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--- Upon resuming at 1641

9511 THE CHAIRPERSON: Order please.

9512 Madam Secretary.

9513 MS SANTERRE: Thank you, Madam Chair.

9514 I will now introduce the first intervenor in support of Mr. Jan Pachul. It is by Ashbridge Bay Watershed Council.

9515 Mr. Oliver Zielke.

INTERVENTION 9516 MR. ZIELKE: Hi.

9517 Thanks a lot for providing me with this opportunity to make an oral submission to the Commission in support of the application for a low power broadcasting licence by Jan Pachul.

9518 I want to say right off that I appreciate all the work of the Commissioners and of the staff for bringing our initiative to this point. Being here now for me culminates three years of volunteer activity in support of establishing a television station in our community.

9519 I am here as a volunteer with a non-profit ecology group -- The Ashbridge Bay Watershed Council. I'm on the Board of Directors. We advocate an ecosystem approach to urban issues, so we are active in schools and on planning issue in our community.

9520 As well, for the last 10 years, I have been working in east Toronto as an activist on social housing, anti-racism, food security, access to technology and community economic development issues.

9521 I want to say also that I'm here on behalf of the people in the community who I have worked alongside in the last 10 years. Obviously, I live in the community. My wife is a teacher in the neighbourhood, and I'm the father of twin boys who are 12.

9522 Awhile back on TV I remember seeing Leonard Cohen and he gave this metaphor for current social life: there is a big flood and everywhere you just see the tops of roofs. The water is swirling and people are holding on to garage doors, and some people have a bit of furniture they have that they are clinging on to, and there are pets kind of paddling around. Amidst this scene, every once in awhile we encounter each other and you meet someone who is kind of hanging on to the side of a piece of construction timber, and you say, "Hi". And they say, "Oh, hi." You say, "How are you?" They say, "Terrific. How are you?" You say, "Fine", and then off you float down in the swirling water.

9523 Well, I'm here, I travelled to Ottawa this week, because I believe very strongly that it is time for us to pierce this bubble that everything is just peachy.

9524 I understand that the current state of affairs in our local communities and globally is very complex, and that any solution is not easy or simplistic.

9525 I also understand that local community access to television is definitely part of how we are going to better our communities.

9526 I first heard about Star Ray TV from an article in a community newspaper. As Jan said, I made a phone call; he answered. He invited me down. He was very respectful of my work as an activist in the community. He encouraged me to participate. He encouraged me to consider using this medium to further the causes that I was active in.

9527 So what do I mean by "easy access to television"? Just this, that the person operating the endeavour lives, works and plays in the local community, that there is an openness to programming, and that the entire operation is what we call, in the environmental movement, place-based.

9528 Now, a sense of place is that collection of environmental and cultural factors that give meaning to a particular location -- it is the characteristic, natural features will often have a great impact on creating a sense of place.

9529 I live between two neighbourhoods whose names come from the natural features that they are near: the Beaches and Riverdale. Property values are often determined by natural features.

9530 What I'm concerned about as a citizen and what has motivated me to contribute hundreds of hours of volunteer time to support this television station is the loss of a sense of a place that has occurred in so many spots around this earth.

9531 This is a good example of a loss of sense of place -- a windowless room.

9532 We can't act locally in a spirit of social change if we are not aware of local realities. By local realities I mean planning issues, land use, transportation, culture, amateur athletics, amateur talent, natural history, politics, issues of race, gender, poverty, what our children are doing, what's happening with our elders, what's being built, torn down, restored and celebrated.

9533 What this TV station is going to do is bring forward these very local realities. Therefore, we, as people in the community who are concerned about quality of life, are going to have a foundation in which we can act, in which we can accomplish the goals of social change.

9534 I think we all know at this time that top-down doesn't work. The solutions to these crises that we are in the midst of has to be rooted in the vernacular. This TV station is going to assist in the fostering of a sense of that vernacular. That sense currently appears very infrequently in the media. Therefore, the media is not supporting the development of that sense of vernacular currently. It is manifested marginally and informally.

9535 I think we would all agree that a broadcasting initiative that operates locally and that targets a local audience and is supported by local advertisers is going to fill a real gap in the current Toronto media landscape.

9536 When we had the experimental licence I understood -- I came into contact with this incredible pent-up demand for our services. We were covering an issue in which a developer was taking a piece of land in our neighbourhood and was proposing highrise development, a very standard, urban kind of situation. So we had developers, local residents associations and politicians.

9537 The people who were involved in this issue were incredibly grateful to us, not only that we were very open to covering the issue, but that we were covering it on an ongoing basis. It wasn't just "Oh, come in" and then "See you later". It was week after week.

