This week MediaPolicy published a report of the CRTC’s announcement on November 15th laying the groundwork for how Netflix and the other foreign video streamers will contribute to Canadian content under the Online Streaming Act.
Released on a Friday, the announcement flew quietly under the radar of the daily news cycle, possibly because there is no immediate price tag attached to Netflix’s future obligations to make or license Canadian shows.
Last June the CRTC imposed on the foreign streamers $140 million worth of annual contributions to Canadian television subsidy funds for news, drama and kid’s programming: last week’s much anticipated announcement might end up being worth five times as much in streamers’ programming budgets for Canadian content.
There are times when the impact of American public policy initiatives on Canadian media policy dwarves anything we might do north of the 49th.
As you may recall, the trial judge in an anti-trust suit begun by the Trump White House and several states against Google resulted in a legal ruling declaring Google an illegal monopoly in Search and search related advertising.
Following up, the collective of Attorneys Generals spearheaded by the federal DOJ have now tabled remedial requests to the trial judge.
Just for starters, they are requesting that Google divest its Chrome web browser and its Android mobile operating system. And there are important requests focussing directly on bootstrapping would-be competitors to Google in the Search market by giving them “catch-up” access to Google’s treasure trove of consumer data. Radical stuff for radical times.
There is a useful news summary from the New York Times. But if you can afford the time for a ten-minute read, I recommend Matt Stoller’s excellent explainer.
As I read Stoller’s piece, it easily came to mind how unlikely it is that Canadian news publishers would have successfully pursued the news licensing payments in the Online News Act if instead of Google’s monopoly on search referrals there was robust competition in the Search Engine market.
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More than a few times MediaPolicy has raised the question of how Meta is getting away with its selective ban on Canadians news content, its response to our Online News Act.
The Heritage Minister raised the same question publicly but she is constrained by the fact that it’s the CRTC’s jurisdiction to investigate it.
It’s possible that federal cabinet considered but dismissed the idea of sending the CRTC a policy directive asking the Commission to look into why Meta permits the sharing of some news items, but not others, and why it has flat-out restored news posting privileges to outlets such as Narcity.
The Commission is twiddling around on this one. In early October it asked Meta to explain the rhyme and reason for allowing some news content on its Facebook and Instagram platforms while banning the vast majority of news organizations.
Meta filed a letter in response and, according to a Canadian Press story, it appears that Menlo Park submitted something, but it’s not clear what. And beyond whatever details of its selective ban it provided, Meta has claimed confidentiality and opposes the public release of its answers to the Commission.
This minor legal drama will play out in the fifth dimension of regulatory time.
Meanwhile the public is still in the dark as to whether the Commission thinks there is a basis for playing hardball with Meta by, for instance, officially designating its platforms under the Online News Act so that banned news organizations can file an “undue preference” complaint and get equal treatment to Meta’s favoured news outlets.
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I’m pleased that so many followers of this blog liked Richard Stursberg’s guest column on the CBC, his advice for the incoming CBC President Marie-Philippe Bouchard. It’s now the most popular post in MediaPolicy’s short history.
Now there’s an interesting column from The Hub’s Managing Editor Harrison Lowman in which he identifies the “defund the CBC” problem as the public broadcaster’s news curation and journalism culture. His bottom line: fix it, don’t destroy an important Canadian institution and a vital provider of news journalism.
Lowman’s piece —-clearly not toeing the Conservative Party line—- was immediately disputed by The Hub’s Editor-At-Large and former Harper policy chief Sean Speer.
Speer’s says his support of defunding the CBC is not founded on an allegation of biased news reporting. Gosh no. It’s about the CBC’s declining audience share (him citing poor television viewership numbers, but ignoring strong digital and radio numbers). His colleague Lowman is just being “nostalgic” about the CBC.
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Until Parliament passed the Online Streaming Act in 2023, Canada did not have a Netflix Plan. Instead, Netflix had a Canada plan (note the witty meme, above). You could write a book about it.
Last Friday the CRTC announced a fresh round of hearings to implement the regulatory framework for foreign video streamers and Canadian television broadcasters.
While the Commission previously ordered Netflix and the Californian streamers to pay $140 million in annual contributions to Canadian media funds, this newest regulatory file is the most consequential thing that the CRTC will do for Canadian television and video streaming.
