, there was an awkward minute because it was evident we were all averting each other's gaze. Everyone's eyes were moist. Not a Loyalist descendant in the room, and yet everyone is emotionally choked up. It's then that I got the point of why it struck us all. This was our story too. French, Ukrainian, Chinese, Polish. This story resonates — vibrates — in the collective Canadian experience. The experience of refuge, the experience of arrival in a strange and alien place of terrifying beauty, the fear of an uncertain destiny — this is the common link of the Canadian experience. We are not bound by blood. But we are inextricably linked by the common memory, however ancestral in our families, of refuge and hope.

And if we cast our eyes over the 500 years of Canadian history — over the years of the European and Asian immigration, because the Aboriginal story is different — the thread runs through it. New France was peopled by the landless of Brittany, Normandy, the displaced and abandoned daughters of Paris. Each year, when the ice in the St. Lawrence broke, a new migration of the hopeful came up the river, until it grew to a colony of 70,000 people.

A hundred years later, the American Revolution transformed this North America, and created the foundations of two countries, by provoking one of the great human migrations of the continent's history — the Loyalists we just spoke of, who went not only to Nova Scotia, but Quebec and Kingston and the Niagara Peninsula. Thus, English Canada was born in a blink of an eye, historically speaking — 20 years — creating the French-English duality which would govern Canada's destiny for centuries.

Post-Aboriginal Canada was founded on two abandoned or displaced peoples. A French colony, occupied by the British and abandoned by the French Empire, who didn't even want it back after the Seven Years' War, and traded it for the tiny sugar island of Guadeloupe. The second people, their ancestral English rivals from the American colonies, who had been driven out of their homes.

The experience of refuge is at the core of the Canadian identity. We are all children and grandchildren of great displacements. The Loyalists were followed by the Scots displaced by the Highland Clearances, by the English of Susannah Moodie's generation, a marginalized class England no longer wanted, and by hundreds of thousands of starving Irish families displaced by landlords and famine who crossed the Atlantic in fever ships.

They, in turn, were followed by the great migration of the landless from Eastern Europe — the Ukrainians, the Galicians, the Mennonites, the Poles, all fleeing war, persecution of famine. Thousands of Chinese young men crossed the Pacific Ocean to flee poverty, and spent generations sending their paltry earnings home to families they would never see again. Thousands of British orphans were sent here in a systematic migration of the abandoned.

These migrations of the hopeful grew in the 20th century to embrace the Sikhs, the displaced persons of the Second World War (which is my parents' immigration), the refugees of the Holocaust, the boat people of Vietnam, the peoples of the great Caribbean migration, and now, the Sudan, the Horn of Africa, the Balkan Wars.

We are all boat people. We just got here at different times. The collective Canadian experience, however recent or buried in the ancestral past, is the memory of displacement and loss, followed by the collective experience of endurance and redemption. Almost everyone of us, somewhere in the root of our past, has a piece of the same story, whether we are descended from the Filles du Roy, the street children of Paris, villages of Galicia, or the Selkirk settlers of Prince Edward Island.

History shapes identity. Nations sometimes acquire defining characteristics and their citizens begin to perceive their role in the world, in keeping with those identities.

The United States was founded as a unitary state on one language, and at the beginning, virtually one religion. It would be a far different place today if, at its origins, the English Protestant colonists entered into a union with the people of Mexico, a people with a different religion and language. It would probably be more like Canada today. But diversity was bred, however tempestuously, into the Canadian society.

In the century and a half that followed, both Canada and the United States drew on the same waves of immigrants, often from the same countries. But though the human ingredients were similar, the difference was already bred in the bone. They created a culture, and an iconology of a unitary state; we created the culture and iconology of a gathering of peoples united in a common project.

This has become ingrained in our own self-esteem. Even a beer commercial like the one with the slogan "I Am Canadian", in seeking the hot buttons to push in the world of marketing, said: "I speak English and French", "I believe in peacekeeping, not guns". In any schoolyard, a child will repeat peace, diversity and tolerance to you as our identity — perhaps not in those words — but those ideas will emerge. Pause and think about this before you pass these by as clichιs and platitudes. That's not what a Polish, Egyptian or Russian child will respond. That's not what a British or French child will respond. A teenager in Birmingham will not likely speak of the wonderful mix of Irish, Welsh, Scottish blood. It's there in reality, it's just not part of the national mythology. They will have their own valid responses, whatever they may be, but Canada is one of the only countries in the world that defines itself by an idea.

