The most common Canadian observation about US politics is confusion over what has happened to American democracy.
How could more than 70 million Americans re-elect Donald Trump: felon, racist, fascist and possibly a future dictator?
For any Canadian older than Generation Zed, American reality no longer jibes with our learned experience of the American public, how they vote, or what they think.
This cognitive dissonance we experience might have something to do with with our inability to place Trumpism within a “political order,” even if we have a clear take on Trump the man.
On that note, a week ago the New York Times’ Ezra Klein, had American historian Gary Gerstle on his podcast show.
Gerstle’s gift of commentary is to organize our thoughts into a sensible narrative, in particular his sketch of American history as a sequence of paradigms of political consensus on political economy and the voting coalitions that support them.
His account begins with the bipartisan political order of the New Deal (Franklin Roosevelt to the administration of Jimmy Carter) eclipsed by three decades of neo-liberalism under Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes and Obama.
The end and beginning of political orders, he says, are marked by great economic upheaval. The Great Depression of the 1930s. The oil price shocks and stagflation of the 1970s. He identifies the end of neo-liberalism, and the beginning of an as yet undefined new political order, as the financial crisis of 2010 followed by the 2016 election of Trump.
Gerstle suggests that the class disparities in the economic impact of the financial crisis and recovery tipped the neo-liberal order into a credibility crisis: the exploding income inequality between rich and poor that was supposed to be tolerated so long as working and middle class Americans were incrementally better off was making Main Street America very angry. The Pandemic shock did the same thing.
And in fact the uncertainty over where we are in 2024, and what kind of political order exists, is what causes Gerstle to say towards the end of the engrossing 90 minute podcast that he doesn’t yet know how to define this new paradigm, because there isn’t one. In a nation divided, it’s still contested.
And here we are trying to make sense of it all. This morning my X feed sent me to two video commentaries among thousands.
Have a listen and a look:
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It might have been the look, the leather jacket. Or the bubble gum lyrics.
Okay, he could write a tune. Twenty Juno awards. A Grammy. 48th on the all-time Billboard 100. The international chart-topping Waking Up the Neighbours album in 1991.
When his songs from Neighbours didn’t qualify as Canadian because of a Seventies-era rule about Canadians collaborating with international talent in the co-writing of music and lyrics —his songs got plenty of radio play regardless— he got mad. His manager got even madder. He was the performing artist of the songs. For pete’s sake, he was a recipient of the Order of Canada. He was insulted.
His anger got the better of him. “I never thought much about CanCon anyway,” he said. “I always thought that it did nothing but breed mediocrity.”
Government, Adams said, should just stay out of the music industry.
Adams jumped into the culture debate again in May 2024 (days prior to a major CRTC ruling on music streaming), releasing a video pre-emptively opposing the application of Canadian content rules to streaming.
A few months later and now he’s posted on Instagram as the celebrity face of the public campaign launched by the global streamers attacking the CRTC’s five per cent “streaming tax” on Spotify, Apple, Amazon Prime, YouTubeMusic and the major platforms.
So why is a Canadian icon headlining for Big Music?
The answer to that question is an opportunity to evaluate what’s happening for Canadian music at the CRTC and what it means for Canadian artists and audiences.
***
On June 4th this year the streamers and the big music labels were angered when the CRTC announced its ruling on “initial basic contributions.” Those are cash levies from Canadian operating revenues, to be paid out by the big video and audio streamers to various Canadian media subsidy funds.
Netflix, Disney and the other Hollywood streamers were assessed a five per cent cash contribution (although in the end it’s a 3.5% levy). The bill is over $100 million annually.
As for music streamers like industry-leader Spotify, it’s the full five per cent of Canadian revenues, a $60 million per year payment collectively owed by the major music platforms.
The CRTC justified the 3.5 % levy on video streamers by linking it to the five per cent paid every year by Canadian cable television companies, beginning in 1995 as contributions to the Cable Production Fund, the forerunner of today’s Canada Media Fund that helps to finance Canadian television shows.After years of steady decline, cable TV contributions to the CMF were still $165 million last year:
But on the music side of the house, the CRTC only assesses a modest one-half per cent levy on Canadian radio stations. As an outlier, the CRTC explicitly requires satellite radio operator Sirius Canada to pay four per cent because the Canadian content quotas for Sirius are so much lighter than radio.
It’s tough for them to make the case they can’t afford it: the Swedish-owned Spotify is no longer sacrificing profits for market share, has cut costs, raised prices and is making good money now. The other leading streamers Apple, Amazon and YouTube are owned by Big Tech.
Nonetheless, the streamers had asked the CRTC that they pay nothing —more precisely Spotify told the CRTC it was hoping for “a very low basic fee”— and here the Commission was hitting them up for cash at ten times the rate paid by Canadian radio businesses. A similar levy in France is 1.2 % of revenues and 2.4% in Spain (in the latter case, extracted from the music labels’ share of streamers’ revenue).
The CRTC did not offer much of an explanation of the tenfold disparity between radio’s 0.5% and the streamers’ 5%. Nor did the Commission explain why in the first place it was calibrating the streamers’ contributions to Canadian music funds to a television fund. The Commission’s main point seemed to be the money was, well, needed for a declining pool of radio operators’ cash contributions —from $60M to $40M in the last ten years— to important musician development funds FACTOR and Starmaker; and their French-language counterparts Musicaction and Fonds RadioStar. Divided up among several media funds including the newly established Indigenous Music Office, the $60 million from the streamers fills that $20 million hole:
And so, the streamer campaign against the CRTC levy was launched.
First, the music streamers appealed the CRTC levy to Federal Court, a litigation they are unlikely to win but might delay the payment of the levy.
Next came public announcements from the streamers and thebig music labels resisting regulatory proposals, whether it’s cash payments to media funds or Canadian song quotas.
Then on September 30th came the campaign to rile music consumers, “Scrap the Streaming Tax,” pushed out on streaming platforms and social media.
The ongoing campaign is organized by the US Digital Media Association (DiMA) which counts Spotify, Amazon, Apple and YouTube among its members. Says it’s CEO Graham Davies:
The streaming tax needs to be scrapped because Canadians are already feeling the pinch from rising inflation and economic pressures. The addition of a streaming tax is an unnecessary burden. This tax is not only a financial strain on consumers, but it also undermines the role that streaming services have played in promoting Canadian culture and artists and enabling the music sector’s investment in talent.
The price increase came the day after campaign launch. Spotify’s June 3, 2024 American price increase was held back and not implemented Canada until October 1st when it was announced at 15%.
A week later on October 9th, the campaign unleashed its star power: a new social media post from Bryan Adams. His “scrap the tax” message (not to be confused with Pierre Poilievre’s ‘axe the tax’) also suggested he hasn’t got rid of the stone in his shoe about CanCon co-writing rules:
The Canadian Government’s new music streaming tax is gonna cost you MORE to listen to the music you love on line.
A while back, the minister Heritage said she wanted to engage with artists about this new tax. Well, that never happened. No calls, no meetings—nothing. And now they’ve slipped this new tax through – wanna know where your money’s gonna go? I’ll tell you – It’s going to prop up outdated broadcasting models such as CanCon, which were originally built to help Canadian creators.
And CanCon needs to change, not be propped up. For example, the way it’s set up now, if an artist decides they want to work with a non-Canadian – then the work is no longer recognised as Canadian, and therefore radio stations are less likely to play it.
How does this help Canadian artists – particularly emerging ones? It doesn’t, these rules just make it harder for new artists to breakthrough and share music on a global scale.
Canadians deserve better. Scrap the tax / and change the rules. Because music…is global.
***
CRTC music regulation —what Adams is referencing as “CanCon”—is about more than co-writing rules.
