Book Review: Canada Lives Here: The Case for Public Broadcasting, by Wade Rowland

Abstract

Wade Rowland Canada Lives Here: The Case for Public Broadcasting. Westmount, Quebec, Canada: Linda Leith Publishing, 2015. 240 pp.Canada Lives Here is a call for action to the Canadian people and their government. Wade Rowland draws upon his many years of experience in Canadian public television news and management to make a strong case supporting the importance of a robust public service broadcasting system to Canadian culture and democracy. However, Canada Lives Here also has an important message that goes beyond the borders of Canada. The message is that the role of the public broadcaster is to ensure that people in a democratic society can learn about important issues, engage culture and the arts, and constructively tackle the issues facing their nation.For Rowland, this role can only be fully achieved through noncommercial media. He asserts that crafters of necessary illusions and the manufacturers of consent theoretically do not influence noncommercial media, unlike their commercial counterparts (p. 2). Rowland is quite harsh on commercial broadcasters throughout this book, and he sometimes glosses over the fact that the governments with direct or indirect control of public broadcasting's purse strings may also have points of view that they hope will be expressed. However, the essence of this point is well-taken.Rowland believes that public broadcasting in Canada is in a state of decline. He supports this thesis by taking the reader on a historical tour of the origins of public broadcasting in Canada, through several administrations. Some of those administrations nurtured public broadcasting and others, through a number of measures, including budget cutting and administrative reorganization, brought the service to the brink of extinction.All public television systems receive some sort of funding from their country's government or a quasi-governmental agency like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in the United States. But ultimately the actual funds come from the people, and in the end, public broadcasting is expected to give back in the form of high quality programming that is beneficial to society. To do this effectively, a public broadcasting system must be adequately resourced. Rowland argues that Canadian public broadcasting lags far behind its European counterparts in the per capita subsidies at $28CAD. For example, he notes that in Norway's public broadcasting, funding is $180CAD per capita, while Germany's is $124 per capita and the United Kingdom is $97CAD per capita. As a point of information, in 2011, the United States spent $4USD per capita for public broadcasting (http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/03/ Funding-Public-Media-How-The-US-Compares-To-The-Rest-of-the-world/).Rowland worries that a combination of a dwindling subsidy, the migration of some heretofore public TV programs to commercial networks-including NHL Hockey-and a sense by some regulators that terrestrial broadcast television might no longer be necessary means that it could be replaced by less-expensive-to-operate online media services. …