Catching up on MediaPolicy – Can Québec shove aside the federal Bill C-11? – CBC bonus pay, the epilogue – Will Page’s “screwed losers.”

Former CBC President Catherine Tait defended “bonus pay” in 2024

June 1, 2025

Last week MediaPolicy offered an analysis of whether the Québec CAQ government’s Bill 109 might trigger a constitutional conflict with the federal government’s Online Streaming Act Bill C-11 over who can regulate video and audio streaming platforms with the goal of making French language content more prominent in Québec.

Having federal and provincial governments running active public policy on exactly the same thing is a bit of a problem, something Julie Miville-Dechêne immediately pointed out on the floor of Senate.

The Senate’s Government Representative, Marc Gold, replied that the federal government was thinking about Bill 109 and “may have more to say on this in the coming days.”

What the Carney government might or might not say in the coming days will probably follow some off the record conversations with CAQ Culture Minister Mathieu Lacombe who has already said publicly he doesn’t have to negotiate with Ottawa.

The legal question of whether it’s Parliament or the Québec National Assembly that has jurisdiction over the “discoverability” of Internet-borne content is a juicy orange for the many devoted fans of Canadian constitutional law.

Legal expert Pierre Trudel of the Université de Montréal published his view in Le Devoir. He argues that Québec can take legislative action “to ensure that French-language works can be easily found in the mass of available content, even by someone who isn’t searching for them,” because nowadays the delivery of online content depends so heavily upon consumer data that it becomes a matter of provincially-regulated commercial affairs and consumer protection.

Trudel offers as a legal precedent a 1978 Supreme Court case. In that 6 to 3 majority ruling, the Court upheld a Québec consumer protection law governing the exposure of children to advertising content even when it was applied to federally regulated television programming.

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In the quiet lull following its miraculous survival of Election 2025, the still-funded CBC released its commissioned report from Mercer compensation consultants that answers some of the outstanding questions about the $18 million in “bonus payments” to 1,200 executives and non-union staff that fed the news cycle for so many months in 2024.

The headline is that Mercer recommended to CBC management that its at-risk “performance pay” component of total compensation is a common practice, a good thing, and ought to be retained in the name of effective staff recruitment and retention. In spite of the advice, CBC management rejected the recommendation to stay the course on performance pay and instead converted those dollars into wages. 

And perhaps that puts an end to the melodrama manufactured by MPs of all parties, as well as many members of the media commentariat, using the bonus payments as a stick to beat the CBC and its unpopular President because she refused to cancel payments owed under employment contracts in a year that the public broadcaster laid off 141 staff and then narrowly avoided mass layoffs. 

Before closing the book on this, there are a few parting observations worth making:

• Every MP ripping former President Catherine Tait for not cancelling performance pay was well aware of what Mercer confirmed: an at-risk component of total employee compensation is a prevalent business practice throughout the economy. The idea is to keep high achieving employees hungry for success through good performance. It’s not a perq. It’s not a cash grab. 

• If the unspoken script to the drama is that CBC employees get paid too much, the Mercer Report put that one to bed. CBC executives and non union employees are paid smack in the middle of the spectrum of total compensation for similar work. In fact they would be slightly below median earnings were it not for a solid pension plan.

• Between MPs asking the wrong questions, Tait clamming up in response to political attacks, and the limited information in the Mercer Report, we still don’t know anything about a number of key questions. Did legal entitlement to performance pay depend in any way on whether the CBC was laying off employees ? (Probably not). Did Tait have any option to reduce or cancel them? (Unlikely). Did employees achieve their targets for full at-risk pay or are the payments gimmes for most employees ? (Unknown).

• More importantly, now that $18 million of budgeted at-risk pay is being integrated into fixed salary, will that be at a dollar-for-dollar rate or discounted because there is no longer an at-risk portion?

The fact that none of these questions have been pursued, let alone answered, tells you what performative nonsense this has been.

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Back to the issue of Canadian content made discoverable on the big streaming platforms: I recommend the latest episode of Dan Runcie’s Trapital podcast hosting Will Page, the high profile expert on global music streaming and ex-Chief Economist for Spotify.

Page says that after a decade and a half of audio streaming that fuels “glocalization” of music — where musical cultures cross pollinate across national and linguistic borders — he was surprised at the growth in the US dominance of the global music earnings when he had expected the opposite.

That has implications for Canada:

“I ask you to go to the YouTube artist charts for Brazil…. Google it up and pull down those top 100 artists in Brazil this week.

And you’ll find one, maybe two international artists on that chart is singing in Portuguese, very little Spanish. And if you’re lucky, I think The Weeknd is ranked 95, and Bruno Mars is ranked 65…

Other than that, it’s an entirely Portuguese chart. So there you go. There’s a top 10 global music market that just said, “thank you and good night” to the English language.

If you are a non-English speaking country with a strong identity, glocalization is a force for good. If however, you are an English speaking country that’s not American, glocalization leaves you screwed. So we have winners and we have losers.”

Page has lots more to say about Canada and Canadian music. You can listen to the podcast here.

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This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2025.