Regulation of media enterprises operating in Canada has two goals. The first is to subsidize the production of Canadian video and audio entertainment, either through program spending commitments by the enterprises or the payment of cash levies to “media funds” that distribute them to independent Canadian television producers or musicians who make content.
The second goal is content “discoverability,” meaning that the videos and songs made by those Canadians are given an extra push so they appear on consumers’ radars.
In music, radio stations do a lot of discoverability. The CRTC gives them Canadian airplay quotas: 35% on commercial radio (and 65% French language selections from Canadian and global sources on French radio) and 50% on the CBC. Before streaming, radio was the major venue for emerging Canadians bands to gain an audience. So far no one has put a dollar figure to it, but it’s uncontroversial to say that the exposure of radio is worth a lot more to Canadian musicians than cash from the one-half per cent of revenues that radio operators pay to media funds. Ultimately, Canadian radio stations provide considerably more to Canadian music in exposure than the $40 million to development funds.
There are exceptions to the one-half per cent: the multi-channel format of satellite radio isn’t friendly to airplay quotas, so the CRTC license for Sirius Radio favours cash payments (four per cent of revenues) over quotas.
The foreign music streamers walked into this regulated Canadian world and told the CRTC they wanted to do neither cash nor discoverability. Where Netflix grudgingly conceded it would cough up two per cent, the music streamers offering nothing. On discoverability, the streamers all said the same thing: our consumer-centred song and playlist recommendations and curationare sacrosanct. We won’t change them for anybody.
So, what about Canadian music’s opportunities in the digital age? When the debate over regulating music streaming was mooted in Parliamentary committees in 2022, Gord Sinclair of The Tragically Hip described the Kingston Ontario band’s regulatory-fueled exposure as the difference between Canadians making a living at music, or not:
Over the years, we wrote some good songs, we worked hard and we had great fans, but in the beginning we were beneficiaries of CanCon, the partnership between private broadcasters and government. This was not a handout. For us, it was a leg-up. With the help of our managers, we recorded an EP and got signed to a label and, with their help, we were able to get some airplay on radio. That gave us enough exposure across the country to take the show on the road, as so many great Canadian entertainers have done.
Canadians excel at live performance. The sheer size of the country is our greatest asset. The road is long and hard, with vast distances between gigs. You can’t have a day job and aspire to be a performer in Canada. You either learn to love the life and your travelling companions or you break up. The late great Ronnie Hawkins always said that Canadians have to work 10 times as hard to get a tenth as far.
The artists who do endure have honed their talent to a very high standard. Canadian musicians are seasoned travelers. They’ve learned to play live and to live on the road, and that’s what sets us apart. Somehow, during the years and hours of staring out the van window at granite and black spruce, you discover what it means to be a Canadian. You realize that despite its size, distinct regions and communities, there is more that binds us together in this country than separates us. The Hip wrote songs from that perspective. Many of them resonated with our fellow Canadians and enjoy enduring popularity.
Through the travel, the space, the time and the weather, the songwriter searches for meaning and what gives us a common identity. Nations create and preserve themselves through the stories they tell. Words set to rhythm and melodies are our stories. They allowed us to enjoy a long fruitful career until Gord Downie’s untimely death.
Walt Whitman wrote, “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” In 2022, five years after the loss of Leonard Cohen and Gord, we must ask ourselves where our next generation of poets will come from. How can we help them discover themselves?
Times change. In the 30 years that the Hip were performing, we went from producing vinyl records and cassettes to CDs, videos and DATs through Napster, and to iTunes and YouTube, and now to streaming and its dominant platform, Spotify. Through it all, until recently, there have been live shows to make ends meet, but people no longer buy the physical products our industry produces. In the digital age, people haven’t given up on music—just the idea of paying for it. That business model is unsustainable.
We are all stakeholders of the arts, and the future has never been more dire. For years, traditional broadcasters, in partnership with the federal government, have helped develop and sustain Canadian recording artists. The Canada Music Fund provides critical support for music in this country. What will happen if that funding disappears?
Gord Downie wrote in our song Morning Moon that if “something’s too cheap, somebody’s paying something”. Every song ever recorded can now be streamed for less than $10 a month. The somebodies in this case will be the future you and me when we realize that we’ve undervalued the contribution of Canadian musicians and songwriters.
There is no better art form to preserve, promote and export our culture than music, but after two years of pandemic-induced venue closures and cancelled performances, our domestic industry is in peril. Artists must see a glimmer of hope for a career in music or they will simply give up. Where will our next Joni Mitchell come from if we abandon our young artists? Artistic development takes time.
If we don’t actually value something at a level necessary to sustain it, it will surely disappear.
Streaming is here to stay, but the platforms and ISPs must contribute to the long-term health of the arts in some way. They must look on it as an investment. Streaming is a great way for artists to have their material heard, to discover new music and to be discovered, but in an industry that has seen the majority of its revenue streams disappear, how can an artist earn a living? Streaming can help, but regulations must adapt to allow Canadian culture to flourish in the digital age. It has to begin at home.
Ditto, says the Québec-based music industry.
From the first day of public debate over the Online Streaming Act, spokespersons for French-language music organizations pointed to the drastic underconsumption of French-language music in Québec relative to the provincial population of native French speakers.
Across Canada, only 2.8% of music streams were French language songs, despite 22% of Canadians being native French speakers. Only 122 songs from Québec were among the 10,000 most played tracks in Canada.
Inside the language citadel of Québec, only 8.6% of streams were French language, including foreign bands, despite the province being populated 80% by French speakers. The dismal rate of stream consumption was compared to 50% of physical format music sales in Québec being French language.
The Québec spokespersons attributed this to the streamers’ algorithms and their lack of active measures to close the gap through song curation or user recommendations.
The major streaming services and music labels have never addressed this “French language problem” in any public forum. Recently, the publicist for the “scrap the streaming tax” coalition said that consumption of French language music is up globally (impliedly representing an export opportunity for Québec artists). For Canada, she simply noted the top French language songs streamed in Canada are by Canadian bands:
From streaming industry publicist
Unfortunately, Spotify’s spokesperson did not respond to MediaPolicy’s follow up inquiry asking about the French language consumption gap.
The streamers are dug in, not just against paying regulatory fares but against any tinkering or tweaking their curation or recommendations. A defence of their position was provided this summer by Will Page, the Scottish-born economist who worked for Spotify for seven years.
In a July 8th appearance on Michael Geist’s podcast, Page said Canadian musicians are doing well on Spotify finding a global audience, which is what the platform is about.
But within the Canadian market, homegrown bands recently captured a mere 900 out of the top 10,000 songs. An underwhelming result, said Page, but he pointed out that Canadian superstars like Drake, Justin Bieber and The Weeknd overrepresent Canada in the top tranche of music consumption. He said these conflicting results on overall Canadian “presence” versus superstar “prominence” are an “intuitive trade off.” He did not explain whether he means “one out of two ain’t bad” or that it’s an axiomatic choice driven by the laws of music consumption. Still, there’s “wiggle room” to have both presence and prominence, he said, “but don’t fool yourself that you can have both.”
Unfortunately, Page did not address the deficit in consumption of French language music on streaming platforms (Page did not respond to a series of MediaPolicy questions about his podcast presentation).
He did note that Canadian Punjabi language artists are hitting it over the fence by using the global platform to reach into the Indian market and, you guessed it, that is another “trade off.”
The discussion of song discoverability on the global platforms inevitably opens up a debate over algorithmic-driven curation and song recommendations. Page acknowledged that the closely guarded corporate secrets of algorithms are “a black box” that even he doesn’t fully understand. But he still argued against regulators asking platforms to tweak them to increase consumption of Canadians songs.
