Speeches and Interviews

June 29, 1998

At Home in the World

To the International Forum on Culture and Cooperation — Perrin Beatty — Ottawa, Ontario

Opening remarks

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for this opportunity to address the International Forum on Culture and Cooperation. I want to congratulate Keith Kelly and the Canadian Conference on the Arts for bringing together non-government organizations from Canada and around the world for this conference. It is an appropriate complement to the Minister's meeting of Ministers responsible for Culture. I also want to commend Keith for the work that he has performed in his years as National Director. As you know, he steps down later this year, and all of us in the Canadian arts community will miss his energy and imagination. With this conference, Keith and the Canadian Conference of the Arts plant a seed that may prove to be an enduring legacy — an international alliance of non-government organizations to foster cooperation and political support for culture and the arts.

The Big Shadow

NGOs from around the world have a common cause — a challenge to foster our own cultural expressions, and nurture our artistic voices in a world of vertical integration and horizontal consolidation of media empires. It's often frustrating to discover how little we value our own cultures. Too often, we simply take them for granted or assume that they will survive with little effort on our part. Others, however, are not so complacent. They understand that culture can also be big business. Over the past decade, a handful of corporate giants have emerged to compete with one another for the hearts and minds, ears and eyes of the world's six billion people. Their range of media extends from:

• cinema to broadcasting;
• cable to satellite;
• music recording to magazine; and
• newspaper publishing.

And in case anyone thought the competition might be limited to what we might consider communications media, consider that some of these giants are also competing for audiences to theme parks, have created their own residential communities, and are beginning to enter the vacation cruise market. These corporations have saturated the American market. They are a growing presence in Europe. Their greatest potential growth areas lie in Asia and Latin America. Consider the band of 12 countries that lie from Japan to Pakistan. Zenith Media projects that, by 2001, these 12 countries will have 470 million television households. Very few (95 million) of these are now served by cable; fewer still (13 million) have satellite dishes. But the race is on among the half dozen corporations who dominate the sector to capture market share among those households, and the infrastructure is being put in place. News Corp, for example, estimates that about 75% of the world's population is covered by satellite and television platforms it controls. That is a very big shadow — a technicolour shadow of very high quality entertainment. We are only now beginning to feel the full impact of the Hollywood entertainment machine with its very sophisticated marketing, and low export costs. We need to look at what has happened in other countries, where foreign content sometimes controls as much as 98% of broadcasting time, and ask how our own voices will be heard, our stories told.

Canada's Been There

This cri du coeur is familiar to generations of Canadians. It didn't take satellite technology to bring American culture to our homes. It was a matter of physical proximity, shared language, and an open border. I would like to offer a message of hope. It is possible for a distinctive national voice to endure in spite of the onslaught of inexpensive, high-quality, exceptionally well marketed American products. But it has taken a very strong national will, vision on the part of the arts community, and courage on the part of governments. And it takes initiatives like the one Minister Copps has recently launched. Look at the proportion of Canadian content in various modes of cultural expression, and you see the evidence of battles won and battles lost. We often bemoan the fact that 60% of television programming comes from outside of Canada. Many other countries would look at the same figure and see a victory: 40% comes from Canada. Sixty percent of books sold in Canada are published elsewhere. However, despite the odds, the other 40% are Canadian. Half the magazines that Canadians read come from other countries. Yet, half the magazines we read are Canadian. Seventy percent of the music played on our radio comes from outside Canada. Those who remember the radio programs before 1970 will reflect that there used to be much less than 30% Canadian content. Each of these media have, in some way, been regulated or strongly supported by government. One cultural area in which governments declined to interfere, back when the medium was relatively young, was film distribution. Today, Canadian cinema accounts for only 5% of what is shown in our theatres. Consider the 95% foreign content on our cinema screens, and you get some idea of what Canadian culture might be like if governments over the years had not taken a stand.

CBC's Role

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was Canada's first stand. We were created following a Royal Commission that was concerned about the growing American influence in radio. We:

• started by providing a distinctively Canadian radio voice;
• grew to put a Canadian stamp on television; and
• continue to evolve to ensure that Canadians become masters of the new media.

For more than 60 years, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has been a powerful tool for telling Canadian stories, promoting Canadian talent, and ensuring our voices are heard. It is good public policy, but I believe it is also good business. In a world of growing consumer choice, audiences are drawn by the distinctive brand of entertainment a network can call its own. As many of you will know, CBC's English television network is now virtually all Canadian. In the face of a $414 million budgetary challenge, we had to re-examine who we were, what we did, and what Canadians expected of us. Simply put, Canadians don't need CBC to bring them American commercial shows like Seinfeld or Friends. We took a chance by dropping our American commercial programming. I'm confident that, over time, not only will we maintain our audience share, but we will also increase it. Viewers will tune to CBC for a distinctive brand of programming that will set us apart from anything else available.

