CBC’s former English-language boss tells Senate government needs to clarify broadcaster’s fuzzy mandate

The Conservatives under Prime Minister Stephen Harper are not particular fans of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, but one of its former bosses says it still has a responsibility to spell out clearly what the public broadcaster's role is.

Richard Stursberg, former chief of the network's English broadcasting, spent two hours Tuesday testifying before a Senate committee reviewing the CBC's operations and challenges.

He called the CBC's current strategy "completely incoherent," which he blamed on a vaguely outlined mandate that makes it hard to measure its performance, Postmedia News reports.

“It tries to do a little of this, a little of that to try and satisfy all these different constituencies . . . its strategy is ultimately, completely incoherent,” Stursberg told the Senate's transport and communications committee. “You can’t hold the CBC to account when there’s no consensus on what it’s trying to do.”

It's up to the government to define what it thinks the CBC should and shouldn't do, allow the Crown corporation to produce a strategy to carry it out, and provide the CBC with necessary funding to do it, he said.

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The CBC does in fact have a mandate, spelled out in the two-decade-old Broadcasting Act, to "provide radio and television services incorporating a wide range of programming that informs, enlightens and entertains."

That programming, the mandate says, should be "predominantly and distinctively Canadian," and reflect the country and its regions to both national and regional audiences.

Among other things, it should "actively contribute to the flow and exchange of cultural expression," "contribute to shared national consciousness and identity" and "reflect the multicultural and multiracial nature of Canada." And it should do this in both French and English.

The requirement to serve two distinct groups and widely diverse audiences across the country has created an identity crisis for the CBC, Stursberg told the committee.

The broadcaster is getting just over a billion dollars from Ottawa this year, but Stursberg says that's seven times less per capita than the revered British Broadcasting Corp. gets, despite covering a much larger country with multiple time zones in two official languages.

“The cultural challenge is so much greater here, and yet the money available to try to address it is so much less,” said Stursberg.

He recommended CBC stop broadcasting sports and cut local TV news, concentrating instead on international news and investigative journalism, Postmedia News reports. About three-quarters of the resources of CBC and French-language Radio-Canada go into news, the committee was told.

CBC's English service did cut local TV newscasts once before but soon revived them in most markets after a public backlash.

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Stursberg, whose father Peter Stursberg was a CBC frontline war correspondent during the Second World War, became executive vice-president broadcaster's English operations in 2004 after a stint at Telefilm Canada.

In his controversial time at CBC, Stursberg looked for ways to revive its sagging audience numbers with programs such as Dragon's Den, Battle of the Blades and MVP, a soapy look at life in pro hockey.

He promoted Rick Mercer's comedy show and had notable successes with dramas such as The Border and Heartland, and comedies such as Little Mosque on the Prairie.

But he couldn't lure enough Canadian eyeballs away from slicker American imports or produce the kind of heavyweight dramas, like The Sopranos, increasingly available on specialty cable channels in an audience-fragmented TV universe.

Stursberg was unceremoniously fired in 2010 and two years later published a bitter memoir of his experience entitled Tower of Babel: Sins, Secrets and Successes Inside the CBC.

The book landed to mixed reviews. Journalist and author Peter C. Newman said Stursberg's departure might have been the CBC's last gasp at creative relevance.

"His tenure may well have been the CBC's final burst of lustre and eloquence, now out of favour with the government, facing newly enriched broadcasting rivals and stuck with having to kowtow to inferior superiors," Newman wrote in the Globe and Mail.

"Richard Stursberg's rage dominates his crackling autobiography – as does his grief for the lost network's unfulfilled promise."

But Daniel Francis, writing on Rabble.ca, hammered Stursberg for his "condescending, at times sneering, attitude toward his own workforce," and his dismissive attitude toward the CBC's governing board of directors.

Most of all, Francis criticized what he saw as a misguided fixation with audience size and ratings.

"Stursberg wanted to make the CBC popular by making it look like everyone else," he wrote. "But if it becomes like everyone else, then why bother to have it at all?

"The conundrum seems to be that if the CBC accepts Stursberg’s standard of success, it may be ensuring its own irrelevance and ultimate demise."