Source : Montreal Gazette

by Lawrence Martin

Bid adieu to Perrin Beatty. Government insiders confirmed yesterday that the president of the Canadian Broadcasting Corpse will soon be out of a job.

Beatty's contract will not be renewed when it expires in March. He will likely receive a mini-extension of a few months while his successor prepares to take the reins.

Beatty has long been rumoured to be on death row, but has been fighting to stay on. His successor has not yet been chosen. Peter Herrndorf, who recently stepped down as head of TVOntario, has the most advocates. But there is a concern about his limited French.

According to his critics, Beatty, once a boy wonder of Canadian politics, turned boy blunder at the CBC. Ian Morrison, head of the watchdog lobby Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, describes Beatty as "an abject failure." He pictured him as a well-meaning noodle who rolled over in the face of the government's budgetary assault on the network.

Beatty did some good work during his four-year tenure but had to cope with enormous cutbacks and with a prime minister in Jean Chrétien who was hardly enthusiastic about the network.

Cut more than Mulroney

Chrétien's downsizing of the CBC was yet another carry-over of the policies of the previous government. But whereas Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was much criticized for his bare-knuckled approach to the broadcaster, Chrétien has fared better while cutting more. While government departments were chopped an average of 19 per cent, the little guy from Shawinigan let the CBC have it to the tune of 31 per cent.

A goodly portion of the paring down has been justified. There was some truth to the view of western Canadians who saw the CBC as a Toronto-dominated, bloated bastion of leftist-leaning rubble. Where a camera crew of one could do the job, the CBC sent four.

In light of the cuts, it is rather peculiar now to see the Chrétienites trying to protect the domestic magazine industry with legislation barring Canadians from advertising in American periodicals. Heritage Minister Sheila Copps, a big favourite of the prime minister, explains the move by saying Canadians have to be able to tell their own stories.

Yet as Ian Morrison points out, the Corpse is many times more important in allowing Canadians to explain themselves to one another than the magazine trade.

The prime minister's chilliness toward the network is explained in part by the French CBC's longstanding hostility to his federalist politics and non-intellectual persona.

On the English side, Chrétien's attitude was hardly softened by the deplorable hype job the network did on the APEC story last fall. The CBC does a lot of excellent reporting but quality was hardly on display in the breathless remake of this year-old story. Compare how many times the network assaulted viewers with a replay of the pepper-spraying incident to the number of times it showed the students breaking the law in tearing down the security fences. In desperately trying to tie the Prime Minister's Office to the affair, how many times did the network point out that it is in fact routine procedure for the leadership in any country to co-ordinate security measures with police for major summits and to recommend stern measures where needed?

Market-driven approach

Choosing a replacement for Beatty will not signal a change in the PM's attitude to the network. Insiders say he wants a more market-driven CBC.

Allegedly a raw-boned defender of Canadian values, it is worth noting how Chrétien has let Canadian institutions such as the military, the RCMP and the CBC decline on his watch. The military will get a boost in the next budget, the Mounties a very modest increase and the bleeding at the CBC will finally stop.

Besides Herrndorf, other candidates being looked at to succeed Beatty include Trina McQueen, the veteran CBCer who is now head of the Discovery Channel, Bob Rabinovitch, a business executive with high Liberal connections, Robert Prichard, the outgoing president of the University of Toronto and Francoise Bertrand, the current chairman of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.

It is a good bunch to choose from and there are many elements of the CBC, like the high-quality Newsworld, that are well worth saving.

© The Gazette