Source : Globe & Mail

VANCOUVER -- When CBC Television announces its fall lineup on Monday, Marketplace will not be part of it. The award-winning investigative consumer-affairs program will not return to the airwaves until January, 2009.

Its current first-run timeslot - Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m. - will not be available for the show in the fall. That spot will be filled, starting in September, by a recent CBC acquisition: the U.S. syndicated game show Jeopardy!. The public broadcaster is running Jeopardy! to match the time it runs in the United States, a signal which is available on Canadian TV sets.

"Maybe Jeopardy! has bumped the show [out of its time slot]; I guess it has," said CBC spokesperson Katherine Heath-Eves. "But I don't think it has anything to do with a devaluing of Marketplace." She said it was simply a programming decision.

"Is this the best CBC can do? I hope not," said Ian Morrison, with the watchdog group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting. "The public broadcaster should be running Canadian programming all the time - particularly in peak viewing periods like 7 to 11."

A report from the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, issued in February, recommended that CBC-TV reserve those hours for Canadian productions.

Morrison compared the decision to run Jeopardy!in the Marketplace slot to the move two years ago to delay The National in some time zones for a simulcast of the U.S. reality show The One: Making a Music Star. The decision was greeted with howls of protest, but it all became moot when The One was cancelled after just two episodes due to poor ratings.

The issue of simulcasting came up at hearings of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission last month. CBC executive vice-president Richard Stursberg testified that commercial-TV networks have an advantage over the CBC because private broadcasters benefit from simultaneous substitution (which allows Canadian networks to substitute their signals on U.S. channels running the same program at the same time) while the CBC does not. "The fact of the matter is: We don't do that," Stursberg said, according to CRTC transcripts.

When asked whether the CBC will run Jeopardy! as a simulcast, employing simultaneous substitution, CBC spokesperson Jeff Keay replied, "Presumably." CBC-TV will also begin running Wheel of Fortune in September, at 5:30 p.m. on weekdays. Programmers see the show as a strong lead-in to local supper-hour newscasts.

Marketplace is the second-longest-running program on CBC, entering its 36th season in January. When it does return next year, it will feature 13 episodes. While that's about one-third fewer than this past year, it is still considered a full season by CBC. The show is expected to move to Friday night, where a spot will open up with the departure of The Royal Canadian Air Farce.

There has been some grumbling within the CBC that Marketplace is not considered a high priority because it doesn't run commercials within the body of the program; it is the only regularly scheduled non-children's program on the network that doesn't.

CBC relies on commercial revenues (including advertising and other revenue-generating initiatives) for about 55 per cent of its budget. The remainder, 45 per cent, comes from government funding.

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