Source : Charlottetown Guardian

Funding cuts at CBC are leaving Canada in danger of raising a generation ignorant of its own culture and heritage, a top executive of the national broadcaster warned Wednesday.

Mark Starowicz, executive producer of CBC's documentary production unit, spoke to a crowded auditorium at the Confederation Centre, saying that the federal government has marked the corporation for starvation.

He said that CBC, which last year received $964 million for television and radio programming in two languages, has seen its overall funding drop in recent years, despite inflation and the return of public spending in other areas.

"From 1996 to 2004, federal support for the cultural sector went up by $39 million, funding to the CBC dropped by $9 million," Starowicz said in an interview. "It's not an accident.

"Britain has twice our population but they spent seven times as much on the BBC. In Britain they have 15 hours of new domestic dramatic programming every week. Canada doesn't do that in two months."

Starowicz was this year's speaker in the Symons Lecture on the State of Canadian Confederation.

This was the third year for the event.

He warned that a lack of public funding forces actors, producers and behind the scenes talent to leave Canadian television and seek work in the United States.

Much of the Canadian-based work is carried out to tell American stories to American viewers. He told the audience that the CBC is the only entity that would have been able to produce programs such as Canada: A People's History. The 32-hour series cost millions of dollars and took years to bring to television, but didn't attract any private sector sponsors until the 11th hour.

The show was Canada's most popular documentary program ever, spawned a two-volume bestselling history and produced a series of videos that were the top Christmas seller in the year they were released.

Starowicz told those on hand for the lecture that the show had struck a chord by speaking to a Canadian search for identity.

He said that would not have happened under a system purely driven by the advertising market.

"Entertainment commercial television is not driven by the number of people in the audience, it is driven by the number of people who fit a particular economically important they feel they can develop a program for," he said.

Starowicz said the broader national audience, whole geographic regions and ethnic groups are invisible to commercial TV because they don't fit its target group.

"We have to have a national strategy for this information age before our own stories, our own agenda, disappear in the digital deluge," he said.

© Charlottetown Guardian