Canadian Broadcasting Corp., the country’s government-run radio and television
agency, plans to cut as many as 800 jobs, or almost 10 percent of its
workforce, to trim costs as advertising plummets.
The broadcaster faces a funding shortfall of C$171 million ($139 million) this
year, forcing it to fire workers and scale back programming, according to a
statement from Ottawa today. Factors contributing to the shortfall include
declining advertising, aging infrastructure and increased programming costs.
“The shortfall was there and we were looking for ways of managing it and this
is where we are today,” said Angus McKinnon, a spokesman for the broadcaster.
Seventy corporate-services employees will lose their jobs, as well as 393
workers in the English operations and 336 in the French-language Radio-Canada
service, McKinnon said. Executive pay will be cut as much as 20 percent, and
the agency may sell C$125 million in assets.
The CBC gets about C$1 billion, or three-fifths of its overall budget, in
public funds each year from taxpayers. Prime Minister Stephen Harper declined
to provide bridge financing to cover a shortfall this year. The broadcaster
said it can’t borrow on financial markets like its private competitors.
The cuts today are symptomatic of problems affecting all broadcasters in Canada
and the biggest losers are people who live in smaller cities, where the CBC is
sometimes the only local news operation, said Ian Morrison, a spokesman for
programming watchdog Friends of Canadian Broadcasting.
‘Empty Warehouse’
“You’re stripping away a lot of production value capacity, so you keep the
station open, but effectively it becomes an empty warehouse,” said Morrison,
adding that the CBC made poor choices such as overpaying for U.S.-made shows
and hockey rights. Morrison said the government should force cable and
satellite companies to pay fees for the right to carry CBC and other
conventional television stations.
The CBC, established in its current form in 1936 to preserve a Canadian point
of view for news and programming, operates independently of the government. It
has about 8,300 employees in 27 offices.
“At a time when Ottawa is supposed to be providing stimulus to the Canadian
economy and ensuring that people maintain employment, cutting 800 jobs is the
wrong approach to take,” Lise Lareau, the Canadian Media Guild’s national
president, said in an e-mail to employees. “Once again, in spite of our
supposed arm’s-length relationship with Parliament, CBC/Radio-Canada is
completely at the mercy of the government of the day.”
Public Support
A Harris-Decima poll of 1,000 Canadians conducted March 12 to 15 found that 50
percent supported the idea of a government line of credit for the CBC, while 41
percent opposed it. The poll has a 3.1 percentage point margin of error.
In 2006, the CBC had about 12 percent of all local television advertising
revenue in the English market and 26 percent in the French one, according to
the latest data from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications
Commission. The CBC doesn’t run ads on its radio stations, and it doesn’t plan
to change this.
The broadcaster also plans to cut costs by scaling back radio and television
programming for news, current affairs and music, and will reduce its marketing
and travel budgets.
To contact the reporters on this story: Alexandre Deslongchamps in Ottawa at
adeslongc...@bloomberg.net.
_____________________
Jaisakthivel, Chennai, India
www.dxersguide.blogspot.com
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