Canada and Television

MR. GRIFFIN: Members and Guests of The Empire Club of Canada: It is with a great deal of pride that I declare open the fiftieth regular season of the Empire Club. I feel it is particularly appropriate that we should inaugurate our second half century with an address about one of the marvels of our age – television--undreamed of when this Club was founded.

Our speaker today, in his official capacity as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, is the one best qualified to tell us about the relationship of television to Canada. Mr. A. Davidson Dunton, born in Montreal in 1912, has had a remarkable and meteoric career. While he attended no less than four great Universities he found it possible to become Editor of the Montreal "Standard" at the age of twenty-six when many men are just leaving university. After service with the Wartime Information Board and a brief further period with the "Standard" he was appointed Chairman of the Board of Governors of the C.B.C. in 1945--a post he has held since that time. In this position he is responsible for the successful introduction of television into Canada just one month ago. We are proud to entertain so distinguished a public servant.

MR. A. DAVIDSON DUNTON: Madam, Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen:

In my job, as you can perhaps imagine, I meet a great many people who have television on their minds; in fact, almost everybody I come across in trains, street cars, at afternoon teas, and other places, seems to get the word "television" into the first sentence of conversation.

The things they say differ a good deal, although they seem to follow into one, two or three categories. First, some say, "When do we get it? We want it." They don't usually say, "What is it going to be like," or discuss what this thing is going to bring into their homes: they just say, "We want it."

Then there are those other people, often people who have been lucky enough to have some of the higher forms of education, and they say, "What do you mean, bringing television into the country? What is it going to do to our children?"

Then there are also the people who say, "Look what television is doing to children! Look what it is doing to children in the United States! What is it is going to do to children in Canada?"

As you see, the views of most people seem to be strongly personal views. They are usually fairly vigorous one way or another, regarding programs both in the United States and Canada. And views of members of the public are very important, they are important to us as a broadcasting organization because we have to try and serve the potential viewers of Canada.

Today I don't want to try to talk about television from your personal point of view, or that of your family, or from the point of view of Mr. Mutrie and his young people on Jarvis Street who are working long, long hours producing television programs. I do want to try and talk about what it will mean to all of us in this room, as Canadians: in fact, what it will mean, should or could mean, to all Canadians, every place. I want to try to talk about the things that I think we all should be thinking about in relation to television, no matter what our particular personal views may be at the moment.

Some people say, "Television has done such awful things in other countries." There is, of course, no reason why television must be the same in Canada as in other countries. There are a good many things in Canada that are different to those of other countries.

I think there is one thing we can do right away, and that is to drop the idea that television is not important. There are some people who still regard it as a kind of domestic peep show, something that comes into the house and is amusing or not, according to one's taste; that anyone can take or leave; something like the movies in their early days. I suggest it is wise to disabuse ourselves of any notion like that, simply because television has already proven itself as an extremely effective means of mass communication, of communicating to hundreds and thousands and millions of people at a time. That has already been proved by what is happening in other countries, the United States, Britain and others nations.

We can all agree right away that it is a very effective means of communication. It brings sound, it brings sight, it brings motion; and any psychologist will agree when you have that, you are making about as direct and formidable an assault on the human as you can. The only thing we have lacked up to now is colour, and that will be coming. And all these things come right into people's houses. Obviously it has a very strong appeal as a means of communicating things--it has to a very large majority of people. What is more, it has an enormous vividness and effectiveness of impact. It makes a strong impression on people's minds. You can see that by watching children's faces in a room in which there is a television set operating. The children stay fascinated for long periods of time. The material on the screen, whatever it may be, is making a very vivid impression on their minds.

Whatever anybody's personal tastes may be, we can be sure of one thing: that increasing hundreds of thousands of homes will have television sets; that the sets are going to be watched; and that what those families are seeing is bound to have a strong influence on how the ideas of those families develop. I think we can take it for granted that television is going to be a very strong social force. It is going to have a strong effect one way or the other on the development of our national life. I suggest to you the way television develops--what is on that screen--what is available to see--is going to make a considerable difference on what Canada is like twenty or thirty or forty years from now. I don't mean what it is like physically, but what young Canadians are thinking about, what their concepts of life are, and what their standards of value are. It will make a considerable difference in those things that go to make up a nation.