Black box or not, Page knew enough to explain the “slipstream” coding of platform algorithms, that they’re good at matching the music appeal of an unknown band with a famous band, thereby pushing undiscovered music to the bigger audience. “If you had geoblocking” of foreign music entering Canada over the Internet, he said, you couldn’t match to more successful bands outside of Canada. (No one has proposed geo-blocking music on the Canadian Internet.)
You only “get one bite at the cherry” Page continued: the algorithm can’t pair a small Canadian band to both a bigger Canadian band and a well-known foreign band. He didn’t say if he saw this inside the black box.
Whatever is in the black box, the streaming platforms aren’t giving tours. Like Fight Club, the first rule of commercial algorithms is, don’t talk about algorithms.
A regulator that was willing to take bold steps on the discoverability of Canadian music would first take two relatively easy steps when faced with the platforms’ array of consumer-controlled, human-curated, and algorithm-driven music services as illustrated in this chart created by Page for Music Canada:
For human-curated services (editorial, algotorial, station/radio) operated by the streamers’ song pickers, Canadian radio quotas would be mapped over to streaming in some form.
On the other end of the spectrum, no regulator is going to touch services that exist for consumers to pick their own “user curated” music.
It’s the middle path —algorithm-driven song selection and recommendations— that makes for regulatory controversy.
But at least in English-speaking Canada, no one of influence is beating down the CRTC’s door asking for regulation of algorithms. The streamers, global music labels, and even the independent Canadian music labels are all on the same page: hey, leave those streamer algorithms alone.
In Québec, it’s a consensus in the opposite direction: algorithms are not sacred, English Canadian hang-ups about them are silly, and regulatory efforts are needed to close the French-language consumption gap. The province’s nationalist CAQ government is publicly committedto introducing legislation in 2025 that, in some fashion, will address the problem. Meanwhile industry representatives are asking the CRTC to do its own empirical study of the consumption gap in preparation for public hearings on music discoverability (current data from Luminate does not include YouTube’s user-uploaded songs and playlists).
So far, the federal Liberals are ducking the issue. After surviving the political theatre that characterized Parliamentary debate over the possibility of regulating YouTube’s video curation, Ottawa (or at least the Prime Minister’s office) has no appetite for that kind of a fight over music. A cabinet orderto the CRTC in December 2023 encouraged the CRTC to butt out of algorithms, something the Commission was already inclined to do.This regulatory shyness ignores a stark policy mandate from Parliament in Bill C-11 for streamers to make song recommendations for Canadian songs, in both official languages:
Whether it’s from Ottawa or Québec City, we haven’t heard the last of debate over the consumption gap in French-language music.
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In the end there are two reasons why Canadians and the CRTC pay attention to what the music streamers are doing for Canadian music.
The first is cultural: do we want Canadian audiences to have a real opportunity to notice, consume and hopefully enjoy the music produced by Canadian artists?
The second is also cultural, but first appears as industrial policy: are there enough Canadian artists earning enough money to make a career out of music? This was what The Tragically Hip’s Gord Sinclair spoke passionately about to Members of Parliament considering the Online Streaming Act.
This bottom-line concern about musician incomes is reflected in many regulatory debates in Parliament and the CRTC, even though strictly speaking the Broadcasting Act (as amended by the Online Streaming Act) is concerned with the supply and exposure of Canadian music, not the welfare of Canadian musicians.
Most music consumers are well aware that global streaming platforms can be credited with saving the music industry from the catastrophe of pirated and illegal music distribution. But streaming completely rearranged market share, earnings, delivery platforms and every other aspect of the music industry.
In the graphic below prepared by Will Page tracking Canadian music earnings, one can follow the steep demise and recovery of music revenues over two decades (although inflation is not accounted for) thanks to streaming revenue taking over from physical formats and downloads. CRTC data backs this up change in the online audio market: in 2014, downloads enjoyed 83% of the action compared to 17% for streaming and, by 2023, it reversed to the point that streaming owned 97% of the online market in contrast to 3% for downloads.
The money earned from radio play (within ‘neighbouring rights’ income) remains a secondary and modest source of earnings:
A detailed study completed in 2021 (based on 2019 data) by economist Gerry Wall noted that results are heavily skewed towards a few superstars like The Weeknd, Drake, Shawn Mendes and Justin Bieber, all signed to major music labels, who claimed 90% of Canadian streams. Among seven million global artists on streaming platforms, one in a thousand artists earned $100,000 USD or more from streaming revenue, annually (although streamers don’t pay musicians directly, they pay rights holders that have contracts with musicians).
A more useful earnings benchmark might be the average industrial salary of $65,000 CDN, assuming that’s closer to the figure needed to keep musicians pursuing their craft full-time. We are unlikely to get an undisputed account of musician earnings under the streaming business model given that the data is spread among so many private parties.
Nonetheless the musician middle class, concludes the Wall report, has been hollowed out over time. And the situation is worse in Québec. That may be because of the nature of a smaller domestic market: as advocates say, the algorithms reward songs with at least a million streams. That is more difficult to achieve in a smaller market unless French language artists enjoy extraordinary export success in international markets.
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When Bryan Adams intervened in the CanCon debate with this first political video in May 2024, his punch line was “hey, Justin Trudeau, music is global.”
That’s not quite right.
Music distribution is global.
Music, around the globe, is a kaleidoscope of styles, cultures, and traditions. Adams excels at one of its most lucrative: Anglo-American rock and roll.
Here on northern half of the continent, the music kaleidoscope includes Canada, Québec, Cree and Kahnawake.
Put that lyric to a beat.
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A Louisiana racoon, searching the bayou for gators
October 29, 2024
Lucky me, I spent last weekend visiting family in the bone-soaking warmth of New Orleans.
We kicked off a hot and sunny Saturday morning in the Treme neighbourhood by joining in a Second Line, otherwise known as tucking in behind a street parade of musicians. Turns out, it was a Kamala event. Someone gave my sister-in-law a Harris-Walz sign to carry. As a well mannered southern white lady and hard-core Democrat, she was glad to oblige. We spent the next hour being rewarded with verbal fist-bumps from Treme residents.
Afterwards, we walked the narrow sidewalks towards the Mississippi levee through the touristy French Quarter. This time, verbal fist bumps from young white women, almost on every block.
A young white fellow in a full sized pickup espied our election sign, pulled up, rolled down the window, and yelled “Donald Trump” in our faces for all his life was worth. My unfailingly polite sister-in-law replied “have a nice day.” The gentleman sped off to a safe distance of 50 yards away and flipped us the bird. Blaring Fleetwood Mac melodies on the truck radio.
A few minutes later, same thing. A twenty-something white guy in a pretend pickup pulls up, leans out the window, and shouts “Donald Trump, baby.” My sister-in-law gives him the same agreeable reply . He takes off and too late I think to say “yes.”
Sunday morning. It’s time to get out of blue New Orleans and see red and rural Louisiana. The four of us take a swamp tour on the Pearl River, not far from the Mississippi state line. The weather-beaten homes along the bayou have a few Trump flags, but no Harris signs and we didn’t bring our’s.
The Pearl has plenty of gators, boars, egrets, rattlesnakes, and pint-sized raccoons. The latter are right out of Disney. Apparently they like to eat juvenile alligators. “It’s no contest,” says the tour guide.
The guide René is great: a funny and swamp-wise young man raised on the Pearl and absolutely in the core Trump demographic. But no political ad hominems from him today. Except for some dry remarks about government wasting taxpayers’ dollars fighting invasive plants when hurricanes get the job done for free.
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As expected, last week the Heritage Minister announced that veteran public broadcaster Marie-Philippe Bouchard is the next CEO of CBC-Radio Canada.
Bouchard’ ‘s appointment was marked by a yetanother poll confirming that a strong majority of Canadians don’t want to defund the CBC, but many want to see it improved.
What Canadians want will make no difference to Pierre Poilievre or his Heritage Minister in waiting, the steely Rachel Thomas. They will defund the CBC anyway. Or as Poilievre giggled recently, “I can’t wait.”
