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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Angus Reid has published a helpful public opinion poll in anticipation of a federal election likely to be won by Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives.
The poll focusses on Canadians’ gut feelings on eight major governing issues including defunding the CBC. The poll surprisingly ignores the carbon tax and climate change. But it includes questions on a bundle of fiscal issues such as budget balancing, income tax cuts, and increased defence spending.
The notorious “defund the CBC” plank in the Poilievre platform is unpopular, something we already knew from the recent Abacus poll. But once that data is broken down by voting intention, it remains a Conservative voter favourite. Unsurprisingly, Canadians of all voter stripes assume Poilievre will follow through:
The Canadian voter — the fictional voter representing aggregate opinion— has sniffed out Poilievre pretty well. He’s presumed to have a secret agenda. That’s probably because it’s awfully difficult to square the circle of budget balancing, reduced taxes, and increased defence spending unless you are a Ronald Reagan Republican (who famously ran up the national debt). The virtual voter long ago figured that out.
The poll also establishes some wedge issues. Only Conservative voters support defunding the CBC, closing Canada’s borders to immigrants, mass layoffs in the federal public service, and encouraging more privatization of health care.
Assuming the Liberals, Bloc and NDP are game to exploit that voter divide, they might make a lot of noise on the campaign trail about a Conservative “hidden agenda” on those issues.
***
Last week there was a minor kerfuffle on social media after Liberal MP Taleeb Noormohamed chastised National Post Senior Editor Terry Newman for having the temerity to twitter troll his colleague, Liberal Immigration Minister Marc Miller.
Noormohamed’s brain fart was to scold Newman for her taunts as so much ingratitude, considering that the Liberal-authored federal journalism subsidies keep the Post afloat:
Conservatives and others opposed to journalism subsidies as a threat to the independence of the press had a field day and were all over his statement.
My guess is that Noormohamed let his emotions get the better of him out of loyalty to a colleague and the guilty admission that, yes, Liberals are so committed to saving a mainstream media that is essential to democracy that they willeven fund that bullhorn of a Trudeau-derangement syndrome news outlet, the National Post.
Nobody honourably resigns from anything anymore, but Noormohamad either has to apologize or resign from his portfolio as Parliamentary Secretary to the Heritage Minister, the cabinet member responsible for the federal news funding programs.
Since neither will happen, I recommend an alternative remedy that he be required to read aloud in the House of Commons from the following essay on press freedom penned by New York Times publisher AG Sulzberger.
***
The documentary Russians At Warproduced by Canadian-Russian filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova about the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine has roiled nationalist passions and cries for censorship.
Trofimova’s embedded reporting on a platoon of Russian soldiers souring on the war was denounced by many, including Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, as “Russian propaganda” that ought to be repressed, stripped of federal film subsidies, or outright censored. Conservative Party free speech crusaders are conspicuously without an opinion on the matter. On the other hand, the freedom of expression organization CJFE came to the defence of distributing the film.
Several mainstream reviewers saw the film and categorically rejected the Russian propaganda label and agreed that it lived up to its billing as an anti-war documentary.
Myself, I haven’t seen the documentary. I spoke to a couple of friends about it. One, a reporter, reminded me that embedded reporting gives the audience a front-row seat to reality with great emotional impact, but embedded reporters are limited in their ability to sharply question news subjects holding loaded weapons in their grasp. Better not to be the “ded” in “embedded.”
Another, a filmmaker, thought that Trofimova might have executed some better context and editing in a couple of scenes where Russian soldiers are conceded unfiltered speech, but that overall Russians At War is an anti-war documentary.
***
We haven’t heard much from the Liberals on when they will push forward Bill C-63, the Online Safety Act they tabled during the spring session of Parliament. MediaPolicy previously commented on the bill here, here and here.
My free political advice is the Liberals should split the Bill and proceed only with the online safety features. The hotly debated anti-hate provisions that increase criminal penalties for hate speech and re-establish human rights litigation can go into the Liberals’ next election platform for Canadians to pass judgment.
There’s also some merit in watching what the Americans are doing. The trumpeted success of the US Senate passing an online harms bill to protect kids is now getting watered down in the House, according to The Washington Post, possibly an outcome of heavy lobbying by Big Tech companies.
***
Any time a Canadian media company begins talking up an innovative or start-up idea, it swivels my head.
Here’s a couple.
