If there were hard decisions to be made, decisions that were going to make him enemies, Stursberg wanted to make them. Producer Niv Fichman remembers chatting with Stursberg about his acclaimed Movie Central TV series Slings and Arrows. It was originally intended for cbc, but the network backed out at the last minute, without explanation. Stursberg tried to apologize for that decision, until Fichman reminded him he hadn’t even been at cbc at the time. “Everyone else in the world wants to take credit for things they don’t do,” says Fichman with a laugh. “Richard Stursberg wants to take the blame.”
tursberg can be indicted for plenty of things he did do at cbc. Among them was paying far too much for the rights to nhl games (a burdensome cost said to be more than $100 million per year, about $40 million more than the network had paid in the previous contract), and trying to run infomercials at night, a plan the board voted down. What he can’t be blamed for are the conditions under which he made those decisions. Even some cbcers are now willing to admit that, in the face of the network’s harsh realities, Stursberg’s pursuit of ratings success for the public broadcaster was the only logical, perhaps the only responsible, choice.Since the government of Canada decided in 1974 to fully fund cbc Radio but not cbc TV, the network’s finances have grown progressively more strained. Canada’s level of government support for its public broadcaster now ranks near the bottom compared with that of other Western industrialized nations, accounting for a pitiful .07 percent of gdp, versus 0.23 percent each for the UK, Denmark, and Norway, and 0.28 percent for Finland, according to the most recent study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. A 2006 report showed that Canada ranked sixteenth out of eighteen nations in per capita funding of public broadcasters, at $33 per inhabitant, compared with an average of $80. And it’s not as if the government was cutting back everywhere. From 1996 to 2004, Canadian federal spending on culture, excluding cbc, rose by 39 percent. In the same period, federal funding for cbc decreased by 9 percent.
The corporation’s financial woes stem mainly from its troubled relationship with government. “This arm’s-length relationship is really about a finger long,” says Lareau. Which would be tolerable if cbc enjoyed the same historical respect as the bbc (“Auntie” to the Brits). In Canada, however, politicians have long regarded cbc with suspicion, or worse. Tony Manera, cbc president in the mid-’90s, describes it as “substantially reliant on the goodwill of the government.” He adds, “It is true that it has eroded.”
Unlike the bbc, which is protected from parliamentary whim because it’s funded by a direct licence fee of £142 per household and operates on secure five-year terms, cbc effectively functions at the pleasure of the prime minister. When Manera was president, he took pains to develop a good working relationship not with the minister of heritage, but with Eddie Goldenberg, Jean Chrétien’s closest policy adviser — a frankly ludicrous position for a nation’s public broadcaster to be in. Indeed, it proved useless to Manera, because Chrétien had cultivated a passionate hatred for cbc ever since surmising that separatist forces were at work within Radio-Canada during the 1980 referendum campaign. So when Chrétien’s finance minister, Paul Martin, delivered an austerity budget in 1995, it was no surprise when cbc took a $414-million hit, or 34.5 percent of its total expenditure, which has hobbled it ever since.
When Rabinovitch arrived as president in 1999, he found a corporation in denial. “There was still this belief, especially on the English side, that one of these days the government was going to wake up and realize how underfunded the cbc was and write a cheque.” He knew that wasn’t true. But he thought there was a chance that if cbc could find ways to meet its essential needs and absorb the costs of inflation, the government might be convinced to break open its wallet and pull out a bill or two for programming. So he set about finding hard assets to monetize. He created a vice-president of real estate to sell off or rent out cbc properties. He scraped up $75 million by selling Newsworld International. He sold the Galaxie music service for $60 million. Like an obedient corporate Cratchit, he did it all to please his Scrooge. “I wanted a reward,” he says. Eventually, he got his goose, in the form of a special $60-million allotment for programming, which every year or two must be approved for renewal.