I think we will all agree that a nation is not just a matter of geography or statistics. I like the definition of a nation as "A group of people who think they are a nation". In other words, a nation exists because a group of people living in a certain area of the world develop common attitudes and thoughts.

I think a historian observing from another planet might very well think it is rather an anomaly that Canada exists at all. I think some of us have the same idea ourselves. Canada is an arbitrary slice taken off the top of the North American continent. For historical reasons, reasons of tradition and interests, we, this fourteen million odd people of Canada, have chosen to make a nation of the people living in this slice of the continent, in spite of the fact that many of the Canada of geography and economics are against Canada being a separate nation. Most of the means of communication are north and south. In most regions of Canada it is easier to communicate with the United States than with other parts of Canada. Most Canadians have more Americans than Canadians living within 200 miles around them, and it is easier to communicate with these Americans than with their follow Canadians east and west.

It costs money to keep a Canadian nation operating, yet somehow we have made the actual practical decisions we have just thought necessary to do it. We still think it is a good thing that there be this Canadian national entity, and that it develop in its own way. I don't think we should develop against anyone else, but that our nation should develop for the things which it can do and which it stands for: for the old ties and traditions which it has maintained across the Atlantic, developed' in the North American environment differently than among our friends to the south of us.

If the things of the mind are so important to the development of a nation, it behooves us to take careful thought about the development of things that affect Canadians' minds and their growth. In our history as a nation we have in many, many instances had to make practical concrete decisions to see that our national life, our national organization developed. We took the early political steps, of course. Further than that, we have had to do practical things that cost money. We have had to subsidize the building of transcontinental communications to hold together the colonies that were to become Canada. We wanted to see many industries develop here, and we have had to employ tariffs. The result is we pay more for our shirts and for our automobiles, because we wish to have in Canada a shirt and an automobile industry. We pay a good deal more for our radio and television sets, because we have felt it important to our national life to have an electronics industry.

But if it is well to encourage these physical means of production in the country, is it perhaps not still more important that we too give thought to the production and activity of the things of the mind? And in television, it would not be just enough to say that this new marvel exists; that we can have television stations since there are channels that can be used, and that therefore we should have a system of communication among Canadians. There is more to think about. As a people we have not only to think of a desire we may have, but of the hard economic facts that must lie behind any development.

As business men, I am sure many people in this room know only too well how costs vary in different markets. We know in the United States many things can be produced more cheaply because of the immense size of the national market. Here (although we are improving in many ways) the cost of production in many things is higher because of the smaller population. But in many cases we think we ought to encourage that to give a chance to Canadian production.

In a thing like television, economic factors work even more sharply. Take a television program, which you know is a pretty complicated piece of work. In the United States the cost of that product can be spread over that immense population and the cost per head works out relatively small. In Canada at the best the cost of such a product has to be spread over a much smaller number of people, and the cost per head must be a good deal larger, on any basis.

Again, take the cost of distribution. In the United States one small collection of stations can reach far more people than in Canada; one station from New York City can serve a population as large as the whole population of Canada. If we want to have a television system reach the large portion of our people it is obviously going to cost a great deal more per head.

Therefore we have, in deciding what we want in Canada, to have these cost factors in mind. I suggest to you it is very important to think of these practical things in a cool, calculating way if we are determined, as we seem to be determined in this country, to keep our country going ahead under its own steam as a real national entity.

Television, as I say, is an extremely effective means of communication. It could operate relatively cheaply in Canada if it were largely a means of bringing in material outside of Canada. If television broadcasting followed the ordinary dictates of a straight commercial arithmetic, that is how it would develop--as a series of pipe lines bringing largely non-Canadian material into Canadian homes. That is the cheapest way from a commercial point of view for it to develop.

We should remember we have not very many means of national communication in Canada. We have our daily press our periodicals and a few other means. Far many more periodicals from outside Canada are read by Canadians than periodicals produced in Canada. Is it not important that in this strikingly new extremely effective field, we both have chances for Canadian production, and chances for the development of communication among Canadians? Because of the way economics work, because of the fact that on a purely commercial operating basis, Canadian television would tend to broadcast mostly non-Canadian material, the only solution seems to be to take some steps, as we have taken in other fields, to see that there are other means of paying for and supporting Canadian television and for the production of Canadian television programmes and distribution of them around the country, by means apart from those of ordinary commercial operations.

