New Improved Multiculturalism
by Farrell Childe, licensed television critic
Canada is multicultural, Canada is multicultural, Canada is multicultural. If you're a Canadian you've heard that before, and you know you're going to hear it again. And again. And again.
Canada proclaimed itself multicultural back in the 70s, and hasn't stopped talking about it since. Multiculturalism is such a priority that the federal government has long had a ministry of multiculturalism.
So what do we get for all this talk and effort and money? What kind of multiculturalism do we end up with?
In television, what we ended up with was CFMT, a multicultural television station founded in Toronto in 1979 by Dan Iannuzzi, publisher of the Toronto Italian daily newspaper Corriere Canadese. CFMT's call letters stand for Canada's First Multicultural Television (Johnny Lombardi must have been wondering just what he'd been producing for years). In the beginning its licence allowed it to broadcast in any language except English or French. Speakers of non-official languages would be able to enjoy service in their own languages which they couldn't have before, except for all those programs produced by Johnny Lombardi and other people which had been around for years.
Anyway, as a multicultural outlet CFMT quickly spread on cable throughout Ontario, as the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) used its mandate to promote multiculturalism. To facilitate the promotion of multiculturalism the CRTC, oh, refined the definition of multiculturalism a bit.
The first change was to allow programming in English after 11 pm. This allowed CFMT to show Joan Rivers' talk show. Well, American culture is definitely culture, but the usual CRTC view is that it is not one of the cultures that multiculturalism is designed to encourage, given that it's everywhere on TV. But for CFMT they'd approve it.
Redefinition accelerated after Rogers Communications took over the station in 1986 and later added a multicultural cable channel and radio stations. The television services (recently rebaptized as OMNI-1 and OMNI-2) now broadcast in English 40% of the time. As we have said elsewhere, the CRTC should be renamed the CTRC (Catering to Ted Rogers Commission).
OMNI/CFMT is now a major operation, and still claims on its website to have "an ongoing commitment to reflecting the evolving needs of its diverse audience." OMNI-1, the old CFMT, fulfils this commitment by showing The Simpsons, Frasier, Everybody Loves Raymond, Just Shoot Me, King of the Hill, The Late Show with David Letterman, Ricki Lake, Jenny Jones, professional baseball, professional golf, and other English-language programs. OMNI-2 fulfils it by showing The Caroline Rhea Show, Family Feud, Weakest Link, Cops, Celebrity Justice, and other English-language programs.
The first language of the OMNI website is English. Links are available to Italian and Portuguese pages only. The only station personalities promoted on the website are ones who have regular assignments working in English. Of the intelligent and personable Sónia Silva, who to my mind is one of the most promising young television personalities on the air today, but whose work for OMNI is mainly in Portuguese, there is no mention.
It's not as if there isn't enough non-English programming to fill the schedule. There's enough foreign-language programming on OMNI-1 and OMNI-2 combined to provide a complete schedule for one station. So what happened?
What happened is that multiculturalism, despite all the earnest proclamations, has never been a priority of the Canadian government. It is simply a pretext for distributing money to people the government likes. Multiculturalism means grants to "community groups" which might be grateful at the polls, but most of all it means big money for Ted Rogers. The federal government just loves to be nice to Ted.
For example, earlier this year the CRTC denied Star Ray TV a licence to operate a low-power community television service in east Toronto because there were too many stations in Toronto. Then it granted a licence to Rogers to operate its low-power OMNI-2 broadcast station in west Toronto. And I'm sure everyone remembers the saga of KISS radio. The CRTC went out of its way to insist that this Toronto licence be awarded to a country music operation, even though country music radio has never succeeded in Toronto. It explicitly refused the licence to formats which were more likely to succeed. And then when the country station failed, who was allowed to buy it and convert it to rock overnight? Our man Ted.
I guess we can conclude from this that Ted Rogers is one hell of a nice guy. He must be to get all these nice things done for him. So next time you hear someone tell you that Canada is multicultural, you'll know at last what that means. It means that some people have very good friends in high places.
New Improved Multiculturalism © Coolth, 2002
Posted October 30, 2002
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