The hearing notice for March 31, 2025 tips the CRTC’s hat in terms of the regulatory changes it wants to make, although it’s not final and is subject to debate. The changes will become law in the summer or fall of 2025 unless interrupted by a federal election campaign (which seems more likely than not).
The “too long, don’t read” summary (and this is a long post) is this:
The headline is some minor tweaking of the definition of a “Canadian program,” the first step before assigning the foreign streamers a programming budget for Canadian shows.
A far more important proposal concerns who should own the long term copyright and commercial opportunities for a Canadian program that is made by a Canadian producer and then licensed and distributed by Netflix or the other US streamers.
A bold and controversial move by the Commission is a proposal to abolish programming minimums for Canadian television drama (“Programs of National Interest” in CRTC-lingo) which have been centrepiece of the Commission’s regulatory remit for decades.
The Commission wants to do something significant to support television news, presumably through subsidies, but unlike the other issues in its announcement it doesn’t appear to have any idea of how to do it.
What is Canadian?
The argument over what ought to be considered a Canadian program will never stop. It’s like criticism of the CBC: impeaching the cultural status quo is a Canadian parlour game.
We’ve always used the headcount method to define Canadian programs, allocating up to 10 points to a program that stars Canadians and puts Canadians in the key creative jobs of producer, director, writer and a few other talent slots that are deemed to contribute to the look, feel and vibe of a show.
The governing principle is that we can count upon Canadian artists to make Canadian art. Or as the Commission puts it with so little rhetorical flair, “having Canadians responsible for key creative decisions will enhance Canadian stories.”
Netflix and the other streamers aren’t crazy about the headcount test. If they are going to be required by the CRTC to make Canadiana, they want to use their own people. Their people are Hollywood actors, directors, writers and showrunners; the hand picks whom the streamers believe they can count upon to make hit shows with global appeal.
Some Canadians think that instead of the headcount method we should be qualifying programs as Canadian with a “cultural theme” appraisal of the plot, story, location, and —to use the CRTC’s language— cultural signifiers and symbols. The British do it that way in the UK. They use a panel of television executives to vet programs as British enough for subsidies.
In last week’s announcement, the Commission rejected the cultural theme test as too subjective. In a technical briefing provided to the media, Commission spokesperson Scott Shortliffe said that the cultural test was too difficult to administer because of irreconcilable views on “unifying” Canadian symbols and signifiers. (IMO the latter argument is unconvincing: Canadian culture is a mix of national symbols and diverse, locally authentic signifiers. Canadiana does not require classic cultural totems like Vimy Ridge or the Canadian Pacific Railway to call itself Canadian).
In its announcement, the Commission focussed on tweaking the headcount formula in a number of ways, introducing points for “showrunners” of Canadian TV series; giving credit for employment of Canadian costume designers and make-up leads as well as visual and special effects wizards. The Commission also relaxed the rule that all personnel sharing a point-eligible role (for example multiple writers of an episode) have to be Canadian: now one in five can be non-Canadian.
This is all nibbling around the edges of the current point system. In an incremental way it might allow Hollywood streamers to use more Hollywood talent on a Canadian show, but it’s no game changer.
Whose money is it anyway?
When Netflix was asked by Parliamentarians in 2022 what amendment to Bill C-11 it wanted the most, the one-word response was “copyright.” The amendment didn’t fly.
“Copyright” was short-hand for Netflix saying that if the Online Streaming Act compelled foreign streamers to sink millions into distinctly Canadian shows, it expected to own those programs lock, stock and barrel. “Copyright” meant not just the possession of first release in Canada and all global markets, but also ownership for the streamers’ permanent libraries of shows as well as the intellectual property of series spin-offs, branding, merchandise and any other long term commercial opportunities.
Unfortunately the streamers’ expectation that they own a show, rather than license it from Canadians, runs smack into Canadian regulatory rules that favour copyright and intellectual property residing with the independent Canadian television producers who make Canadian dramas and license them to broadcasters home and abroad.
The CRTC backs this up by requiring Canadian broadcasters to spend a fixed tranche of their programming budgets on “Programs of National Interest” (Canadian dramas and documentaries) and buying at least 75% of shows from independent Canadian producers.
