Government appoints lawyer, former Transcontinental director to head CBC

The complicated relationship of the public and private sector in media became even more tangled on Monday with the announcement that Hubert Lacroix is to be president and chief executive officer of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The Montreal lawyer -- a senior advisor to the law firm Stikeman Elliott -- was once a senior adviser to Telemedia Ventures Inc. after spending several years as the executive chairman of Telemedia Corp. After Telemedia (which at the time owned Canadian Living, Homemaker's and Style at Home) was merged with printing and media giant Transcontinental Inc., Lacroix sat on Transcon's board.

A one-time basketball colour commentator and coach at McGill University, Lacroix, 52, assumes the position on Jan. 1, the day after Robert Rabinovitch, who has served as president and CEO for the past eight years, officially finishes his second term.

“I am a huge fan of the CBC,” Lacroix, who was approached for the job by a head-hunting firm, said in an interview with Canadian Press. “I grew up with it, I worked for it, so it’s pretty exciting to actually now join this team, which is an incredible one, and try to help CBC/Radio-Canada move forward.

The appointment of Lacroix did not go down well with Friends of Canadian Broadcasting president Ian Morrison, who says the cabinet appointment meant Prime Minister Stephen Harper ignored a Commons Heritage committee directive of a few years ago that said the president should be hired and fired by the CBC board of directors, not the prime minister.

“The problem is if you’re named to that position by a certain party, do you feel an obligation to that party?” said Morrison. ``We’d like the president of the CBC to have a responsibility to the board of directors and be accountable to the board, not to the prime minister.”

Morrison also suggested that Lacroix’s CV was lacking in significant broadcasting experience.

“Could you imagine the head of CTV being someone who had almost no television production or scheduling or marketing experience?” he said. “I just wish there were more people near the top at the CBC who knew television as well as the senior executives of CTV know television.”

Of course, Lacroix said he was well-prepared for the task.

He said the public broadcaster faces two significant challenges: to stay relevant to a changing population and to raise funds that will keep that audience watching and listening.“My job and the mandate that I have taken is clearly to try to make this company evolve in terrific changing times and to create the sense of urgency that I know everybody else around, in every other company competing with CBC/Radio Canada, has.”