In 1995, the Task Force Report,  “Fading Away ”, identified the resource required to address the existing (backlog) A/V heritage problem as a  “cost–shared program at the level of $2 million per year for ten years for non–federal stakeholders, and an additional $2 million per year to those federal agencies which are already preserving an important part of Canada's audio–visual heritage ” (e,g,, CBC/R-C, NFB/ONF, LAC/BAC, etc.) To deal with current and future holdings, the report suggested the creation of a national Preservation Fund that would generate a minimum of $2 million per year to support preservation and/or restoration and intellectual and physical processing projects. In sum, the estimate of ‘new money’ required in 1995 to address Canada's A/V preservation requirements was some $6 million annually, including an undesignated component for broadcast–specific activity. In the intervening 14 years, the national inventory of radio and television has increased enormously as new services developed and the broadcasting system itself became much more complex.

The quantum of Canada's existing broadcast backlog is still being calculated but certain indicators are instructive.

• In the course of the Commission's 2009 New Media Hearings, Canada's Film Commissioner, Tom Perlmutter, put the cost of digitizing the National Film Board's catalogue at between $30 and $40 million alone.¹
• At CBC Television, it is estimated that it would take one technician 30 years to complete digitization of its existing network program inventory and no one has begun to compile figures on the thousands of hours of programming in regional/local inventories of both private and public broadcasters.
• CTV has been working assiduously on digitization of its network holdings for the past five years; they attacked the most vulnerable 2” material first and that has been completed. Their ¾” inventory is three–quarters completed, and a small amount of the one–inch and Beta–SP recordings have been transferred, with a considerable amount left to be addressed in order to completely digitize the network's analog holdings, a task that can only be proceeded with as funds permit.

The current suggestion to introduce a per–subscriber fee–for–carriage of Canadian OTA television services similar to that applied to specialty channels may create an opportunity to address the gap in funding for broadcast heritage. Even the preliminary response of BDU's to this proposal makes clear that they intend to pass the new fee through to subscribers; it will, therefore, be the subscribers who bear the new cost to receive a programming service for which they have hitherto had to pay no additional (direct) fee. This prospect may not be altogether welcome in difficult economic times. [In practice, of course, taxpayers pay some $34 per year each to support the many services of the national public broadcaster and all Canadians contribute indirectly to the cost of private broadcasters' services when they buy items whose purchase price includes the cost of product advertising and promotion.]

We suggest, however, that an incremental benefit to the Canadian public could be introduced as a result of this new carriage fee if a very small percentage were to be set aside to create a fund for broadcast heritage preservation. In decades past, Library and Archives Canada which holds responsibility for preservation of our national heritage has not had the resources required to build the infrastructure and technical services necessary to deliver a comprehensive national program of broadcast heritage collection and preservation. However, if a dedicated ‘preservation charge’ were part of the new fee, it would generate dollars for a national fund to be administered by LAC and dedicated solely to broadcast heritage preservation through programs it would establish for both in–house preservation activity and to assist industry and other heritage institutions with digitization of their radio and television holdings.

As we prepare this submission, we are assembling detailed information on how such a program would be structured and the quantum of dollars that would be required to address the problem in a reasonable period of time. What we do know is that the need is great and that, as indicated in paragraph 20 above, just to deal with its analog backlog Canada must find many millions of dollars to cover the technical, human resource and end-storage costs of digitization of our broadcast heritage. Based on a conservative (2007) combined cable and satellite subscriber base of 10,581,700 million households², we calculate that each one cent monthly charge so allocated would generate $1.3 million dollars annually.

Canadians already have an interest in the programs for which they have directly (through the CBC, NFB, Telefilm Canada, CTF) and indirectly (commercial broadcasters) provided the resources to produce, yet their long–term access to this material is generally limited. [The exception to this is the NFB's new program to gradually make its film inventory available on–line, as national broadcasters in Britain, France and elsewhere are now beginning to do.] As a corollary to the introduction of the proposed preservation charge, it would be useful also to consider having the LAC and/or other institutions introduce a Canadian initiative that would provide future public accessibility to an inventory of vintage broadcast programs.

¹Wednesday, 25 February 2009.
²Statistics Canada CANSIM Table 353-0003, at http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/comm01a-eng.htm