Village Squire, 1979-02, Page 42P.S.
What the country
mini -network
BY KEITH ROULSTON
needs is a good, rural TV
I see in the paper they're getting
something very special in Toronto: a
multi-lingual television channel.
The channel will broadcast in something
like 24 different languages when it goes on
air meaning that finally people from other
language groups who have come to Canada
will be able to get a few hours of
programming a week in their own
language. Hopefully they'll also gain
something from the hours that are devoted
to programming for other languages too.
The new station is not without
controversy of course. The furor isn't about
the station itself but about what will
happen when the station goes on air and
it's time to assign it a position on cable
television. Cable television has boiled
down simply to the God-given right of
Canadians to watch American stations,
even if they live 500 miles from the
American border. So when the Canadian
Radio and Telecommunications Commis-
sion set up a policy that said that Canadian
channels must get priority on Cable
television the seeds of dispute were sown.
Now every time a new Canadian station
goes on ' air in an area, an American
channel gets bumped to the secondary
cable service for which you have to have a
converter at an additional expense. Thus
when French language stations went on the
air in places like London and Vancouver,
you'd think people were being raped and
plundered in the streets, to listen to the
phone-in shows or read the letters to the
editor column.
All this doesn't mean much of course to
those who live in the country like me.
Having to make a choice over whether to
buy a converter for my cable television
system isn't a problem because I don't
have, and likely never will have, cable
television. The costs of cable are such that
people out in the country may never be
serviced and even many small towns and
villages are being ignored.
And that brings me finally to the whole
point of this piece. If we can be concerned
enough about the needs of the minorities in
the cities that we can provide television in
24 launguages, isn't it about time we
decided to do something about our own
home-bred, huge minority who live out of
the main stream of urban life. I mean the
people who live in small towns, villages
40 Village Squire, February 1979
and on farms all across the county.
You'll remember that down in the states
they were worried that ordinary television
didn't really conncect with kids living in
the ghetto so they came up with special
programming like Sesame Street. How
much less does the programming from
regular urban sources mean to rural
oriented people. It's like another world.
Kids watching television know far more
about Toronto or even New York city than
they do about life in their own
neighbourhood and others like it across the
country.
We have spent a lot of time and money in
recent years in Canada in the belief that it
is important for people to be able to see
themselves reflected in books, in movies,
in plays and on television but all we've
really managed to do is increasingly
portray the impression of Canada as an
urban country when a huge proportion of
the population lives outside the major
centres.
The stumbling block to adequate
representation for rural areas has always
been economics. Just as it is impossible to
service farm homes with cable television
because of cost, it is also impossible in any
one rural area to find a financial base for
television.
Yet the CRTC through its own policies
has shown the way to get an adequate
television service for rural areas of Ontario
and all across the country. If the CRTC can
allow the Global television network to set
up repeater stations wall across the
province to repeat the same programming
it produces from Toronto, why can we not
have a similar set up for a rural
broadcasting network? With the bulk of
programming on such a network being
produced in one central station and time
being set aside for local regional programs
we could have a relatively inexpensive
television hookup that would not only allow
rural people to see themselves, but unite
people from say eastern Ontario together
with people from western Ontario in the
common tie of their rural culture.
I would ideally like to see not only
programming about farms, but drama and
comedy based on rural themes. There is
room for indepth programming on the
problems of small towns, dealing with
things like regional government from a
point of view that has not been
conditioned by the bigness of modern life.
There are so many things that deserve,
indeed need, more treatment for a healthy
perspective of rural life and problems. Our
entire view of ourselves in rural areas has
been shaped by people living in cities and
we need to be able to come to grips with
our own needs in television as we have say
in the weekly newspaper field where
healthy weekly newspapers have done so
much to help us solve our own problems.
Such a station must be located in a rural
area of course or soon the viewpoint of it
too would be urbanized. What is needed is
a location far enough from city influence to
keep it independent. In recent years there
have been persistent rumours that the
economics of the situation was going to
spell the end of one of the few
rural -oriented television stations we have:
CKNX in Wingham. Perhaps if the day
does come someone with some imagination
could use that station as the flagship for
such a rural network that could first take in
Ontario with repeater stations and perhaps
someday all of Canada.
If a few hundred thousands Italian.
Greek. and Pakistani dwellers of Toronto
deserve their own station. surely a few
million farmers and small towners across
Canada deserve an equal chance.
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