Those Canadian producers retain the copyright and intellectual property in those shows because the governmentand media fund subsidies that finance these Canadian shows are conditional upon the producers retaining the commercial control and exploitation of their shows for 25 years. For producers, it’s seen as the difference between being an entrepreneur and a gig worker on their own shows.
The foreign streamers hate these rules, but they are operating in Canada and they are going to have to get used to them.
From the Canadian point of view, these are the regulatory rules that allowed us over decades to build a thriving film and television sector across multiple production clusters in Vancouver, Toronto, Montréal and increasingly in other provinces. It’s the reason why the Liberals amended Bill C-11 to make pro-Canadian copyright rules explicit. The amendment wasn’t airtight but reflected the reality that the financing of Canadian shows is a mix of Hollywood money, Canadian investment and public dollars.
But this is the real world and the streamers know they can make trouble for Canada by appealing to US Congress and the White House to take on their fight.
The CRTC is not oblivious to this realpolitik, so it is looking for a compromise solution. In the announcement, it invited proposals on how copyright and intellectual property might be shared between Canadian producers, broadcasters and foreign streamers. While the Commission did not elaborate on how, these sharing models could be targeted to specific genres of shows, markets or the size of their programming budgets. After all, the streamers are potentially bringing the big budgets that Canadian television producers might not otherwise obtain and are expanding access to global audiences beyond the usual foreign partners in cable television distribution.
The Commission also mooted the possibility that Netflix could “buy” outright copyright by maxing out on the use of key Canadian talent, a proposal that might drive a wedge between Canadian producers and Canadian production guilds. The Canadian wing of the set workers’ union IATSE, based in Hollywood, has been explicit about this already.
This is going to be regulatory dog fight, you heard it here first.
Watering down rules on television drama
Canadian television regulation has always given special treatment to financing and promoting Canadian drama since at least 1979, when the CRTC orderedthe CanCon-laggard CTV to produce 39 hours of original shows per year.
Because of the market dynamic of a small domestic audience for Canadian content in both Québec and the rest of Canada, television drama is —as the CRTC reminds us in its last announcement— “risky to produce and difficult to monetize.”
A fulsome production and subsidy ecosystem is built around government and industry subsidies plumping up programming budgets for Canadian dramas and documentaries made by independent Canadian television producers. The programs are dubbed with some grandiosity by the CRTC as “programs of national interest (PNI).”
Further regulations require major broadcasters to dedicate a large slice of their programming budgets to the PNI genre (ranging from 5% to 15% of revenues).
Yet another regulation completes the ecosystem by requiring those broadcasters to buy 75% of their PNI-qualifying programs from the aforementioned independent producers (and in practice broadcasters do almost no in-house production of dramas and buy 100% from these producers).
The broadcasters don’t mind buying from the independent producers; they do mind filling a quota of PNI spending. They have been seeking reductions in PNI for years.
They appear to have got their wish.
The Commission is now proposing to eliminate the broadcasters’ PNI programming obligations.
It’s reasoning seems to be:
The foreign streamers are in the business of television drama, so if they have to make Canadian content there will be more “PNI” dramas without having to specifically require it.
The Commission’s proposed changes to the definition of Canadian content will encourage the production of dramas (IMO, this is a stretch).
Canadian broadcasters want to make less risky and more profitable content (the elephant in the room is the debt-laden Corus Entertainment, which has sought to satisfy their CanCon obligations with more reality and lifestyle television and fewer dramas).
Without a PNI spending quota, the production of Canadian dramas can still be encouraged by giving streamers and broadcasters extra credit for making dramas (i.e. a reduced overall budget for Canadian entertainment content in proportion to spending on drama).
The Commission should reserve its most stringent regulatory efforts for encouraging news production.
Canadian broadcasters have a legitimate list of woes. Cable subscriptions are steadily declining. The television advertising market is going out with the digital tide. Access to popular US programming for retailing to Canadian cable customers is getting more expensive and less available.
All of that jeopardizes their ability to produce local news, a money loser for 12 years running.
The Commission’s most recent announcement sends strong signals of its desire to save television news from further erosion.