Using New Media to Celebrate Cultural Diversity

As a public broadcaster, we're expected to take chances and pioneer new initiatives. You see the results in our emphasis on developing unknown talent — bringing regional performers to a national audience from which many have gone on to achieve international stardom. You see it, as well, in our leadership in new media. CBC Radio became the world's first public broadcaster to offer programs live on the Internet. Newsworld launched the first Canadian news service with full motion video on the Internet. RDI provides a similar service for francophones here and around the world. In fact, we are part of a growing presence of francophone content on the Internet. Some 30% of Internet content in French is Canadian, and I foresee an opportunity for CBC to contribute to the vitality of French content on the medium, much as we have ensured that English Canadians had a voice in radio and television. We are the only Canadian broadcaster with a major presence on the World Wide Web. We do much more than just distribute the spillover from our broadcast services. We also design programs specifically for the web. I hope that all of you are familiar with our Infoculture sites, which report in English and French about cultural news and activities across the country. You can use them to find out what is happening in communities across Canada. They are Canada's most extensive online culture magazines.

CD-ROM Initiative

Our experience with new media — and our history of ensuring Canadians can communicate with one another — have made us very aware of the challenges producers of new media face in this country. Canadian CD-ROM producers tell a story that is familiar to Canadians in all other media. The domestic market is very small; the distribution system expensive; and when marketing their products, Canadian producers lack the benefits of the American distribution and marketing machine. Often the Canadian producers are small businesses that have little opportunity to bundle their products with computers. It's hard for them to get their products reviewed in the US trade magazines. It's equally hard for Canadian customers to become aware of what is available. Last April, at the Minister's Roundtable on Innovation, I made a proposal on behalf of CBC. If the other players agree to join us, CBC will be part of an industry-wide initiative to promote CD-ROMs about Canada or produced by Canadians. We would undertake to review Canadian CD-ROMs and post reviews on our website. The reviews would have hypertext links to producers of CD-ROMs for further information including where to purchase the product. We would allow our reviews and our logos to be used for promotion as long as the integrity of the review is respected. And where it is appropriate in our radio and television broadcasts, we would mention the Canadian products. I believe this initiative could help to showcase Canadian content in new media. The cost is minimal, but the benefits could be enormous.

The Need for Partners

The CD-ROM initiative demonstrates how cultural strength can be built through partnership. CBC is building partnerships in all areas of its cultural expression — from relying more upon the work of independent producers for our television content, to alliances with satellite distributors and other public broadcasters in order to deliver their news reports to Canadian audiences. One of the best results of the hard choices we've had to make in the 1990s is the degree to which we have had to cooperate and collaborate with others. The partnerships have been effective because, as Canadians, we share a common cause:

• we want to tell our own stories;
• we want to provide jobs for our own people;
• we want Canadians to be able to express their views to the rest of the world.

Over the generations, we've learned some lessons, taken some wrong turns, but have emerged today with a culture that is not only surviving, but thriving. The organizations represented here will attest to that. You will also attest to the fact that the struggle is far from over. Indeed, each generation of Canadians has had to respond to new challenges to maintain our cultural sovereignty. Each draws upon important allies: among the arts community, with the business community, and with the politicians and regulators who influence the environment. In a global marketplace, it is becoming more evident that these alliances will grow stronger if they cross international borders as well.

Closing remarks

Canada has always been remarkable in its openness to other people's cultures. We have always invited the rest of the world to send us the best it has to offer. Often the competition for the eyes, ears, hearts and minds of our citizens has been stacked against us. It hasn't been easy to nurture a distinctive and flourishing culture but we've done it. We will keep on doing it, so long as we have the vision and the will to remain a distinct society in North America. The task of making sure that distinct culture thrives becomes increasingly complex as new technologies emerge, and the media empires south of us continue to expand and consolidate. But we can make common cause with others who face the same challenge and believe, as we do, that culture is not just a commodity like other goods and services. This conference is a promising first step. CBC is proud to join the Minister of Canadian Heritage and the Canadian Conference of the Arts in today's activities. The stakes are high for all of us. What hangs in the balance is nothing less than our ability to ensure that our citizens will continue to know their own history, to explore their own cultures, to preserve their own heritage. We need to work together because, for the sake of our children, this is a struggle we cannot afford to lose.