Ottawa, March 25, 2003 --The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) announces the appointment of Gilles Moisan FCA and Tara Rajan to its Québec Regional Panel.
Gilles Moisan, a public Adjudicator, is a Fellow of the Order of Chartered Accountants of the Province of Québec and an expert in management, negotiation, financial, and administrative issues. His considerable accounting and management expertise led to the running of businesses in the Quebec City area as well as partnership and management roles in a major Quebec and Canadian accounting practice. He has also served as Chairman of the Board of the Centre hospitalier de l'Hôtel-Dieu du Sacré-Coeur de Jésus and has been a Member of the Board of the Chambre de commerce de Québec since 2000. After serving as the Treasurer, Vice-President and then President of the Orchestre symphonique de Québec for more than a decade, he more recently played a major role, as Executive Director, in the rescue of the Orchestre symphonique de Québec, taking it from a significant deficit to a surplus in that period.
Tara Rajan, a public Adjudicator who has spent her career working in the cultural industries, is currently the Director of Research and Data at the Canadian Television Fund. The first Executive Director of the CBSC, Ms. Rajan has also held positions at Telefilm Canada and Canadian Heritage. In her capacity as Manager of Periodical Publishing Policy there and a member of the team responsible for designing and implementing the Canada Magazine Fund, she received a special Deputy Minister's Award. As a volunteer, Ms. Rajan has served with the Centre-femmes d'aujourd'hui in Quebec City, and on the Board of Directors of the Ottawa Women's Credit Union. Ms. Rajan holds a Master of Arts degree in Political Science from Laval University.
Ron Cohen, the National Chair of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, expressed his enthusiasm regarding these appointments to the Québec Regional Panel. "The Québec Panel has played an important role in the rendering of decisions recognizing the distinctive characteristics of Québec broadcasts, well aided by the regional, linguistic and gender balance of the Panel. The judgment of the new Panel members will only strengthen an already strong team. Their professional, cultural and public service backgrounds will be of great value to the exercise of the CBSC's public responsibilities." The Québec Panel, like all of the other CBSC Panels across the country, is made up of equal numbers of public and industry members. Its Chair is Me Guylaine Bachand of Montréal, an industry Adjudicator. The other current broadcaster members are Sylvain Chamberland of RadioMédia (Montréal), Me Bernard Guérin of TQS (Montréal), Brian Kenemy of Corus Entertainment (Montréal) and Robert Parent of Radio-Nord (Gatineau). The other public members are Professor Peta Tancred and Michèle Audette (both of Montréal). There is currently one public member vacancy on the Québec Panel.
Canada's private broadcasters have themselves created industry standards in the form of Codes on ethics, gender portrayal and television violence by which they expect the members of their profession will abide. In 1990, they also created the CBSC, which is the self-regulatory body with the responsibility of administering those professional broadcast Codes, as well as the Code dealing with journalistic practices first created by the Radio Television News Directors Association of Canada (RTNDA) in 1970. More than 530 radio and television stations and specialty services from across Canada are members of the Council.
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All CBSC decisions, Codes, links to members' and other web sites, and related information are available on the CBSC's website at www.cbsc.ca. For more information, please contact the CBSC National Chair, Mme Andrée Noël CBSC Executive Director, John MacNab