Jeff Elgie’s Village Media has done a soft launch of his foray into the Toronto market for digital news. The full-on launch of the TorontoToday.ca website will be in October. At the moment, he’s aggregating reader e-mail addresses and pushing out a daily news e-mail update that links to news and information content published on his competitors’ websites. That will change next month to his own reporters’ content.
Elgie has expanded Today’s initial target audience in the condo-heavy downtown core to go a little further north and west (now capturing yours truly in a modest semi-detached).
He’s up against some stiff competition for eyeballs in the Toronto Star, BlogTO et al. His journalism will be more hyperlocal than the Star and is likely to be better than BlogTo and the various neighbouhood print monthlies (and as a resident I’d be grateful if they raised their game in response).
It will be interesting to see how Elgie innovates with information items and listings that draw in more readers, like cheaper (than the Star) obits or his Spaces social media product that invites readers to moderated community chats. He’s the most innovative publisher in the Canadian digital landscape, so TorontoToday is a space to watch.
Then there’s the announcement of Postmedia Studios creating a partnership with the Los Angeles based media creation company Contend. The product is video entertainment, drawing on Postmedia’s IP and historical archive.
The words “Postmedia” and “innovation” in the same sentence, you ask? There’s not a great deal of reveal in the press release, so it’s another space to watch.
***
There are so many ways to tell the news story of Rogers $4.7 billion buy out of Bell’s share of MLSE, the operator of the Toronto Maple Leafs, the NBA Raptors, the Argonaut CFL club and the MLS club Toronto FC.
Another angle is what if anything Bell is signalling about long term plans for its media division. That’s a question that keeps getting asked every time big blue sells radio stations or lays off television employees.
There’s no clear answer to that question: Bell CEO Mirko Bibic passed on the opportunity to make the announcement into a “retreating from media” story, although he certainly didn’t describe broadcasting assets as a core business.
The Globe’s Tim Kildaze provides a good explainer on Bell’s decision to pay down debt and prop up both the BCE share price as well as its ability to meet its high dividend payout.
***
As media-playing smartphones have long served as a second television, radio receiver and music stereo, I keep track of the never-ending debates over Canadian cell plan prices.
There’s been a lot of regulatory action. The federal cabinet has ordered the CRTC to kick butt. The Commission has responded with its “MNVO” plan which forces the majors to rent out their infrastructure to price-piranha independents.
The same federal cabinet waded into the Rogers-Shaw merger last year and cleaved Shaw’s Freedom Mobile from the deal, now sold to Quebecor as a disruptor in the BC and Ontario markets.
You may also follow the spirited debates about what cell phone prices really are. The singular focus on basic plan price, or sometimes total monthly bills for all services, is ripe for cherry picking the numbers.
To place plan price within its full value package, the majors must be presumed to deliver quality. After all, what’s the point of tolerating market power in telco ownership if their customers aren’t getting the premium brands’ promise of great customer service and reliable connectivity?
So here’s my recent experience as a mobility customer.
I felt I was paying too much to Bell. Despite the trumpeted price-war, Bell raised prices this spring. I was up to $61 per month for cross-Canada calling, 15 GB of data monthly, and an additional $13 for the Apple Watch connectivity (a second wireless line).
It was August with back-to-school pricing in full swing, so I went to Freedom Mobile which might as well be an indie in Ontario. A great price of $30 per month (US calling and lots of data included) but another $30 for the Watch line. Fair enough, I don’t think Freedom is targeting the Apple Watch crowd.
So I went down the street to Rogers.
The sales guy quoted $55 for the phone plan, Canada and US calling, 100 GB monthly, and $15 (first 24 months free with a $70 connection fee) for the Watch line. Beat Bell by some margin.
Okay, sold to the man in the red golf shirt.
That’s when the quality and service nightmare began.
The Apple Watch line wouldn’t activate. It took Rogers a week to fix it: six hours of my time spent in queues and five chat calls with tech support before they figured out it was a coding problem for customers bringing their own phone. Once they figured it out, Tech Support messaged me it was “fixed” but neglected to tell me to do a factory reset on the watch. Another hour of my time in a queue to get that key instruction.
Then two other things immediately happened that can’t be coincidental.
My iMessage no longer synchs properly across my four Apple devices.
And suddenly I’m getting at least two scam texts daily (with Bell it used to be two per week).
Price ain’t everything.
***
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Back in April 2023, I posted that the Liberal government needed to make its case for defending or re-engineering the CBC.