If the Commission has anything in mind other than homilies about the value of local news, it’s keeping its cards close to the vest. Instead, industry participants have been invited to make proposals.
“Level the Playing Field”
The Commission’s announcement answers some of the questions about how foreign streamers will contribute “equitably,” measured against the efforts of Canadian broadcasters to finance and promote Canadian content.
The Commission has linked its expectations of streamer spending on Canadian programs to the “Canadian Programming Expenditure” (CPE) requirements for major broadcasters, pegged at 30% of Canadian revenues. This CPE is less than it could have been if the streamer obligations had been benchmarked to Canadian “specialty” broadcasters whose “CPE” minimum averages at about 29% of revenues but in practiceis 48% of revenues.
The streamers’ CPE will be at least 30%, but probably much less in the end, for these reasons:
The streamers’ 30% will be reduced, perhaps more than dollar for dollar, by the 5% cash contributions the Commission already ordered streamers to make to Canadian media fund.
The Commission has already signalled in last week’s announcement that it might reduce overall CPE in proportion to money spent by streamers and broadcasters on making “risky and difficult to monetize” Canadian dramas; and
The Commission could end up pushing the 30% benchmark lower by granting the pleas of major broadcasters to reduce their CPE to 20% or 25%.
Notably, the Commission has folded the broadcasters’ regulatory relief requests into the file for the upcoming hearings.
Discoverability rediscovered
Ever since the Online Streaming Act received Royal Assent in May 2023, the Commission has been squirming in discomfort over how to implement the new statute’s “discoverability” mandate that streamers must recommend Canadian content on their platforms “by any means of control.” The Commission has repeatedly disavowed “regulating algorithms” to achieve discoverability outcomes, overstating the statutory prohibition that the Commission may not prescribe a “specific” algorithmic method.
In a briefing for media on last week’s announcement, the Commission stated that its approach to discoverability would be integrated into each regulatory proceeding rather than scheduling a special hearing on the topic. Its spokesperson made a point of mentioning the importance of discovering French language content on foreign streaming platforms, a hot issue in Québec.
Until we hear a more concrete proposal from the Commission, it may be safe to assume that the lip service to discoverability will continue.
Getting under the election wire
In the media briefing, the Commission suggested it wanted to conclude hearings and issue rulings on the regulatory actions raised in its announcement by summer or fall of 2025. (In case you are wondering, a year agothe federal cabinet allowed this much time by setting December 2025 as the deadline for the Commission to implement the “regulatory framework” for the Online Streaming Act).
However if the writ is dropped for a federal election (likely no later than August 2025) the Commission would observe political custom and put a hold on release of its rulings.
Barring a political miracle, the Poilievre Conservatives will form a majority government before the end of 2025 and they have repeatedly promised to “Kill Bill C-11.”
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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.
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 twoposts, 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 reporton 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.
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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When you’re right, you’re right. And if you were right a long time ago, you’re vindicated.
It’s possible that former CBC executive Richard Stursberg is feeling just that, 13 years after leaving the public broadcaster where he served as the head of English language services from 2005 to 2011.
At the CBC, Stursberg’s calling card was that “audiences matter.” His single minded mission was to capture for the public broadcaster, especially in English language television, an audience commensurate with its role as Canada’s leading cultural organization (and its billion dollar Parliamentary funding).
To outside observers, he seemed to be at odds with everyone and not really minding. First there was the lockout of CBC staff in 2005. Then he grabbed the rest of the organization by the scruff of the neck and piloted a revolution in the CBC’s entertainment programming, for example embracing audience-pleasing reality television (remember Battle of the Blades?).
With an all-Canadian line-up, in five years Stursberg moved the needle significantly in CBC’s share of the national television market, closing the gap with CTV and its prime time schedule of hit US shows. Then he fell out with his new boss, CBC President Hubert Lacroix. And so on: read all about it here in his memoir, The Tower of Babble, ranked by the Globe and Mail as one of the best books of 2012.
Along the way, he made some friends, allies and enemies. The enemies he cheekily dubbed “The Constituency,” an assortment of CBC traditionalists and media watchers who might also have been described as “those who rip Richard in public.”
