No Radio Canada International, No South of 45
Canadian law should entrench the role and mandate of Radio Canada International as a world service with programming tailored primarily for non-Canadians outside of Canada.
Readers who have been following from the start (thank you!!!) will recall that this newsletter is called South of 45 because it primarily follows Canadian politics from northern Vermont, watching from across the 45th parallel north that forms the border between Vermont and Quebec. Some have wondered how someone from south of the border (and raised in Pennsylvania, nowhere near that border) developed such an interest in Canada. Shortwave radio did it.
Growing up in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, I had a small radio and discovered that it had a a shortwave band. I knew that shortwave broadcasts could travel long distances between countries, but I did not know how the signals worked. I especially did not know that Wilkes-Barre was the perfect distance from Radio Canada International’s transmitters in Sackville, New Brunswick for “the first hop.” Shortwave signals bounce between the ground and the ionosphere, and I was at the perfect location to receive the signals on their first trip down from the skies. RCI boomed as well as a local station, making it easy to listen to Canadian news for hours. And I joined the party in 1979, just in time for several crucial events in Canadian political history. There was the first Quebec sovereignty referendum in 1980, which led to the push to patriate the British North America Act from Westminster.
I also listened to other radio stations like the BBC World Service, Deutsche Welle, and Radio Australia (even Radio Moscow when I was feeling rebellious–it taught me how to deal with propaganda and disinformation). It made me curious about world politics and led me to want to learn languages. But RCI was always my favorite, and I went on to become not just a political scientist, but a Canadianist, as well as a diplomat for 22 years. And it all started with a portable radio.
Shortwave radio is not a perfect technology. The ionosphere is a funny place, one full of electric charges that can swallow the signals as easily as it can reflect them (and that assumes no one tries to jam them). With FM broadcasting and internet streaming, we forget just how noisy most radio bands are, and shortwave was a haven for static. So it is no surprise that AM (“medium wave”) and shortwave broadcasting have fallen by the wayside. Most listeners to the BBC World Service and the Voice of America listen via local FM transmitters. I still listen to foreign broadcasts, and I do it online through noise-canceling headphones that provide stereo sound. Why not? (Shortwave did not have podcasts, either.) We have good internet in the United States (though its quality here in Vermont is a big issue in our state politics), and news broadcasts are not blocked on political grounds. (Having access to a virtual private network periodically helps. I’m looking at you, CBC Gem.) But not everybody has good internet. As a diplomat, I lived both in countries with little communications infrastructure and others that censored foreign content heavily. Shortwave remains important in those countries, even if there is a lot less to listen to in 2022. We have seen this at play not only in the Great Firewall put in place by the People’s Republic of China, and in Russia’s blocking of Western websites this year (and retaliatory Western blocking of some Russian sites).
But in Canada’s case, we have seen something more. The decline of shortwave made it easy to question not just international broadcasting, but the public diplomacy behind those broadcasts. RCI always had problems with its domestic constituency, in the sense that it never had one. Few Canadians probably knew it existed, and those who knew may have thought the money was better spent elsewhere than on broadcasts in Arabic, Portuguese, or Russian–or on making The World At Six available in Phoenix. Radio Canada International nearly met its end in the 1991 reorganization of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and in 2012, its broadcasts went online completely, as part of an 80% budget cut. Along the way, most of the language services were disbanded. Then in 2021, RCI lost its English and French services and their programs specifically for non-Canadians outside Canada.
In 2020, the Trudeau government introduced the Online Streaming Act in the Canadian parliament. For most Canadians, the Act deals with the regulation of online streaming services and social media by the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, and attempts to increase the amount of Canadian content online. Domestic concern focuses upon legal liabilities one may encounter just by posting something online. But within Bill C-11 is a proposal to amend the Broadcasting Act, specifically Article 46(2), the only place in federal law that deals with Radio Canada International. The article as written simply requires CBC to provide an international service. It would be preferable to entrench in Article 46(2) the role and mandate of Radio Canada International as a world service with programming tailored primarily for non-Canadians outside of Canada, making the directive from Parliament more clear.
The Canadian Senate is currently studying Bill C-11 after its passage through the House of Commons this year. The Standing Committee on Transport and Communications has the opportunity to reinforce Canadian public diplomacy by amending Article 46(2). The kid from Pennsylvania who turned into the Canada specialist was less than a quirk than a product of farsighted policy.
References:
Broadcasting Act (S.C. 1991, c. 11)
Order in Council Number: 2012-0775 Date: 2012-06-07
Sackville, N.B. residents to lose landmark radio transmission towers | CTV News
RCI ends shortwave broadcast | CBC News
SOVIET UNION ENDS YEARS OF JAMMING OF RADIO LIBERTY - The New York Times
The silence of Radio Canada International
Pour un service mondial à Radio-Canada/CBC
Radio Canada International se modernise pour le XXIe siècle
Cuts to Radio Canada International can only hurt Canada’s image and influence abroad
The Evolution of Shortwave Radio
The Internet’s Impact on International Radio - Radio World
The future of Radio Canada International (RCI) will be decided by mid November--RCI Action Committee
The silencing of Radio Canada International and Canada’s shrinking voice in the world | The Star
The early shortwave stations : a broadcasting history through 1945 | WorldCat.org