Every month that went by with the Prime Minister ignoring the relentless Conservative messaging to “defund the CBC,” the more his detachment resembled Trudeau pater’s famous shrug.
The CBC is no longer the political sacrament it once was (except in Québec) yet public opinionpolling continues to reveal clear majority support for the public broadcaster, including one poll that showed a big appetite for improving it.
Heritage Minister Pascale St.-Onge got things going a year later in May 2024 when she appointed an expert committee to “advise regularly” on the CBC. So far, no reports.
This week the Minister posted a rather good pitch on social media posing intelligent questions about rethinking the CBC.
Why do we need a public broadcaster?
How do we keep CBC-Radio Canada independent, accountable, and serving the audience?
How does CBC stay relevant in the sea of Internet content?
How can CBC better reflect Canada?
All great questions, if obvious. What’s lacking are answers: the 81 second video ends with the message “Stay Tuned.” Let’s hope she’ll have something more to say about this before a Liberal election Red Book just repeats the good questions.
In the meantime, you can have your say through the Friends of Canadian Media survey portal.
Update: I recommend this recent commentary from Kirk Lapointe moving the yardsticks along on the public debate about rethinking the CBC.
***
I wrote last week about the internecine friction between indie news publishers and mainstream news outlets in both Canada and California, scrapping over the spoils of settlements made with Google for its monetizing of linked news content on Search.
A spokesperson for the indie point of view —which is that mainstream digital publishers should not get their proportional share of any settlement —- was Ken Doctor, writing in Nieman Lab.
Doctor is the publisher of the Californian digital outlet, Lookout Santa Cruz, where his newsroom won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. The non-profit Lookout is not making money, but it’s stable, and Doctor is expanding his business model to another small community, this time up the coast in Eugene-Springfield, Oregon.
He was interviewed recently in Nieman Lab and gives away a few trade secrets there.
***
Last weekend I told you about my debate with Len St.Aubin. It began with his article in CARTT.ca touting the significance of Netflix’s investments in certified Canadian content over the last ten years and, as a consequence, his view that the CRTC should go easy on formal investment obligations for foreign streamers.
In his mid-week rebuttal, St.Aubin said that the increase in CanCon investment by foreign streamers is bigger than I gave them credit for, particularly after 2015.
Aside from the difficulty in measuring how much foreign investment in Canadian shows has grown since 2011, the real data problem we both struggle with is that we don’t know whether it was the Hollywood streamers or international broadcasters who fed it. As a former regulatory consultant to Netflix, St Aubin feels quite certain it’s the streamers. As a former Unifor spokesperson, I’m skeptical of the claim.
Regardless, that still leaves us evaluating St.Aubin’s contention that CRTC levies on the streamers will only eat up the streamers’ existing market-driven investments.
In an earlier article, St.Aubin suggested (reluctantly it seemed) no more than a 7.5% of revenue CanCon levy on streamers in the form of direct investments in Canadian dramas and documentaries (compared to the 29% benchmark for Canadian specialty broadcasters).
The two figures —7.5% versus 29%— don’t seem “equitable” between foreign and domestic broadcasters, required by the federal cabinet’s directive to the CRTC. But that argument is further down the regulatory road when the CRTC deals squarely with the issue.
I note that lately the CRTC chair Vicky Eateries has taken to describing the Commission’s future expectations of the foreign streamers’ CanCon spending as needing to be “meaningful.”
Parse, parse.
***
As you may recall, the US 3rd Circuit Court of Appeal recently ruled that Google is operating an illegal monopoly in Search.
Last week another anti-trust trial began for Google in the US. This time the Department of Justice is trying its case that Google has illegally cornered the Ad Tech market that feeds digital display advertising on websites.
On the third day of the trial, prosecutors began to introduce evidence of how Google employees thought about the company’s products at the time when the government alleges it set out to dominate the ad tech market.
“We’ll be able to crush the other networks and that’s our goal,” David Rosenblatt, Google’s former president of display advertising, said of the company’s strategy in late 2008 or early 2009, according to notes shown in court...
Rosenblatt came to Google in 2008 when it acquired his former ad tech company, DoubleClick, and left the following year. The notes of his talk showed him discussing the advantages of owning technology on both sides and the middle of the market.
“We’re both Goldman and NYSE,” he said, according to the notes, referring to one of the world’s biggest stock exchanges at the time and one of its biggest market makers.
“We’ll do to display [advertising] what Google did to search,” Rosenblatt said.