The Conservatives’ single-minded commitment to silencing the English-language side of the public broadcaster is on display whenever CPC MPs get together (along with the NDP’s Nicky Ashton) at Heritage Committee hearings to haze current CEO, Catherine Tait.
Ms. Tait has had just about enough thank you and is biting back. Good for her, I say.
There’s two ways of looking at this dynamic. Here’s a contrarian column from the Globe and Mail’s Simon Houpt casting Tait as the “imperfect defender of public broadcasting.” And here’s another from Konrad Yakabuski, predicting Bouchard will be its last CEO.
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I’m enjoying the launch of Village Media’s first digital start-up in the big smoke, Toronto Today. Some good stories and lots of demographic maps. I love maps.
The Today newsroom came up with an attention-grabbing idea of shooting video of their reporter at a local independent grocer —-my local grocer—- paying for people’s groceries on the condition they pay it forward by doing something kind for someone.
Now you have to know my downtown neighborhood, which the realtors call “Seaton Village.” With some mischief, I used to call it the Soviet Socialist Republic of Seaton Village. Despite the fact that our most famous resident is Jordan Peterson, it’s kinda pink. So just try to pay for someone’s groceries on condition they do something kind that they were already going to do. As you can see from the video, it’s harder than you think.
Another cool thing that Village Media pulled off this week was getting a podcast interview with the Prime Minister. It was a soft interview by Press Gallery standards, but still interesting to get the most thick-skinned PM in Canadian history to talk about his daily torments.
Village Media CEO Jeff Elgie was miffed when CBC.ca used the interview content, credited his newsroom, but failed to link to the podcast. The Toronto Star had not failed to do so. Deprived of the considerable traffic referrals a CBC link would have sent his way, an irritated Elgie groused on LinkedIn that even Meta was never so discourteous.
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Back to the US election.
At the last moment the “democracy-dies-in-darkness” Washington Post withheld its locked-in Presidential endorsement to Kamala Harris. Its owner, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, vetoed it. The same thing happened at the L.A. Times, but my god this is the Post.
In a sentence that fits the crime, Bezos’ newsroom wrote several stories humiliating him for cravenly valuing his money over his integrity. Here’s his rebuttal.
Bezos joins a growing queue of Big Tech titans who are either pro-Trump (Elon Musk, Peter Thiel) or quickly cuddling up to him (Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and Bezos) in hopes that a second Trump presidency will disavow the Biden administration’s Big Tech trust-busting.
There’s an insightful piece on that here, from Matt Stoller.
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Last week I was in Charlottetown attending a conference on local news.
I posted a brief summary of the keynote speech delivered by Steve Waldmanhere.
Waldman is the American journalist who heads the Local News Project and the Report for America intern program. If you want to place him in the Canadian constellation of public journalism, consider him an American counterpart to our Ed Greenspon or Margo Goodhand. The headline graphics above and below are from Waldman’s slide deck.
Waldman’s pitch, and the idea behind the conference, was that saving local news journalism is job one.
The argument he makes is that there is a great deal of evidence in the US suggesting that towns and rural areas living in news poverty —with too few or no community news outlets — are ripe for misinformation circulating on social media and also political polarization when searching for news on more partisan sources at the national level.
There is a connection, he says, between being underinformed or misinformed about local events, issues, and politics and on the other hand the rising national tide of political polarization where citizens sort themselves into tribes and stop listening to each other.
One should be cautious about copy and pasting Waldman’s analysis from the US to Canada, but his view will strike many as true.
***
The National Post scored some of outgoing CBC President Catherine Tait’s e-mails, commenting on the Conservative “defund the CBC” campaign, through an access to information request. Alas, her comments weren’t very juicy.
Tait’s replacement is due to be announced by the Heritage Minister any day now: LaPresse and Le Devoir had stories claiming it will be Marie-Philippe Bouchard. She is currently the CEO of the Canadian broadcasting consortium TV5 Unis that partners with global francophonie broadcaster TVMonde. She was at CBC-Radio Canada for 26 years before that.
Bouchard’s reputation precedes her, at least in Québec, where reaction to her possible appointment was roundly positive.
Appointing Bouchard to replace Tait would fall in line with the important tradition of alternating between Québec and English Canada.
Peter Menzies raised the obvious question: it’s the current state of English-language CBC that needs review in response to Pierre Poilievre’s promise to defund CBC but not Radio-Canada, so why not pick someone from another province?
The answer may be that she spent 12 of her 26 years at CBC working as legal and regulatory counsel for both sides of the corporation. You can expect the question to be raised again if Bouchard is appointed.
***
A notable absence from the Charlottetown local news conference was Jeff Elgie, CEO of the expanding Village Media chain of local digital media sites.
Elgie has seemingly defied gravity for the last ten years by growing from one local site in Sault Ste. Marie to more than thirty in Ontario. Along the way he’s built a popular proprietary publishing system and even added a legislature news bureau.
I interviewed Elgie back in March and it is one of the most popular posts in MediaPolicy’s short history (he’s only got a 100 or so employees, so it’s not what you think).
Besides launching his first Toronto site in the next weeks, his next big idea is “Spaces,” a social media platform for chat groups moderated by community hosts.
I just signed up, so wait for a report.
***
My recommended read is for media nerds only. Doug Shapiro has another crystal ball blog, this time about the impact of Generative AI on video creation. It has the feel of David Bowie’s famous 1999 “tip of the iceberg” prognostication about the Internet.
Here’s a teaser from Shapiro’s “GenAI as a New Form” about what might lie below the water line:
***
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We are into year seven of Toronto Metropolitan University’s Local News Research project issuing regular reminders of the steady decline of local news outlets and the matching rise of “news poverty” (no news, or less news) in communities across the country.
The most recent report is here. Represented graphically above as a tally of closings and start-ups (not necessarily in the same communities) it presents a disturbing picture of Canadian news poverty.
The Michener Awards Foundation —the public service journalism organization that co-manages its well known annual awards with the Rideau Foundation— just assembled a meeting of 40 or so independent news publishers and editors in Charlottetown, hoping to survive and chart a path to “innovation and sustainability.”
The first two hours of the conference were the most compelling as news outlets swapped strategies of audience engagement. The common denominator could be summarized as “independent local ownership equals brand trust and community engagement with readers, advertisers and community organizations,” the latter being particularly effective in generating popular local content.
The keynote speaker was up next: Steve Waldman of the American Rebuild Local News project and the national intern program, Report forAmerica. His elevator pitch was already known to anyone tracking the news poverty crisis. Measuring by polling metrics, citizens living in communities that have lost most or all of their local news outlets are prey for misinformation spread on social media, increased political polarization and alienation. It’s a democratic crisis, not a business crisis. Or as one publisher told the crowd, “this is not a business. This is a public service that I have to run as a business.”
Familiar to Canadians, Waldman’s prescription is a variety of public policy solutions, that is subsidies of one kind or another at the state or federal level.
After speaking, Waldman sat down and tried to eat his sandwich while MediaPolicy and others peppered him with questions about the American experience with public policy solutions (he was just as interested in what Canada is doing).
His political reporter’s account of US legislation falling short by a whisker —in US Congress and at the statelevel— make it clear that bipartisan Republican and Democrat support is indispensable but within reach.
That political reality offers a segue to our own Canadian politics of saving local news. The publishers at the conference were grimly aware of Pierre Poilievre’s invective against government assistance to media.
If the likely winner of the next federal election cannot be persuaded to see the wisdom in the current federal program of subsidies tied directly to the employment of news gathering journalists in communities, it’s possible he might be enticed into a re-design that keeps some form of that program and expands the market-facing policy solutions.
