Paul Kennedy: CBC doesn't understand its mandate any more

McLuhan, Gould, and seven symphony orchestras walk into a public broadcasting corporation

“I’m Paul Kennedy. Welcome to Ideas.”

For twenty years, these words delivered in Paul Kennedy’s baritone welcomed listeners to one of the CBC Radio’s flagship shows – 300,000+ listeners per show, in fact. Unlike many other classic shows on the CBC radio which just cease when the host moves on or retires, Ideas has continued, though Paul couldn’t tell me how it compares with his own era. He doesn’t listen to the CBC radio any more, and in that he’s like a lot of us who used to have the dial – and later bookmarks and phone apps - permanently parked on the CBC. We have meanwhile abandoned it in droves. “I sometimes listen to Your World Today, former The World at Six show, but that is it”, he tells me when we meet for coffee off King Street East. 

Our paths first crossed during a recent Jane’s Walk led by Katherine Govier, where he made a cameo and shared his story of renting in the Annex as a young nerd trying to make it in journalism. He’s in his seventies now, and technically retired.

I say technically, because these days he is trying to preserve history. He and a group of retired producers and hosts from the CBC Pensioners National Association are interviewing other prominent retired colleagues about their careers - and about Canada that they witnessed during the many decades of reporting about it. “It’s called the Legacy Project,” says Paul. “We’re all veterans - shall I say survivors - of the CBC and we have all these skills that we’re putting to use.” Ten oral history interviews have been made so far, three of which by Paul. He’s hoping to record broadcaster and author Whit Fraser (81) and a number of other people. “It’s very slow, with lawyers asking for written permissions and such, but we’re trying to explain to them that we know what we’re doing, because we’ve been around the block.” The group are in talks with the TMU about the university hosting the completed audio archives and keeping them available for public access and use. 

And I presume the CBC had no interest in doing anything to help out? Their work of archiving, no other way to put it, sucks. I don’t get it, I tell him. “I do. It’s incompetence.” I laugh but he’s serious. “I go back to the time when the CBC Radio was on Jarvis St. Everything was on quarter inch tapes, so not easy to store.” And the digitization of a lot of material simply never took place, but even digital stuff is poorly preserved. “Entire shows from the period when I was hosting ideas, 1999-2019, are missing. In television, for example… Wayne and Shuster will have, like, one show archived out of 12 years worth of shows.”  

Writers and Company, it was recently announced, will be archived at Simon Fraser University; someone on that show had enough foresight not to trust the CBC with any archiving and public service efforts and immediately started looking for a new home. “Yes, that was smart. And my experience tells me, not only will the CBC not help, they’ll try to prevent others from trying to archive the programs.” 

So we try to tackle the ever daunting question of how the CBC got the way it is now. “Managers at the CBC are not broadcasters but MBAs… they want to be working for Nike and similar companies,” he says. In other words, the thinking is short-term, focus on short-term gains. In addition, funds and focus have been moving away from radio at least since the 1960s. “The CBC was created as a radio broadcaster, but around 1962, with the rise of television, radio fell down the funding priorities. TV was getting 70 percent of the budget at one point,” he says, “and that’s before the internet. With the coming of the internet, the funds were starting to be siphoned out of television too, into what is now known as cbc.ca.” 

The BBC, I suggest, never made the mistake of starving its radio. Their app has something like 5 radio channels now. “Yes… but they only have one time zone. And they have the World Service, which is known world-wide.” Our own international broadcasting, the RCI, is modest in comparison. “And fine, I was in favour of it, but it needs to be mentioned, Radio Canada, the French-language programming, gets half of the budget whereas only 30 percent of the population speaks French.” I agree it’s unfair, but the Quebeckers are clamouring for its public broadcasting, and I’m not sure the ROC has felt anything much about the English language service lately. He doesn’t disagree.