After he left, the CBC lost NHL hockey rights to Rogers and with it a whole lot of eyeballs and connection with Canadian audiences. Netflix ate up market share for Canadian entertainment television. And then Google Search and Facebook devoured the digital ad market. Stursberg tells more of that story in another prize winner, his 2019 book, The Tangled Garden. The job of keeping CBC relevant today is twice as hard as it used to be.
These days Stursberg continues to have his fingers in different cultural pies. He is outspoken on his support for major reforms to the definition of Canadian content, favouring a “cultural theme” test of distinctive Canadian programming over the traditional headcount of Canadian talent.
As a past reinventor of the public broadcaster, it’s his 2024 views on the reinventing the CBC that are worth soliciting in its hour of crisis. As conservative commentator Harrison Lowman recently projected, “CBC, your days are numbered.”
MediaPolicy asked Stursberg, what is to be done? This guest column, his advice to incoming CBC President Marie-Philippe Bouchard, is his response.
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Advice to the new President of the CBC, Marie-Philippe Bouchard
By Richard Stursberg
Welcome to the job.
Given your deep knowledge of public broadcasting you are ideally placed to do well, but you will have significant challenges. Here is some unsolicited advice on how you can succeed from one who also believes in the importance of the CBC/Radio-Canada.
The Structure of the Corporation
First, your most important challenge will be English television. It is the central problem, not because Pierre Poilievre wants to shut it down, but because it has fallen to its lowest audience share ever. Put bluntly, with the exception of the recent Olympic Games, almost nobody is watching it. There are very few viewers for any of its shows, including news. Your presidency will succeed or fail depending on whether you can solve the problem of English television.
Second, it is important to understand the CBC is not a normal corporation and lacks a normal Board. It cannot decide its own fate. The overall strategy of the corporation has to be approved by the CRTC; and it cannot raise capital without the agreement of the Treasury Board. It lacks many of the powers of a normal corporation. This makes change very difficult. To succeed you will have to have the Minister of Heritage and the Prime Minister on-side for whatever you plan to do.
Should English TV be Fixed?
The Environment
The TV landscape in English Canada is in serious difficulty. The big conventional networks — CTV and Global — the major private sources of local and national news, have been shedding staff for over ten years and losing money. Their ability to commission Canadian drama and comedy is compromised. They are spending less and — for financial reasons — what they are doing is increasingly American in look and feel.
The cable industry has been losing customers for many years and with them, the fees that they pay to specialty channels. As a result, they too are significantly cutting back their staff and ability to commission Canadian shows.
The groups that own the vast majority of the conventional and specialty broadcasters are in trouble. Corus, the parent of Global, is essentially insolvent. Bell Media, the parent of CTV recently wrote down its broadcast assets by just over $2 billion. It is not hard to imagine that in another five to ten years the English Canadian broadcasting industry will — with the possible exception of the sports channels — no longer exist.
Their loss will mean that CBC TV will be the only broadcaster still producing Canadian drama, news, comedy, public affairs and documentary shows. If we value hearing our own stories told in our own voices, there will likely be nowhere else to see them.
Social fragmentation
The emergence of algorithmically driven social media has encouraged polarization and social fragmentation. Canadians increasingly live inside filter bubbles that act as echo chambers. Disinformation, deep fakes and AI generated falsehoods have compounded the problem. The space of common ground and shared assumptions has grown ever narrower as distrust spreads like a stain across public discourse.
As divisions grow more fractious, it is increasingly important that there be places that can bind the country together and create shared understandings about who we are. They need to provide stories, ideas, news and art that allow Canadians to celebrate, explore, discuss and make sense of their country. And, they need to be true. Truth is an essential component of patriotism.
The CBC is the last great cultural institution in the country that is in a position to do this. It can only do so, however, if its programming is trusted and popular. Unless it reaches big audiences it cannot create the large scale shared space that will provide the counterweight to the endless fragmentation of social media.
One initiative that the CBC might take is to address the challenge of disinformation by creating a news and public affairs portal that hosts not just its content but also that of all the other media in the country that are governed by traditional journalistic standards of truth and fairness. This could include other broadcasters, newspapers, magazines, on-line information sources and bloggers that are committed to ensuring the accuracy of their reporting. The portal’s promise — its brand — would be truth.
