The cozy world of Hockey Night in Canada and the CBC hasn’t existed for some time

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“Major shock,” the headline on the CBC’s website announced the other day. “Canadians grapple with loss of CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada tradition.”

“Canadians are grappling with the loss of a cultural touchstone,” it explained, “after CBC announced Tuesday its Hockey Night in Canada broadcasts have come to an end.” It quoted one loss-grappling Canadian, Craig Baird, host of the Canadian History Ehx podcast. “It’s not just a show,” he said, “it’s a part of our culture. It’s woven into the fabric of Canada.”

The story went on to describe the “massive” cultural impact of HNIC “in its nearly century-long run,” noting that “a lot of Canadians bought their first TV sets so they could watch the games.” The show was “credited with inventing the instant replay,” while “its classic theme song was often referred to as Canada’s ‘second national anthem.’ ”

Opinion: The end of Hockey Night in Canada is no tragedy for collective identity – just look at Quebec

I read the story with mounting alarm. No more televised hockey? At night? In Canada? Or at least, no more Hockey Night in Canada? After its nearly century-long run? Why, it’s woven into the fabric of Canada!

Well, no. As the story eventually got around to explaining, Hockey Night in Canada is not going anywhere. It’s just not going to be on the CBC. Indeed, the corporation lost the rights to broadcast NHL hockey in 2013, when they were acquired by Rogers Sportsnet.

The only reason it has still been seen on CBC is by virtue of a sublicensing deal it signed with Rogers, allowing it to simulcast Rogers-produced games on Saturday nights. That’s what just expired, as the two were unable to agree on a price to continue with the deal.

Rogers also acquired the rights to use the HNIC brand in the same 2013 deal. But it didn’t acquire the rights to the show’s legendary theme song: the CBC had already lost those to Bell/CTV/TSN in 2008. So Hockey Night in Canada has for many years been seen without its theme song, which is now heard exclusively on non-HNIC broadcasts – neither on Rogers nor the CBC but rather TSN (and its Bell stablemate RDS), which notwithstanding Rogers’s ownership of national broadcast rights, continues to broadcast in regional markets.

Also, you can see a lot of hockey on American cable channels, if you get them.

I have possibly belaboured this point, only to establish that the simple world depicted in the CBC story, in which the CBC and HNIC and the second national anthem and hockey and Canada are all more or less coterminous – the whole nation gathered together around the electronic hearth every Saturday night – does not exist and has not existed for some time.

That this is apparently news to some Canadians, not least to some employees of the CBC, is perhaps instructive of the CBC’s current state. Because the whole televisual world in which the CBC was born – a world with a small number of over-the-air broadcast channels, no cable, no satellite, no internet and most important of all, no way of charging viewers directly for the programs they watch – is no longer with us.

In that world, it should be said, there was a case for a public broadcaster, if not to broadcast popular, mass-market fare like hockey – in Canada! – then certainly more niche programming. Why? Because the only other way to pay for programs, in those far-off days of television’s technological infancy, was to hook them up to advertising: to charge advertisers for audiences, rather than audiences for programs.

But advertisers naturally wanted the largest possible audiences for their money. With only a few channels available, that led to a lot of programming on private television that looked alike: bland, inoffensive, crowd-pleasing.

It was, in short, a textbook case of market failure. Most markets don’t operate this way. In most consumer markets, you can find a vast range of different offerings, catering to every conceivable kind of taste: high or low, niche or mainstream. The case for the CBC, and for broadcast regulation, à la the CRTC, was to recreate that kind of diversity on the airwaves.

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Whether either succeeded at it is a different matter. As the HNIC saga illustrates, the CBC has had a long history of confusion over just what its mandate was. If it was to provide the sort of broadly popular programs that would “bring the country together” – programs like, well, Hockey Night in Canada – the private broadcasters could do that. Or if it was to produce the sorts of high-cost, high-quality, highbrow programming that the BBC or PBS specialize in, well, where were they?

Things only got worse as time went on, and the CBC, unable to persuade the public or the politicians that its production record warranted giving it still more funding every year – the corporation’s argument was rather that it should be given more funding because its programs were so lousy – started to rely more and more heavily on advertising to defray its expenses, negating its whole raison d’être as a public broadcaster. Hence its recent descent into productions such as Family Feud Canada, even as its share of the viewing audience has continued to dwindle.