The solution that has been found in sound broadcasting, and that is being applied in television broadcasting, is the setting up of a publicly-owned system. This becomes chiefly a device by which the people of Canada who benefit pay in another way, or pay a supplementary amount, to ensure that the system has the possibility of Canadian production, and distribution. That has been the role of the CBC in sound broadcasting. The basic decisions have been made in television broadcasting toward a system which can have the means of drawing financial support from other than straight commercial channels, and which shall have the means of developing Canadian production and distribution of Canadian programmes.

The CBC has been commissioned to start the Canadian television system. We have established production centres in Montreal and Toronto. These are more than just stations for these areas. They are centres at which, we hope and expect, Canadian programmes can be produced which will be seen locally first and which later will be seen in other parts of Canada as well. We have been lent money to start,--eight million dollars so far, and we shall have to have more to get going well.

I would like to point out the government of this country does not run the CBC. The CBC operates under an Act, but it is not as all-powerful as people sometimes suggest. Nobody can tell us what to do in our operations, that is, what we put on the air. The Government has the final say of the licensing of stations. Parliament has the final say in the general picture and structure of broadcasting in Canada.

The start has been made. Canadian television is now 3 1/2 weeks old. I am not going to try and comment on what it has done so far, and on what it has not done. Those of you who have television sets can tell for yourselves a good deal better. I do suggest much has been accomplished, and, I hope, you will agree when you consider what has had to be done.

Television, as I am sure you all know, is an extremely complicated, integrated, obstinate kind of operation, in which great skill and ingenuity of operation are needed. Groups of young Canadians in Montreal and Toronto have taught themselves to operate television and produce programmes. We were told we would have to have people from outside Canada. We have had a look at other countries, and learned a great deal from them for which we are grateful, but it is the young Canadians who have taught themselves how to carry on this complicated operation who are now producing full-fledged television programmes. And I would suggest to you some of those efforts are not bad at all.

Where do we go from here?

First, I should say that the CBC has said publicly that it wants to establish stations as soon as possible in other areas toward the development of a national system. The Government has said it will ask Parliament to lend us money to establish stations on the Pacific Coast, the Prairie Provinces, the Ottawa area, and the Atlantic Coast. We know there will be one station in the Pacific area, one in the Winnipeg area, no final decision has been made on location of the Atlantic station. The station in Ottawa will likely be the first on the air. As you know, we have ordered from Mr. Watson and his Bell Telephone people the network connection between Montreal and Toronto which will be ready next spring. Ottawa will be tied into that network connection. The other stations in the country will have to be fed for some time at least with transcriptions of programmes, with some local production at each point. That is as far as we can see ahead definitely now. As I say, the CBC does not, and cannot, on its own responsibility make a number of other decisions. It can recommend and have plans and visions ahead. We have plans which we hope to carry out for other stations which would in effect make a good strong national framework of publicly-owned stations in Canada and which would assure that there will be a Canadian system strong enough to carry on Canadian production and strong enough to be the framework for over-all distribution of national Canadian television service. Fitting into that system as part of it, are private stations,--private stations helping to extend national service, having programmes of their own, but also having a number of programmes of the national service.

Looking farther ahead, we see a vision that is not too precise but which we think can be carried out in general. It is a vision of television in Canada serving a large majority of Canadians, with the number not served diminishing continually; a service that is basically Canadian, based on Canadian ideas, but because Canadians are interested in material from other countries, bringing in programmes from those countries; a service that brings in lots of entertainment and fun to Canadians, things of interest and excitement, sport and other things, but that, while it entertains, also brings things of deeper values,--some knowledge and information, that helps Canadians in one part of the country to understand Canadians in other parts of the country; a service that brings things of spiritual value as well as entertainment value, and the sort of thing that will help young Canadians to have wider understanding; a service that will give them lots of relaxation and fun but will also give them deeper insights into life, our country and the world; a service that will be operated under the principles of freedom under which we live in this country, which means that people should have a good choice of material of all kinds and different values, to decide what they want themselves, and what they choose to add to the things that are in their minds.

We hope that all these things will develop in Canada. We are convinced they can be done because of Canadian ability, because of the human resources of Canada, because there are in Canada the people that are needed to contribute to the development of such a system.

We are sure that it can be done. Gentlemen those are the directions in which Canadian television is now going.

THANKS OF THE MEETING were expressed by Mr. C. E. Watson.