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 [...]
“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 [...]
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 Recognition to [...]
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 [...]
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 Voice to [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.” [...]
If you’ve forgotten, or just need an extra boost to remember, how amazing radio can be, do not miss out on this wonderful radio documentary by Garth Mullins that was broadcast on February 13, 2014, World Radio Day, by Canada’s national public radio broadcaster, CBC.
In 54 very radiophonic minutes Mullins takes us on an ride [...]
February 13, 2014 is the UNESCO World Radio Day – a good day to remind ourselves how important radio and all kinds of communications around the world are. Turn on a radio – remind yourself what a neat wireless device it is. For more info on World Radio Day go here.
(P.S. – Yes, I know [...]
Wednesday (May 15, 2013) Radio Canada International launched a mobile version of its website, after RCI director Helene Parent convened staff to a late morning meeting to showcase the new version, and to bring employees up-to-date on RCI news.
The presentation was almost cancelled, since the RCI website was off-line after the server hosting it (the [...]
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 [...]
BREAKING: 6:45PM Ottawa 22:45UTC today CBC and RCI directors to explain 80% budget cut at Senate Committee hearing in Ottawa http://tinyurl.com/cvgwyy2 Radio Canada International
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BREAKING NEWS: Conservative Senator Hugh Segal spoke in the Canadian Senate yesterday, October 25, about the 80% cut to Radio Canada International’s budget, and reiterated his intention to have a Senate Committee ask questions of management about the cuts.
You can read his comments here
We’ll have more details about this later.
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And don’t forget the petition [...]
Many thanks to U.S. listener and RCI fan Thomas Witherspoon of Ears To Our World (ETOW) for getting this petition out to stop the dismantling of Canada’s only international broadcasting site, the transmitter site in Sackville, New Brunswick. Click on the photo below or this link for details. Thanks to all who have already signed [...]
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See updates below – In the next few days the transmission lines that allow Canada to broadcast to the world will be taken down one by one. For more than 67 years Radio Canada International’s shortwave transmitters have guaranteed that Canada’s voice would be heard despite the Cold War, despite natural disasters, and Internet blocking. [...]
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We’ve been quiet for a while, re-grouping, dealing with the tough situation at Radio Canada International after our 80% budget cut. But we haven’t been totally quiet. Radio New Zealand has just (August 6) broadcast an interview by RNZ’s Bryan Crump with RCI Action Committee Spokesperson Wojtek Gwiazda:
Thanks to Thomas at The SWLing Post for [...]
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Please join us in this new project: “RCI – WE WILL NOT ‘REST IN PEACE’ PHOTO PROJECT – RCI, RIP ? NON !
You have been so generous with your time, in reading, and commenting and supporting us. We are now into our fourth (!) week without radio broadcasting. We’re not happy about this. We don’t [...]
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