CANADA-COMMUNICATIONS: Radio Canada on chopping block

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Stephen Dale

OTTAWA, Jan 17 1996 (IPS) - Fans and employees are hoping they can stave off the government axe and keep Canada’s international radio service on the air.

If Radio Canada International (RCI) falls silent by Mar. 31, as planned, Canada would be the only major industrialised nation without a global radio service.

Since the government announced in December that a lack of funds will force the death of RCI, employees and friends have frantically lobbied to keep the outfit on the airwaves.

“The fastest, cheapest, and most effective way of getting information around the world is shortwave radio, but apparently the government still doesn’t see its value,” says Wojtek Gwaizda, an announcer-producer who is spearheading the employees’ efforts to preserve RCI.

“Our feeling is that the government must decide as we approach the millennium that, as a nation, one of the things you need to do is talk to the rest of the world,” Gwaizda told IPS.

The cuts are all the more surprising since the radio service appears to have been fulfilling many of the goals outlined in a sweeping Parliamentary review of Canadian foreign policy in 1994. RCI’s shortwave service draws an audience of five million people worldwide with another 10 million for its satellite broadcasts.

“RCI can play an important role in promoting international peace and understanding,” a government statement said last year. “Promoting democracy and human rights, economic and social justice; caring for the environment; safeguarding peace; and respect for diversity are values which RCI is eminently well- placed to project abroad.”

Analysts say RCI is vital to Canadian efforts to promote trade around the world. Critics point to the lavish business missions Canada is mounting, the latest being the current tour of Asia.

“I think it’s absolutely crazy that they want to close RCI,” says Clyde Sanger, communications director at the North-South Institute, an independent Ottawa think-tank.

“The government has acknowledged that these cultural expressions are a good in themselves, and that they are also an aid to trade policy,” he said. “Coming from a government that is obsessed with trade, this decision makes absolutely no sense.”

RCI’s Montreal-based executive director Terry Hargreaves says the service receives about 25,000 letters a year from listeners.

“It’s been our experience that short-wave audiences develop a real feeling of intimacy with the broadcasters,” he said, bemoaning the service’s small budget of some 12 million U.S. dollars a year.

Critics argue that Washington’s Voice of America and the German Deutsche Welle both spend at least 20 times as much on their services. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) World Service radio spends over 17 times as much, while Radio Nederland spends four times as much to broadcast in half as many languages.

There are 126 shortwave services across the globe, 101 of them state-run, with the rest operated by religious organisations. In terms of hours broadcast, RCI ranks 44th among its competitors, behind nations such as Egypt, Ecuador, the Philippines, Swaziland, Ghana, and Guam.

Yet its supporters say that RCI has built a solid following because its news programming is perceived as unbiased.

“RCI is seen as not having any axe to grind, although it obviously doesn’t have the scope of the BBC World Service,” said Sanger.

Gwaizda, the announcer-producer, adds that many people are also interested in Canadian problems — such as English-French conflict in Quebec, and Canadian Aboriginal peoples’ struggle for rights — because they mirror events unfolding elsewhere.

Gwaizda, whose last project was to produce a series of English lessons for listeners in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, also says that RCI’s willingness to look at the negative side of Canadian life tells its audience that its international news is not slanted.

But the broadcaster acknowledges that RCI has lost a significant portion of its audience since budget cuts in 1990.

When its funds were slashed by a third, RCI lost half its staff and replaced many original programmes with others produced for the domestic radio service of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). RCI also reduced the number of languages it broadcast in from 14 to seven.

The North-South Institute has proposed that alternate funding sources be found to keep RCI afloat.

In a letter to the Globe and Mail newspaper, the think-tank suggested that the defence department could pay a portion of RCI’s bills, since Canadian peacekeeping troops use the service as a link with home. It also argues that businesses could buy commercials or blocks of programming time to promote themselves internationally.

But Gwaizda is wary of such a solution.

“Any kind of privatisation or blocks of sponsored programmes send a very mixed message to the world,” he said. “You start stepping into the area of propaganda and undercutting the trust of the audience. It’s our feeling that the government should accept this as a responsibility and assign RCI a protected budget.”

Voices in Canada and abroad have been urging Ottawa to keep RCI alive. Some listeners in China have offered to make donations to save the station. But there is little indication that the government is listening.

“I’m not aware of any specific steps being taken (to save RCI),” a foreign affairs department spokesperson told IPS. “Our minister (Andre Oullette) has said that he hopes it happens. But it’s a question of finding the budget.”