Rebecca Ings first tuned her radio to the CBC in 1979— the year her first daughter was born. “It helped me keep my sanity,” the 62-year-old says. Twelve years later, in 1991, Ings was busy with three daughters, and the CBC, which had now become her close companion, was being regulated by a brand new piece of legislation.

The Broadcasting Act of 1991—an upgrade from the 1968 version—does many things: lays out broadcasting policy in Canada, defines the regulatory powers of the CRTC, and determines how the CBC operates. But above all, the new Act was designed to encourage Canadian expression and diversity, something Ings isn’t certain it’s accomplished.

“I wouldn’t say it’s not reflecting [Canada’s diversity],” she says. “I would say the complexity of the reflection is a simpler and less detailed and nuanced reflection of our diversity.” Ings, who now works as a psychologist in Fort McMurray, Alta., blames this on the closure of regional CBC offices and the fact much of the public broadcaster’s content is being produced from one central location: Toronto.

This downsizing and centralization was something the Broadcasting Act was supposed to prevent, according to one of the researchers hired in the 1980s to analyze Canadian broadcast policy. Media commentator Gerald Caplan was a member of the Caplan-Sauvageau taskforce—a taskforce established by Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government in 1985. The team, which advocated public sector broadcasting, released a 730-page report a year later, with the recommendations to strengthen the CBC, regulate broadcasting more rigorously, and most importantly, Caplan says, increase government funding to the field.

Excerpt from Marc Raboy’s 1989 report: “Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back: Canadian Broadcasting Policy from Caplan-Sauvageau to Bill C-136″*
Click annotation to see full document

“We had been appointed by a Conservative government and reported to that government,” Caplan says. “Many, probably most, of its members did not share our commitment to public broadcasting. The new Broadcasting Act was developed with that critical difference in play.” Since then, instead of seeing an increase in public subsidies, the CBC has experienced an onslaught of cuts.

While the Broadcasting Act hasn’t protected the CBC financially, as the Caplan-Sauvageau taskforce hoped it would, it has managed to withstand 25 years technological advancement, says one media expert. Dwayne Winseck, a professor of communications at Carleton University in Ottawa and an expert in media policy, says the Act has endured everything the internet has brought about because of its neutral wording.

“It really doesn’t matter if you get your television on the back of a tortoise or the back of the internet,” Winseck says. “If it’s television, then it’ll be treated as such under the Broadcasting Act.”

And that’s why Ings is still able to catch her favourite radio spots despite the shoddy reception in northern Alberta. “I used to tell everyone they weren’t allowed to phone me before 10 o’clock on Saturday mornings because I was listening to ‘The House,’” she says. “Now I can listen whenever I want to, which is gratifying.”

Although Winseck doesn’t see a strong need to create a new Broadcasting Act, he does agree priority needs to be placed on public funding for broadcast content. “We need a CBC, especially as we see the news engine of the private sector newspaper and television journalism be gutted across the country,” he says. “News is a public good… so we need funding for kinds of content that has merit and is important in a democratic and interesting and lively society.”

That kind of content is what long-time listener Ings is hoping will eventually return to the airwaves. “There’s always that question of what would you like and what’s realistic,” she says. “It’s clear the quality of coverage, regional and diverse coverage, and coverage of various points of view have suffered. It’s clear we’re not getting the same.”

History of Broadcast Policy in Canada:

Source: Parliament of Canada and The Canadian Encyclopedia

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*Information on the Caplan-Sauvageau Report: “Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back: Canadian Broadcasting Policy from Caplan-Sauvageau to Bill C-136” https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2719098-Two-Steps.html
Marc Raboy looked at how the recommendations had and hadn’t been used when Bill C-136 was first introduced in 1988. I found out about the Caplan-Sauvageau Report through the Parliamentary debates around Bill C-136: http://parl.canadiana.ca/view/oop.debates_HOC3302_15/782?r=0&s=1
From this link, I was able to determine who the NDP critic for culture and communications was: Ian Waddell. I attempted to reach out to Waddell via LinkedIn to get his take on the broadcasting industry in 2016, but unfortunately I never heard back. This report was helpful because it brought me back right before the Broadcasting Act was actually passed through. It gave me a sense of what broadcasting was like at the time, and made it easier to compare to what’s happening now. There were a lot of cuts to the CBC back then as well, and the Caplan-Sauvageau recommendations wanted to stop that from happening in the future. Unfortunately, they didn’t.

**Graph of CBC cuts via Friends of Canadian Broadcasting
https://www.friends.ca/blog-post/238
The line graph shows the decline in parliamentary funding for the CBC from 1990-2015. I obtained the graph through Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, a non-partisan organization designed to act as a watchdog for Canadian listeners and viewers. I thought the graphs was helpful in visualizing the point all three of my interviews made about cuts to CBC funding. Friends of Canadian Broadcasting used financial reports from the CBC to illustrate the cuts, that while there have been a few increases in government funding, overall, the CBC has seen a drastic decline in public subsidies.