CBC/Radio-Canada’s Hubert Lacroix

PREMIUM: Hubert Lacroix, the president and CEO of CBC/Radio-Canada, tells World Screen that the company no longer thinks of producing content for different platforms—rather it thinks of telling stories that can move fluidly from one to another.

WS: How has CBC/Radio-Canada contributed to the Canadian media landscape?
LACROIX: Everything revolves around the mandate that we have, which is all about informing, enlightening and entertaining Canadians. When you translate these verbs into actions and output and content, you’ll see that for the last 80 years we have been offering Canadians absolutely fearless reporting about what’s going on in our country and around the world. We look at the world through Canadian eyes, and we bring the world to Canadians. On the entertainment side, we offer dramas that showcase our country, our writers and our actors. In comedy, our values are different than those of our friends to the south. It’s political satire that speaks to people about what’s going on in our country.

Then it’s all about Canadian stories. We have a big country, and we want to make sure that the cultural lives of people across the country are impacted by our content. We want to tell stories about people who are in British Columbia so that people in Newfoundland can understand what is going on, and the same is true for Quebec and our offerings in French and in English. We think that our contribution has allowed us to carve out a place in the Canadian identity conversation, because when you talk about what CBC/Radio-Canada is all about, everybody identifies us with being in the social fabric of this country because we tell these stories. We have 27 TV stations and 88 radio stations, and we will continue to be deeply rooted in the regions because you can’t be a public broadcaster without that kind of geographic footprint. We broadcast in two languages, and we are strongly committed to this. As a public broadcaster, we have to reflect and respect the fact that we have two official languages, so we need to be able to deliver programming to people in Saskatchewan or Manitoba or Alberta who speak French. In the same way we have to be able to give Canadians who live in Quebec [the same content] in English.

When we broadcast signature events, like the Olympic Games or an election night, they bring Canadians together. This is where we shine brightest: 33 million Canadians, 11 million on our digital platforms, came to us for the Winter Olympics in Sochi. On election night—October 19, 2015—9 million came to us on our digital platforms. It just shows you that not only do we create all of this content, express the culture and enrich the democratic life of Canadians, but we do it in a very modern and completely transformed way.

WS: What are some of the highlights of CBC’s schedule? What draws Canadians together the most?
LACROIX: Two years ago, we made a shift to Canadian programming in prime time. We used to have American programs in prime time that actually led our schedule. We don’t do this anymore; we are completely committed to Canadian content in prime time. We have very strong content, like Murdoch Mysteries, or Heartland or Rick Mercer [the political satirist], who has been such an important piece of our schedule. We have Dragons’ Den, The Nature of Things and 50 Years of the Nature of Things, as well as Marketplace and The Fifth Estate, which are investigative journalism in prime time and are signature programs for us. Among our new shows is Hello Goodbye, which is set in an airport. We have also brought in the best of the rest of world, like Great Barrier Reef with David Attenborough and This Changes Everything, Avi Lewis’s feature documentary. Our new strategy for sports is focused on amateur athletes and the Olympic Games. We were able, with our partners, Bell Media and Rogers, to secure as lead broadcaster the rights to the Olympic Games until 2024, including the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro this year.

Radio will always be a flagship for us, und we are doing well there. If you look at the 26 markets in which there is monitoring of the performances of the different networks, our morning programs are number one in 15 of them, and we are number one, two or three in 25 of them. We are podcasting a lot, and we are changing the way we want our stories to be heard because of that.

WS: How have you remained committed to your mission in an ever more crowded and competitive landscape?
LACROIX: We are all about Canadian content, so I will come back to that point. We focus on and try to differentiate ourselves with great Canadian content and stories. In an environment where viewers and listeners have limitless choices, we go deeply into our communities, into more local and more digital content, and frankly, [this makes us] a more financially sustainable broadcaster. The shift we have made to digital is where we become different. We become the place where conversations start, and Canadians will realize, I hope, that this is a public space; this is where they go for Canadian conversations. That is the differentiating factor between the rest of the world and us.

WS: How have you been making your content available on digital platforms?
LACROIX: It’s all about content, and it’s not about platforms only. What we have seen is that by being so integrated—and yes, some of the choices we have had to make to amalgamate platforms quickly and to have the teams work together have been accelerated because of our really complicated financial situation—this gave us the ability to go from one platform to another in a very fluid fashion. I’ll give you an example. Recently, when the government was debating whether it wanted to invest in education or not, one of our young French reporters, Marie-Eve Tremblay, got all sorts of pictures from teachers of how badly maintained some of the schools are. She then put them together and posted them online, and all of a sudden she started a tsunami of reactions of posted pictures showing the state of some of these schools. That then became a front-page story in the newspapers. It was picked up by our main channel in French. It became a major story. She was asked to come in [to Parliament] and explain what the story was about, and all of a sudden government was intervening. Then other media picked the story up. The story wasn’t led by television. It was a posting in a social-media environment that created the tsunami. That’s how we work now.