History shaped this idea. Since most of us are descended from a migration — mostly a migration from adversity — it's not only in our genetic memory now, it has evolved into an active idea. That's who we are, that's what we're always going to be, that's what this place is. This is what we choose to value: take the second largest land mass on the planet, a place of numbing vastness and sometimes terrifying beauty, and bring to it, over the centuries, the adventurous, the dispossessed and the displaced. We covet no land, our armed forces will mobilize only for liberation or protection, and we embrace no ideology, no religion, and ask only that you live in peace and industry. This is our noble vision of ourselves, our iconology. This is our vision of that which is best in our character.

We are different from the Old World. We are disdainful of class and privilege — there is no greater social sin than trying to pull rank, or jump the cue. It is unacceptable to be rude to a waiter or waitress in this country, because your son or daughter is going to be one at some point in their lives. We are suspicious of government, and ideology, because we are the refugees from governments, armies and ideology. We are vigilant about our rights and very uncomfortable with the idea that someone might have more rights than others. Canada — cranky, litigious, a perpetual living negotiation of its constituent parts. To the frustrated question: "When are we finally going to settle all this?" the answer is, of course, "Never. That's not the problem, that's the point." The genius of Canadian history is the constant search for equilibrium, where no one ever fully wins the upper hand.

Some people suggest we have a tepid history because we don't have Napoleonic armies of a quarter of a million soldiers. In fact, one article by a prominent Canadian writer predicted our series would fail because, let's face it, we don't have exciting ingredients like Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. But the Canadian experience has created one of the great mysteries of history. We have all the ingredients, all the toxins to create a Sarajevo or a Northern Ireland. Two major religions, two languages, contested land, racial and ethnic divisions. How we didn't become Sarajevo, or the West Bank, or Vichy France, is a far more intriguing mystery and far more pertinent to the modern world.

What I learned from the experience of the project is the following:

1. Canadians have a very refined and clear idea of who we are, where we came from, and what civic principles we stand for; this is not a country confused about its principles;
2. They are, if anything, deeply worried about and resentful of any erosion of those principles;
3. We like our American television programs, but we are not about to accept the American cosmology that goes with it; in fact, the divergence of values seems ever more pronounced;
4. Canadians are open to the world, but make no mistake, they are also in a firmly nationalist mood.

That's why Canada: A People's History worked. It confirmed how we came to be different, how we came to embrace certain civic values. We didn't incite any new feelings they didn't have. We just gave them a historical framework for the feelings and the set of convictions they already had.

An important thing to understand about Canada: A People's History, is that it never would have seen the light of day in a commercial television marketplace. First, for six years we could find no sponsors — until the last minute. Second, no commercial network would have invested the substantial budget to produce it because it would not have yielded the return on investment of a reality show or a much cheaper form of production. Had the risk not been taken by CBC/Radio-Canada, that story would still remain untold. So you have to ask yourself, what else is not being produced? What other stories are untold out there?

So I'd like to talk with you now about television, and about our future.

If you accept the proposition that this highly diverse country lives in a culture of perpetual dialogue, perpetual negotiation of its constituent parts, that the civility of its democratic process depends on the maintenance of this dialogue and equilibrium, then you're inevitably drawn to the conclusion that radio, television, digital highways are absolutely essential to the survival of the country as we know it. These are the arteries through which we maintain our collective sensibility. We are vitally dependent on these arteries of cultural communion — be they concerts or comedies, sporting events or mini-series.

And here, there is very little cause for optimism, and every cause for alarm about the state of Canada's electronic culture, because in the economics of the digital age, our stories are being drowned out.

On the one hand, the availability of televisual product has grown exponentially — I don't need to tell you we live in a thousand channel universe, that electronic borders have disappeared, and we've never had more choice. The Internet will combine with television to increase those choices beyond anything we've imagined. On the other hand, never has the proportion of Canadian choices in the medium been more threatened.