The other thing it must do is provide galvanizing programming that speaks directly to Canadians to foster debate and conversation about who we are and want to be. It must take on large projects that transcend the current divisions — whether regional, ideological or social — and provide Canadians a place to laugh, argue and cry. This is very difficult to do.
Can English TV be Fixed?
It will be very difficult. Your most important source of revenue aside from the Parliamentary appropriation is advertising, which has collapsed. At the same time, you are facing brutal competition from the vastly rich, foreign owned, unregulated streamers — Netflix, Apple, Amazon, etc.– who bear none of the costly cultural and social burdens that you do.
Business as usual cannot succeed. To save English TV you will have to develop a radical new plan for its future. The plan needs to reinvent its news and entertainment properties and find significant new sources of revenue. The creation of such a plan will be challenging. Substantive change will be met with criticism from all sides.
How Should the Plan be Developed?
It is important to develop a set of principles to guide the creation of a plan. These might include the following.
1. Focus on what the private broadcasters cannot do. They do not need competition from a publicly supported CBC. They are in tough enough shape as it is.
The space that the privates can no longer occupy is very large. Delivering what they cannot will make you more distinct and give Canadians more reason to view your programming.
2. Focus on serving audiences. The measure of success must always be whether Canadians are watching your shows. They pay for the CBC and can reasonably expect to be offered programs that they will want to watch. There is no public broadcaster without a public.
3. Focus on developing new sources of revenue. Television advertising is dying. Google, Facebook and the other big digital companies have taken it all away. Make a virtue of necessity and get out of ads for your drama, comedy and documentary programming. This proved a very successful strategy for radio and would certainly make CBC TV much more distinctive and attractive to audiences.
You will need to develop a new revenue plan. It can be based on sponsorships, whether from corporations or foundations, charitable giving, levies on the streamers and/or internal reallocations.
4. Ensure that the money you are given by Parliament is allocated fairly and sensibly. The French service receives 44% of the government money. This means that French speakers get a per capita subsidy of $70 per person, while the rest of the country gets $23 per capita. Given your biggest challenge is on the English side, this is both unhelpful and unfair. Only a French President can change it.
5. Do not try to please everybody. You can’t. Instead, focus. Be bold. Take risks. Make big bets.
Some Facts About English Canada’s Media habits
Every week Canadians spend about 20 hours on the Internet and 30 hours watching TV, whether traditional TV or streaming services. These are their most important leisure activities.
CBC English radio continues to perform well. It takes a 16% share of all radio listening and is number one in most markets.
CBC English TV has collapsed over the last ten years. It now has a share of roughly 4% of all TV viewing. Its share is equivalent to that of a specialty channel.
Although CBC likes to brag about the reach of its digital service, it is very lightly consumed. Compared to radio and TV, it performs poorly. Canadians spend about 17 minutes per week on CBC.ca., which is a share of just over 1% of their time spent on the Internet.
What are the Key Elements of a Plan?
Local News
Much of local news has vanished; Canada has entered a local news desert. Most small town and community papers and supper hour newscasts have died. All market research indicates that local news is the most important form of news, since it is about the events that directly affect people’s lives. Where local news dies, electoral participation falls and local corruption increases.
Consistent with the principle of doing what the private sector cannot, CBC should expand its local news presence. Recently (November 12, 2024), it announced a significant expansion of its local news presence.
To strengthen its local news further, it would be wise to leverage its strength in radio and have radio promote to and complement the CBC’s local news sites. This has proven a successful strategy in some very small towns in western Canada and Ontario.
Strengthening local news would also help your national news. There is a powerful correlation between local shows on radio and Canadians’ propensity to listen to the national ones as well.
National and International News
The National needs to be refocussed. Some evenings it draws less than 200,000 viewers at 10:00. CTV typically draws two to three times as many viewers for its late night news at 11:00, although in fairness The National gets many more viewers on Youtube and CBC Gem.
Aside from the Globe and Mail, almost nobody except the CBC has any foreign bureaus or investigative capacity. The National — and the News Network — could be dramatically strengthened by using these resources to shift the focus of their journalism. Instead of “telling” Canadians the news, they should give priority to making sense of it by providing background and context.
