:
Good morning, everybody. As the members are taking their places, we will start this meeting.
Welcome to the seventh meeting of the Standing Committee on Official Languages. Today is Thursday, April 1. Pursuant to Standing Order 108, we are studying the support of the federal government for official languages minority media.
We have the pleasure to have as witnesses this morning two members of the National Campus and Community Radio Association. Mr. Kevin Matthews is the executive director and Shelley Robinson is the membership coordinator. Thank you for being with us this morning.
Joining us via video conference from Montreal is Mr. George Bakoyannis, the secretary-treasurer of the Quebec Community Newspapers Association. Mr. Bakoyannis, thank you for being with us this morning via this technology.
I guess we should begin. I would invite the people from the National Campus and Community Radio Association to begin with their opening statement.
Monsieur Matthews.
Good morning, members. I'm Kevin Matthews, executive director of the National Campus and Community Radio Association, and this is Shelley Robinson, the membership coordinator.
The NCRA is a not-for-profit group of organizations and individuals committed to volunteer-based community-oriented radio broadcasting in Canada. The NCRA aims to increase the effectiveness of campus and community radio in Canada through public education about community media and by providing a forum for community broadcasters to share their work, develop their skills, and network. We also help represent community radio to government and other agencies.
Founded in 1981, we now have 76 members, four of which are situated in official language minority anglophone communities in Quebec. There are two other stations in Quebec based in OLMCs that are not currently NCRA members. We also have many English licensed stations in English majority communities that carry some French programming for their local minority francophone community and could use support to increase their services. But given the time limits of this presentation, we have focused mostly on the particular needs of stations serving OLMCs in Quebec.
We continue to work with l'Alliance des radios communautaires du Canada and l'Association des radiodiffuseurs communautaires du Québec to represent the sector and our 134 members who are divided about evenly between anglophone and francophone radio.
Our stations support official language minority communities in several ways. They provide local news and community announcements in the minority language. In many places, community radio is the only place people can hear about services, local cultural events, and government programs available in their official language.
In Sherbrooke, for example, CJMQ-FM is the only station in the area that does emergency broadcasts in English, and at CFTH-FM in Harrington Harbour, they receive most of their press releases from outside the community in French and translate them for the local listening audience.
They also support other minority language media. CIDI-FM in Missisquoi and CJMQ-FM in Sherbrooke both work closely with their local English newspapers, promoting them through ads and by contributing content.
They serve local businesses, particularly those targeting the OLMC, by providing advertising at a very low cost. For example, at CIDI-FM in Missisquoi, $10 buys you a 30-second ad in both English and French.
They provide support to official language minority artists and culture. All of the stations play a lot of local and regional music and make it a priority. They also have times when local musicians come in to play live on air and do interviews.
They allow a place for official language minority communities to tell their own stories. CIDI-FM in Missisquoi has just started a series of history programs about the area, looking back 60 to 80 years, produced in English by their volunteers.
They preserve a special place for the minority language. Even those stations that have a lot of French programming feel their English programming and their standing as an anglophone cultural organization are crucial to serving their official language minority community effectively.
As for specific needs, our members serving official language minority communities tell us their primary challenge is underfunding. Whether to increase power to serve a larger population, to hire more staff to cover more local news and cultural events, or to create outreach programs to engage more volunteers, these stations find themselves financially unable to grow, to plan strategically for their future, to build capacity, and to fully serve their communities.
CFTH in Harrington Harbour needs training in program design, announcing, computer skills, journalism, and volunteer development. CFBS-FM in Blanc-Sablon also wants training for better staff and volunteer retention. The personnel at the station are self-taught, and they'd like outside help to train the next generation and avoid costly learning based on trial and error. They would also like training for their board of directors, who are drawn from the community, to help them understand their governance role in the station.
CJMQ-FM in Sherbrooke wants to increase their broadcasting power from 2,000 to 6,000 watts in order to better serve the township's anglophone community, and they would like to employ more staff. Currently, even the station manager is unpaid and has been for eight years. They also lack strategic resources to fully research the needs of their community and how they can serve it better.