That time he almost got fleeced by Marshall McLuhan’s agent with the unlikely name of Mrs. Molinari

It sounds like the stuff of legend now, but Paul got his first CBC contract by… walking into the building on Jarvis, declaring he’d just abandoned his PhD thesis on Harold Innis at the U of T, and that he needed a job. The one person he knew there, his former politics tutor from Queens, told him they weren’t hiring but that he could go upstairs, where this show called Ideas was being made, and that they might have something for him. He walked out with his first radio documentary contract, the five-part series on Harold Innis - his PhD work finding a new life.  

Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, many decades apart (wiki photos)

Marshall McLuhan (“Marsh”, as Paul still refers to him) was his unofficial research advisor at the time. The star academic would invite the young scholar to his office or his Wychwood Park home at least once a week and begin their tutoring sessions with ‘So what have you been reading’. Paul, naturally, wanted him in his radio documentary, but McLuhan’s agent was a tough nut to crack. Her name was Mrs. Molinari. When Paul phoned her, she asked for a $5,000 fee in exchange for McLuhan’s participation, which amounted to Paul’s entire budget for the series. “Everybody's trying to screw Marshall,” he was told. His pleading went nowhere, and the first episode on Innis was made without the star academic who, however, ended up listening and wondering why he wasn’t in it. Mrs. Molinari was soon overruled and the rest of the series indeed does have McLuhan as a talking head. 

“He knew Innis… but the two men were not close friends,” says Kennedy. Innis died in 1952, long before McLuhan achieved his planetary fame. “McLuhan wrote in one of his books, ‘Nothing I’ve ever written is more than a footnote on the work of Harold Innis’ and it’s true.” But nobody knows who he is any more. His books are not easy to find, and very few people still read him. “Oh he’s unreadable. But worth the effort. He wasn’t a good writer and kind of wrote for other academics - but not even for them particularly well.” 

“McLuhan picked up snippets from Innis work and ran… and brilliantly ran. He was also full of contradictions… This rock star scholar was a devoted Catholic who went to mass every day. Also, one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met, and generous to me with his time, and to a lot of people. But he definitely had some rough edges.” His Catholicism, says Kennedy, came with a dose of antisemitism thrown in.

Innis, for his part, didn’t like Catholics, and this included McLuhan. 

Why isn’t there an intellectual biography of Innis, why aren’t there books for non-scholarly readers about him? “Canadian historian Donald Creighton wrote a book about Innis, so that may be worth checking out,” says Kennedy. (Alas, the book was published in 1957.) On hearing Creighton’s name I drew a blank, so Paul offered some context. “Creighton wrote the standard bio of John A. Macdonald which is a beautiful book; Creighton could write.” As a young freelancer, Kennedy wrote a piece for Quill and Quire for which he interviewed both Creighton and his arch-nemesis Arthur R. M. Lower (one was Tory, the other liberal, locked in an intellectual feud about Canadian history). “Lower wrote this great book which became a textbook, Colony to Nation: A History of Canada. Innis commented that it should have been called ‘Colony to Nation to Colony’: started as a colony of Britain and France, became a nation, and now we are a colony of the US.” 

Creighton was livid, says Kennedy, after he found himself in the same article as Lower. This is what the kids today call being non-consensually co-platformed, I tell him. Jokes aside, why don’t we hear conversations like this anymore - and why aren’t they on the CBC?

He turns pensive. “There’s nowhere for them to be,” is all he says.

Did his time at the CBC overlap at all with the era of Glenn Gould making radio documentaries for the corporation? “No, that was before me - but I did have one conversation with Gould, on the phone, as a freelance journalist.” Early in his freelance career, Kennedy found himself editing a classical music magazine called Fugue. (“In my head I called it Fug u. I didn’t know much about classical and was trying to catch up by reading liner notes off recordings.”) He was paid, but there was little money for other contributors. “I created this character called Doug Ryan… I wrote under that pen name, adding a name to the masthead.” How does one get Gould on the phone? He just rang his number from the newsroom rolodex? “No, I sent him a snail mail letter first, to ask for an interview,” he says. The letter went to his St. Clair Avenue apartment. Nothing further was done until one day the phone rang. “Hello Paul? It’s Glenn Gould. I didn’t know what to say at first. I’d explained in the letter that I wanted to do this last-page column called Quodlibet and interview him for it. He talked to me for half an hour, he played with me for a while, probably wondering who this kid was, and then he said he’d think about it. And that was it. I never heard back.”

