Ian Morrison steps down from watchdog Friends

Ian Morrison, the co-founder of Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, is handing over the reins of the organization after 32 years leading the watchdog. He’ll remain on the board of directors as Daniel Bernhard takes over as executive director and spokesman of the group, which focuses on advocating for a strong public broadcaster and Canadian broadcasting in general. Bernhard was previously president of Toronto consulting company Mushroom Cloud. Morrison said in a phone interview that over the past 18 months, the organization has been planning the transition to a new executive director and “for a generational change in leadership.” “We’ve found a really talented person,” he added. The group began after Brian Mulroney’s government announced a $100 million cut to the CBC/Radio-Canada budget in 1984, Morrison recalled, as a “two-page ad in the national edition of the Globe and Mail.” Over the years, he cites as among its biggest accomplishments the survival of the CBC, albeit “bloodied and damaged,” from cuts made by the governments of former prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Stephen Harper. “I think a fair-minded person who observed what was going on on the public broadcasting file would say that the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting had something to do with that,” he said. He also noted that the group was among the first, in the 1990s, to speak out about “the dangers of corporate concentration, vertical integration, all those forces,” has built up a body of public opinion polls, and worked to encourage “the Justin Trudeau Liberals to outbid the NDP in terms of what they would do to reinvigorate public broadcasting” in the 2015 federal election. The organization will now continue focusing on its four main priorities: keeping the CBC strong and increasing its independence from government interference, as well as defending section three of the Broadcasting Act as the government reviews the legislation, Morrison said. That section, among other elements, stipulates Canadian ownership and control over the country’s broadcasting system, and sets out that system should “safeguard, enrich and strengthen the cultural, political, social and economic fabric of Canada,” that elements of the system need to make Canadian content contributions, and outlines the mandate for CBC programming. “Basically, the pride of place for Canadian programming … that is really important,” Morrison said. The fourth priority is the group’s “close the loophole” campaign, which asks the government to end tax deductions for advertising on foreign online media. It’s a move the Public Policy Forum (PPF) has also called for in front of the House of Commons Heritage committee, which recommended changes for digital advertising on Canadian-owned platforms but did not go as far as disallowing deductions on foreign platforms. Morrison noted that digital advertising is growing rapidly and taking an increasingly larger share of the total advertising pie, and the vast majority of it is going to foreign digital giants like Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc. That’s one aspect of the ongoing move to digital that the broadcasting sector is grappling with, which offers a challenge to the likes of which the industry has never seen before, Morrison said. “It’s the biggest challenge we’ve ever faced. It used to be that we were just thinking about Hollywood and American content, et cetera, but these are huge global enterprises. They are getting into scraps with governments.” Morrison argued that “we are… too much in awe of them and insufficiently conscious of the danger that they represent to our culture if they remain outside of our system, if they’re not making appropriate contributions to the system.”

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Ian Morrison steps down from watchdog Friends

People | February 12, 2018

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