Senate Committee — TRCM — Brief — emailletter_shaunasylvester_e

TRCM / Brief / emailletter_shaunasylvester_e

Senate Committees

BRIEF Date: November 16, 2024 From: Shauna Sylvester, Vancouver BC To: Clerk of the Committee, Angus Wilson Re: Study on CBC Regional Radio, Television and Online Services Dear Senate Committee, I am writing to provide feedback on CBC’s Radio and Online Services with a perspective from Vancouver, British Columbia. I do not own a TV so I will only provide brief comments on CBC TV’s services. I am a committed listener to CBC Radio 1. It is like a friend who I welcome in daily into my home.

I wake up to the sound of Stephen Quinn’s voice with the Early Edition and I go to bed after being thoughtfully provoked by Nahlah Ayed’s Ideas program. I love laughing to the Debaters and Gavin Crawford, catching up on federal politics with The House, thinking deeply about the world with What on Earth with Laura Lynch, learning about science with Quirks and Quarts or listening to indigenous leaders from all walks of life with Roseanna Dearchild. CBC Radio gives me a sense of what it means to be Canadian. It has opened my door to the world, to communities from sea-to-sea-to-sea and to my own backyard.

It has been a lifeline during Covid when I was living in lockdown in Point Roberts, WA with my American husband and it has helped me immeasurably in my work in foreign policy, communications, dialogue and social and environmental change over decades. The regional and local services of CBC have been critical in educating me about key issues in my community. CBC local news, regionally focused programming and issue-based programming have helped to shine the spotlight on the parts of my community I don’t necessarily see or understand.

I depend on CBC journalists’ fact-based and ethical daily reporting of events, their analysis of issues like housing, economic development, health care, municipal and provincial politics etc. and their storytelling about people, food, new innovations, arts and culture. I can’t imagine what my world would be like if I couldn’t depend on CBC to introduce me to new ideas and new events. On a more practical note --- CBC regional radio and online services are essential in times of emergencies.

They are our family’s go to source for information on storms, wildﬁres, ﬂoods, heat domes, king tides, earthquakes, shootings and emergencies. They are also our number one source for information on local, provincial and federal elections because they provide consistent, fair and ethical reporting through election campaign periods and most importantly, through the period of vote counting.

If it wasn’t for the calm, consistent updating of voters in our last provincial election which demanded a week of patient vote counting before we knew the ﬁnal result, I don’t think voters would have trusted our provincial electoral process. As our public broadcaster, CBC is held to a high standard in demonstrating the best of media and elections reporting, and they are the gold standard by which other broadcasters aspire.

If there was anything I might suggest for improving our regional CBC programming, it would be to really look at our population base and better reﬂect the stories from all sectors of our communities. We are deﬁnitely making up for lost time in reporting on reconciliation and that is important, but I don’t hear the same kind of intentionality in our reporting on other communities in BC. I’d like to learn more about my other neighbours – across Metro and in remote communities. I’d like to hear more programming that is youth-designed and developed.

I’d like to get more insights from owners of small businesses from outside of the lower mainland, or hear about people working the front lines in some of the sectors that lead our economy. We aren’t just a resource economy and there are so many people doing diﬀerent and innovative things in the green economy, the creative economy, in transportation, food, social enterprizes etc. To strengthen our democracy, I also think we need to hear more constructive (not gotcha) journalism with diverse thinkers.

I don’t mind the morning political and journalism panels, but they are so old in their formats – debate, predictable commentary and sometime smug disassociated opinions (something I used to love in my 30s when I worked in media, but now ﬁnd deeply cynical). I keep wondering what can we learn from other media jurisdictions? How can we innovate how we communicate public beneﬁt journalism without being overly “woke” or earnest?

I formerly ran an international media development organization (the Institute for Media, Policy and Civil Society) which worked globally in media and elections, media and peacebuilding and women in media. I was proud to hold CBC up to the world as a model to emulate, and to include many CBC journalists and technical staﬀ as trainers in our work in conﬂict and post-conﬂict zones. CBC Radio and our online services are a regional and national institution that need to be protected, supported and enhanced.

I will also add CBC TV to this list because so much of the reporting is shared across platforms and TV brings the world visually into our homes. Although the excessive advertising on all TV platforms is the reason why I stopped watching TV, I still look to CBC TV at critical moments, like election night, during a major world event or to follow an important breaking story. I hope the Senate looks carefully at how they can support our public broadcaster. We need our local and regional news and programming. Without CBC, I can’t imagine what would hold our communities together.

It is a bridge to learning, to understanding, to seeing and celebrating our communities in all their diversities, which is critical to building our public square. Without such a focal point for accurate, fact-based and ethical reporting, I fear that the deep misinformation and consequent polarization we see in the US, will be the dominant media landscape in Canada. Thank you for your focused study and please contact me should you require any further information. Shauna Sylvester

Document details

Collection	Senate Committees
Citation	TRCM / Brief / emailletter_shaunasylvester_e
Type	committee
Volume / chapter	441 / Brief / emailletter_shaunasylvester_e
Language	en
Format	pdf
Source	COMM_SEN
Identifier	64916c36c73cc1ed1124774271b1c14fa92a6288

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