On the other hand it may be necessary to take Poilievre’s nihilism at face value. His hostility to the mainstream media in general and federal aid in particular is, when combined with his prowess in reaching voters directly through social media, a little too close to Donald Trump’s political strategy.
Steve Waldman’s presentation deck includes this slide charting American public policy proposals for funding local news, compared to Canada. The chart would appear to be missing the Big Tech news licensing payments flowing from Canada’s Online News Act:
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This week MediaPolicy published an interview with Chris Waddell, author of the 2020 book “End of the CBC?” Waddell is not advocating defunding the CBC, but recommends sweeping change.
The post’s viewing numbers are off the charts (for this modest blog) which tells me there is a real thirst for this kind of discussion.
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You will recall the reporting on the Warner Brothers Discovery studio and streamer allowing its content deals with Corus and Bell to lapse and making a new Canadian distribution deal with Rogers instead.
I think Rob Malcomson saw this coming. In 2021 the Bell regulatory executive told the CRTC that if it approved the Rogers-Shaw merger it would be giving Rogers the hammer in the Canadian market for content rights by granting Rogers 47% of the English Canadian market.
Three years later, Rogers shoved Bell and Corus aside and grabbed rights for a significant bundle of Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD) content that Bell and Corus had profited from over the years while investing in their own Canadian programming to build around that branded American content.
When BCE announced in response to the Rogers coup that it was suing its American business partner — Bell also buys WBD’s premium Home Box Office content for Canadian distribution on Bell Crave— all eyes were on the text of the non-compete agreement that Bell said restrained their Hollywood supplier from taking all that content to Rogers for two more years.
This week Bell announced the lawsuit was settled. The WBD deal with Rogers remains intact.
In exchange, Bell says it gets “expanded content” from WBD. The announcement then lists some big shows that, as far as I can tell, it already offers in its Crave/HBO package. Bell was unable to clarify whether it really meant to say “extended access,” in terms of pushing out further the undisclosed expiry date on HBO content. The press release says the new deal “ensures Crave subscribers have continued access to a vast library of premium content for the foreseeable future.”
The more enigmatic paragraph in the announcement was that Bell is “strengthening and deepening our relationship with Warner Bros. Discovery, marking a significant milestone as we move forward together. With our commitment to develop co-productions, and the extended pipeline of extremely valuable content for subscribers, we’ve ensured Crave is well-positioned for continued growth and success.” (Emphasis added).
Throughout the Parliamentary and regulatory journey of the Online Streaming Act, Bell has pushed for regulatory “incentives” that might induce the global streamers to partner with Bell in financing big budget Canadian productions and then distributing them with a bigger payoff for Bell. The partnership idea found favour in the federal government’s cabinet instructions to the CRTC on implementation of the new Act.
Perhaps Bell’s settlement with WBD is part of that strategy.
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The CRTC must be feeling the heat from MediaPolicy or the federal Liberals —you can guess which— on Meta’s porous ban on Canadian news, designed to shield the social media company from liability for licensing payments to news outlets under the Online News Act, Bill C-18.
Last week the Commission told Meta to explain why some Canadian news content continues to appear on Facebook and Instagram without Meta self-identifying as a digital news intermediary, subject to the legislation. Meta’s response was due yesterday.
The first is that news posts on Meta platforms originating from entities that might not qualify as “news outlets” operated by “eligible news businesses” under C-18 would therefore not be “making news available” as defined by the Act. It would follow that Meta would not be carrying on any news hosting making it liable for licensing payments.
This begs the question of what Canadian news organizations fall outside the definition of “news outlets” as defined in C-18, a deep but fascinating rabbit hole to dive down. Is that Rebel News? Narcity? The Conversation? MediaPolicy?
The other point Geist argues is that screen shots of Canadian news stories originating from bona fide news outlets, but uploaded by citizens to Meta platforms, may fall outside the definition of “news content” because —this is going to bake your noodle—-the ownership of the screen shot news has migrated from the news outlet to the citizen as a consequence of “user rights” under copyright law and therefore is no longer content from news outlets liable for licensing payments under the Act.
Go figure.
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There are two recent news items about governments regulating social media platforms that seem to go together well.
The New York Times has an explainer about the big wins rung up in the US by NetChoice, Big Tech’s lobby coalition, relying on expansive First Amendment free speech rights.
On the other hand, government regulation came out on top in Brazil: a court order shut down Elon Musk’s X platform for a month after he refused to moderate content advocating a military coup. Musk relented. The migration of Brazilians from X to rival platforms seemed to have done the trick.
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The US Department of Justice’s trust-busting case against Google, ruled in August by the US Third Circuit federal court to be an illegal monopolist under the Sherman Act, is now at the remedy stage where consequences will be considered. The DOJ’s last great anti-trust victory was over AT&T and it resulted in the court breaking up the telecommunications giant in a court remedy known as “structural separation.”
Matt Stoller provides a good summary and predicts a no-holds-barred political fight in the near future, enticingly headlined “The Rage of Google.”
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The “End of the CBC?” didn’t catch the attention it deserved when it was published in early 2020, two weeks before the Covid pandemic buried its promotional campaign. Nevertheless, it was extensively reviewed here, here, here,here and here.
The apocalyptic title of the policy piece written by Chris Waddell and the late David Taras was geared towards the public broadcaster’s drift and decline, not Pierre Poilievre’s subsequent campaign promise to “defund the CBC.”
Although the manuscript was finalized before the 2019 federal election —well before the Online Streaming Act, the Online News Act and Meta’s blackout of Canadian news— the authors’ analysis of the Canadian media environment in general, and English-language CBC’s struggles in particular, could have been written yesterday.
The “too long don’t read” version of their book is this: the CBC should get out of English-language television entertainment programming and focus on news, current affairs and information. It’s not just the $180 million savings of programming dollars that could be otherwise spent; it’s a matter of mission.
Sadly, author and Mount Royal University scholar Taras passed away in 2022. A professor emeritus at Carleton now, Waddell is also well known to Canadians because of this many years as a bylined journalist, including a lengthy stint at CBC News.
As Heritage Minister Pascale St.-Onge is poised to unveil a new policy direction for the CBC, MediaPolicy belatedly interviewed Waddell about End of the CBC?
Author Chris Waddell
Your book “End of the CBC?” was published very quietly just before the pandemic lockdown in 2020 so I don’t think many people heard about it, given the importance of the topic. Do you think the book is dated by the events of the last four years?
The book came out just two weeks before the pandemic lockdown in March 2020, but the trends David Taras and I highlighted have become more prominent during the past four years. Our analysis and recommendations are just as or even more relevant today than when the book was published.
Audience enthusiasm for streaming services, the collapse of the private broadcasting system in Canada and the competition for audience remain grave threats to the future of the CBC. That means we need a radical rethink about the role of public broadcasting in today’s media environment. Sadly that’s something the federal government has consistently avoided.
Meanwhile we continue to have this ridiculous situation of the federal government subsidizing the salaries of journalists in what was print media to offset some of their loss of advertising revenue to Google and Facebook. At the same time, parliament allocates $1.4 billion annually overall to CBC/RadioCanada radio, TV and online even as it competing for advertising against the same media outlets that the government is subsidizing. That makes no sense as either public or economic policy.
The book is about the future of English-language television. Radio still has an important although chronically underfunded role to play in Canada’s media world but we don’t address radio in any detail. Some of the global trends forcing change at CBC television also affect Radio-Canada, but the book isn’t about Radio-Canada. It plays a distinct role in the cultural life of French-Canadians and has traditionally been seen as a defender of their language as well, neither of which applies to CBC English television.
Heritage Minister Pascale St Onge is set to announce a new vision for the CBC and a new President. What do you think should be the strategic direction?
The changes we have seen in media in the past decade and a half means media outlets can no longer afford to be everything for everyone. They need to make choices and tough decisions about stopping doing things where they are no longer competitive. They must concentrate on what they think they can do better than anyone else.