By owning publisher ad servers, the advertiser ad network would have a “first look” at available spots for ads, he said according to the notes. He also said it was a “nightmare” for publishers to switch platforms.
“It takes an act of God to do it,” he said.
***
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Well before the Online News Act Bill C-18 was tabled in the House of Commons in April 2022, I sat in on a heated debate about the wisdom of such an endeavour, held at the Ted Rogers School of Management in Toronto.
The debaters were from Canadian news outlets, the independents and niche digital outlets outnumbering those from mainstream newsrooms.
The majority of the participants were opposed to legislation that would force Google and Facebook to bargain news licensing payments. But mostly they were opposed, vehemently opposed, to anything that would give mainstream organizations a farthing. In fact, if there were any farthings to be had, they should go to the independents and “let the dinosaurs die.”
The mainstream folks bit their lips. The Globe & Mail guy left early, begging another appointment.
That was behind closed doors.
Today, the antagonism is out in the open. It is reflected in the CRTC filings in response to Google’s application to recognize its exemption from the Online News Act on the basis of its $100 million brokerage deal with the champion of the independents, the Canadian Journalism Collective.
In the same vein Scott White, the outgoing Editor-in-Chief of The Conversation, took the occasion of his departure to comment on the family feud in an LinkedIn post written out of exasperation with the denial of QCJO federal wage subsidies for his journalism enterprise:
Being rejected by an expert panel whose members cut their teeth in the days of ink on paper was a clear indication that funding programs are not open to new models. The federal funding and the subsequent Google money for journalists has laid bare an ugly battle between traditional and new media. Established broadcasters and newspapers want most of the money to go to them. New media say the old models have failed and funding should instead be used to invest in fresh enterprises.
This internecine rivalry continues to be one of the biggest threats to Canadian journalism. Old media, with their established brands, needs to innovate to survive. New media needs better brand recognition to thrive. New and old working together would be the best path forward – and yet the history of the profession shows that’s unlikely. Self-interested rather than collective strategies, outdated news wars and C-suite egos have led to the tattered playing field that is today’s journalism industry.
How one parses the statement that “established broadcasters and newspapers want most of the [QCJO and Google] money to go to them” depends on the meaning of the word “most.”
The mainstream news outlets that cover 98% of the news with 98% of the paid journalists support the equal wage subsidy for each employed journalist that is baked into the rules for both the Google and federal money.
Putting aside the fact that the federal QCJO program isn’t available to broadcaster news websites or that the federal government has drastically capped the broadcasters’ pro rata share of Google money, the headcount funding formula could be described as fair. If headcounts aren’t fair, everyone is at liberty to argue for “merit of news product” based upon audience data of clicks, views, or paid subscribers.
If the failed business model is the advertising model, then nearly everyone in the news game is a failure, in Canada and elsewhere (Jeff Elgie’s Village Media notwithstanding).
Meanwhile, the “failed” mainstream outlets do try. Try to innovate, that is.
The billionaire-backed Globe and Mail has made a state-of-the-art transition to digital. If Postmedia wasn’t being sucked dry by never-ending debt payments incurred by a bad business bet from 15 years ago, it might have done the same. The unpaywalled La Presse is a success with its tablet innovation and small donor fundraising. The Toronto Star blew $25 million trying to imitate La Presse, its former owners losing their family fortunes in the effort.
The same independent versus mainstream media spat is being played out at this moment in California. Instead of vetoing the Californian legislature’s version of the Online News Act, Governor Gavin Newsom has struck a five-year funding deal that allows Google to pay a very modest price to evade news licensing legislation, lets Facebook off the hook completely, and looks to government subsidies to take the sting out of disappointed expectations.
The money looks like this:
A public-private News Transformation Fund administered by a California journalism school (with majority control awarded to independent news outlets) funded $14 million annually from the state budget and another $10 million each year from Google.
The continuation of Google’s $10 million per year funding of Californian news journalism through the Google News Initiative and its Showcase aggregation site.
A $12 million dollar per year Google-sponsored Artificial Intelligence Accelerator fund, paving the way for AI adoption, something that may end up being the best or worst thing that ever happened to news journalism.
In sum, Google will shell out $32 million per year for Californian journalism, Facebook is out of the picture, and government has picked up $14 million in annual subsidies.
With a Californian-sized population, Canada has $100 million annually in Google money (with $37 million going to private broadcaster and CBC websites) and $95 million per year from various federal aid to journalism programs. That’s about four times the Californian news money (not counting the CBC parliamentary grant).