Let's pause for a couple of minutes on the issue of choice in television. Most people don't understand how North American commercial television works. They think it's a little like movie theatres. The owner of the theatre tries to get the best movies he can, to attract the most customers, and make his profit from selling tickets. And most people think all these television channels are like movie theatres, trying to attract as many paying customers as possible. The only apparent difference seems to be that we don't have to pay an admission price because that's been covered by the commercials. The product of the movie theatre system is — movies. Follow the money. The money goes from you, the patron, to the theatre owner and the maker of the movie. They're selling you a movie. Isn't television roughly the same?

No. Follow the money again. You don't pay for the program, so that is not what's being bought and sold. So if it's not the program that is being bought and sold — what is the product of television?

The product — that which is being bought and sold — is you. To quote Les Brown, the former New York Times writer who became one of the world's leading historians of the industry: "The product of commercial television is the viewer. The program is merely the bait." The exchange of money is not between the viewer and the network, it is between the network and the advertiser. The advertiser is buying "eyeballs" by the hundreds of thousands, from a network.

Another critical difference between cinema and commercial television is this — the theatre owners are happy to get you into one of their seats. They don't care how old you are, how much money you make, or what your consumer habits are. They're grateful to have your bum in their chair.

In commercial television, on the other hand, they care very much whose bum is on the living room couch. North American commercial television is not a democracy. This is not one person/one vote. Certain demographics are far more valuable to the advertiser than others. A woman, 18 to 35, for example, is worth at least ten people over 50. That's because the people in the 18-35 demographic still have their major purchasing decisions to make — fridge, home, car. In the Toronto market, depending on the network, and the time slot, women 18 to 35 may be sold at $150 per thousand to an advertiser. But an old goat like me, who's unlikely to make the same purchases, will be worth only $7.50 per thousand. We are not all equal citizens in this universe. We are classified into complex grids and income categories with names like "Asian Heights" (meaning Vancouver Chinese immigrant gentry) or "Urban Nesters", meaning childless downtown professionals. Some of us don't even count as citizens. A program can attract a million older citizens and never see the light of prime time. And all children have not gone to bed by 7:00 p.m. They're just not worth programming to in commercially valuable time.

Have you also wondered why commercial television news is scheduled at six and at 11? To quote Les Brown again: "TV news is scheduled at the peripheries of prime time, where it will do the least possible damage to commercial revenue."

Now if you want men and women in the 18 to 35 demographic, you design Friends or Desperate Housewives, or Survivor. If you want to attract the 14 to 18 niche, you design Gilmore Girls. And, incidentally, that's how almost everyone on television turns out to be white and suburban with disposable income. The reason there's so few African Americans or Hispanics on prime time US television, despite their large proportion of the American population, is because they are not as desirable an economic demographic for the advertiser, as measured by disposable income.

Commercial television is part of the marketing and distribution system of the manufacturing economy, not part of the cultural production system. It's arguably the very engine of consumer distributing. We are bought and sold, in our hundreds of thousands, by companies that assemble viewers — networks, in other words — and sold to agencies representing auto and computer manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies and toy makers. None of this is inherently pernicious. Business is business; and it can produce some excellent programs. But let's not confuse this with serving the needs of the people, or even entertaining the social spectrum of the people. It's serving the needs of the advertiser. Only that will get produced which assembles the largest number of desirable consumers, as determined by the marketing and advertising system. In this model, the viewer is not a citizen and one citizen does not equal one vote. The viewer is a consumer and that consumer is valued and sold according to her consumption habits and demographics.

But what has happened is that the commercial television industry has successfully hijacked the rhetoric of democracy, liberty and choice. In the cornucopia of choices, they will argue, you have pure democracy at work, and the viewer ultimately decides what will be aired or not aired. You've heard the arguments. People are voting with their eyeballs. If they wanted more Canadian programs, why are they watching Lost? The question of freedom of choice has been defined, by the commercial industry, as the freedom to pick between two hundred channels' worth of their particular advertising clusters.

But freedom of choice — in radio, television or cinema — should be defined as the freedom to produce television, not just to consume. Let me give you an example that's a bit extreme, but, I think, pertinent. I did a film three years ago in the Canadian North, in the Inuit community of Inukjuak. They have almost as many channels as I do in Toronto. They can choose ER or Entertainment Tonight or watch the fall of Baghdad live on CNN, as we did. But they have virtually nothing in their own language, nothing produced by them, nothing that speaks to them and their society. Do they have freedom of choice in television? Like any Canadian, I want my American programs. I like American television; my daughters like it. I don't want anyone restricting our access to it and I don't believe in electronic Berlin walls. But how did we come to delude ourselves that everything that appears on our screens must by arbitrated totally by what is essentially a massive consumer distributing industry, and one that is preponderantly American?