The CBC has never decided to stop doing anything. Management just keeps piling on additional activities likely because it is afraid if they stop doing something, it will lose more audience which means less advertising revenue. But trying to do everything means spending is spread too thinly, continuing to fund activities where it is no longer relevant and has no hope of returning to former glory, while starving the activities where it has a competitive advantage.
In your book, you describe what I would call the anvil of reality for the old media world, eclipsed by the “attention economy” of the Internet. What are the consequences for Canadian media in general, and the CBC in specific?
The explosion in the ways people can watch, listen to, read, create and share their own media thanks to technology means Canadian media are now competing with global media for the eyes and ears of the Canadian audience. They are losing their domestic audience to video and audio streaming services, social media and global media available online. Even the growth in population we have seen from immigration in the last few years doesn’t help Canadian media as immigrants can watch, read and listen to media online in their own language from their home countries as well as non-English or French language media produced in Canada.
Audience size has fractured taking advantage of unlimited choices which reduces advertising revenue even without the success of Google and Facebook in building more effective models for advertisers than traditional media can provide. With less revenue, media outlets cut back on the breadth of what they are offering to audiences and cut employee numbers as well which hurts programming. Audiences notice that and go somewhere else for entertainment or news or whatever. That means media have to charge less for ads as fewer people are watching, reading or listening which means less revenue, which means more cuts and less programming. The cycle keeps repeating itself in what becomes a death spiral.
You talk about the CBC making hard choices about programming and platforms. What are the hardest choices and what would you say is untouchable?
The core function of the CBC must be news, current affairs and information. It needs to be strengthened and more focused that it is today as it is drifting and rudderless in editorial philosophy, trying to be everything for everyone.
News and information remain vitally important today as we watch the decline of private media in Canada. At the same time, misinformation, disinformation and lies are promoted by individuals and groups including foreign states trying to undermine our democratic institutions.
News, current affairs and information are the only parts of CBC’s current range of activities where it maintains a competitive advantage. That’s true in everything from local radio markets across the country to the number of Canadian journalists it supports abroad to show and tell Canadians about the world through Canadian eyes. Except for the Globe and Mail, Canadian media have abandoned foreign reporting to cut costs. That means Canadians learn about the world through foreign media and wire services, which have their own interests that reflect the interests of the audience in their home country, not Canada.
What about advertising? The federal Liberals promised in their last election platform to do away with that.
If the new vision to be announced for the CBC continues to include advertising it has no hope of success. That’s not just because streaming services have proven so popular because they don’t have advertising. Chasing advertising revenue distorts programming decisions and content. It creates a mentality within the CBC of competing against private media at a time when the CBC is needed to help rebuild private media.
The federal government’s new vision should focus on how the CBC can use its relative financial stability to work with private media – both the mainstream and the growing number of online media organizations – to help them survive and grow. Continuing to compete with private media means Canadians will be worse off.
The book outlines some ways cooperation can replace competition. Getting out of advertising completely is the essential first step down that road. CBC radio did it long ago and it remains a strong presence in both urban and rural Canada with distinctive programming and no ads (other than ones that promotes CBC radio and television programs). That has happened despite management’s continuing cuts to radio budgets at the expense of television or online activities.
If the CBC needs to pick a lane and focus on news and information what does the new CEO focus on?
First, the new president should have greater knowledge and understanding of the role that news, information and current affairs can and should play than recent presidents have demonstrated.
But not only should CBC television concentrate on news, information and current affairs, it should significantly narrow the focus of what it covers within those areas. Clearly stating what the CBC will and will not cover can help provide the editorial philosophy and approach it currently lacks.
Much of its online news for example is click-bait designed to boost audience numbers to sell to advertisers. Does the public broadcaster really exist to do stories about, for example, individual travelers who lost their luggage on airlines or who have complaints against banks? A clear editorial philosophy would help CBC programmers determine what stories they can leave to others as much as it would give direction to news judgments.
It also would make clear where private media can concentrate their attention without fear of being outnumbered by the CBC.
A new CBC should concentrate on six themes in news, current affairs and information. That starts by expanding its ability to tell Canadians about the world by increasing the number foreign correspondents it has based in more countries that are important to Canada and Canadians, including putting more reporters across the United States.
In Canada, CBC news, current affairs and information programming would focus on five themes: urban life in Canada; business and the economy; public policy at the federal, provincial and municipal levels; health and science and Canadians who are making a difference. We list in the book some of the sub-themes that are important under each of these broad categories.
These themes should guide both CBC local television news and national news and information programming. CBC television should do what radio already with regular programming about many of the issues under these themes.
That leaves room for local private media to cover police, crime and the courts, traffic, fires, sports, weather, entertainment without competition from CBC. They can also choose what to cover of the themes they know the CBC will focus on.
CBC should also make its foreign and domestic reporting available free to any Canadian news organization that wants to use it. That means current broadcast competitors and all Canadian online news sites. Perhaps the Canadian Press can be the distribution network though which that happens.
Finally, CBC online should also feature stories from small news startups helping give those organization the visibility for their work among a broader audience they lost when Facebook stopped posting Canadian news on its site. That could help encourage audiences to subscribe to those small media outlets, helping them grow.
This dramatic transformation would take place without cutting CBC budgets. All funds currently allocated to English language television would go to news, current affairs and information. That could allow a new CBC television to produce regular programming on the five themes we outline as well as on sub-themes within each theme
It’s a very different vision for public broadcasting that means a change in CBC mindset from competing with private media to helping save and rebuild Canadian media for the future.
In your book, you say that the CBC has to make the hard choice and stop competing in the CanCon entertainment space. Given that the CBC is the biggest Canadian broadcaster for that kind of programming, what would be the fate of Canadian entertainment programming?
If the federal government believes telling Canadian stories is an important public policy goal, it should fund that process directly to concentrate on getting Canadian content onto the global streaming services. Why should that be confined to a network that now has a very small domestic audience?
Sports provides an example of how to do it. When Vancouver was awarded the 2010 Winter Olympics, government decided that Canada must not repeat the embarrassments of 1976 in Montreal and 1988 in Calgary when Canadian athletes did not win a single gold medal. So the federal government created Own the Podium and began funding sports directly, supplemented by the private sector, with a clear goal of more athletic success. That paid off dramatically in Vancouver and continues to do so today.
Do the same for entertainment, drama and comedy programming. Replace the various levies applied by the CRTC with direct government funding for programming. Then use perhaps the National Film Board to market that programming to the streaming services. More Canadians would then watch Canadian stories than currently view them on CBC.
Do you think that the CBC has an image problem as much as a programming problem? A lot of Canadians might say they don’t see themselves or their regions reflected back to them.
Yes, very much so. Too many Canadians don’t see themselves or their communities on CBC particularly in news, information and current affairs. CBC radio has expanded – in Ontario for example in London, Kitchener-Waterloo and Hamilton. That hasn’t happened in television.
Television news pays little attention to subjects that are critically important in regions of the country. For instance, agriculture is major industry and a major exporter but there are rarely if any stories about agriculture on national CBC news. Education and health care are covered primarily through stories about individuals who have complaints about specific issues or events. There are hardly ever stories that compare how the education or health care systems work in different provinces or solutions to problems that one province has implemented that could be applied more broadly.
Yes, the broadcaster is too Toronto or central Canada-centric. But a more focused editorial philosophy could address that by providing a guide to what issues and stories should have national exposure if done by a regional newsroom.
Part of the problem is the decades of changes and tinkering with CBC television regional newscasts and newsrooms. That has been combined with steady cutbacks in employee numbers across the country, denying those newsrooms the resources to show the rest of the country what is happening in their own region.