Writing in the American journalism site Nieman Lab, Ken Doctor claims victory in California. Doctor is the publisher of an independent news outlet, Lookout Santa Cruz and if Santa Cruz was located in Canada he would doubtless have joined the Canadian Journalism Collective that represents 2% of journalism but 100% of the brokerage deal with Google.
The reason that the Californian deal is a win, says Doctor, is because:
Facebook is off the hook, so there is no news throttle and Californian news outlets continue to reach their audience on that platform.
Local broadcasters get no money.
12% of the News Transformation cash is ear marked for news outlets with five or less journalists operating in underserved markets.
A fund governance structure keeps mainstream news outlets in a voting minority.
Says Doctor:
The relatively low level of [financial] support, ironically, may address one of the concerns many of us have had throughout this process: Why should the state use its hammer — and taxpayer dollars — to support the financially driven companies (Alden, Gannett, McClatchy) that have disinvested in California local news? For a bevy of political reasons, no settlement or legislation emerged that effectively deprived them of funding; they, like the ethnic press and digital startups, will receive the same per-headcount funding, with no apparent cap. That still seems like bad public policy, but there’s where it landed.
In other words, less is more so long as corporate media gets less.
***
The Facebook Swiss-cheese news ban continues in Canada. In last week’s post I noted that Facebook has not blocked a Telelatino News interview of Pierre Poilievre uploaded on August 23rd by the Conservative Party (it’s still up).
The news and information site Narcity has celebrated its “organic social” audience recovery only a month after Facebook reinstated its account. In the LinkedIn post graphic at the top of today’s blog, Narcity publisher Chuck Lapointe charts a full recovery of social media audience in a very short period of time.
An interesting visual on the left side of the graph is the precipitous decline of Narcity audience that occurred before the Meta news ban, consistent with long term trends for news publishers.
***
Blacklock’s Reporter is appealing the Federal Court’s summertime ruling that Parks Canada violated no copyright or contractual rules by purchasing an individual subscription to the investigative news site and then sharing the paywall password with multiple employees.
The incongruous battle between the tightly paywalled news site and a federal government that spends nearly $100 million annually to support news journalism is described by Peter Menzies in an op ed published in the Globe and Mail.
The federal cabinet minister responsible for Parks Canada is Steven Guilbeault, a former Heritage Minister who sponsored the pre-legislative consultations on the Online News Act. The current Heritage Minister is Pascale St.-Onge. Possibly, the two are acquainted with the issue at hand.
The data is now a year out of date, so caveats all around. But I noted three items for future reference:
Revenue for music streaming has plateaued. If that sticks, it will reinforce the transition of the global music streamers from prioritizing growth to making profit.
Conventional television losses keep getting worse, 11 years running. The large television companies are in a 34.3% loss position (the small independents that receive local news subsidies from cable companies are in a 2% profit position).
The overall market share for broadcasting across all platforms is approaching the symbolic cross-over point where Internet streamers earn more Canadian revenues than domestic cable operators.
***
Cartt.ca has done a terrific job of reporting on Bell’s lawsuit against Warner Brothers Discovery and Rogers in the wake of WBD cancelling its content deals with Bell and Corus.
The story lede was that Bell has withdrawn its matching legal action against Rogers for scooping the highly profitable Discovery programming now that Rogers has disclosed that WBD had kept it in the dark about the key non-compete clause in the expiring Bell-WBD agreement.
The juicy stuff in the story is how WBD plans to lawyer its way out of liability by describing the non-compete clause as turning on the dissolution of the Bell-WBD legal entity governing their joint venture in Canada, not the continued availability of the programming rights to Discovery content. Presumably, WBD has no intention of dissolving the numbered company that served as the now empty bucket for content rights.
***
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Last week MediaPolicy responded to policy arguments suggesting Netflix and the unregulated US video streamers have boosted Canadian content with a rising tide of production investment over the last ten years.
As it turns out, not so much. You can read about that here.
***
As of this week, Pierre Poilievre’s August 23rd upload of his by regulated broadcaster TLN Media interview ——replete with describing Liberals as “wackos,” “radicals” and “extremist socialists”—-remains on Facebook, despite the Meta ban on Canadian news.
***
I wrote last week about the conservative movement’s varying opinions on defunding the CBC.
A good addition to the discussion is a National Post interview with conservative journalist and book publisher Ken Whyte who most definitely does not want to defund the public broadcaster.
