Ieuan franklin

3.6 Challenge for Change

Radio programming such as Between Ourselves featured a great deal of oral history in order to fulfil the broad CBC remit to reflect or interpret Canada to Canadians, and to celebrate the diversity of Canada’s provinces.¹²³ Earlier in the chapter we discussed the cultural mandate of the CBC, specifically the fresh impetus given to regional programming in 1967-8 by the CBC Annual Report. The Liberal Government’s two-fold policy at the time was to democratize and regionalize culture by increasing communication between provinces, and by integrating the margins into the mainstream of Canadian life (Marchessault 1995: 134). In a sense, Liberal Governments had also established “the role of subsidized culture as a guardian angel for national identity” (Tuer 2005: 97), ever since the Massey Report recommended setting up an agency to subsidize Canadian culture without trying to direct or control it (Frye 1982/2003).

However, debate has often raged about whether governmental cultural subsidy delivers on its promises, or equates to “a constellation of national bureaucracies that empower an abstract collective identity without necessarily empowering the actual citizens in whose name they speak…” (Berland 1995: 517). Newfoundland has represented a particularly interesting and complex regional challenge to the notion of national cultural subsidy – before joining Canada in 1949 there had already been “a century of various projects of state formation and ‘nationalisms’ of one kind or another that defined Newfoundland as a distinct political and cultural entity” (Crocker 2008: 73). With the example of the Fogo Process, we will see how local community empowerment resulted – against the odds - from the convergence of national cultural subsidy and a local and ‘marginal’ grassroots initiative in Newfoundland.
During 1967, the year of the Centennial of Confederation, a project was initiated which also reflected the Liberal Government’s democratization agenda, and which took a highly instrumental and experimental approach to cultural development. ‘Challenge for Change/Societies Nouvelle’ (hereafter Challenge for Change) was a bi-cultural (Anglo-Canadian and French-Canadian) project initiated by the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada in 1967 and subsidised by seventeen federal government departments and agencies. Eight government departments each contributed $100,000, which was match-funded by the NFB, creating a budget of $1.6 million. Created “to help eradicate the causes of poverty by provoking basic social change”, this division of the Canadian ‘War on Poverty’ ultimately gave some of the disenfranchised and marginal communities of Canada a measure of self-definition by facilitating their access to communications media (film, and later Super-8, portable video and cable television) (Marchessault 1995; Boyle 2000). Challenge for Change therefore represented not just a groundbreaking experiment in communication for social change but also a model of best practice in the government subsidy of community or alternative media (Lewis and Scifo 2008), a point that will be re-iterated in Chapter 5.5.

Although the products of these initiatives were films and not radio documentaries, the issues they raise about the ethics of editing and about ‘citizen access’ to media also anticipate my discussion of the uses of oral history by BBC radio and community radio in Chapters 4 and 5. For example, the decision to create discrete, ‘modular’ films about individual people, events or a particular work process (see p.188) obviated the difficult choices typically faced by oral historians and radio producers when they ‘wrench’ excerpted testimony from a whole series of interviews to support the theme or argument of a programme, thereby reassembling the life history ‘evidence’ to view it from a new angle, as if horizontally rather than vertically (Thompson 1988: 237). Secondly, whilst the Fogo Process utilized 16mm film as a catalyst for social change, there is no reason why other communications media cannot be utilized to achieve similar results. For example, the grassroots communication organization Ryakuga currently utilizes the model of the Fogo Process in establishing community radio stations in Newfoundland and training local people in community reporting, the use of recording technology to catalyse discussion of local issues and publicise local culture. The resulting content is broadcast on FM and simultaneously webcast as Internet radio.

A more open and inclusive way of working eventually emerged, in which Challenge for Change facilitated community projects that enabled ordinary people in disadvantaged communities to explore their own problems and arrive at their own solutions. This meant the involvement of citizens in the production process – choosing their own subject areas, influencing the editorial process, and determining to what audiences the film should be shown. The Challenge for Change filmmaker thus became a facilitator of the process of social change more than a creator of a finished ‘product’, and in some circumstances could actually utilise his previous liability as an outsider to mediate and resolve conflict within communities (Hopkins 1971).