By Jon Farmer
(Originally posted in May 2014 on Farmerfarafield.wordpress.com)
In December 2012, I attended a Vinyl Café Christmas Concert in Vancouver as an aspiring documentary maker. Armed with an audio recorder, I was there to interview audience members about the role of radio in their lives. I wandered the lushly carpeted lobbies of the Queen Elizabeth Theatre and introduced myself to strangers, asking for a few minutes of their time and a handful of their memories. Although the campus radio station I was volunteering with was moth balled before I could edit the show, an interview with one man stayed with me.
He was middle aged, wore a thick sweater and spoke with a mellowed Scottish accent. He told me that radio taught him what it meant to be Canadian. When he first immigrated to Canada in the 1970s he would listen to Peter Gzowski while at work. He credited those radio shows with introducing him to this country and its people. Good on the CBC; in the case of at least one Scottish immigrant it fulfilled its mandate by reflecting Canada and its regions.
Truthfully, CBC should get the credit for my nationalism as well. I was born and raised in Owen Sound but didn't travel enough as a child to say that I knew the country. I did, however, know the names of far off towns and some of the nation's history. CBC taught it to me through Vinyl Café introductions, hourly weather reports, and the episodes of Canada: A Peoples' History that drifted in through the snowy antenna of my grandparents' bedroom TV.
I've never been to most of the places I was told about but I identify with them and the people who live there. I feel a connection to them, and rightfully so considering that we participate in the same governmental system and collectively fund everything from this country's military to the environmental assessment agencies that preserve the honesty of our postcards. On the nuts and bolts level our shared nationalism is simply common participation in a political and economic system but emotionally it's much more than that. The flag on my back pack represents more than the pot of money that my taxes go in to. At least, I feel that it does. I consider myself Canadian but if pressed to define the term I have to be a little vague because Canadians are made, not born.
Canadians are the people who share this space whether they speak Anishinnaabe, English, French, Farsi, Mandarin or any language. Our local and provincial lives may be different, we may carry different cultural practices and trace our bloodlines to the soil of different regions, but we are nonetheless connected. We are different patches of a quilt that stretches across six time zones and touches three oceans and we are held together through the stories and the narratives that we share with each other.
Public broadcasters are the collection agencies for those stories and the medium through which we access them. Reducing our access to common stories reduces Canadians' ability to empathize and engage with each other. It confines the construction of our national identity to museums and textbooks and lessens our ability to actively and collectively construct it. Most of us simply don't have the time or energy to dig those stories out from the archives but we can pick them up when they are available. CBC makes them available.
Beyond constructing our history, responsible democratic government requires an informed and active population. We need public platforms on which to explore and debate the decisions that our representatives make at the federal level. Canada is large and Canadians are diverse; national public broadcasting is uniquely situated to gather that diversity. CBC is the town hall in which this country meets.
Questions of CBC's profitability and ratings miss the point. According to its missions statement our public broadcaster exists expressly to "contribute to shared national consciousness and identity". This is necessary work that maintains the foundations of our national community and preserves Canadian interests more than any military or economic strategies can. 'Preserves' is the wrong word; CBC helps us to define Canadian interests. When federal policy and funding fails to reflect this reality, it fails Canadians.