It was into this more commercialized cbc that Rabinovitch brought Stursberg to apply the new pragmatism to programming, the only asset left to monetize. He knew Stursberg was inclined to think boldly when it came to cbc. Some years before, in 1996, Stursberg had authored a memo, apparently as part of a bid for a high-level cbc position, that proposed the network be sliced into three cable channels — for arts, documentaries, and news. It also proposed, remarkably, that cbc should live within its government appropriation and “get out of advertising altogether.”
Stursberg later dismissed the memo as notes “on the back of an envelope.” By the time cbc’s headhunters called, he had come to believe that living purely on public funds was impossible. Of cbc English Television’s roughly $630-million budget, less than half comes from the government. Most of the rest comes from advertising and subscriber fees. The political environment had hardly improved — the Conservative party was fanning anti-cbc sentiments in its fundraising campaigns — so the prospects for some future windfall were nil. The only way the network could function was to make what money it could from advertising. When Stursberg looked around, he saw (and it suited him to see) where the best growth opportunity lay — not in news, cbc’s historical strength, but in its weakness: homegrown entertainment.
In the middle of 2009, he stood before an audience of French Canadian television and movie people at a conference in Montreal and presented a slide showing that the ten most popular entertainment series in English Canada were all American. “Voici le problème,” he said. And his audience gasped, because in Quebec all the top shows are Canadian.
“We are the only country in the industrialized world that prefers other people’s entertainment programming on television to our own,” Stursberg said in his office. “The only one,” he repeated. “The only one.”
There was a time when cbc English Television’s share of the national audience, aside from a few American channels that leaked across the border, was 100 percent. By the early ’80s, when the network was running a mixture of Canadian and American programming (including Dallas) in prime time, it had fallen to 22 percent. In the mid-’90s, cbc decided to “Canadianize” and completely fill its prime-time schedule with domestically produced programming. Its audience share fell to 11 percent. By some measures, it stood at less than 5 percent when Stursberg arrived. The fragmentation caused by the proliferation of channels was only part of the reason, because the network was losing audience at twice the rate ctv was.
In Stursberg’s view, cbc’s entertainment programmers were making the same mistake as the filmmakers he had argued with during his time at Telefilm: they didn’t take the whole notion of entertainment seriously enough. Just as those filmmakers were making “art house” films for “elite” audiences, cbc tended to follow what Stursberg terms “European conventions” in its television, rather than the American conventions viewers obviously preferred.
“I say this with the greatest gentleness,” he told me. “One of the things that surprises me in terms of the cultural conversation within English Canada… is that people don’t admire popular culture. They don’t admire television.” Canada is living in the golden age of television, he said, and we’re missing it. The New York Times, The New Yorker — they take the medium seriously. “In English Canada, we don’t treat it as an art. And it may be because we have failed for so many years. But it is an art. It is the great, popular, difficult art of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I don’t know why we don’t love it.”
Stursberg’s cbc got rid of things like Opening Night, its Thursday night block of performing arts programming, a good example of TV that wished it wasn’t TV. It won awards, he said, simply because it had few competitors. Because nobody does that kind of programming anymore. Because nobody watches it.
Instead, Stursberg’s cbc embraced the medium. It started to love entertaining people. Frothy comedies? Family dramas? Hockey players on figure skates? Bring ‘em on. Yes, it would adapt a Canadian novel or two, but it would do the big international co-productions as well — The Tudors, Camelot, perhaps even an adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children — and it wouldn’t “turn them into art house projects.” It aimed for mass appeal, because then it could start a tide of revenue to lift all of cbc’s boats, including the news and current affairs division (which, by the way, would run “documentaries which are less auteur”).
To those who feared that by using the public broadcaster’s resources to purchase and present conventional, popular television, that by producing shows that could easily have appeared on other networks, Stursberg was following a path that would ultimately lead to a cbc with less reason to exist, he replied… yes. “I completely agree with that. And our shows in prime time are utterly different. They’re Canadian.”
Never mind that ctv has a Canadian series or two in prime time; the real business of the private networks is airing shows they buy in Los Angeles. That’s not cbc’s business. “I’m not worried about distinctiveness,” he said with a brush of his hand. “We have the most distinctive schedule that the cbc has ever had.”