As I mentioned, the experience of Canada: A People's History is painfully pertinent. For years, not a single Canadian corporation would become a sponsor of the series. Not the airlines. Not the oil companies. Not most of the financial sector. Not the manufacturing companies, the big retail chains, the communications giants. Not until the last minute when one, Sun Life, and later Bell came on board.

The truth is the marketers in most companies felt there were more efficient ways to sell cell phones, Toyotas and Tylenol than in a Canadian history series. And it may surprise you to hear me say this, but they're probably right. We probably weren't the most cost-efficient delivery vehicle of 18 to 25 year olds, or the best platform for selling cosmetics. That series would never have seen the light of day if it had to meet the market consumer delivery test. Even if it did reach millions, after all there are cheaper ways of reaching millions of people. You can get three million viewers by buying CSI at a miniscule fraction of the price of producing an equivalent quality Canadian program.

This is how Canadian programming is strangled daily. Not because Canadians don't want it. Not because we can't compete with the world. But because it's not the most efficient return on investment, or not the most efficient demographic targeting device to sell consumer products.

Why does it have to be? Must the marketing heads become the people who decide what appears on Canadian television? I understand and accept that if a Canadian program isn't popular, has not found a significant audience, it should probably be cancelled. But I resent that a Canadian program will not even be born, even if it might reach a considerable audience, if I can't prove it will sell shampoo. Yet I have described, quite precisely I believe, how Canadian television programming is decided. Let's not confuse marketing with democracy.

Because we live next to the most powerful commercial market in human history, we've been conditioned to accept this is the norm. In fact, at the dawn of television, that commercial model was the aberration. Public broadcasting owes its genesis to the British, who set up a completely public system, and only allowed commercial competition decades later. Radio and television were not in the same column of the economic register as department stores, but in the same column as schools, highways, railways, and the post. And that's the way it initially developed in Japan, in Italy, in Germany, and in France — in fact, in most countries of the world.

In public television, the economic model is different. Large audiences matter, don't let anyone fool you, and they should matter. But the unit of measure really is one person/one vote. In commercial television, the unit of measure is the number of consumers. In public television, the unit of measure is the number of citizens.

The health of a mixed private and public system has to be measured in its balance. Both public and private networks will produce children's programs, both will produce comedies. But one, the public half, will produce children's programs regardless of the particular needs of the toy manufacturers, and comedies which appeal to more than the highest consumer demographic. Britain, for example, has a healthy, balanced system. Private networks make strong profits and the BBC is widely cherished by the audience too. In Canada, however, we have a fatal imbalance, which is hurting us domestically and internationally.

It is not necessary any more, in 2006, to have to persuade anyone that information industries are the central battlefield of the 21st century. It is the Information Age. Yet Canada enters that age with a dangerously weak media sector. The newspaper industry is gripped by monopoly. The national magazine sector is moribund. In books, though we are probably living the Golden Age of Canadian literature, the publishing industry is financially precarious and being taken over by multinationals. The English-Canadian movie system can't get off the ground. And the broadcasting industry is totally dependent on importation of American series — in other words, on decisions made in New York and Los Angeles.

The largest unit — the public broadcaster — is still in the recovery ward after a decade of divesting itself of a generation of talent and entire production departments. If we set out to design a system by which Canada would lose in the global information economy, then we've found it.

There is no Canadian national industrial strategy for the Information Age. There may be a document somewhere; probably a dozen. But our strategic planning is, in practice, diffused between the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Department of Finance Canada, the regulatory agency, and a cacophony of federal and provincial funds and tax credits best understood by lawyers and riverboat gamblers.

This chaotic drift derives from the fact that for almost two decades, successive governments have made it clear that national broadcasting is not a significant priority of national policy. It is a mystery to me how Canada failed to identify this as one of the top two or three key strategic economic areas in the new global order.

