A7

Rod Allen

Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

1 Comment(s)

I am gratified to report today that if no one else reads my rants about Canada's Natural Governing Broadcaster, we have at least one reader in the CBC.

Yesterday, a CBC operative responded to my complaint posted in these pages earlier this week that the CBC still hasn't responded to the request we made about a year ago, under the federal Access To Information Act (ATIA) for a detailed account of the publicly-funded broadcaster's 2008 budget of $1.1 billion.

I really hate to review all the responses from the CBC over the past year but I feel compelled to at least give a brief review because heck, that's a lot of money.

Just about a year ago the local CBC started pressing the municipal government of Moncton to release the individual salaries of its employees, with names attached. Their argument was that because the city is a publicly-funded institution, the public has the right to know not only the salaries, but who is making exactly what.

Since the CBC is also funded by taxes, we here at the newspaper feel the public also has the right to know the exact same information from the CBC.

There has been a good deal of back-and-forth since then, but the most recent responses from the CBC illustrate the tale I want to tell today.

Although we paid our five bucks for the information, as required under the ATIA, the CBC told us they also wanted $550 as a 'research fee' before they coughed up. That was this summer.

Now right about this time, Radio-Canada, the French-language branch of the CBC, called us looking for some information from our news archives and strangely enough, our estimate of the cost perfectly matched the CBC's ATIA 'research fee,' so we offered a trade, even-up.

That was the last we heard of it until about a month ago when we called them up to ask how our ATIA application was going.

Their reply was that they "assumed" we were no longer interested in the application because we hadn't paid the $550, so they "abandoned" our request, but the fact is they never responded to our offer of an 'information trade.'

Yesterday, we heard from them again, more or less apologizing for the misunderstanding and informing us our request is now active again and we don't even have to pay another five dollars.

But, we still have to pay the $550.

But, we still haven't got an answer to our reasonable offer for a trade.

Now, maybe it looks like we're playing a bit of a game here folks, but gosh darn it, I too am a taxpayer and I think I might be getting the run-around from this publicly-funded organization, which just this week, complained through its Chairman Tim Casgrain that it is getting too many RTA requests -- 150 already this year.

Chairman Tim even complains that most of them are coming from other news organizations and he feels that because these other news organizations are rivals of the CBC, they are abusing the RTA to put their competitor in a bad light.

I find that odd in a variety of ways. The first being that the CBC can hardly call the rest of us competition, since they don't have to worry about making money to cover production costs.

It's also odd to hear the head of a huge organization, one of the principle objectives of which is to gather news, complaining about other news gatherers trying to gather news about it.

But, put all that aside because the mother of all oddities in this is that Chairman Tim has the gall to complain at all, given this year's annual report from federal Information Commissioner Robert Marleau, released in May.

Marleau reported that his office had received 536 complaints about the CBC in fiscal 2007-2008, more than any other department or agency of government, and that more than 90 per cent of those which had been investigated to that point were found to be valid.

Most of those complaints were about delays in responding to requests under ATIA, reported Marleau. Well sir, you can add ours to your long list of complaints, even though the CBC's 2008 budget is pretty well spent by now and we'll soon have to start the whole process over again for 2009.

But even if we never get the numbers, I still think $1.1 billion is a lot of money to pay for a 'government-owned news organization,' especially when put in the context of some of Canada's other publicly-funded ventures such as our war effort in Afghanistan.

I mentioned that in my last column on this subject earlier this week and have to apologize for publishing an incorrect figure.

The expenditure of $848.6 million is what is projected for this budgetary year, not for the entire war effort, but I think the figure still raises a valid point.

We will pay about $250 million more for the CBC this year than we will to supply all our soldiers and civilian support staff in Afghanistan with the support they need to survive, as well as their individual salaries in which, by the way, I'm not very interested.

That, at least in my opinion, based on what I saw for myself over there recently, is money well spent.

* Rod Allen is an assistant managing editor with The Times & Transcript.