Is CBC required to share sensitive and competitive information, Maclean's asks?

Maclean's magazine's Quebec bureau chief Martin Patriquin this week chronicles the siege being laid on the CBC by Michel Drapeau, a fervent and frequent user of Access to Information act and how his campaign may be fuelling a feud between Quebecor and the CBC. The story reports that Drapeau -- a lawyer and retired colonel -- has filed nearly 800 ATI requests with the CBC since the fall of 2007 when, under the federal accountability act, the crown corporation became subject to access to information requests. 

“The CBC has not made the psychological and corporate turn,” [Drapeau] says. “They don’t understand that they are no longer a private-like organization that they can do as they wish without any public oversight. They have a sense of hostility toward anybody exercising their right to have access to records.”

For its part, CBC management maintains that much of the material Drapeau has requested is of commercial value to his client, the Quebecor-owned Sun Media chain, and giving it up would be tantamount to Macdonald’s sharing its secret sauce with Burger King. Yes, the CBC is a taxpayer-funded organization, they say; but it is also a broadcaster whose competitors aren’t similarly compelled to divulge sensitive journalistic, creative and programming information.

Drapeau says his requests are his own initiative and Sun Media had no input into them. But it's clear that the results of his requests are providing a stout stick with which Quebecor can beat their hated rival. 

Quebecor's Sun Media chain has been hammering away at the CBC, a major competitor in the French television market, but the impetus for the campaign (vendetta?) is that Quebecor boss Pierre Karl Péladeau, is steamed about a  2007 Le Devoir interview with Sylvain LaFrance, head of CBC's French service, who said that Péladeau "was acting like a thug" by pulling out of the Canadian Television Fund. Péladeau launched a $700,000 defamation suit against LaFrance, which is in court now.

The trial has taken on elements of the absurd. La­france’s lawyer brought in an expert to distinguish the difference between calling someone a thug and saying that they are acting like a thug. (“It’s not an identity, it’s an analogy,” testified linguist Jean-Claude Corbeil.)

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.”