Glenn Gould (Don Hunstein, wiki free commons)

For another piece that he did as a freelancer, he got Mick Jagger and Joey Smallwood on the phone. The piece was about prominent former Boy Scouts - in all seriousness. “Joey Smallwood answered his own phone and was only happy to talk about how he was The King’s Scout, not just any kind of scout. My third interlocutor for this piece was supposed to be Charles Manson. Yes, the serial killer. I phoned him up in prison and someone went to find him, but I thought better of it and hung up.” 

Catherine Tait, the Brooklynite

These days, Kennedy listens to the Chum FM and a Buffalo music station which he took to as a kid growing up in a General Motors family in St. Catherine’s. You listen to commercial stations? “What can I say, I’m into 1960s’ music.”

What has the CBC done to lose Canadians to this degree?

“It misunderstood the mandate,” he says. “They think they’re in competition with private stations. They’re not. People used to talk about having their dial permanently fixed on CBC Radio. They alienated that audience.” 

What about their dependence on contract work? Kennedy himself worked contracts for the CBC for fourteen years before he was hired. This happy ending is less and less frequent now, most contributors just working contracts until they can’t - or the contracts dry out. “Oh they [the CBC] live off contract workers. But I did my best work as a contract worker there, I think.” Did you feel you were justly compensated for your work? “I was better paid replacing hosts on various shows than for my freelance work,” he says. 

And then there’s the way the CBC gets rid of people. Like, say, Wendy Mesley, who I think was unfairly dropped when the CBC found itself in the American progressive purity spiral. “Yes. FFS. Saying the title of something that contains the n word in a meeting. That was insane.” 

What of Catherine Tait and her pandemic spent in Brooklyn? Could an executive be more irritating even if they tried? “No, I agree. It’s part of the contract if you’re the CBC President to live in Ottawa. She did not, and claims it was because her husband was sick. I’m not buying it. But more importantly, before she was hired, she hadn’t lived in Canada for 16 years.” What’s her background, I’m sure she has vast broadcasting experience? “No, she was listed as one of the producers in Michael Moore films. Good for her. But what does she know about Canada - or care?” 

We glumly skim over the eras of some other recent executives – Heather Conway, Richard Stursberg - but eventually land on a better memory. 

Yellowknife, “How the Light Gets In” festival, Winter Solstice celebration. December 20-21-22, somewhere in the early 2000s. “First night, Jurgen Gothe did a variety show. There were throat singers, classical musicians, all kinds of performers. Second night, I did an Ideas about the Solstice, and this went live. Third show as the CBC Vancouver Orchestra, for which the CBC Radio Music commissioned a solstice concerto by Christos Hatzis (he did the music for my oceans series, probably the best thing I ever did).” Wait, I stop him. The CBC had an orchestra? “In the 1940s the CBC had orchestras in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton and Calgary, and Vancouver. They all commissioned new work.” All gone now, the Vancouver orchestra the last one standing until it too was disbanded in 2008. 

“So there we were in Yellowknife… and the harpsichord arrives at the airport ahead of the concert. How do we transport a harpsichord across Yellowknife to the concert hall in -24C temperatures? They were scared shitless. How is the wood gonna react? Is it gonna crack? Explode? But in the event, the harpsichord arrived in one piece.” 

Before I go for the easy joke “...but the CBC didn’t”, Paul asks me if I know where “How the light gets in” comes from? I happen to know that it’s a Leonard Cohen lyric. Of course, he says - and then tells me about that time when he spoke with Prime Minister Paul Martin about nominating Cohen for the Nobel Prize, and that other time when a producer told him that they had found the real Suzanne and that they should do a TV documentary about her. And the conversation continues.