By way of example, the recent coverage of the US election focused on it as a horse race. There was much discussion of polls, performance at rallies, the Electoral College, more polls, swing states, etc., all accompanied by hand wringing and pearl clutching. Through it all, there was little or no discussion of what a Trump victory might mean for Canada. What will we do when he starts to deport “illegal” migrants when they appear at our border looking for sanctuary? How will we respond to his demand that we turn on the “tap” and divert our water to the parched southwestern states? How do we respond when he withdraws from NATO? The point of foreign bureaus is to make sense of what is happening in other countries for Canada.
In a similar vein, the coverage of the health care crisis focuses on Canadians’ lack of family doctors, overcrowded emergency rooms, and long waits for elective surgery. It does not explore how Canada might fix its broken system by looking at what other countries get right. Why are France, Sweden, Denmark and Norway doing better than we are?
A promise to answer these kinds of questions and embrace Solutions Journalism would go a long way to restoring the relevance of The National and The News Network.
Entertainment and Documentaries
Like the news, the entertainment and documentary shows are doing poorly, particularly the newest ones. The older shows are holding up better: Heartland (season 18), Murdoch Mysteries (season 18), This Hour Has 22 Minutes (season 45?). The newer shows like Crime Scene Kitchen and My Mum Your Dad (a dating show) draw hardly any viewers.
The problem with the new shows is that they are not unique; they do not fill any unmet need. Similar offerings can be found on lots of specialty channels. They are also not particularly Canadian.
A new strategy must be based on commissioning shows that Canadians cannot get anywhere else. They need to be big, daring, appointment pieces that speak to our unique history, dreams, fears and sense of humour. They need to be about us, our neighbours, fellow citizens and friends. To be relevant, they must be distinctly Canadian and squarely rooted in Canada. The private broadcasters will never do this.
By way of example, one of the CBC’s most successful series was Canada: A People’s History. It drew tremendous interest and precipitated great controversy. For years, it was used in schools and with immigrants to help explain who we are. Surely the time is right for an Indigenous People’s History of Canada. To achieve reconciliation, it is essential that people understand the truth of what happened from the point-of-view of Canada’s original inhabitants. Like its predecessor, it would be a multi-part series that starts with first contact and comes up to the present day. Inevitably, it would be expensive, controversial and — if done properly — galvanizing. Nobody else in Canada has the resources or the expertise to make it.
As for fiction, one can imagine a show about our relationship to the US. The premise is simple. The southwestern states have run out of water (which they have). Canada has more fresh water than any country in the world. The Americans face an existential challenge: they must save Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and southern California. They must have the “tap” turned on even if it means war. Again, no private broadcaster would make this; they could never sell it in the States.
Radio-Canada has been very good at producing extremely popular shows that reflect Quebec in all of its remarkable diversity and energy. Every Sunday night “Tout le monde en parle” (Everybody Is Talking About It) provides a funny, charming and thoughtful window into the cultural, social, political, athletic, musical, business and religious life of Quebec. It is the most successful talk show in Canadian history. It is must see viewing. Why is there no English equivalent?
To do these kinds of things, you may have to restore the financial balance within the English network. Over the last ten years roughly $200 million has been stripped from English TV and radio to finance digital, the worst performing service.
Conclusion
English TV can and should be saved, but it will require difficult and bold restructuring. It will need a plan that is based on making great shows that speak to English Canadians’ desire to see themselves and explore their country in ways that are exciting, beautiful and moving. Whether news, documentaries or entertainment shows, table stakes for programs are — in the current intensely competitive environment — quality, originality and relevance. Nothing less will do.
The plan must also ensure that the necessary resources are in place to make it happen. This is likely to involve very controversial decisions about the reallocation of money across the corporation and within English services. It will also require the development of new sources of funds (the major banks could easily sponsor an Indigenous People’s History of Canada).
Although you have a deep understanding of public broadcasting, I understand that your experience is principally on the French side of the corporation. The English and French markets are very different, both in terms of their levels of competitive intensity and the kinds of conventions that underpin successful TV. It might be a good idea for you to move to English Canada for a few months. Watch all the shows and newscasts, both those that are working and those that are not. Talk to everybody: the employees of the CBC, the heads of the big English media companies, the audience measurement experts, the independent producers, everyone.
