Video - CBC Rally in Calgary

On 2009-04-17, Calgarians headed to CBC's broadcast building on Memorial Drive to show their support for CBC, and to protest lack of support of CBC by the (currently conservative) federal government. I carted down a sign and videocamera, and after waving at traffic for 10 minutes ("is this what we do?") started asking fellow attendees questions about the CBC. The finished video is embedded in a R4NT.com blog post of a fictional nature.

Possibly the best point on the subject of CBC funding was articulated by DJ Kelly and Wil Knoll (but unfortunately captured by IndieCalgary.com and not myself): (paraphrased)

Although the CBC has become more self sufficient in its reliance on its ad revenue there was never an expectation of self sufficiency when the CBC was first created, and it is not fair to have that expectation now. CBC has been lucky that ad revenue has offset rising costs to taxpayers, but we're here to say we'll gladly pay for our CBC, and return to the original model which does not depend on ad revenues.

CBC currently costs Canadian taxpayers $34 per year, per citizen. I'm happy to pay that. In fact, as I explore this world of blogging, video production and avoiding anything that resembles what an investigative journalist would actually do, I'm quite certain that strong public broadcasting is key to maintaining a democracy through this transition period from newspapers to... whatever will replace newspapers.

Various remix friendly version of CBC Rally in Calgary and raw footage are released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.