Rabinovitch tells hostile committee timing made lockout necessary

The chair of a House of Commons committee urged the head of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. to soon approach the federal government about the public broadcaster’s funding allocations for next year. Marlene Catterall, chair of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, appeared bewildered when CBC president Robert Rabinovitch responded that he hadn’t approached Canadian Heritage about its funding for 2006, since the government is now discussing budgets. "I haven’t requested a job – I mean a meeting," said Rabinovitch, making a Freudian slip as he appeared October 27 before the committee, which blasted him for the recent eight-week lockout of 5,500 employees in English Canada. Rabinovitch and other CBC executives faced three hours of hostile questioning from MPs over the lockout and other issues such as cuts to regional programming. Another bone of contention for disgruntled MPs was whether or not Rabinovitch had gotten a vote of approval for the lockout from his board. The committee asked CBC management to submit to it a list with dates of Canadian Heritage staff members who were briefed about the possibility of a lockout, and to provide details of meetings with CBC board members. "Our choice on August 14 was straight-forward: wait and let the union strike at a time of their choosing when Canadians would be deprived of critical programming , or bring the negotiations to a head at a relatively quiet time of year," said Rabinovitch. Canadian Media Guild CBC Branch president Arnold Amber countered Rabinovitch’s claim by saying that by October the union would no longer have had a strike mandate; it would have expired in early September – three weeks after the lockout was imposed on August 15. "We had three more weeks to negotiate," he noted. NDP Committee member Charlie Angus moved that Rabinovitch be asked to resign, while a proposed conservative motion called for a government task force to review the CBC’s mandate and operations. Both of these motions were put off until a future committee meeting.

Rabinovitch tells hostile committee timing made lockout necessary

News | 11/07/2005 5:00 am EST

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