November 17, 2024
This week MediaPolicy hosted a guest column on the future of the CBC from Richard Stursberg, the author of The Tangled Garden: A Canadian Cultural Manifesto and the 2012 Tower of Babble, a memoir of running English language services at the CBC. The column welcomes the new President of CBC, Marie-Philippe Bouchard, with some advice.
Stursberg’s column follows an interview that MediaPolicy published recently with Chris Waddell about his book, End of the CBC?
You see exposed now, my naked agenda: more talk about how to reinvent the CBC and present an alternative to Pierre Poilievre’s promise to defund it. I hope to keep this going with more discussion on this platform.
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Here’s one piece of my mind I offer about the CBC.
Pierre Poilievre has many political goals to be achieved by defunding the CBC, not the least of which is repaying donors so he can convince them his audacity is genuine.
The other purpose of “defund the CBC” is to effect a seismic shift in the media reporting universe. Silencing the CBC through defunding is the right-wing version of cancel-culture, something you might have heard is a bad thing. The reputed CBC “news bias” will be eliminated along with the work of 3000 unwanted journalists.
For a thought provoking video clip, here is CBC news host David Cochrane putting forth a plausible hypothetical in a Canada purged of the CBC:
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On November 15 the CRTC announced that it is commencing hearings on March 31, 2025 that will dive into the meatiest of remaining regulatory issues for video streamers under the Online Streaming Act Bill C-11. MediaPolicy will have more to say about that in mid-week.
Even though the federal cabinet gave the Commission until December 2025 to complete the regulatory “framework” for the bill, the Commission’s laborious pace is awkward given the Conservative election promise to repeal it.
On Friday the Commission made it clear that the best case scenario for completing its work including the specific requirements for online and traditional broadcasters is in 2026 and, as expected, it will pause this work the moment that the election writ is dropped.
That means voters in the a federal election to be held no later than October 2025 will be relying a great deal on what political parties say the legislation is about, rather than how it is actually implemented. We deserve better.
The campaign against C-11 continues uninterrupted.
As covered by MediaPolicy in these two posts, the coalition representing Spotify and the Big Tech music streamers recently launched the public campaign “Scrap The Streaming Tax,” a reference to the CRTC’s CanCon levy authorized by C-11. The Washington D.C.-based Digital Media Association (DiMA) behind the campaign was fortunate to land Canadian rocker Bryan Adams as an ally and supporter of the campaign.
Now DiMA has sponsored —-paid for—- an opinion column from The Hub’s Sean Speer in which Stephen Harper’s former policy chief proposes the repeal of Bill C-11.
The column, illustrated with art from DiMA’s “Scrap the Tax” campaign, signs off “this article was made possible by the Digital Media Association and the generosity of readers like you.”
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The Parliamentary Heritage Committee has issued its final report on hearings convened in reaction to the political campaigns and news throttles conducted in Canada by Meta and Google in 2022 and 2023. The modest title of the proceedings was: “Tech Giants’ Intimidation and Subversion Tactics to Evade Regulation in Canada and Globally.”
Alas, the committee’s majority report (the Conservative MPs dissented) is anti-climatic. When the hearings commenced, MPs demanded that Meta and Google cough up e-mails that might reveal “astroturfing” alliances between the Big Tech giants and grassroots Canadian organizations opposing Internet legislation.
In the end, there is nothing in the report about those e-mails. It’s just as well. The Big Tech funding patrons and campaign alliances were openly acknowledged by those Canadian organizations.
The Committee made five recommendations for regulating Big Tech’s activities in Canada, four of which are addressed by the Liberals’ Online Safety Act C-63 that currently languishes in Parliament.
The fifth recommendation is a reprise of the Heritage Committee’s 2017 proposal to “Close the Loophole” in section 19.1 of the Income Tax Act that exempts online advertising from the tax presumption against placing Canadian advertisements in foreign media operating in Canada. The policy idea is to encourage Canadian advertisers to reach online Canadian audiences through Canadian media.
A footnote: the Conservative Party’s dissenting statement declares its intention (or that of its committee MPs) to repeal the Online News Act, C-18. While the Party and its leader have repeatedly opposed and criticized the Bill that delivers $100 million annually to Canadian news organizations, this is the first time I have seen them commit to repealing it.
By coincidence, this week CBC News announced it is using its $7 million in Google money to hire 25 journalists in underserved regional markets with a focus on Western Canada.
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The ability of Canadian governments to regulate Big Tech operations is always limited by the reality that we are a small country and the US is a big one that uses trade power to defend the interests of its corporations. Anything we want to do differently from the US in respect to Big Tech is difficult; anything the US Congress does on its own accord would be easier to mirror in Canada.
So the impact of the Trump and Republican victories in the recent election upon Big Tech is all important. The Washington Post published a summary of the live Tech regulatory issues in 2025 such as AI, child safety, and Elon Musk (he’s his own issue).
The Post speculated that the selection of the new majority leader of the Republican Senate might be crucial to tech issues and indeed the job was captured by South Dakota’s John Thune, despite Musk’s vigorous opposition to his appointment. Thune is sometimes identified as a traditional Republican and more likely to work constructively across the aisle with Democrats.
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