Richard Stursberg is CBC’s executive VP in charge of English television.

Matthew Hays (‘Should CBC drop ads and sports?’ July 10, 2006) highlights some of the discussion generated since the Senate committee report was released last month. While no clear consensus has yet emerged, the debate at least suggests a thoughtful and engaged public – a very good thing considering the stakes at hand: CBC’s English-language television service is facing financial pressures quite simply unprecedented in its history. It really is all about the money.

Some have stated their desire for CBC TV to ‘return to its roots’ and, as the Senate report suggests, become commercial-free. In fact, there has never been a time when CBC was commercial-free. Advertising revenues have been crucial to CBC since its beginning. Over the 55 years that CBC TV has been on the air, commercial revenues have been the engine for creating, producing and broadcasting Canadian content throughout the network.

Over the past 15 years, in real dollar terms, the CBC’s government appropriation has decreased by approximately $400 million. We are under constant pressure to generate more programming with fewer resources. For the CBC to continue to produce great Canadian content – drama, news, current affairs and children’s programming (the latter without commercials) – we need money. As our funding from the federal government continues to erode, revenues from advertising will play an increasingly important role in allowing us to maintain the level of service that Canadians currently enjoy.

The cultural challenges that the CBC seeks to address are daunting. Canada is in the unique position of living next to the United States, the single largest exporter of English-language cultural content the world has ever known.

Canadians experience media differently than our counterparts in Europe and elsewhere. Television schedules in other countries are dominated by indigenous programming supplemented by foreign content. Here, the reverse is true; schedules are dominated by American content, with Canadian programming increasingly pushed to the margins.

If we agree there needs to be a Canadian voice and presence within Canadian media space (radio, TV, Internet), then from a public policy perspective, how best is this to be achieved? Private broadcasters may be required to provide a minimum amount of Canadian content in their programming, but their priorities – quite understandably – are their shareholders and their profits. And those profits are created largely by providing American content in primetime. CBC, as the national public broadcaster, uniquely has deep primetime available for telling Canadian stories from a Canadian perspective – high-quality, intelligent content that speaks to the lives, experiences and interests of Canadians across the country.

And yet despite these circumstances, the CBC is significantly underfunded. The BBC, for example, receives five times CBC’s funding per capita and has the luxury of operating in a single time zone. A recent study of public broadcasting systems around the world shows that next to the U.S. and New Zealand, Canada spends the least amount of money per capita on its national public broadcaster. Italy, Spain, Germany, the U.K., France, Finland and others are all ahead of us in terms of spending.

In the U.K., where they are hardly under the cultural pressure from the U.S. that Canada is, the BBC is funded to the tune of more than $120 Canadian per capita. France, Germany and Italy, all of which have intensely vibrant national cultures, spend an average of $81 per capita on public broadcasting. Canada, on the other hand, provides roughly $32 per capita in funding to CBC/Radio-Canada as a whole – that’s for 27 platforms, including a range of television, radio and online services in French and English, and eight aboriginal languages in the North.

We at CBC TV are proud of the achievements of our news and sports programs in attracting large audiences and now want to achieve similar success in our drama and entertainment programming. By taking this approach, CBC Television will increase its viewership, increase its popularity and value to Canadians, and increase its advertising revenues; all of which helps support the services we provide on all of our delivery platforms.