What do you make of the fact that it took the Trudeau Liberals nine years of governing and Pierre Poilievre’s promise to defund the CBC to finally take this policy issue seriously?
Public broadcasting remains important in the contemporary media environment in many countries around the world.
But in Canada, politicians of all parties have always viewed the CBC through the narrow and self-interested lens of how its news and current affairs coverage hurts them politically. They never consider what public broadcasting could do to explore and explain the country and issues faced in different communities to other Canadians. A review of the 1991 Broadcasting Act in 2020 largely ignored the CBC and the federal government has done that as well.
For the last 30 years or more there has been no champion of public broadcasting among politicians in power. But that being said, it is also true that no politician has ever lost an election in Canada for failing to be an advocate for public broadcasting.
Poilievre says that when (he doesn’t say if) he is Prime Minister, he is going to defund English-language CBC. What do you think that would look like?
It’s a slogan, and slogans are almost always more difficult to turn into policies than a slogan’s simplistic solution implies.
I would be surprised if there is an effort to shut down CBC radio as I suspect there is more support for it in the Conservative caucus than some may think, particularly at a time when many smaller communities are losing all their other media.
Defunding the CBC is a bit like unscrambling an egg. Facilities, technical operations and some personnel are integrated, all under one roof among radio, television and online in French and English and the eight Indigenous languages in which the CBC broadcasts. Trying to take one service — English television — out of that mix may undercut the CBC services a Conservative government may want to maintain and the result would save less money than they think, if saving money is actually the issue.
Liberal and Conservative politicians have tried over the years to control the CBC by appointing party fundraisers or operatives without media or broadcasting experience to the CBC board. The board can then constrain spending or try to direct it in certain ways to implement whatever political agenda those who appointed them want the CBC to follow. Alternately the government can simply cut CBC funding to the point where it withers away. As audiences continue to decline steadily, it would then be easier for a government to it shut down without much pubic complaint – hence the title of our book.
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Let’s start this weekend with something inspirational.
I’m half-way through the four-episode documentary No Dress Rehearsal on the glorious music career of Kingston Ontario’s own The Tragically Hip.
It’s gold (say I, as a diehard Blue Rodeo fan).
The documentary was made by Mike Downie, older brother to late Hip frontman Gord Downie. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last month. You can watch it now on Amazon Prime.
The Hip was the X/millennial generations’ iconic Canadian band in both its songwriting and success. Perhaps because of their international appeal, the documentary’s streaming rights were snapped up by Amazon Prime, instead of Bell Media’s Crave.
Filmmaker Downie is interviewed by The National’s Ian Hanomansing here.
If you want to dwell a little deeper on your connection to “Canada’s band” and the signposts in their music to Canadian experiences, have a listen to Elamin Abdelmahmoud’s CBC radio show here.
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You may have noticed two weeks ago that CTV National News stepped into a big puddle of mess with its reporting on the Conservative Party’s efforts to bring down the Trudeau government through a Parliamentary motion of non-confidence.
CTV took up a story angle linking Pierre Poilievre’s motion —–which he branded as Canadians deserving an opportunity to vote in a carbon tax election— to the possibility that the Liberal-NDP dental program would be the collateral damage of a fallen government. CTV’s spliced video of Poilievre’s stand-up edited out his reference to the carbon tax which, of course, wasn’t the story angle.
I was waiting for the dust to clear for a clearer picture of what happened. The fired staff aren’t speaking publicly (the unionized editor has filed a grievance and the non-union reporter hasn’t done a Lisa Laflamme-style video giving her side of the story).
But Rewrite commentator Peter Menzies did some digging and has an informed take on it, here.
The controversy shed light, retrospectively, on yet another CTV National face plant, a story covering the capital gains tax increase in the Liberals’ spring budget.
Three weeks ago the industry self regulator, the Canadian Broadcasting Standards Committee (CBSC), found against CTV in a complaint filed by two Canadians who pointed out egregious factual errors in a newscast that misstated Canadian tax law and as a consequence wrongly identified tax liabilities for children inheriting the family cottage.
The CBSC ruled that CTV breached the expected standards of “accuracy” in news presentation.
When pressed by the complainants to make a further finding of CTV’s “bias” against the Liberal government, the CBSC ruled that “to make a finding of bias, the report would need to use incorrect facts for the purpose of pushing a specific agenda. This was not the case with the CTV report.” (Emphasis added).
As far as we know, no one got fired.
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We are only weeks away, one hopes, from something very big on the CBC.
A story on the CBC website, quoting an anonymous Heritage Canada source in Minister Pascale St.-Onge’s department, says that within the month we can expect the Minister’s announcement of her government’s new vision of the CBC along with the appointment of a new CEO to carry it out.
With a federal election looming, St.-Onge appointed an expert panel in May to advise her on a CBC re-boot.
She’s been posting social media videos about a new CBC for the last two weeks, stating that questions about the CBC’s mission need answering. Soon we will get a peak at what her answers are.
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Another big Canadian broadcaster —it’s Facebook I have in mind— still makes available original news journalism produced by a Canadian television broadcaster and uploaded by its news subject, Pierre Poilievre, on August 23rd in brazen defiance of its year-old ban on posting Canadian news.
MediaPolicy commentedpreviously on the selectivity of Meta’s news blackout on its Facebook and Instagram platforms.
Meta’s Canadian news ban is easily evaded, and apparently not policed by the company, through uploads of news story screen shots and modified hyperlinks.
In the high profile case involving Narcity, the news outlet was reinstated to active posting of news articles because its content was rejected for journalism salary subsidies by Revenue Canada due to an insufficient volume of original news-gathering.
Now there’s yet another on ramp to Facebook and Instagram for those wishing to evade the ban: news outlets can pay Meta for a boosted post of their news journalism.
Lauren Watson has the story in the Columbia Journalism Review.
UPDATE: On October 4, 2024, the CRTC asked Meta to explain reports of a selective news blackout, Meta’s response to be filed by October 11th.
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The new centre-right New Zealand government is on track to pass a bill similar to Canada’s Online News Act, Bill C-18. In response, Google is threatening to remove news links from Search.
The bill was tabled two years ago by the ruling Labour Party and opposed by the National Party. But the new government has had a change of heart.
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The House of Commons is back in full swing and media policy issues are coming thick and fast.
For at least the next few months, it might be a good idea to rename this blog MediaPolitics.ca.
I say that because the politicization of media policy issues —- the linking of minor events to allegations of catastrophic policy failure — is spinning around the turntable at 78 rpm.
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I just attended a conference organized by Taylor Owen of the Max Bell School of Public Policy focussing on policy issues embedded into the Liberal government’s Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act.
The Bill earned publicity when it was tabled in the House last February by folding in tougher criminal sanctions against hate communications and reinstating the right of individuals to file human rights complaints as a consequence of online hate.
But the core of the bill is legislating a generic “duty to act responsibly” for social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok.
Platforms will be required to reduce online harms through safety plans that re-engineer data-driven algorithms responsible for driving harmful content and Internet predators to unsuspecting users. User tools and settings are other ways for platforms to make their services safer. Take-down orders are limited to revenge porn and sexual exploitation of children.
Justice Minister Arif Virani is the bill’s sponsor in the House but, he informed the crowd, he has no intention of giving ground to suggestions that he split off the hate crime provisions of the Bill to enable the safety plan core of the legislation to pass the House with less resistance from Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives.
Online hate, said Virani, is what silences Canadians belonging to vulnerable, maligned communities and discourages their participation in online speech.
Online racist hate, he continued, radicalized the murderers who targeted those same Canadians. The rest of us of should find more empathy for those Canadians, he suggested, choosing his words more diplomatically than I have paraphrased.
Those who advocate for splitting the hate provisions off into another Bill (I’m one such advocate) see only another Conservative filibuster in House committee proceedings, previously the fate of the Netflix Bill C-11 (twice in the House and arguably a third time in the Senate).
