Public Service Broadcasting and the Failure of Political Representation

In September 1991 Trina McQueen, vice president of news and current affairs at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, charged the news departments of the CBC and Radio Canada with an impossible task. Canada had been mired in a constitutional crisis since 1982, when then–prime minister Pierre Trudeau patriated the constitution from London to Ottawa. In practical terms, patriation meant that the British parliament would no longer need to approve amendments to Canada's constitution. However, the French-speaking province of Québec refused to approve the act of patriation because Trudeau failed to find an amendment formula that the province would accept. The constitution might finally have been in exclusively Canadian hands, but amending it would still be a near impossibility.

In the years that followed Canada's leaders would negotiate two agreements designed to create the conditions necessary for Québec to join the constitution. The first, negotiated in 1987 near Meech Lake, Québec, just outside of the capital in Ottawa, met a dramatic end in 1990, when the provincial legislatures of Manitoba and Newfoundland refused to bring it to a vote. By September 1991 Canada's leaders were in the process of negotiating a second agreement, which Canadians would approve or reject in a national referendum. Because of Meech Lake's failure emotions were running high, and the stakes of the new negotiations were considerable. On the table were proposals to give the French-speaking province of Québec greater say in the constitutional amendment process, to turn the Senate into an elected (rather than appointed) body, and to create a new level of government to complement the provincial and federal levels that would represent the interests of Canada's First Nations.

Given the scope of the debates, McQueen was concerned that viewers of the CBC (the corporation's English-language television network) and Radio-Canada (its French-language television network) be as well informed as possible. In a memo to the networks' news departments she wrote, "This is a fundamental debate for all citizens of Canada, who must make important decisions on shared values[,] on the political, social and economic arrangements that they prefer, and on the structures of their government." For that reason, viewers were "entitled to hear that the point of view held by groups of which they [were] part . . . [was] expressed," where such groups represented "political, regional, cultural and economic interests" (McQueen 1).

On the surface, the task McQueen set out appeared entirely reasonable: after the failure of the Meech Lake accord, which generated a great deal of frustration across political and linguistic lines, Canadians wanted to know what changes their political leaders were proposing and how something that had long remained fairly abstract—the constitutional amendment process—would affect them in their daily lives. Despite its reasonable appearance, however, McQueen's memo was met with considerable resistance. French-language journalists, for instance, were concerned that McQueen was effectively asking Radio Canada to become an organ of propaganda for the government (see Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec). Although English-language journalists did not share this concern (see Phillips), they faced another challenge. It would be impossible to be exhaustive in finding groups representing the "political, regional, cultural and economic interests" alluded to by McQueen. Who, then, would be left out? More important, at least for the groups that were included, whom would journalists choose to act as those groups' representatives?

A number of contradictions, then, arose from McQueen's memo. The overall goal, to generate healthy debate and encourage people to take an active role in shaping the course of their government, is common to all public service broadcasters, but the means to that end, in particular where political representation is concerned, are not entirely straightforward. The question of who represents whom is politically fraught, especially when it is journalists who make the decision. In their coverage of the constitutional debates in 1991 and 1992, for instance, CBC and Radio-Canada journalists followed identifiable professional norms when choosing representatives to speak on behalf of the groups identified by McQueen, the end result being that they...