RADIO IN CANADA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 234, 17 December 1943, Page 14

RADIO IN CANADA

"Much Is Being Done To Maintain The Standard Of Taste"

66 HE Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is, in my mind, the one really successful and enterprising State department in Canada," said Lorenzo Paré, one of the three Canadian press representatives who recently made a flying visit to New Zealand on their way back from Australia, M, Paré is the Ottawa representative and press gallery reporter of the French paper, L’Action Catholique published at Quebec. He seemed especially interested in the cultural side of Canadian life, in the use of broadcasting as an educational medium, and in music, so The Listener took the opportunity at a gathering of journalists in Wellington to get him to talk of these things. There is, in Canada, a broadcasting service operated by the State, with one man in charge, responsible to a Parliamentary Committee; in addition, pri-vately-owned stations are operated under certain restrictions, carrying advertising matter and programmes chosen for their audience-catching qualities. :

We asked M. Paré whether the commercial stations had more listeners than the CBS stations. "No, fewer. The regulations are administered very sensibly, and the commercial stations never get strong. They wanted to unite in groups and have big networks as the Americans do, but. . ." "You kept them divided?" "Kept them divided and kept them small, And we can restrict them when we give them wave-lengths." "Does this mean that your authorities are trying to keep up the standard of taste?" Very Little Jazz "Yes, They have seen to it that the CBC has the most listeners, and the CBC’s programmes are not cheap. We have very little jazz-none in the evening until late, but there is some in the daytime to fill in hours and so on, With the commercial stations it is mostly music-in-the-box, tin-can music." "Do you have American programmes ‘on your stations? For instance do you receive recorded programmes from the Office of War Information and the U.S.A. War Department?" "No. We have nothing like that. We do have certain famous American network programmes relayed to us-piped over the border as it were-Jack Benny, Amos ’n Andy, Metropolitan Opera on Sundays, and so on. But don’t think we're flooded with propaganda from the States. We're used to our neighbours, you know-we’ve been next door for 200 years, and we don’t exchange formal propaganda in the way other countries are doing under the policy of Bon Voi-sinage-Good Neighbour, as you say." "What we hear of Canada on the air is negligible with what we hear of the United States. Is Canada content to let it remain so? Or does Canada realise that this part of the world knows so little of its ways?" "Soon you will be able to hear from us. A shortwave station is being established, and it will be finished inside six months I think." Talks And Discussions "What do you have in’ the way of talks and discussions on the air?" "They are very good, There is Farm Forum, a discussion in which a leader chooses a group of men holding all shades of opinion, from Tory to near-Commun-ist, and they talk freely about things the country people are interested in, Labour Forum is a similar programme on different subjects, The religious broadcasts are not so easy to perfect, You could count the really good religious broadcasters on the fingers of one hand. On the whole I think the CBC does very good work; I think about this because I am interested in music and art, and I see how the CBC helps our young artists. I have a very good friend who wrote a symphonic suite-just short, in three movements, he had it performed for the first time on the air, In this way our own musical composers are much encouraged, But of course we pay only two dollars a year in licence fees, and there is no surplus in the CBC accounts,"