CIDI-FM in Missisquoi estimates they need about seven full-time employees to really cover their local communities. They currently have three. They also identified the need for a regional conference of the stations in Quebec serving the official language minority communities, where they can share tips and resources and develop stronger ties for ongoing support.
All of these challenges relate to funding. With better resources, stations could offer more training to staff and volunteers, better salaries and benefits to retain skilled and experienced staff, and more resources to recruit and train volunteers from the community. More than anything, this kind of support would mean they could better serve their local official language minority communities.
Many of these challenges are shared by English stations operating in majority anglophone communities that also offer access and programming to local francophone minority communities. Chronic underfunding means there is no money to translate training materials into French or to hire staff who could speak to programmers in their official minority language.
Thus, in addition to specific support for stations based in OLMCs, support for the campus and community radio sector as a whole also helps strengthen services to official language minority communities.
On funding, the short story is that the community-based radio sector has a public service mandate, but with no guaranteed funding to accomplish it. Stations get money from local fundraising, advertising, student fees, and a tiny amount from government and other grants. In 2008, NCRA members raised an average of 3.1% of their revenue from government sources. By comparison, 14% was raised from private donations, from listeners, and from community funding drives.
Currently, the Government of Canada has no specific program for community radio. Stations that apply to federal funding programs are competing for that funding with other kinds of community organizations, including arts groups and other social service organizations.
To resolve some of these concerns, the NCRA, ARC du Canada, and ARC du Québec founded the Community Radio Fund of Canada, now in its second year of operation. Together, we are working to address the gap in funding for community radio by pursuing contributions from Canada's private broadcasters, the federal government, and other donations.
In Quebec, the Minister of Culture, Communications, and the Status of Women has a program for community radio, though it's not available to campus stations. Without it, though, CJMQ-FM in Sherbrooke says they would have to close their doors. We congratulate the provincial government of Quebec for its success, but this is not enough to let stations serving official language minority communities do much more than survive. They deserve to flourish.
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In the past year, the NCRA, ARC du Canada, and ARC du Québec participated jointly in the CRTC campus and community radio policy review. Our comments to the hearing addressed several areas of the policy in which our stations need more flexible and realistic regulation, but the dominant topic of the hearing was the need for sustainable funding of the sector.
We encouraged the CRTC to direct a mandatory portion of the CCD benefits that private radio stations pay toward the Community Radio Fund of Canada, as it has been certified by the CRTC to receive these benefits, and support for community-based radio is support for Canadian culture.
At the same time, we addressed our stations' service to official language minority communities. To respect our limited time here, we must refer you to our submission to that proceeding, which we will append to a brief to this committee in the near future, and which is also available online attached to that CRTC proceeding. The proceeding number is 2009-418.
The copyright system in Canada presents barriers to campus and community radio that also affect official language minority communities. Copyright reform will affect our stations' ability to support local artists, including those based in OLMCs, and will affect not only our stations' ability to adopt new technologies but also of course their delicate financial position.
To save time, we will refer you to our participation in last year's public copyright consultation, at which we laid out our agenda on copyright reform for the good of community-based radio. We will also append this submission to our forthcoming brief.
If Canada's new copyright legislation is not reflective of our needs, it may inhibit our stations' support of emerging and independent artists and their ability to allocate resources to local culture and information programming, and it might possibly inhibit them taking their arts support activities into new media.
Earlier this year, while we prepared our testimony for the CRTC hearing, the NCRA, ARC du Canada, and ARC du Québec assessed the gap between the funding we get and the cost of performing our mandate. We are urging the federal government to play its part in addressing this gap, as CCD benefits from private broadcasters are based on their revenue and are not sustainable or consistent enough for a healthy community-based radio system. Official languages is a piece of this puzzle.
At this time, we recommend core funding, via the Community Radio Fund of Canada, at a level of $30,000 per station to support core operations and thereby enable all stations to better serve official language minority communities. This is more than one full-time salary at most stations, which achieve remarkable results on shoestring budgets.
For the 140 campus and community stations that serve Canadians in nine provinces and every territory, this core support would cost the federal government just $4.2 million, would result in better support to official language minority communities, and would directly affect hundreds of communities, thousands of volunteers, and tens of thousands of listeners across the country.
Thank you.
