Friends of Canadian Broadcasting take aim at CBC for rejecting ad
OTTAWA — The CBC is coming under friendly fire.
The broadcaster is refusing to air an ad — produced by the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting — over concerns it would jeopardize its neutrality.
On Monday, Friend’s spokesman Ian Morrison expressed disappointment at CBC’s rejection of the ad, which he maintained is meant to highlight how the Conservative government is “gradually transforming the CBC from an independent public broadcaster into something that is approaching a state broadcaster — the kind of thing you would associate with Russia, even today, with China, with Cuba.”
The spot shows an actor — in character as a journalist — interviewing Prime Minister Stephen Harper, asking him about “critics” who say he’s undermining the arm’s length relationship between the CBC and the government.
“How do you respond to that?” that actor asks, before two mafioso-style thugs stuff him in the trunk of a car.
A longer version for the organization’s online pitch adds the actor rhyming off a laundry list of opposition complaints against the Tories, from F-35 fighter jet procurements and cancelling the mandatory long-form census to the Senate spending scandal.
“There goes my Senate appointment,” quips the actor as he’s shut in the trunk.
Friends of Canadian Broadcasting bills itself as a nonpartisan watchdog group that defends Canadian content on TV, radio and online.
“The priority of the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting is to hold (the government) to account between now and 2015 — that’s not partisan,” Morrison said Monday.
“We’re partisan for democracy.”
The group’s concern is a provision contained in Bill C-60, passed in June, which gives the Treasury Board oversight of the collective bargaining process at the taxpayer-funded Crown corporation.
Treasury Board spokesman Matthew Conway said the feds want to keep an eye on crown corporations to ensure they’re “financially viable and costs are sustainable.”
Still, “the measures do not affect the independent operation of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) or any other Crown corporation.”
Morrison said the government has “no credibility” on the issue and that Friends plans to spend some $60,000 to air the ad. It has approached both CTV and TVA, a Sun News sister network. The CBC expressed its own concern over the provision in a letter to the House Finance committee in May, arguing it undermined its ability to independently manage its public resources.
CBC receives roughly $1.1 billion in federal government funding annually.