Hi, I’m common sense. I was one of the six million Canadians who tuned in to the Academy Awards and, Hooray for Canada, we bagged an Oscar! The Danish Poet. Best animated short. Good old NFB, love those cartoon shorts, they’re world class. Then I turned on the telly to have a look for it…

Sorry Mac, unless you were willing to wait a week and then stay up until midnight on a Sunday on CBC, you’re out of luck. (Unless you live in Quebec. Provincial pubcaster Télé-Québec aired it right after the Oscars – late though proximate.)

C’mon, people! Could we not do a little better than that? You can just imagine Jacques Bensimon slapping his forehead. The former NFB chairman and film commissioner, whose tenure ended in December, called on the government and our cultural industries to band together to face the challenges that a borderless society and multi-platform future are throwing at us.

‘My message to the Canadian government is, get your act together,’ Bensimon said in December. ‘Don’t let everyone go at it at the same time and in an anarchic way. The CBC, the CRTC, the NFB – make sure they work together to confront the new approach.’

Given that one is a producer and the other a broadcaster and both are public institutions, you’d think that the CBC and the NFB would be ideally positioned for putting their heads together to tackle these new paradigms.

No one at the CBC was available for comment, but word has it that fiscal deadlines got in the way of a bigger Danish Poet splash, and they plan to mount a larger campaign sometime down the road. But in terms of striking while the iron is hot, the CBC and the NFB have missed a great opportunity here, and this is a perfect illustration of how their respective realities are usurping common sense.

‘There’s an explanation for why they haven’t worked together as much as they could,’ says producer Arnie Gelbart. ‘They’re separate institutions with separate cultures, and to say they should be working together easily or that they dovetail is to look at them as one creature.’

Start with their mandates, and more importantly, the manner in which they’re interpreted. The NFB’s raison d’etre is as a trailblazer, or as its English Program director general Tom Perlmutter puts it, ‘the HBO of documentaries and animation.’ In Bensimon’s time, the NFB’s focus on social activism intensified.

The CBC, meanwhile, is going the other way. Yes, it has its journalistic imperative, but at the same time it is struggling to capture the largest swath of middle Canada that it can while also going head-to-head with the private broadcasters for ad revenue. No broadcaster with a rigid schedule and advertisers to please can turn on a dime.

And as far as television distribution goes, the NFB learned from the beginning to live without.

‘When TV was created it would have been the most natural thing to give a licence to the NFB,’ said Bensimon. ‘By not doing that they cut the umbilical cord linking us to Canadians.’ The NFB therefore approaches television as a complement to a broader range of activities.

This is not to say that the two organizations do not work together. They do, and fairly extensively, according to Perlmutter.

‘We probably have done more work with CBC than any other broadcaster, but we do work within a range,’ he says. The CBC has been an acquirer of NFB product from the beginning. They are working on a couple of projects together, and Perlmutter adds that the two are currently inking another new business deal that is still under wraps

Their shared history with The Documentary Channel is another example of how the two shoulda, coulda, but aren’t.

In 2000, the CBC partnered with the NFB and Corus Entertainment to launch the digital channel, but today its audience is modest and highly niche, and the channel, which is now controlled by the CBC, does not provide the easy pipeline for the NFB that, say, that broadcast licence it was denied (again) in the 1980s would have. This is especially apparent given that the NFB and Barna-Alper Productions, both of which own a stake in The Documentary Channel, are producing an animated documentary on the Great Depression. The broadcaster? History Television.

As far as The Danish Poet’s win goes, the film now goes to more film festivals, it’s available at the NFB’s Mediatheque in Toronto, and is unspooling before films in a couple dozen Canadian theaters and a couple in the States. The Danish Poet DVD is on sale on its revved-up website.

Torill Kove, director of The Danish Poet, suggests that CBC and the NFB take a page from the film’s coproduction partner, Norway. When projects are funded through the Norsk Filmfund, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corp. typically offers presale support and takes a window in exchange, and they did so with The Danish Poet. But again, short-form animation doesn’t fit the mold for North American TV conventions, or their advertisers.

Perlmutter says he spends a lot of time thinking about what this new multiplatform future will bring, and that with time, he believes the CBC and the NFB will fall into step.

‘Our public sector mandates will no doubt converge.’ he says. ‘The kind of leading edge we’re talking about will connect with the things they want to do, too, I’m not concerned about that.’

Maybe he should be.