:
Good morning. My name is George Bakoyannis, and I thank you for the opportunity to be here today. I am the secretary-treasurer of the Quebec Community Newspapers Association. I am also the publisher of five community newspapers, three of them being official language minority community newspapers.
I am here today representing the interests of 35 or so members of QCNA and that of our association. Our association has been in existence for 30 years, and it supports English language community newspapers in Quebec. QCNA is a funded beneficiary of Canadian Heritage, and as such, we recognize the importance of official language support programs.
Our association exists because of funding we receive from Canadian Heritage. Our other financing comes from an advertising clearing house. Basically we have one client, and that is the federal government. We work very closely with the public works department to provide services and clear advertising for our member papers in Quebec.
There are many items that we could talk about, but I chose two in order to be brief and not take too much time. One is the support from the federal government for official language minority media, and I think this is very pertinent to the meeting we're having today.
Last year at this time I was present at a consultation in Ottawa on media advertising on official language minority media. I met with some people from Public Works. They presented me a brochure with some information regarding advertising from the federal government and where it has been going in the last few years.
In a graph that was presented to us, we saw that federal advertising has been increasing not only for newspapers, but also for TV and radio. The biggest increase, I would like to say, was in newspapers. The graph shows that, in 2004-05, the federal government spent $868,000 on advertising in Quebec, in minority media I'm presuming. In 2007, that number doubled—again, this is only for newspapers—to $1,938,000. That's a very healthy increase.
But we have a huge problem at QCNA because between those two years we had a decrease in the amount of advertising that came to our member papers. In 2004-05, QCNA cleared from the federal government about $300,000 of advertising to our 35 or so members. Compare that to 2006-07, when barely $65,000 went to our members from the federal government.
So while the budget doubled, minority community newspapers in Quebec got 75% less advertising than they did in 2004-05. It's a huge discrepancy, and one that we would like to see changed in a way where a certain portion of the advertising spent by the federal government would be earmarked towards community newspapers.
I'm not as well prepared as my counterparts from radio, but I can tell you that our needs are just as great as theirs. We have newspapers that are just basically hanging in there.
I can talk about one of my papers that is barely hanging in there. It's called Parc-Extension News. It's a small newspaper that covers an area of Montreal that is called “the Port of Canada”, basically because most new immigrants to Quebec end up there. We're talking about unemployment and welfare in the neighbourhood of 40%. It's a very deprived area.
We have a newspaper there. We've been publishing that paper for 17 years. I can tell you, if it weren't for the little we get from the federal government, and the very little we get from the provincial government and from the City of Montreal, that paper would not exist. It would just not be viable with only advertising from the businesses in the area.
The other thing I would like to talk about is the Canada Periodical Fund, which I also think is important and very crucial for community newspapers and our association. We were very happy to see the changes made to the Canada Periodical Fund, and we're hoping that special consideration will be given to minority language community newspapers.
What we would like to see also is the inclusion of free-distribution papers, with of course some rules and regulations. Because of the way the market is here in Quebec, paid newspapers that were eligible to get this Canada Periodic Fund had to change their way of distribution to stay relevant and competitive in the market. They had to compete with other newspapers that were doing door-to-door distribution, or basically blanket distribution. Having done that, they lost their funding from this program. We would like to see that funding extended to papers that have free distribution, or what we call controlled distribution.
I'll just stress the point that the federal government is doing a wonderful job supporting French papers outside Quebec. The APF, or the Association de la presse francophone, is clearing ads for its members, which are about 35 newspapers across Canada--French papers--outside Quebec. While English papers in Quebec are getting in the neighbourhood of $100,000 in advertising, our French counterparts outside Quebec are getting 10 times that. Having said that, I think there is some room for improvement, and I hope we can get this worked out as soon as possible.
:
Thank you, Mr. Bakoyannis.
Now we will proceed with the first round.
Before I begin, I would just like to extend my best wishes, on our first day, to our clerk, Isabelle.
[Translation]
It was your birthday yesterday, Isabelle.
Mr. Bélanger, you have the floor.
