RAC Admin
Two days after our open letter to the Prime Minister and three of his ministers (see here), Shaun Poulter, the Executive Director of Strategy, Public Affairs, and Government Relations for our public broadcaster and RCI’s administrator, CBC/Radio-Canada, wrote an email to some of the signatories of the open letter.
It appears that signatories whose email addresses were public, including that of RCI Action Committee spokesperson, Wojtek Gwiazda, received a form letter because “I saw that you had added your name to a letter calling for a halt on CBC/Radio-Canada’s planned changes” to Radio Canada International. The letter sought to make sure signatories had “all the information you need about the service” because “There has been some confusion over what we’re doing…” The letter copied the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Foreign Affairs Minister, and the Canadian Heritage Minister.
The next day, February 18, 2021, our spokesperson sent the Committee’s reply.
Since neither CBC nor the government has shown any movement on our appeal to stop the implementation of the new CBC policy taking RCI away from its core mandate of programming for external audiences, we felt it was important to make this letter public, and our response to it.
The following text is the reply. The original text of the CBC’s Shaun Poulter is in blue italics.
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Dear Mr Poulter,
Thank you very much for your email, which you shared with me, and some of the other signatories to our open letter. Thank you also for sharing it with the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Foreign Affairs Minister and the Canadian Heritage Minister.
We are appreciative of the fact that you wanted to share your perspective.
What follows is a response to your email. It does not address every comment you made but will help us all to be on the same page.
Hello,
I wanted to reach out to you because I saw that you had added your name to a letter calling for a halt on CBC/Radio-Canada’s planned changes to Radio-Canada International. There has been some confusion over what we’re doing and I wanted to make sure you have all the information you need about the service.
First I would like to correct the way you referred to Radio Canada International. Perhaps this was a typo? There is no hyphen between Radio and Canada. Order in Council 2012-0775, states in English and in French, the name of our international service is “Radio Canada International.”
First, we are not changing the mandate of RCI. It remains an international service projecting Canada, Canadian stories and Canadian perspectives, to the world. That has not changed.
A reading of the CBC press release of December 3, 2020 would suggest otherwise. Within the outline of all the ways CBC will “modernize” RCI there is no mention of an international audience.
There is also no mention of international audiences in “Radio Canada International’s transformation is focused on three key areas:”
And there is no mention of international audiences in the final paragraph of the press release:
“By becoming more relevant, more visible or more widely available in the languages spoken by the largest number of new Canadians, the new offering will allow Radio Canada International to better connect and engage with its target audience. RCI will also make all this content freely available to interested ethnic community media.”
In fact, this last paragraph confirms what we have said, the new transformation very clearly puts the focus of RCI on a target audience in Canada, which is not part of Order in Council 2012-0775.
What has changed is the way people around the world today access news about Canada.
Once, RCI on shortwave was the only way to get news about Canada. Today it is through the Internet.
Radio Canada International has been on the Internet since the mid 1990s at the same time as CBC. We have successfully used the Internet since then, independently of the CBC.
The challenge we have is that our international audiences are overwhelmingly using our traditional websites, CBC.ca and Radio-Canada.ca to reach us, bypassing RCI.
It is difficult to react to this statement. How much of this is Canadians abroad, and how much is non-Canadians, RCI’s international audiences?
The number of weekly visits to the RCI site from outside of Canada is less than 0.05% of outside visits to CBC.ca or Radio-Canada.ca. Inside Canada, it’s less than 0.01%.
Again, are these Canadians abroad? Also we are not quite sure about the importance of this statement. CBC’s budget is more than a billion dollars, RCI’s is about $2 million. We might be able to raise those figures you mentioned if we were better funded.
We are trying to change that by increasing the visibility of RCI with a home page presence on CBCNews.ca and Radio-Canada.ca, along with a languages portal page, in addition to adding it to the CBC News and Radio-Canada Info mobile apps. In this way, RCI’s international reach will be increased, not decreased, by our proposed changes.
How will international audiences know where to find RCI within the CBC and Radio-Canada websites? And why are RCI’s existing mobile apps being deleted? As is stated in the CBC press release: “the service’s five existing apps will be deleted.”
We are also going to increase the amount of content offered on RCI by using more of the great content already produced by our journalists at CBC and Radio-Canada and adapting it for international audiences. RCI staff will also begin offering weekly podcasts tailored to each language.
How is firing two of the three people in each language service, going to increase content offered by RCI? Surely you would agree, three people can produce more content than one person?
How is translating and adapting CBC and Radio-Canada content better than having trained international broadcasters who create content for their target audience?
How is firing all three English and all three French host-producers going to increase programming for international audiences?
And you point out that under the new policy there will be one podcast per language per week under the new policy. How is that better than what RCI does right now? Each language section produces 18 audio reports per week.
Finally, on languages, we are going to be able to offer content in two additional languages, Tagalog and Punjabi, in addition to the English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Mandarin already offered. We are also adding a reading option in traditional Chinese.