Use all that you learn to make a real plan, one with teeth and targets, recognizing that it will take two to three years to bear results. Then, find yourself a media executive who agrees with you and has the skills, contacts, experience and daring to execute it.
Once the plan is ready, make it public. It is essential that Canadians understand and support what you are trying to achieve. Let them see that you understand what they need and want, and that you are daring enough to try and deliver it. Let them hold you accountable for the spending of their money.
Building a public constituency for your plan will provide a powerful counterweight to the forces that will resist change. You will need all the friends you can find.
The plan may also be a good answer for Mr. Poilievre – if elected – and his Heritage minister. You will also need them.
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On the weekend MediaPolicy published a lengthy explainer about the new “Scrap the Streaming Tax” campaign launched by the global music streamers to fight CRTC regulation.
The post’s opening hook —-how Canadian rocker Bryan Adams stepped forward to become the celebrity face of the campaign—- adds a little colour to the debate over the regulatory environment for “CanCon,” something Adams once said “only breeds mediocrity.” This week, Adams launched his own channel on Bell Media’s iHeart radio.
The main point of my post was that the music streamers appear to making no efforts to come to grips with the biggest of cultural challenges within Canadian music: the enormous and baffling underconsumption of French language music on their streaming platforms in Québec.
Right on cue, La Presse published a story on its journalist’s discovery that part of Spotify’s song algorithm is, not surprisingly, a popularity index that rates songs based on global listens and the time freshness of that audience. The result is not a shock: the popularity index of French language Canadian music is not in the same ball park as English Canadian songs, to say nothing of the indexing of the most successful global artists.
La Presse’s attempt to get Spotify’s comments were met by stony silence, as were previous inquiries by MediaPolicy.
***
Former CBC executive Richard Stursberg wrote in his 2012 memoir of his tumultuous tenure at the helm of English language services that one of the things that the CBC excels at, and should focus on, is “smart talk,” his description of programming that curates debates about important public issues.
In the swirling discussion over the Conservative Party’s promise to defund the CBC, that smart talk is what CBC host Elamin Abdelmahmoud just put together on his Commotion podcast, first with a panel of three critics of the CBC and next with three defenders.
Separating the sparring teams was a good idea: you will be better informed and spared the tedious cross talk of face to face debate.
Harrison Lowman of The Hub warned the CBC “that your days are numbered,” something he does not relish personally, and that a dramatic re-engineering of the public broadcaster is required for survival. On the other hand, writer Rupa Subramanya is not for saving the CBC: she would defund CBC television, CBC2 music radio, and provide “tiny” funding for CBC Radio One (perhaps inadvertently, no comment on CBC.ca).
In the other room, National Observer columnist Max Fawcett regarded Subramanya’s claims that the free market will provide Canadians with their own media as “delusional.”
What makes the two podcasts so engaging is how everyone addresses the elephant in the room with honesty. That elephant is a composite of belief, caricature, misrepresentation and reality that CBC’s institutional culture is dominated by its location in downtown Toronto andthat this culture suffuses its programming throughout the rest of the country, creating resentments, hostility and worst of all indifference.
We live in an age of cultural wars that animate political polarization, with tribes suspecting the worst of each other. Together the two podcasts are a tonic. Which is what the CBC mandate can be.
***
A news story that is going to hang around and get a whole lot bigger is the federal government’s decision after a lengthy national security review to ban TikTok from operating on Canadian soil but allow private citizens to use the app. In short, it’s a “use at own risk” advisory.
There’s an informative story on this in the Globe and Mail (which has followed the federal government in banning its employees from using the app out of surveillance concerns).
US Congress had ordered the Chinese-owned TikTok to sell its American operations or face an Internet ban in that country. But with President-Elect Trump making friendlier noises about TikTok, that’s in doubt.
***
Life at Corus Entertainment must be a misery these days.
The profitable but debt-laden company is the target of acquisition by Canadian media rival Québecor which hopes to buy Corus at a discount. The unsecured creditors see this coming and are manueuvring for a more modest haircut on their loans.
Meanwhile, Rogers is showing no mercy to its vulnerable competitor. In addition to its scoop of Corus’ best American programming, it is now seeking to dump Corus’ kids channels from its cable service.
***
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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.
***
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.
***
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.
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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.
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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.
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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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