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You know, I really don't think it's fair, because I am looking at the list of all the people who are getting the funds; some of them are huge multinational corporations that I personally think don't need the help of the federal government, and here we have newspapers that are basically struggling. I am talking about official language minority papers: English in Quebec and French outside of Quebec. I'm not talking only about Quebec here; I'm talking about my French counterparts outside Quebec. They're in basically the same position that we are. I don't think it's fair.
Pushing us so that we are going to have to go out and sell 2,500 papers or 5,000 papers--I'm not sure what the number is--in order to qualify for this program is, I find.... Yes, you're going to have some people who are going to go out there and get very creative and do this in order to get the program, but I don't think that's the way it should be done.
You were talking about 35 papers in Quebec and another 35 papers outside Quebec, and how some of these papers are already receiving this funding because they are smaller papers outside metropolitan areas. If you're publishing a paper in a small town and your distribution covers a 30-square-kilometre area where you cannot do door-to-door distribution, then you have to use Canada Post or some other method. You have no choice but to have a subscription-based newspaper. However, in our communities in Montreal and surrounding Montreal, the market doesn't work like that. We are competing with many other papers. As an English paper, I am competing with three or four other French papers in the area, so we can't go to subscription only; our numbers would drop down to such a number that it would be impossible to compete.
First, I would like to congratulate our friend Yvon Godin. His bill relating to bilingualism for Supreme Court judges was passed yesterday. It is an important step forward for Canada that the judges on its highest court will understand both official languages of the country, Canada. It should have been done a long time ago, but it is never too late to do it. I would like to mention this.
Good morning, Mr. Matthews, Ms. Robinson and Mr. Bakoyannis. I am pleased to see you today. We met with your colleagues in the French-Canadian media not long ago. I noticed one aspect of the situation in particular, and I would like to hear your thoughts on that. It is the interdepartmental question.
Are there programs or support from the federal government, apart from Canadian Heritage, that encourage you to apply? Or are you aware of federal programs or departments that can help you in your efforts to disseminate information to the people who listen to you and read you?
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It's more for you than for me, but that explains things.
In section 42, Part VII, of the Official Languages Act, and I'm giving a broad outline, federal departments are concretely urged to support minority communities, whether in Quebec or outside of Quebec or throughout Canada, that is, francophones as well as anglophones, in their minority environments. Given what has been said here in committee, we can say that it isn't Parliament that hasn't done its job; rather, it is the bureaucracy that is not doing what the Act asks it to do. I would also like to put you in the picture on this subject. What we are hearing is that there is still a lot of work to do in these areas.
Being an English Quebecker or anglophone in Quebec doesn't put you under a single department, while all other anglophones in Canada or francophones where they are a majority have the right to deal with all the other departments as well. So there is an unequal situation in how we look at the work that has to be done by all departments of the Canadian federal government with minority language communities in the province or the regions where they live in Canada.
:
No, what I did talk about was federal spending in Quebec when it comes to advertising. I have a graph here from Public Works Canada showing the expenditures in newspapers, radio, and TV between 2004 and 2009.
In 2004-05, newspapers in Quebec received $868,000 in advertising. I believe that was for minority papers, the anglophone papers. In 2006-07 that went to $1,938,000. These are numbers I received from Public Works Canada. These are not my numbers.
I'd like to point out to you that in 2004-05, my association cleared about $300,000 in advertising to our 35 members. That's when the federal government was spending $800,000. In 2006-07, when the federal government was spending almost $2 million, my association cleared $70,000 to our 35 members.
Mr. Bakoyannis, I am going to ask you a question, and then I would like Ms. Robinson and Mr. Matthews to answer.
What areas should we, as legislators, work on, to help you achieve your objectives of distributing newspapers, and especially to make sure that your newspapers and radio stations survive?
A little earlier, we heard that radio stations are closing up shop. The same is true for newspapers that may be having hard times. Where should we focus, to give you a hand in this respect?
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The number one thing you could be doing as legislators would be urging the Department of Canadian Heritage to create a program for support of community radio.
[Translation]
The ministère de la Culture, des Communications et de la Condition féminine
[English]
has a program that it's quite proud of, and it's had a great impact on community radio in Quebec. I think at the same level it would be appropriate for Canadian Heritage to develop a new program that's specifically targeted to support community-based radio throughout Canada.