9538 They were very respectful and appreciative of the fact that we understood the issues. The issues that they were bringing forward were ones that were current to our own lives. We had guests, we had phone-ins, we had taped interviews, we had maps, stills that we were showing. It was at that moment that I realized that television could actually play a role in local community development.

9539 Now, the Ashbridge Bay Watershed Council is scheduled to produce a weekly show called "A Sense of Place". In that show we are going to present the next generation of environmental thinking that suggests that it is possible for human culture and economy to function harmoniously with the natural systems that are present in a local region and that we can flourish.

9540 We are going to profile new community gardens at Roden public school and at Bowmore public school. We are going to talk about restoration efforts that are going on in High Park and in Williamson Ravine and other parks.

9541 I think what's really important here is we are going to be partners in the community economic development movement. Here we are talking about initiatives like A-way Express Couriers where victims and users of psychiatric services who operate a courier company, a very successful business. These people are going to be profiled, but they are also, I think, going to be potentially advertisers.

9542 The Toronto Dollar project is a very successful initiative that is going on which is an alternative trading system. The Carlaw Street Business Development initiative is a warehouse that has been very marginalized and some artists are moving in and it is growing.

9543 These are the small and medium enterprises, and the whole -- SMEs, is the jargon here. The SMEs are going to be very crucial partners in this endeavour. I am very excited about the community economic development partnership in this whole initiative because it addresses so many issues.

9544 Now, it is no accident that the philosophy of this show "A Sense of Place" is congruent to the whole philosophy of the proposed TV station. I think a lot of the shows on Star Ray are going to show this sense of the local: Public forum and amateur talent and the local sports. There is going to a be a brand.

9545 Now, that brand is not like Pat & Mario's where you walk in and you just know that a team of people has designed something. It's not about graphics or slogans, it is actually about a respectful way of mirroring the vernacular. People's antenna are very acute when you actually mirror that vernacular, and this is the brand that -- the "Aha" that people will get when they see this show.

9546 Here I suggest to think of "In the Skin of a Lion", Michael Ondatjee. Roddy Doyle. Walker Evans. Diane Arbus.

9547 So what we are doing in East Toronto is not trying to slightly modify the cable community information-rich formula. It is, in fact, true media activism that is nonpartisan. We are not doing the left-right kind of thing here. This is a movement away from that. But, nonetheless, it is still radical.

9548 This is kitchen-table television and I think the culture of our presentation has come out in that area. It is professional, it is friendly, it is hopeful, it is extremely wise. Because of the advanced digital recording technology and the integration with the Internet -- especially videoconferencing, which I think is going to be just fascinating -- it is going to be current and up to speed.

9549 So why bother with this endeavour?

9550 Well, we really do take seriously the imperatives of the Broadcast Act. When I helped Jan write the application it was very interesting for me to read the Broadcast Act and go "Oh, my goodness, I didn't know this is what the Broadcast Act stated". I was very excited that there was this document which really put forth the philosophy that we were all striving for, because the times call for it.

9551 This is from an intervention by Paul Connelly, a local resident: "For most of us, what we see on mainstream TV is not the norm for our lives, so there is generated widespread confusion about what is normal or acceptable. This confusion tends to make certain ideas, which actually may be an appropriate reflection of an existing local reality, somehow seem `weird', illegitimate or even not worthy of discussion. The homogeneous nature of the vision of the world that is played back through the mainstream media thus contributes to the narrowing and atrophying of public discourse and eventually impairs people's ability to exercise fully their right to participate in the political and cultural life of our society."

9552 We have a gap between the vernacular that you might find in the laundry-mat, at the pub, at the street corner, in moments of compassion when people are grieving, that sense of the vernacular and what is presented on the media.

9553 Now, I became very aware of this when recently a huge event in Toronto, and I know it is happening elsewhere, when the province imposed a megacity amalgamation on our local government. I realized that the only accurate information I could get was from Internet e-mail lists. There was an incredible gap there.

9554 So I am not personally that interested in gauging about why there is that gap, whether you say Chompsky provides this analysis, or whatever theory you want to ascribe to this issue, but I do know that as soon as this station goes on the air there is going to be immediate, not promised over time or anything, but a closing of that gap in our community.

9555 In the end I think that it's all about inclusion in media. That is of independent producers, of the needs of handicapped viewers, of non-cable subscribers like myself. I'm very excited about the inclusion of amateur athletics and culture and the expansion and the diversification of views at the local level which will be the engine for the views that we are currently talking about in our globalization.

9556 So I think today is a significant day in the history of Canadian broadcasting, the beginning of the low power television movement.

9557 I want to thank again the CRTC and Industry Canada and Jan and all the volunteers for making this possible and I look forward to many years of creative partnership with everyone here.

9558 Thanks a lot.

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