The explosion of channels is global. This infinite channel universe is so hungry for product that it has given birth to a global boom in televisual and cinematic material. It's essential that we position ourselves to become major producers, on a global scale. To do that, we have to bring our house in order.

There is no way we are going to become world-scale competitors in production without restoring the public-private balance in Canadian television. When it comes to the economics of television production, we are a colonial economy, dependent on the American television marketing system. In any economic sector, be it lumber or aeronautics or agriculture, you have to invest in production infrastructure if you are going to develop a domestic industry that can trade internationally.

The public networks have traditionally been the engines of production and development. But the public sector in television has shrunk to a miniscule proportion of the channel spectrum. Out of about 100 English-language channels most cable systems bring to a Toronto home, for example, only three are public sector: CBC Television, CBC Newsworld and TVO. That's around one twentieth of the shelf space. [On the infant digital tier CBC/Radio-Canada has one channel, CBC Country Canada, and shares in The Documentary Channel.] That's just on the crude measure of space on the electronic shelf.

CBC/Radio-Canada's appropriation for everything — all services and platforms, radio and television, in all languages — is around $946 million. Now let's turn to the BBC in England. The BBC's budget is seven billion dollars. Now, Britain's population is larger than that of Canada — twice as large in fact — but it's not seven times as large as Canada's. Britain understands the emerging global market in information. The British television industry, public and private, dominates world production as much as the US because of the national investment in the BBC as a driver.

But the BBC is such a special case, and Britain's investment in the information age so breathtaking, that it's almost too perfect to be a practical model. So, as much as I'd like to use the BBC as a measuring stick, let's lay it aside as too unattainable a benchmark. Let's compare ourselves to the rest of the Western world.

A comparison among 18 major Western countries demonstrates that Canada has the third lowest level of public funding for its public broadcaster. At about $30 per inhabitant, Canada's level of funding was only ahead of New Zealand and the United States. What's more, Canada's funding for public broadcasting was less that one half of the $80 average across the 18 Western counties. And Canada's level of funding was about one fifth of the level of the leading country — Switzerland — among those included in the comparison. [Analysis of Government Support for Public Broadcasting and Other Culture in Canada; Nordicity Group Ltd., June 2006, p.1.] There's more.

The federal government supports an array of cultural institutions from Telefilm, to the Canada Council, to museums, art galleries, and archives. Between 1996 and 2004, the federal government's expenditures on culture — excluding CBC/Radio-Canada — increased by 39 per cent. In fact, government spending on everything, except for national defense and debt repayment, went by 25 per cent. So, while the general cultural portfolio increased by 39 per cent, and general spending on everything else by 25 per cent, spending on CBC/Radio-Canada, for the same period, declined by nine per cent. In fact, in just one two-year period, CBC/Radio-Canada's government appropriation dropped by 31 per cent [Ibid., p. 3]. The expenditure on the public broadcaster is totally disproportionate to all cultural expenditure, and totally disproportionate to all other government spending. We haven't been neglecting public broadcasting; for at least eight years, we've been selectively, consciously and systematically starving it.

While Canada has been starving the public broadcaster, it has been generously subsidizing the commercial broadcasters. Private broadcasters in Canada are not pure market-driven enterprises that survive entirely on their wits while the public broadcaster is funded by the government, although the commercial television sector would have you believe that.

The Canadian government provides direct economic support for the commercial sector in a number of ways — simulcast protection, which blocks, for example, the American feed of Desperate Housewives and substitutes the Canadian feed, with Canadian commercials; then there's the Income Tax Act which discourages Canadian advertisers from advertising in foreign programming; then Canadian specialty services are given effective monopolies and protected from foreign and domestic competition. Without these market protections a vast number of American services would enter the Canadian marketplace and destroy most specialty services' business. So English-Canadian commercial channels are heavily protected, and even subsidized by the government. The dollar value of these protections has been estimated at over $300 million annually. That's more than CBC Television gets from its annual appropriation from government. In other words, the Canadian government gives more financial preference to the Canadian commercial television system than it does to the public television system. The point bears underlining — the Canadian government subsidizes commercial television broadcasting in English Canada more than it subsidizes public television.

