It’s not every day you bump into the Federal Finance Minister having lunch…
But when you do find yourself in his company, with a petition signed by thousands of people from across Canada, all asking him to please return the $115 million in annual public funding that his government has cut from the CBC — well, you seize the moment.
Many of our Canadian Media Guild members (both current & retired) have been busy advocating for restored public funding for Canada’s public broadcaster, and a proper arms-length relationship between the CBC and government.
Starting last month we’ve been circulating a petition online, and asking people to sign our “Dear Joe…” postcards. These postcards also request that Finance Minister Joe Oliver restore the $115 million to CBC’s public funding in the Federal Budget that he’s about to table on April 21.
The postcards have been a great way for us to engage with the wider public. We’ve met many enthusiastic CBC supporters who understand the importance of having a strong public broadcaster in Canada.
The Finance Minister was speaking at an Economic Club of Canada luncheon, touting the importance of a balanced budget in a speech. Afterwards, as he was finishing up his lunch, I approached him with a phone book-sized printout of the petition to give him.
Canadian Media Guild’s Naomi Robinson and Karen Wirsig approach Finance Minister Joe Oliver with a petition containing thousands of signatures.
I suggested to him that it would be possible to still balance the budget on April 21 and restore CBC’s funding, if these were priorities of his government, by using just a very small part of the billions of dollars the federal government has recently raised by auctioning off a portion of the broadcast spectrum.
Industry Canada regulates spectrum, a public resource on which wireless information travels. This invisible infrastructure, the public airwaves, is highly valuable to wireless companies, and auctions of this public asset have raised several billion dollars for the public purse.
Using proceeds from the sale of this publicly-held broadcast asset to support the public broadcaster seems straightforward enough. Given the fact that these are public airwaves, CMG supports the idea of setting some of this money aside to support Canada’s major cultural institutions including the CBC.
We propose that half of the proceeds from spectrum sales be invested for CBC/Radio-Canada and other key cultural institutions. But even if he didn’t want to dedicate as much as that, Finance Minister Joe Oliver could easily restore the public funding his government has cut by drawing minimally upon the proceeds of the spectrum auctions.
Finance Minister Joe Oliver looks at a petition signed by thousands of supporters of public broadcasting. The petition urges Minister Oliver to reverse the $115-million cut in annual public funding that has been imposed on CBC/Radio-Canada.
I also made sure that he knew, as a sitting MP from Toronto, about the economic impact job cuts are having on the families of CBCers here in Toronto – and indeed across the country.
With about 1200 jobs gone from CBC in the past year alone, that’s a lot of domestic spending not happening, and truthfully, the effects are even bigger when measured on a personal scale.
We also met Scott Brison, the Liberal Finance Critic, and promised to send along our petition to him (and all the opposition parties) as well. In fact, if YOU haven’t signed the petition yet, please do so now – before we send it off to them! https://actionnetwork.org/
It was all very polite, beginning and ending with a hand shake, affording me the privilege of passing along a message from several thousand voices to the man who holds the nation’s purse strings.
Naomi Robinson
CMG Toronto President