I think Whyte puts his finger on the pulse of CBC hating: what he describes as the “lack of ideological diversity” that results in conservative-minded voters not seeing themselves in the CBC’s media mirror.
***
MediaPolicy recently offered an overview of Canada’s $900 million Digital Services Tax (DST) and the American strategy to overturn it.
Last week the White House announced it was moving the impasse over the DST from rhetoric to a formal trade dispute under CUSMA. The US Trade Representative’s press release is sedate and the Canadian reply even more low key.
With a federal election in November between the Democrat ticket headed by Vice-President Kamala Harris and the protectionist Donald Trump, it is not surprising that Democrats don’t want to be caught on the wrong side of an America-first trade issue.
This development will make Big Tech happy. Those digital companies and their Congressional allies are resisting the international tax treaty negotiated by President Joe Biden with OECD nations to curtail Big Tech profit-shifting to low-corporate tax jurisdictions. If ratified by US Congress, the treaty would make the DSTs enacted in Canada and across Europe unnecessary.
***
Big Tech is turning the tide against government regulation enforcing mandatory licensing payments for online news.
In Australia, Facebook continues to defy regulation by refusing to renew its 2021 licensing agreements with news media organizations.
The Australian government has not taken any action and Meta has not had to make good on its threat to banish news from its platform. Meanwhile, Google is renewing its agreements but according to reports seeks to reduce the payments dramatically.
In California, a state law mimicking Canada’s Bill C-18 seemed on track until Governor Gavin Newsom announced an agreement in principle with Google (but not Meta) to withdraw legislation if Google makes more contributions to Californian journalism (the amount described by the Sacramento Bee’s editorial page as a “relative pittance.”)
Reports of the tentative deal provide a flurry of dollar figures for news funding from Google (including current voluntary news payments), new funding by the state government, and possibly contributions from other participants.
Based on California’s population count (comparable to Canada’s 40 million) it certainly looks like Google will be paying at a rate much lower than in Canada (which was much lower than Australia).
The Californian agreement bears a resemblance to the Canadian settlement with Google last November with less than expected Google payments being supplemented by state government funding.
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It’s not all roses for Google.
In the wake of last month’s US federal court ruling that its Search product is an illegal monopoly, the restaurant search service Yelp has filed a lawsuit against Google for allegedly downgrading Yelp recommendations in favour of Google’s preferred search results.
In a case involving a 10-year old girl who accidentally killed herself after viewing a “blackout challenge” video on her curated “for you” TikTok feed, the Court ruled that the 1996 US federal law that has shielded online services from liability for harmful third party content is not a “get out of jail free” card for social media platforms promoting it.
The case will undoubtedly go to the US Supreme Court.
Canada has no equivalent of the US liability exemption and the Liberals’ Bill C-63 is designed to force social media platforms to deal with harmful content.
If you want to get a more granular account of the ruling, and its implications, here is Matt Stoller’s Substack analysis.
***
Two years ago the CRTC changed course on its 2015 hands-off policy that deferred to cable companies refusing to carry small independent TV services if those channels were adjudged by the cable company to be poor earners.
The soccer television service OneSoccer holds a modest inventory of broadcast rights for national Canadian soccer, perhaps enough to warrant a shot at commercial success that might follow a carriage deal with Rogers. At the time, MediaPolicy wrote about that here.
In granting OneSoccer an unlikely win over the Rogers Goliath, the Commission was probably sensitive to the fact that the old policy had been superseded by the Commission’s approval of the Rogers-Shaw merger that made Big Red the dominant cable company in English Canada, at 47% market share.
But as MediaPolicy concluded, OneSoccer winning carriage on Rogers was one thing. Negotiating fair rates was another.
And so here we are a year and, most likely, a failed negotiation later: Rogers is now refusing to implement the CRTC’s decision because OneSoccer’s ownership structure when it commenced its litigation may not have been Canadian controlled (it’s since been corrected).
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Two years ago St-Aubin and I volleyed back and forth on the merits of the Online Streaming Act as it passed the House of Commons. I suppose the two grumpy old men are back at it again: St-Aubin’s recent column is an indictment of the current regulatory state of affairs and here I am responding.
For the sake of brevity and avoiding repetitious debate I will just focus on his argument about the benevolent impact of the American streamers on Canadian content in the ten unregulated years prior to Bill C-11, what he describes as market driven streamer investments in Canadian television programs.The gravamen of his argument…
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MediaPolicy.ca 