Catching Up on MediaPolicy – CBC review panelists are appointed- CRTC slows down C11 changes – new tv data from the CMPA

The Logic CEO David Skok joins the Heritage panel to review CBC Radio-Canada

May 13, 2024

Heritage Minister Pascale St.-Onge has announced the seven-person expert panel that will advise her on updating the programming vision for CBC-Radio Canada.

The panelists have a good diversity of backgrounds including the former Editor-in-Chief of CBC News (Jennifer McGuire); the CEO of the French language news consortium TV5 (and former Radio-Canada executive) Marie-Philippe Bouchard; the National Film Board (Loc Dao of DigiBC); and former Canada Media Fund analyst Catalina Briceño of UQAM.

Jesse Wente, CEO of the Canadian Council of the Arts (and formerly the Indigenous Screen Office), is a no-brainer appointment.

David Skok, CEO of the online business journal The Logic, is a surprise but promising appointment given the central role that digital news plays in the corporation’s mandate.

Canadian-born academic Mike Ananny of the University of Southern California is an outlier.

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The CRTC has broken its silence on when it’s going to get things done implementing the Online Streaming Act Bill C-11.

The big news is that the Commission is delaying proceedings to re-examine the definition of a Canadian program by a full year, now to begin sometime in the Spring of 2025.

The CRTC announcement also fails to clarify when it will consider the two biggest pieces of regulation: the obligations of foreign streamers to provide original Canadian programming and to make it discoverable on their platforms. At the earliest, the Commission will tell us more about that when it releases its ruling on streamer cash contributions to Canadian media funds, a decision not expected until this “summer.” So anytime between June 21 and September 21?

Monica Auer of FRPC posted this comparison of the CRTC’s initial agenda published in May 2023 and last week’s recalibrated schedule:

A blog post from a Toronto law firm noted that the CRTC’s new timetable appears to put it in violation of the two-year limit directed by the Heritage Minister only last November.

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The Canada Media Producers Association (CMPA) released its annual industry-bellwether “Profile” report on television and film production in Canada.

The long-term data that CMPA presents in these annual reports is indispensable to tracking the health of Canadian content production and the “service” market for US studios shooting in Canada for American release. The two most important long term (10+ years) trends are a stagnation in Canadian content production and a boom in making television and movies for the American market.

Here’s a chart based on the now outdated Profile 2022 that you will find in Chapter 7 of my book, Canada vs California: How Ottawa took on Netflix and the Streaming Giants.

Even in ordinary times, Profile’s year-by-year numbers oscillate up and down, bidding caution. In addition to that, the impact of the pandemic shut-down, the post pandemic catch-up, and the recent Hollywood actor and writer strikes has made results from the last three years into a series of one-ofs.

The newly released Profile 2023 shows solid growth for the production year ending March 31 2023 but the authors note that the effect of the Hollywood strikes won’t be measured until next year’s report. In the meantime, a report from Ontario Creates (with nine more months of data up until December 2023) reveals that the good news of Profile 2023 is unlikely to carry over into Profile 2024. Ontario government data says the province’s 2023 Canadian program production was down 21% and US service production was down 55%.

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My recommended read this week is not a freebie. I reviewed Kim Kierans’ history of the Canadian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize: the Michener Award for investigative journalism. Have a look at the review and decide if it’s for you. It was a great read!

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