Second, I think it would be fair for MPs to support our recommendation to the CRTC that it award some mandatory portion of CCD contributions to the Community Radio Fund of Canada.
I think both these things would include support to official language minority communities by supporting the health of the sector as a whole.
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I would say no. In particular, I'll highlight the fact that the Canadian Television Fund has become the Canadian Media Fund, so it may support television and also new media development, but not radio, for no conceivable reason I can think of. So we're not getting help there.
We see our stations as natural places to help ensure Canadians will have public access to new media. It's a working model. The community radio model does ensure public access to the airwaves, and it works. And if the government wants Canadians to enjoy public access to new media broadcasting, it only makes sense to support the institutions that are already successful, that are serving people this way. But that support isn't coming.
I would also mention that there are obstacles. I should have mentioned, in response to Mr. Nadeau's question, another thing where legislators can help us is when it comes to copyright reform. The current copyright system is presenting significant barriers that prevent us from adopting new media in community radio, from properly embracing new distribution technologies and new kinds of media production, which we could do. We have volunteers coming into the station who want to. We have skilled people. What we need is the money to have a systematic approach to extending our services into the new media environment. So far the support isn't there, and the copyright system, I'm afraid, is holding us back in some ways.
It's now time to resume our meeting with our other witness.
On behalf of the members of the committee, I would like to thank you for appearing and giving us an update.
I saw in the preparation note that there's a strong interest in local newspapers by anglophones and that bilingual readership is high. I have a local radio community in my riding, although they cannot get the rates.
The public appreciates what you're doing. We can see it with the newspapers and I'm sure with the radio as well. Thank you again.
We'll suspend for a couple of minutes to get to our next witness.
Merci beaucoup.
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We'll get started so we can make it on time.
[Translation]
Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(1), we are now going to hold a briefing session on the Canada Periodical Fund. We are pleased to have with us Jean-François Bernier, Director General, Cultural Industries, and Scott Shortliffe, Director, Periodical Publishing Policy and Programs. We are happy to see that you made it over the bumps in the road, if I can put it that way.
With no further ado, I will invite Mr. Bernier to make his opening presentation.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good morning, members of the committee.
My name is Jean-François Bernier. I work at the Department of Canadian Heritage and I am the Director General of policy and programs for cultural industries. As was mentioned today, I am here with Scott Shortliffe, who is the Director of publishing and programs for one of the four cultural industries, the periodical industry.
We are here today to present a technical briefing on the support that the Government of Canada provides for Canadian periodicals. The information relates generally and specifically to periodicals in official language minority communities.
I want to leave a lot of time for questions. I see we have already used 11 minutes of the time we are allowed. I have a brief presentation to put on the table about these issues and I will assume that you have that presentation in front of you to prepare for the discussion we will have in the next few minutes.
Today is not only April 1—the tale of the tires was a joke for my colleague—it is also the first day of the new Canada Periodical Fund. Today is the day it comes into effect. The fund is the result of a merger of two programs: the Publications Assistance Program and the Canada Magazine Fund. The Publications Assistance Program had been in existence for many years and the Canada Magazine Fund had been in existence for 15 or 20 years.
When we talk about periodicals, we are talking about traditional magazines on glazed paper. It also includes more traditional newspapers and community newspapers. For the purposes of the discussion, our program relates only to community newspapers that are not daily papers. So forget about The Globe and Mail, La Presse, and Le Journal de Montréal. We aren't in that business, in terms of government support.
What are the key features of the new Canada Periodical Fund? Essentially, these two funds were merged to simplify the application process, which had become exceedingly complex. It was also to simplify the reporting that recipients had to do periodically to the government on the support they receive. The new Canada Periodical Fund will also provide increased flexibility for publishers of community newspapers or periodicals, i.e. magazines, in their use of resources. In the past, for example, the Publications Assistance Program supported the costs of distributing magazines and community newspapers only. With this new program, we are expanding that to cover a range of eligible expenses, including creating content, transfer to websites, editing, distribution, production, etc. So it is a much broader gamut of eligible expenses.
The Canada Periodical Fund also has the objective of supporting their transition to the digital era. We can talk about that a little later on, if you like. The fund still ties support to the purchasing choices of Canadians. So we are dealing with an industry where we are going to work with the periodicals that Canadians buy.