On the other hand, Virani may be looking the Leger and Nanos opinion polls that demonstrated a high level of support for getting tough on hate crimes and haters. If the Conservatives try to block the government bill, they are going to wear it at election time.
The Conservatives may have figured out that their habitual opposition to regulating the Internet won’t cut it when it comes to online harassment, bullying, and sexual exploitation of minors.
Beyond the bombast, the CPC bill is a serious piece of legislation, but of a different (and smaller) footprint than the government’s C-63.
The Conservative bill requires social media and gaming platforms to design their tools, settings and recommendations of content and contacts to protect children, and only children, from harm.
Unlike the government bill, there are no safety plans in the CPC bill for adults, not even for revenge porn or hate (although both are currently subject to criminal sanctions: the Conservative Bill would increase prisons sentences for revenge porn).
Leaving little work for a future regulator, the CPC bill gives explicit instructions to Internet platforms on what they must or must not do to protect children through safety settings that children and their parents can control or disable:
5 (1) Every operator must provide any parent of a user whom the operator knows or should reasonably know is a child, as well as that user, with clear and readily accessible safety settings on its platform, including settings to
(a) control the ability of other individuals to communicate with the child;
(b) prevent other individuals from consulting personal data of the child that is collected by, used or disclosed on the platform, in particular by restrictingpublic access to personal data;
(c) reduce features that increase, encourage or extend the use of the platform by the child, including automaticdisplaying of content, rewards for time spent onthe platform, notifications and other features that could result in addictive use of the platform by the child;
(d) control personalized recommendation systems, including the right to
(i) opt out of such systems, while still allowing content to be displayed in chronological order, with the latest published content displayed first, or
(ii) limit types or categories of recommendations from such systems; and
(e) restrict the sharing of the child’s geolocation and notify the child and their parent when their geolocation is being tracked.
Default settings
(2) The operator must ensure that the default setting for the safeguards described in subsection (1) is the option that provides the highest level of protection.
It’s shrewd retail politics and allows the Conservatives to say “limiting screen time,” “protect children,” and “parents’ rights” all in the same sound bite.
What seems to have slipped under the radar is that their bill authorizes interference with algorithmic recommendations, previously the centrepiece of the Conservatives’ opposition to the Online Streaming Act.
What’s next for these bills is subject to the whirlpool of Parliamentary politics. It’s not clear when (or if) the Conservative bill might be cleared for mandatory debate by MPs sitting in the House Justice Committee. The same committee has yet to schedule the government’s bill.
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The battle over the Netflix Bill C-11 continues to flare. With an election in the air, the foreign streamers are engaged.
This week Netflix announced it was pulling training and development funding — vaguely described as $25 million spent over the last few years— from Canadian creator projects such as the Pacific Screenwriting Project and the imagineNATIVE film festival. Netflix gave the Globe and Mail a statement blaming its cancellations on the CRTC’s cash levy on foreign streamers to support financing subsidies to Canadian news and entertainment programming.
Netflix had previously told the CRTC it would support a 2% charge, but strenuously objected to any of its cash going to the Independent Local News Fund.
Netflix had also pitched to the CRTC that its training and development deals with various Canadian creative organizations ought to be deducted from the cash levy (training funds are also not deductible from the 5% levy paid by Canadian cable companies).
The CRTC has enveloped Netflix’s 3.5% levy like this:
0.5 % ($7.5M) to the Canada Media Fund for CanCon television series
0.5% to the Indigenous Screen Office to support television productions
0.5% shared by the Black Screen Office, the screen fund for BPOC creators and the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund
0.5% shared by funds supporting producers in official language minority communities in Québec and English Canada, as well as diverse communities; and
1.5% ($22.5M) to support newscasts at independent local stations.
[The list above has been revised and corrected from the original blog post]
Netflix’s grievance is that it ought to be given special regulatory treatment to deduct training and development funding of Canadian recipients of its choosing. (There is no public information available on whether there are strings attached to their funding).
The door is not closed on Netflix making its argument to the CRTC, however. When the Commission completes its regulatory assessment on Netflix and the other video streamers by setting expectations of direct spending on Canadian shows for their services, the streamers can make the same pitch to deduct training and development commitments.
In the same fighting spirit, the US-based music streaming lobby group Digital Media Association is launching a Canadian online petition campaign (see photo above), accompanied by messaging on its services guiding Canadians to the petition. The “Scrap the Streaming Tax” site threatens consumer price increases expressed in a vocabulary similar to the Conservative Party’s “scrap the Carbon Tax.”
Here are two new information releases that you can nerd out on.
The CRTC released its “what we heard” report that summarizes public comments on whether and how to revise Canadian content rules for video entertainment. This is a first step towards a public proceeding on possible revisions to CRTC rules that accredit video programming for regulatory compliance.
The Commission also posted for comment an application from APEM, the French-language song publishers’ organization, asking the CRTC “to collect data from the main online music streaming services and to make them public in order to provide the entire sector with a status report on the listening, showcase and recommendation of musical selections in Canada.”
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It’s the policy of MediaPolicy.ca not to host links to petitions.
I’m making an exception over the actions of the public broadcaster TV Ontario in repudiating its contract with the producers of the anti-war documentary, Russians at War. The documentary was made by Russian-Canadian journalist Anastasia Trofimova who embedded with a platoon of Russian soldiers deployed in the illegal invasion of Ukraine.
The film was denounced by the Ukrainian government, some Canadian-Ukrainian organizations, and Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland who said “it is not right that public money” supported the production of the film. The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) screened it anyway, as did the Venice festival.
The public broadcaster TVO, however, announced it was “withdrawing its support” for Russians at War and will not be airing it.
It’s not clear what “withdrawing support” means. TVO is the main Canadian financing partner for the documentary and purchased the exclusive first window broadcasting rights. In the ordinary course of distributing a first window film after its theatrical release, the film would be broadcast over television and streaming platforms some time in the next few months. With TIFF concluded, you can’t view the film anywhere in Canada and it’s unclear if you ever will.
What’s even more remarkable is that the film was approved for financing by curation staff at TVO, (as well as the public-private Canada Media Fund (CMF) and the Rogers Hot Doc fund). Yet it was TVO’s Board that intervened to announce the withdrawal of support, which could mean anything from refusing to make scheduled payments to the film’s producers, to burying the film.
The chair of the board Chris Daysaid “TVO will be reviewing the process by which this project was funded and our brand leveraged,” his “wasn’t me” gesture to the public and a rebuke to his organization, four days after TVO had publicly defended the documentary.
The TVO Board is appointed by Ontario Premier Doug Ford who, as far as I can tell, has had nothing to say on the matter. Maybe no one asked him.
As an international co-production between producers in France and Canada, the documentary was eligible for financing from federal “CAVCO” Canadian video production credits and the CMF, proportional to the participation of Canadian talent and investments in its production.
The film has been rated reasonably well by professional film critics and considered an anti-war movie, not “Russian propaganda.”
For another perspective, you can read an opinion editorial by Alexander Rodnyanskypublished in the Globe and Mail. The Oscar-nominated producer concedes that Russians at War is “well-made, deserving of professional praise and the good reviews it has received.”
He also says that the film is “seemingly objective” but maintains it is “cunning and sophisticated” Russian propaganda, not because it humanizes Russian soldiers but because “it provides a platform for active duty soldiers to freely repeat the propaganda that poisoned them in the first place while war and death continue.”
While commercial broadcasters and film festivals always retain the right (if not the wisdom) to reconsider screening commitments, public broadcasters should be held to a higher standard of free expression and public debate.
The Documentary Organization of Canada has posted an online petition demanding that TVO reverse its decision to “withdraw support” and not to air Russians at War.
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