On Thursday morning, the federal heritage minister, Pascale St-Onge, gave forth the outlines of her plan to reform the CBC and adapt it to the future. You might think such an exercise would involve asking questions about the CBC’s prior performance, or whether a state broadcaster is really necessary in the 21st century, or exactly what parts of it are essential.
As was obvious from the first days of the Great Rethink, St-Onge and her advisory committee seem to have bothered with little of that, or none: they proceed from the explicit premise that there can be no Canada without the CBC, and that the institution has only proven to become more valuable in every single week of the 5,000 or so that have passed since its creation.
Well, agree or don’t: either way, you knew what the minister was going to tell us. But who expected a Liberal minister to make a bold, decisive defence of the most conservative policy instrument conceivable: flat taxation? St-Onge thinks the CBC deserves to have stable funding not subject to the parliamentary budget cycle — indeed, as far as possible, to remove CBC’s state revenue from parliamentary oversight at all, by enshrining a statutory grant renewable at five-year intervals. (Unless the government of the day simply decided to alter the statute, that is.)
And how would the size of this appropriation be determined? It’s simple: St-Onge wants a head tax. A fixed amount, per Canadian, provided automatically by the treasury.
“Per capita funding reflects the idea that access to public service media is a public good. It becomes intrinsically linked to the concept that all citizens have an equal interest in maintaining a robust and independent media sector. Citizens, as taxpayers, are essentially the stakeholders and owners of the national public broadcaster. A per capita formula would also allow CBC/Radio-Canada funding to grow based on the growth of Canada’s population, thereby guaranteeing that its resources would be proportional to the size of the population it serves.”
My brain, and probably yours, is whizzing with “Who says?” and the occasional “Oh yeah?” as I read this. And there’s a bit of a quirk here in the text of The Future of CBC/Radio-Canada: St-Onge invokes the interests of both “citizens” and “taxpayers” without any proposal to count only citizens or taxpayers in the funding formula. But someone’s done the arithmetic using the denominator we have at hand: the report finds that the current parliamentary appropriation comes to about $34 per capita, which leaves us low in the G7 league table of state broadcasters.
This figure, St-Onge argues, needs to be near-doubled to $62 “over a period of a few years.” After all that consultation, all that reckoning with a new media world and theatrical hand-wringing over the hateful effects of a borderless and democratized digital universe, the key thing in the heritage minister’s plan is just to double the absolute size of the creaky old beast she wanted to reform and rethink. She does, it should be noted, propose to have the Corp disavow all advertising revenue from news and public-affairs programming, so it would be letting go of a few farthings out of the income from the $62 head tax.
As with the “VIA Rail, But Really Really Fast” transport plan announced Wednesday, this may be a stillborn idea. The eventual new leader of the Liberal Party will have to decide whether he really wants to run in an election on doubling the CBC’s appropriation. (Congratulations on winning the leadership! Here’s a hand grenade!)
And even if he doesn’t want to double the amount of the head tax, the whole idea of a statutory per-capita formula is subject to challenge on its own merits. The CBC, like any other enterprise, has fixed overhead costs that don’t increase proportionally with the population it hopes to serve, which ought to be given the benefit of economies of scale. Assuming, of course, that we are not to be allowed to opt out altogether.
National Post