The annual budget is $75.5 million.
[English]
On page 4 of the deck, we have three main components to the program. The first component is the aid to publishers component. This is where most of the money is going. It's a formula-based process. Essentially, we're looking at the number of readers who those magazines or community newspapers are reaching.
I've mentioned that the funds can be used for a wide variety of publishing activities, including creation, production, and online activities. We anticipate that over 900 titles will benefit. There's a new feature under this program. There's a cap per title of $1.5 million. This is a major change from what the two other programs had as program guidelines. The periodicals must sell 5,000 copies per year, with exceptions for aboriginal, ethnocultural, and official language minority publications. We'll talk about that later in the presentation.
There are two other small but important components of the program. The collective initiatives are for project funding for industry-wide initiatives and generic marketing campaigns for magazines. When you travel in an airport, you may see maple leaves on the racks where magazines are. This is the type of project that this component is designed to support. The third component is business innovation. Essentially, it's to help publishers work on their business plans, professional development, market research, etc. We are also going to be working only with online publications. We could take a few questions on that if you're interested.
On page 5, for official language minority publications, we have customized criteria. Essentially, the eligibility requirement of at least 50% of the paid circulation is waived for periodicals from official language minority publishers. The 5,000 copies sold per year has been split in half for those publications, to 2,500. Organizations such as l'Association de la presse francophone and the Quebec Community Newspapers Association can apply to one of the components of the program, which is the collective initiatives program.
[Translation]
Essentially, at page 6, you will see our two programs in 2008-2009: the Publications Assistance Program and the Canada Magazine Fund, which supported 27 official language minority publications. The total amount was a little over $700,000 for those publications. Most of the publications were community newspapers. We anticipate more applicants this year because there will be more publications of this type. The competition is closed and we have already received 35 applications. This is a significant increase. Analysis of those applications is currently underway. We project that funding will be equal to funding in the past, if not higher, for this type of publication. That figure could go as high as about $1 million. By our calculations, official language minority publications might receive as much as $1 million of the total resources.
[English]
Scott, do you want to walk us through the last page?
:
Good morning. I'll discuss some of our special measures for 2010-11.
We had an ongoing process of consultation when we designed the program--we had round tables, we had submissions from groups like QCNA and l'APF--and ongoing discussions since the program launch was announced. It became clear that the number one concern was the gap between the end of the PAP, which was yesterday, and the provision of new funding.
To try to make that gap as short as possible, we decided to launch eight publishers early. Bear in mind that our existing programs were running until yesterday. We created the new program. We launched it on January 19 and gave only a month for people to apply, but we had been advising the various associations for months before that there would be a short application deadline. We received 1,000 applications by February 19 of this year. Normally with a government program, 1,000 applications might take you nine months to process. It's an enormous volume of work. To make that manageable, we decided to use the benefit of the fact that many of our criteria were similar to our existing programs. We had already pre-examined most of these titles under our existing program, so that anyone who was already receiving funding essentially had to fill out an extremely simplified application form, a two-page attestation form.
That meant the number of applications we had to do detailed work on fell from 1,000 to roughly 200. We're working on those right now. Our intention is to run the funding formula in April. That doesn't mean the cheques go out then. That means we'll know how much everyone will receive. There have to be approvals. We have to generate the grants letters. They have to go out. But we've managed to reduce the time immensely.
At least six months ago we had warned all the associations to let their members know that there would be a gap in funding, but that when the funding arrived it would be upfront funding for the year. Under the PAP you got a little bit of funding every time you used a mailing, so you would perhaps get $1,000 or $2,000 a month. With this, you will receive your entire year's funding up front and be able to apply it strategically.
We also let people know for this year only—because we knew people had to adjust to a new program, and they had to have the ability to do financial planning—that the amounts they would receive would be between 90% and 150% of what they had received from our two programs combined in previous years. If you were an existing recipient, you could look at what you'd received previously, and you had at least that surety.