WS: How is CBC/Radio-Canada funded?
LACROIX: Sixty-five percent of our funding comes from the government. You have to remember that of the 18 most important public broadcasters in the world, on a per-capita basis, the average investment is C$82 per person. In Canada, the investment of our government in us for that 65 percent is C$28 per person. The BBC gets C$97 per person. That gives you an idea of the discrepancy between the average investment and ours. So to compensate, we have self-generated revenues for the other 35 percent, in the form of advertising, subscriber fees for our specialty networks and all sorts of other miscellaneous revenues, from the rental of our space to the rental of our transmission facilities. That’s how we build our budget.

WS: Why is it essential to continue to receive government funding? What are some of the programs and services that viewers in Canada cannot get anywhere else but from CBC?
LACROIX: The main thing is Canadian content. If you look at what we do in prime time and you look at the business models of our two competitors, CTV and Global—and I respect them, because it’s the only way for them to make money—they acquire U.S. programming and air it in the same windows at the same time as the U.S. broadcasters and then use that for their advertising. They benefit from U.S. networks that are selling their TV signals into our country. We are completely different. If you take CBC/Radio-Canada out of the picture, there is just about no more Canadian content in prime time. For every dollar that CBC/Radio-Canada gets, we generate close to C$3 for the Canadian media industry—actors, screenwriters, producers and everybody else. And we do that by ourselves, to the tune of C$600 million last year. In terms of investment in Canadian content, all of the other broadcasters together invest less than we do. That’s why, if you take us out of the equation, there is no business model for Canadian content. So as soon as you take out the dollars from CBC/Radio-Canada, the industry collapses.

WS: The government has pledged an additional C$150 million in funding a year. Where is that most needed?
LACROIX: We finally have a government that is interested in culture and I applaud that. We haven’t seen yet how those dollars are going to make their way into our budget. It’s all about our Strategy 2020 and our plan to make CBC/Radio-Canada more local, more digital, and more financially sustainable. We are going to continue to invest in new multiplatform content. We want to continue to invest in high-profile events that bring us together. Next year is the 150th anniversary of Canada; we think we have a role to play there. It’s the 375th anniversary of Montreal; we think we have a role to play there, too. We have to bolster our content in prime time, both on radio and on TV, because we have a lot of repeats right now due to the cuts that we have made recently. This is a complicated world, and I think we have to do a little more in international coverage. We’ve had to suffer through years of cuts trying to manage as best we could. We have an opportunity, not only to reinvest in some of the services that we’ve cut—because we didn’t have the money to support them—but to continue to be as efficient as possible. Some of the strategic choices we’ve made in the past are not going to be revisited. One example of that is we’re not going to start bidding for professional sports rights. We are going to continue supporting our strategy in sports and do it through Olympic Games and through events where Canada plays as a country, or when Canadian athletes are in prime time.

WS: What role must television news play in a world of constant, instant information on the internet?
LACROIX: It’s all about content and not about a particular platform. Everything that comes from one of our platforms flows to the others, but not in the same way. Gone are the days when you would have a story or a news clip that would be shown on television, then simply put on the web and on smartphones. Now it doesn’t work like this anymore. You have to tailor the content to the platform and you have to think differently. So, as this is going on, viewers come to us, a public broadcaster, when they want a credible, trustworthy news source, when they want to make sure that content has been vetted through our very, very rigorous journalistic standards and policies—and they are brutally rigorous. We want to make sure that the public gets the right information according to the right facts. We have ombudsmen that actually investigate any complaints from the public. We are the only news organization in the country that works that way, so it’s all about being a trustworthy, reliable news source.

WS: Is there any other aspect of CBC/Radio-Canada that you would like to highlight?
LACROIX: I have to talk about the courage of the people who are in our environment right now, because it’s been a challenge. It’s been a challenge to tell an organization that has 80 years of history—that has led first with radio followed closely by television, then web, and then digital—to start thinking completely differently. We have put mobile as the number one priority, the web is number two, radio is number three and television follows. This mental shift is very difficult for any organization to go through, and we are in the middle of it. We clearly understand that 87 percent of Canadians still watch tele­vision in prime time; they watch 27 hours of television a week, so we can’t forget these people. We understand how successful we are in radio; we have record shares in both French and English radio content. But with limited resources, we have had to change our thinking and realize that digital and the web are the driving forces of the years to come. I have nothing but respect for the people who work in this corporation as it’s trying to reinvent itself. Frankly, the successes we have had recently and the numbers I gave you on Sochi or on election night in 2015 show you how strongly we’ve committed to digital and how important it’s becoming.

WS: Despite the challenges, do you remain committed to leading CBC/Radio-Canada?
LACROIX: It would have been very easy to exit, particularly when [the environment] was difficult. I have stayed on and have two more years to my mandate. I will have been here ten years in 2017. I now see the shift happening. I see the government clearly expressing support for the Canadian public broadcaster. I see our two main media content lines working really well together, and they’ve never been so close. We have reinvented the way we deliver our content, so I think we are going in a good direction but in a very fragile financial environment.