Opinion: CBC needs wholesale change, not just a tweaking of its mandate

The point of this isn’t to dump on the CBC. Every television network has seen its market share shrink in recent years, as the number of networks has multiplied, first through cable, then via satellite, and finally via the internet: the streaming revolution. But that’s the point. This is an entirely different television world than the one that gave us Foster Hewitt. There is no more spectrum scarcity. There are hundreds, no thousands of channels – maybe even millions, depending on how you define the term – many of them charging viewers directly for their programs.

As a consequence, there is now a dazzling diversity of content available, not just from within Canada but around the world, much of it now made at a fraction of the costs that broadcast television used to entail. A lot of it is crap, but then 95 per cent of everything is crap. But there’s also an unprecedented quantity of quality, as there is of the niche programming that the “market” supposedly will not provide. There’s simply no necessity for public broadcasting any more, or not for the kind of all-inclusive, flagship-network fare that the CBC has been expected to provide.

Neither is there any necessity for the rest of the apparatus of busywork that surrounds it, the CRTC and the Canadian content rules and the granting agencies and the cross-subsidy deals whereby the networks are guaranteed fat profits by the government in return for funding Canadian programs which somehow never materialize. The market for television is no longer failing. The market is providing, often in the teeth of the institutions that are supposed to “save” us from it.

Sometimes it seems like television has never been worse: all those inane reality shows and game shows and such. More often it seems like it’s never been better, with intelligent comedies and absorbing dramas of a quality we never used to expect to see on TV. Both can be true, because TV is divided into two different viewing universes: on the one hand, the legacy networks, still pumping out programs for free, if not over the air, and on the other the pay channels and streamers. The bad stuff is almost all on free TV. The good stuff is all on pay. A paying audience, it turns out, is a demanding, discerning one, that wants its money’s worth.

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And therein lies the CBC’s opportunity. In its present form it is caught between two masters: one eye on pleasing the political class, on which it depends for the bulk of its funding, the other eye on pleasing the advertisers, who supply the rest. The one group it doesn’t seem to have an eye for is the audience, the people who watch – or don’t – its programs. Solution (yes, I’ve made this case before): put the CBC on pay. Let it charge viewers a subscription fee for its programming – willing viewers, willing subscribers – and be accountable to them. And only to them: eliminate all the rest, the public funding and the advertising together.

That’s a challenge, to be sure: making programs that people want to watch and are willing to pay for. But what a splendid challenge! Not only would this be better for the long-suffering taxpayers, or the even longer-suffering viewers. It’s the best possible outcome for the CBC itself, and the many talented people who work there: no longer in bondage to their political or corporate masters, but free at long last to turn their focus to their audience, not as servants but as partners in the creative process.

So much of the discussion around the CBC has been divided between protecting it – in exactly the same form, unaltered, as circa 1968 – and punishing it. The Conservatives have done no one any favours by their talk of “defunding” the CBC, especially given their stated rationale: not as a matter of good public policy, a needed update to an outmoded financial and institutional arrangement, but as revenge for being mean to them.

The point shouldn’t be to defund the CBC but to “re-fund” it: to change the business model, and the set of incentives it implies. We may well still want to maintain a public broadcaster. But it needn’t be a publicly funded broadcaster. We may even want to maintain an element of public funding, for particular purposes where a case can still be made. But general-interest television programming isn’t one of them.

Neither is radio, where much the same technological revolution has taken place. Neither is French-language programming: if there is not quite the same multiplicity of channels as in the English-language universe, there are plenty enough to make the case against public funding, and in favour of viewer funding.

This isn’t only about broadcasting. One of the last purposes left to the CBC’s parliamentary appropriation has been to serve as a pretext for public funding of our business, the formerly private newspaper industry. Supposedly our own much-documented financial woes are the fault of having to compete with a publicly funded rival, and not our own rather-less-documented mistakes as an industry.

It’s bunk, of course, but it’s the kind of bunk that has helped us help ourselves to public funding, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars annually – at first pitched as selective and temporary, increasingly universal and permanent. Perhaps, if we can pry the CBC’s lips off the public teat, we might one day even be able to wean the newspapers.