From Kate Taylor of The Globe and Mail:

Link: Ad-free CBC could serve as a rallying point for Canadian creativity
In an increasingly scattered but ever more Internet-dependent and globalized media environment, the country needs a public producer, curator and distributor to craft a powerful Brand Canada across all platforms, offering not only news, public affairs and documentaries, but also fiction, variety and arts programming. It needs an iconic institution to nurture and lead the cultural industries, a rallying point for Canadian creativity. Continue reading.

From Bill Brioux of Brioux.tv:

Link: Yanking ads off CBC can’t happen fast enough
So yes, by all means, set CBC free. Give them a chance to be a commercial free broadcast zone for however many months it will take before the private networks figure out a way to sell their services on a purely subscription basis.

However: please do not hand over money from me and other taxpayers before auditing the CBC. I’d want to know if they spend money better now — and more of it on generating content — than they did five years ago. CBC needs to prove they can do what they say they want to do, which is create content without having to bow to commercial market forces. It’s a lot easier to say it than to do it. Continue reading.

From John Doyle of The Globe and Mail:

Link: Dismantling or diminishing CBC is the most elitist position of all
Leitch and Bernier are clueless. Television is the most important, influential storytelling medium of our time. Understanding it and why it has impact is rather necessary information to have, prior to denouncing any area of it. In the specific matter of CBC TV, to cite one example, Kim’s Convenience is not forgettable, irrelevant, or badly made; nor is it, in Bernier’s phrase, an example of “bad Canadian copies of popular American shows.” Continue reading.

From a media release:

Today, CBC/Radio-Canada shares its contribution to the Government’s public consultation on the future of Canadian content in a digital world.

Read the digital summary here: future.cbc.ca.

Key highlights:

• Canada should develop a cohesive cultural investment strategy, engaging all of the countries creators and creative industries, similar to what Britainaccomplished with its “Creative Britain” initiative.
• CBC/Radio-Canada can play a key role in supporting that strategy by:
  • anchoring a strong and vibrant cultural ecosystem to strengthen our creative economy;
  • deepening our engagement with Canadians;
  • partnering more closely with Canada’s creators, creative communities and culture institutions to create even more great Canadian content; and
  • promoting Canadian content to the world.
• To allow that to happen we recommend removing advertising from CBC/Radio-Canada. This would allow the broadcaster to focus squarely on the cultural impact of our mandate. It would also free up advertising revenue to help private media companies transition to a digital environment.
• For CBC/Radio-Canada to become an ad-free public broadcaster, we recommend increasing per person funding to CBC/Radio-Canada to $46 – an increase of $12 per Canadian. This would enable CBC/Radio-Canada to remove advertising from its services, complete its transformation, and strengthen Canada’s creative economy. This amount reflects the (inflation adjusted) per person funding increase recommended by the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage in 2008. This is still well below comparable public broadcasters around the world, like the BBC, which receives $114 per person.

SOURCE CBC/Radio-Canada