MONTREAL — CBC’s Richard Stursberg says he likes visiting Quebec because people here care about their home-grown TV.

‘So few people [in English Canada] are preoccupied with CBC TV,’ he told roughly 260 attendees, gathered earlier this week at the Quebec Academy of Film and Television, for a talk on the future of the public broadcaster.

‘It’s impossible to have a clear conversation in English Canada about TV. Here it’s so much easier,’ he told some of the most important players in Quebec film and TV — including Tout le monde en parle host Guy A. Lepage, Alliance Films president Patrick Roy and SODEC boss Jean-Guy Chaput.

(Chaput, who has been asked to step down by Jean Charest’s government over an auditor’s report into his spending habits, was the only guest applauded by the crowd. He will remain employed by the film financing agency until his current contract is up in early October. Gilles Corbeil will replace him as interim director.

Both Stursberg, who is CBC’s EVP of English services, and his French equivalent, Radio-Canada’s Sylvain Lafrance, put forward their visions of how to save the broadcaster, including: charging cable providers fee-for-carriage; establishing a designated envelope for the CBC/SRC at the Canada Media Fund; and obtaining more federal cash.

Both also said they want to continue to work with private sector producers. The newly minted CMF has eliminated the pubcasters’ guaranteed access to 37% of its funds — as has been the case at the Canadian Television Fund — and will allow broadcasters to spend CMF cash on ‘in house’ programming, a change some producers fear will ultimately shut them out of the TV industry.

But on a number of points the two executives differed.

Lafrance is preoccupied with distinguishing SRC from private networks such as TVA, which offers a steady stream of cheap made-in-Quebec soaps, game shows and French-language knock-offs of reality shows such as American Idol.

‘People must recognize the Radio-Canada brand. The personality of the network is important. It must be distinctive,’ he said. Radio-Canada is reputed for taking risks on innovative programming that private networks won’t touch, a number of which have gone on to attract millions of viewers such as Les Bougons, C’est aussi ca la vie and La Petite Vie.

Stursberg on the other hand believes the key to attracting CBC viewers — which he says have increased 6.7% to 8.7% in primetime under his watch — are populist sitcoms and reality and game shows.

‘It’s always seemed silly to me why we didn’t get into the biggest TV trend hitting the world sooner. I don’t get it,’ he said, referring to reality TV. He remarked that CBC is now making TV based on the North American, rather than European, model. ‘I think it’s silly to think that we can’t make shows that are both popular and high quality.’

While Radio-Canada currently has a 15% audience share of the Quebec TV market, it does not make reality shows.

Stursberg said he found the current preoccupation with the economic decline of private-sector broadcasting ‘ironic and sad,’ considering private networks contribute ‘nothing to Canadian culture.’