In fact, for smaller titles, it will be more than the 100%. It will be between 100% and 150%. The only exception to this 90% to 150% rule is, as Monsieur Bernier mentioned, that we put a cap of $1.5 million on it. That means some of the large titles are losing close to 50% of their funding for this year, which was a strategic decision the government made, and that funding is being reapportioned among smaller titles, including official language minority titles.
:
That was actually one of the major questions during our policy review. Our old programs were set up that way. They were only for paid circulation magazines and community newspapers.
During our consultations several groups asked, what if we expanded it to free circulation papers? The problem with free circulation papers is you're not sure who is reading them. Are you distributing 30,000 copies because 30,000 people want to read it, because you can print 30,000 copies and leave it on 30,000 doorsteps where it goes into the cat litter box the next morning?
We decided that for our program we would take the attitude that we are supporting the reading choices of Canadians. The funding we apportion is based on the money that Canadians have decided to invest themselves in buying a magazine, either on a newsstand or through a subscription. So we're offsetting the creative choices of citizens in that way. And because of that, if a magazine spends our funds unwisely or a community newspaper spends it unwisely and loses readers, they'll get less funding from us. They have an incentive to connect in the best possible way with their readers.
The other practical reality is that currently we're looking at funding roughly 900 to 1,000 titles. According to Statistics Canada, there are 2,700 magazines in Canada and 1,300 newspapers. If we expanded to fund all the free circulation titles as well, I would need a 300% budget increase. I don't think this is the best time to ask for that, since I think I know what the answer would be.
So given the reality of--
I think a $75.5 million budget is a substantial one. There is a dilemma, the way I see it. In my riding, there are a lot of local newspapers, and also anglophone papers. The newspapers are monthly or bi-monthly, and they are struggling. They are staffed by volunteers. These free papers don't get any funding. They have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for money, and here I'm seeing that you are actually funding newspapers that are surely very capable of surviving without your funding. I have some hesitation in that respect.
At page 4 of your document, this is under "Aid to Publishers". They have to sell a total of 5,000 copies a year, the exceptions being aboriginal, ethnocultural and official language minority newspapers. What does that mean, exactly? Explain it for me.
:
We fund such an incredibly wide range of titles and such a large ecosystem. We fund very large magazines, which also provide the best pay rates to writers and artists, and we fund a large number of very small titles.
When we set the 5,000 copies per year, one of the reasons was that we had a summative evaluation of the PAP, our programme d'aide aux publications, a few years ago, and it said that administratively we were spending far more time and money administering small amounts of money than it was worth. My smallest recipient in PAP last year was getting, I think, $7.11 for the year.
Coming out of that evaluation and taking that into account, we set the general maximum of $5,000 a year, because lower than that, probably if it sold 5,000 copies a year, a title will probably be getting a grant of $1,000 or less. Under $2,500 a year, it will probably be getting between $500 to $600 a year. And we had roughly 300 files of this size. Taking into account the administrative burden of having another 300 files to manage and the recommendation from our independent evaluation, we decided to set a level of 5,000 copies sold per year.
We made the exception for the official language minority titles and the aboriginal and ethnocultural titles, because even if it's less than $1,000 a year, we recognize that any assistance is worthwhile. That's why we set those levels, and we also provide support through our collective initiatives through associations to try to help the smallest of the small.
Since I don't have a lot of time, I am going to try to go quickly. We needed some clarification on that point.
If the people at Quebecor, and it is in fact Quebecor where I come from, if they make an application for national or local newspapers and say those papers will in fact by funded by your funding, what do you do to check, to make sure, that it is in fact those papers that are being funded, and not Quebecor, the upper level, that is collecting the money? There are a lot of papers published by Quebecor, all over Quebec. Do you do that kind of checking? It's actually very important. If the money stays in one place, the papers lower down are not benefiting from it.
:
[
Member speaks in Mandarin]
[Translation]
It's important to remember on April 1 that Chinese is not an official language of Canada, eh?
[English]
Thank you for your information. C'était très bref. It's very clear and easy for even MPs to understand. I appreciate it very much.
I have several quick questions.
We heard earlier, either from George Bakoyannis or Shelley Robinson, that there was no specific program--I just want to make clear that we're talking about this specific program--that funds the kinds of resources they provide. You heard their testimony. Were you surprised when you heard...?