On May 1, 2013, the director of Radio Canada International (RCI) Hélène Parent and her boss Hubert Lacroix, the president of Canada’s national radio and television public broadcaster CBC/Radio-Canada were before a Canadian senate committee to explain the 80% budget cut to RCI. Lacroix made the opening statement before the Senate Standing Committee on Transport […]
“It pains me to hear that RCI will be leaving SW in June. Over the years I’ve counted on RCI to keep me connected with home, be it during my travels in Europe, Asia, and even the depths of the Amazon. Most of those areas have no access to the internet. I vividly recall during […]
In 2002 the Association of North American Radio Clubs (ANARC) awarded the RCI Action Committee with a Certificate of Recognition for our work in defending Radio Canada International. Here’s the text of the certificate: Certificate of Recognition for the RCI Action Committee The Association of North American Radio Clubs proudly presents a group Certificate of […]
From the CBC Archives: Broadcast Date: Feb. 25, 1945 The Second World War is winding down in Europe, but Canada’s new international shortwave radio service is just getting started. From its studios in Montreal and a web of shortwave transmission towers in Sackville, N.B., the service targets both Canadian and foreign listeners. In this inaugural […]
February 2008 – Action Committee spokesperson suspended! Radio Canada International tries to “muzzle” communications union which represents RCI employees The Syndicat des communications de Radio-Canada (FNC-CSN) is outraged by and condemns the three day suspension without pay of one of its union stewards, Wojtek Gwiazda. For years he has defended the international mandate of Canada’s […]
On March 26, 1982 RCI inaugurated its Ottawa bureau. RCI Director Betty Zimmerman (fourth from left) with staff: three English and three French journalists. At the time, they were all kept very busy covering the nation’s capital. In 2010, one of the two (!) journalists of our reduced Ottawa bureau was sent to the city […]
Study says RCI should not be integrated into the domestic service, the CBC/Radio-Canada In October 1996, the Canadian component of KPMG, a accounting, tax and professional firm, released a report on RCI commissioned by the domestic radio and television service, CBC. The report came out at a time when RCI’s financial future was unsure. The […]
An overview of the issues involved in RCI’s international mandate. November/December, 2007 – Questions about the international mandate of Radio Canada International (RCI) were once again raised at a parliamentary committee as it prepares to issue a report on Canada’s public broadcaster CBC/Radio-Canada. The public broadcaster is responsible for RCI. And according to Canada’s Broadcasting […]
Ottawa, 11 June 2003 – In a massive report on broadcasting in Canada called “Our Cultural Sovereignty”, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage described RCI as “an essential international service.” Among its 97 recommendations the Committee called on the “appropriate department [to] review the mandate of Radio Canada International, with a view […]
Below is what our Committee submitted to the Canadian Heritage Committee in 2001 in an attempt to protect the international mandate of Radio Canada International. (You can see the Standing Committee’s response here.) Radio Canada International and the Broadcasting Act: The Need to Protect RCI’s International Mandate and its Operational Autonomy A submission to the […]
The administrators of RCI and our domestic service CBC/Radio-Canada make the decisions, but they are also responsible to Canadians through Parliament and the ruling Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. We need for these administrators, politicians and the media in Canada and in your country to know that the cuts to RCI programming are […]
It’s hard to believe it’s so long: March 22, 1991 when our reality at RCI changed so radically. In December of 1990, our parent company the public broadcaster CBC/Radio-Canada announced that the international service would be eliminated unless the federal government paid for it (CBC actually had up until then budgeted about $20 million for […]
On February 2, 2004 we had another “briefing meeting” about what was about to happen at RCI. Here’s a portion of what I wrote back then on the RCI Action Committee web site: The briefing meeting is over. We’ve been told about the “repositioning”, feels more like shuffling the chairs on the Titanic. A number […]
From the beginning of June till mid October 2001, the RCI newsroom was empty on weekends…….no journalist and no announcer producer was permitted to work at keeping the world up to date on Canadian news on the weekend. All RCI produced newscasts, and all live programming were cut as part of the “Redeployment Plan that […]
On May 25, 2007, the union representing most of RCI’s employees (Syndicat des communications de Radio-Canada) called on parliament’s Canadian Heritage committee to protect RCI’s mandate saying “there will be nothing preventing the CBC from changing its international service” unless “the Broadcasting Act has been amended to protect RCI’s Mandate.” See testimony parliamentary committee here.
The 2003 report highlighted the following from the RCI Action Committee submission: “The Broadcasting Act must outline RCI’s mandate to “attract an international audience” and develop “international awareness of Canada” [the CBC’s Corporate Policy No. 14]. It must specifically oblige RCI to prepare such programming in both official languages, English and French. There should be […]
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Being Canada’s Voice to the World and explaining Canada to the world, is at the heart of what Radio Canada International (RCI) is all about, and so it’s more than a little surprising to see how that mandate is being dismantled. For example, CBC/Radio-Canada, Canada’s national public broadcaster is obliged to maintain the international service. […]
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