Source : Ottawa Citizen

By any measure, it was one of the nastier public fights over money, power and politics in recent memory: a dispute that cut to the very heart of Canada's convoluted cultural policy.

But one year later, it now seems that cable mogul Jim Shaw's attack on the Canadian Television Fund (CTF) may have been the best thing that could have happened to it.

This morning, the CRTC will begin public hearings to further review a series of recommendations that were made last June by a task force appointed to study fund operations and governance on the heels of Mr. Shaw's criticism.

And although it's probably not quite the outcome he intended, his aggressive challenge has forced the fund and those who manage it into a rigorous self-examination that may ultimately enhance its relevance at a time of fragmentation in the conventional television industry and financial pressure exerted by the force of emerging new media.

After all, an awful lot of money has been earmarked within the fund for the development of content that's increasingly consumed in an entirely non-traditional way.

"In preparing for this hearing, we've focused a great deal on documenting the CTF's successes," says president and CEO Valerie Creighton. "Without this process, we might otherwise not have been forced to focus on our future quite so urgently."

The extreme external scrutiny and public debate about its operations and viability have already prompted the fund to expand its reach.

For example, today it plans to ask the CRTC to broaden its mandate to allow it to distribute Canadian content on any CRTC-licensed platform, such as cellular phones and other wireless devices, not just conventional television.

It's currently working on a new media pilot project that will be launched in April. And it's the sort of initiative that could eventually see the fund add telecom companies to its private sector revenue source.

As it happens, bringing such additional sources of new revenue on stream is one of the task force recommendations: The cable and satellite television industry currently contributes about $150 million (one-third of which comes from Shaw alone) toward the fund's annual $250-million budget.

(In the midst of the uproar last year, former heritage minister Bev Oda renewed the federal government's annual $100-million funding commitment for another two years.)

Today's hearings will also see Ms. Creighton, who joined the television fund in 2006 from SaskFilm, move into the spotlight for the first time since the controversy erupted.

Although fund chairman Douglas Barrett, who has reportedly had a turbulent relationship with some of the board members, corresponded with Mr. Shaw directly and participated in closed meetings with Heritage Department officials, the fund conspicuously failed to communicate its position when it was challenged.

Even CRTC officials, including incoming chairman Konrad von Finckenstein, who oversee the regulation of the fund and its private sector contributors, didn't hear from the television fund.

Not surprisingly, one of the task force recommendations is that the fund "devise and implement a clear communications strategy."

According to Ms. Creighton, fund management got snarled in reaction mode and in trying to stabilize finances for productions already under way after Mr. Shaw said he'd withhold his mandated contribution. Furthermore, the organization had been absorbed for more than a year with the integration of Telefilm.

All of which had everyone turning inward rather than out at exactly the wrong time.

"We've realized that we have to do a better job of explaining what we do and how we do it," Ms. Creighton concedes. "It can be complicated and we need to remember to simplify it."

Very specifically, the fund needs to do a better job of explaining how it measures the success of the Canadian television programs it funds -- something that will take quite a bit of doing.

That's because it's funded by the federal government and by private broadcasters -- and they each have substantially different measures of a program's "success." The Heritage Department's focus is on the dispersal of Canadian-made cultural content, while private broadcasters are geared to bottom-line returns.

That gap is one of the reasons that the CRTC task force is proposing that television fund revenue be separated into two distinct streams: one that reflects the cultural mandate of the Heritage Department and the CBC, the other the commercial criteria of private broadcasters who measure success principally in terms of ratings and longevity.

At the heart of that recommendation is an issue that particularly rankled Mr. Shaw: The CBC gets about 37 per cent of the "envelope" of annual funding from the the fund, despite it's $1.3-billion-a-year budget as the public broadcaster.

He and other fund supporters demanded greater documentation and a voice on how their money is spent.

Although Ms. Creighton insists that the envelope system is far less subjective than past practices, she also allows that because it is relatively new, it's not widely understood or especially well documented.

Her other concern is the recommendation that return-on-investment should be used as a factor in deciding which productions to support.

"There's no way to anticipate in advance what will be a hit, or what the definition of a hit is," she says. "It goes back to making things subjective, to picking winners and losers."

Thanks to Mr. Shaw, however, the television fund is being forced to make that call on its own behalf.

Deirdre McMurdy is a vice-president at the Public Policy Forum in Ottawa.

© Ottawa Citizen

Related Documents:

July 27, 2007 - Submission to the CRTC on the CTF Task Force Report
FRIENDS comments on proposals from a CRTC Task Force on the governance and operation of the Canadian Television Fund.