As CBC/Radio-Canada's appropriation from Ottawa declined, costs inevitably continued to rise, and the Corporation turned more and more to cutting costs and raising commercial revenue. This led to the massive regional cuts, the elimination of internal departments, and an increasing dependence on commercials. CBC Television now gets more than half of its operating budget from earned revenue — mostly commercials. The public broadcaster is, in effect, no longer a pure public broadcaster, but a mixed public/commercial enterprise. A few minutes ago, we went through the inevitable laws of the television marketplace, which leads you to value consumers over citizens, which skews the very kind of programming that gets produced, and transfers much of the decision-making power over what gets produced to the advertising marketplace.

So Ottawa has starved CBC/Radio-Canada while it has been favouring the commercial sector, and in the process, forcing the national public broadcaster to be dependent more and more on the principles of commercial television. If these trends continue, and they show every sign of doing so, then we can imagine that a decade from now we may no longer have a national public broadcasting system left in Canada. It's half gone already.

Ottawa has drifted very far from the founding principles of national public broadcasting.

Public broadcasting was established under a Conservative government in 1932. Prime Minister Bennett, when introducing the Broadcasting Act into the Commons, did so with these words:

"This country must be assured of complete Canadian control of broadcasting from Canadian sources, free from foreign interference or influence.... No other scheme than that of public ownership can ensure to the people of this country, without regard to class or place, equal enjoyment of the benefits and pleasures of broadcasting... I cannot think that any government would be warranted in leaving the air to private exploitation and not reserving it for the use of the people."

The Hon. Lionel Chevrier, Minister of Transport, addressed the question in 1952 in the House of Commons, when television was introduced to Canada:

The essential reason for public development of television in this country is that we want...both popular programs and cultural programs to be produced in Canada by Canadians, about Canada....we want programs from the United States....But we do not want, above all, that these programs will come over and be in a position to monopolise the field....It is perfect nonsense for anyone to suggest that private enterprise in Canada, left to itself, will provide Canadian programs. People who invest their money...will certainly invest it where they will make the profit — by importing American programs.

The Broadcasting Act of 1968 states that:

The Canadian Broadcasting system should....Safeguard, enrich, and strengthen the cultural, political, social and economic fabric of the country....

When any conflict arises between the objectives of the National Broadcasting Service (the CBC) and the interests of the private element of the Canadian Broadcasting system... paramount consideration shall be given to the objectives of the national broadcasting service.

The purpose of the annual Symons Lecture is to assess the state of Confederation each year in a different area. Jean Charest was asked to speak on the political state of Confederation; Roy McMurtry on the state of the judicial system; you've asked me to speak on the state of culture in our Confederation.

I think the biggest single threat to the integrity of Canada's cultural vitality is the alarming and precipitous erosion of the national broadcasting system. That system is critical to the survival of this country. The airwaves are our national arteries of discourse, the means by which we tell our stories, negotiate our political and social values and communicate across regions and generations. These airwaves, these digital arteries, are more vital to us than to many other nations on earth because we are a vast country made up of a thousand diversities and particularities. We are a living negotiation, an evolving narrative.

We need a vital national broadcasting system as much in the digital and Internet age as we did at the dawn of radio and television — perhaps even more. The digital deluge of channels and broadband services is global in scale and all borders are disappearing. We have to have a national strategy for this Information Age before our own stories, our own agenda, disappear in the digital deluge. We can't afford to lose the arteries that link us — and make no mistake, we're losing them. We have to re-invest in them, rebuild them and revitalize them. We have to have a concerted national surge of energy and imagination to renew our regional programming, to exponentially increase the production of Canadian drama and cinema, to support and nurture the arts, to nourish the music of our children.

We cannot sit out the New Information Age and abdicate our cultural vitality and our national discourse to the economic Darwinism of the North American television marketplace. That system will not link our communities of interest, it will not serve our national needs, it will not tell our stories.

We not only need these vital arteries to maintain our civic and cultural space, but also to participate in the global Information Age. We have to compete, to project our stories and our music and our arts to the world. All of this cries out for the urgent creation of a national strategy to renew the electronic highways of Canada, and to assure that our voice is heard in the new global information order. In the global village, we're going to need an address.

I've worked for over 30 years in the production of Canadian stories — from As It Happens to Sunday Morning, to The Journal to Canada: A People's History. And what I've learned is this: "If you build it, they will come."

These remarks are the views of the speaker and not necessarily those of CBC/Radio-Canada.