Discriminatory Comments Made during Native Land Claims Discussion Not in Breach, Says Broadcast Standards Council

Ottawa, October 29, 1999 – The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) today released its decision concerning a discussion on the Pia Shandel Show, a morning talk show broadcast on CFUN-AM (Vancouver), of the native land claims issue. A listener complained of the discriminatory comments made by Ms. Shandel against the First Nations’ peoples.

The B.C. Regional Council considered the complaint under the human rights provision of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ (CAB) Code of Ethics. It found no Code violation. The Council did, however, underscore the fundamentally political nature of the lands claim discussion and noted that

[t]he CBSC always begins its assessment of complaints with the bedrock principle of freedom of expression as a foundation. As will be noted below, other Canadian societal values may occasionally require protection in the face of this basic right; however, in the Council’s constant review of challenged circumstances, this principle is never more inviolate than when the type of expression targeted by the complaint is of a political nature.

While the Council stated that it “was uncomfortable with some of the statements made by Ms. Shandel during her discussion of the native land claims issue”, specifically the references to First Nations’ peoples as “children” and “an abhorrent child” and the contention that “[t]hey can't even keep their people fed and alive and off the bottle and not committing suicide”, it found that “these statements were mitigated throughout the entire discussion and thus did not breach the human rights provision of the Code.” The Council noted that

the overall effect of the discriminatory comments was tempered by such inclusive references such as “our aboriginal brothers and sisters” which served to defuse the we/them polemic of the discussion and the acknowledgment that the land claims create a “complex situation” which “you and I couldn’t deal with it either”.

The Council concluded that “although ... the native land claims issue is a highly controversial one and one on which the expression of opinion will often be divisive; discussion of the issue cannot, nor should it, be avoided. Silence on controversial issues is never in the public interest.”

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 430 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 World Wide Web at www.cbsc.ca. For more information, please contact the National Chair of the CBSC, Ron Cohen, at (###) ###-####.