Multiculturalism would evidently be an important vector there, and the orientation of the producers or programmers to the question of cultural difference would undoubtedly play a significant role in prefiguring the treatment of those issues. With that in mind, I take your point about the political dimensions of the mandate and its interpretation on the level of legislation and then production. This is not something to which I have given extensive consideration, but I will interested to see what insights your current projects can provide with respect to these matters. If we can put all this together in the mode of the circuit model, we might be able to get a better sense as to how all of these values and terms have functioned (or been made to function) at various levels in relation to the CBC and Canadian society more broadly during this period.

I will say that is particularly interesting to contemplate that issue in light of the fact that it has now been more than twenty years since this mandate was drafted and implemented. If the pattern holds, we could be due for a new broadcasting act in the not so distant future. I wonder what that might look like and how the CBC’s mandate would be reconfigured in the current paradigm, which has seen us move more firmly into a less broadcasting centric media era.

You speak of the work performed by the show, but I think you’ve identified only half the work, the half that is directed toward and involves viewers individually and the “Canadian public” (a construct that includes viewers but is not coterminous with them) more broadly. The other half is directed toward the politicians who wrote the CBC’s mandate into the Broadcasting Act and the policymakers who work to ensure that it is implemented. Here, the work is not nation-building as such but a demonstration that the CBC is doing what it is supposed to do. In other words, the substance of “national consciousness and identity” is in some ways invented each time the term is invoked. It is not some inherent quality of a TV show but a piece evidence that justifies the show’s creation by demonstrating that it fulfills a mandate.

If we shift perspectives to focus on this second type of work, it raises a new set of questions. What is the relationship of politicians and policymakers to program-makers themselves, and how is that relationship mediated by the CBC’s mandates? Is policy a good way of effecting change within a broadcasting system? Or, more to the point, in what ways is it effective or not? How does policy influence the program-makers’ decisions related to production?

I suspect that answers to this new set of questions will also shape the answers we find to the questions you’re posing, although I’m still working through that process. But I’d be very interested to hear your take.