Just released, the Poilievre platform proposes to more than double the funding of the federal Local Journalism Initiative (LJI), from $20 million per year to $45 million. That potentially adds a further 400 journalist jobs in local print media markets across Canada. The locations of those markets line up nicely with Conservative Party ridings in rural areas and outside major metropolitan areas.
The reaction in some conservative circles to Poilievre’s announcement could be described as vein-bulging disbelief. They had half expected a federal news voucher policy, like the Liberals’ now expired reader tax credit. But this?
In The Hub, a conservative publication that rarely allows daylight to show between itself and the Party, Sean Speer fumed the LJI funding was “a massive concession to the Trudeau agenda and a fundamental failure of conservative politics.” The remarks were made on a podcast, so I am not sure whether the word “conservative” was supposed to be capitalized.
The Hub Publisher Rudyard Griffiths chimed in that the federal government controls news content through the LJI, a serious accusation but without a basis in fact.
The Hub’s dismay with Poilievre’s position on subsidies should be put in context.
If elected Prime Minister, Poilievre will defund the English language services of the CBC with its 2,000 journalists.
Oddly in consideration of his repeated castigations, Poilievre’s platform is silent on the federal $65 million QCJO subsidies to about 3,000 print media journalists, dispensed at 35% of salary.
He has promised immunity to Meta for liability under the Online News Act, which puts at risk Google’s compliance with their commitment to pay $100 million per year compensation to news outlets employing 9,000 journalists (at about 15% of salary).
He has also promised $20 million to fund “Indigenous journalism” without providing specifics.
The Hub’s feeling of betrayal by Poilievre runs deep. In the past few months the publication has gone out of its way to celebrate its refusal to take federal subsidies or compensation from Google, proclaiming its disdain for this financial support as part of its marketing campaign for more paid subscriptions.
What’s not well advertised is that two years ago The Hub publisher Griffiths sought and obtained official designation from the Canada Revenue Agency as a “QCJO” news publisher and, more recently, the seal of approval from the Canada Journalism Collective that is administering the Google money.
I asked him about this apparent contradiction and he confirmed that The Hub has the designations, but spurned the money. A month ago The Hub very publicly donated its $22,000 in Google cash to a charity.
As for the QCJO designation, he says The Hub wanted it for the purpose of Press credentials and never applied for the salary subsidy or reader tax credit program. As for seeking and then giving away the Google money, he said The Hub wanted to follow its application through the CJC process so it could verify the integrity of the distribution.
The Hub’s argument with subsidies is about the independence of the press from government, a non trivial concern of course, but the relevant discussion is “independence” from the many vectors of power in our liberal democracy, not only government but big corporations, sponsors, political parties, billionaires, readers demanding ideological conformity and powerful local families.
The Hub‘s success in winning official status raises the concern of how best to administer QCJO designation when it results in the certification of a news outlet so utterly committed to a northstar political party, one that may be governing Canada come Tuesday morning.
That concern is usually shrugged off by those who point to the historic practice of print media mixing its news reporting with politics through opinion journalism and explicit party endorsements. It got us where we are today, so why worry about the close ties between some media and their political champions?
One way to stop worrying about those political allegiances is found in program design for the subsidies. One of the best ways for a news outlet to prove its bona fides of good journalism is through its committment to original and accurate news gathering as the main course in the journalism meal, with opinion as the dessert.
The QCJO criteria for designation has always required that news outlets engage in original news gathering with a fairly high bar for professional standards. The weakness of those rules is that lack of a high bar for volume of news gathering, requiring only that news gathering be carried out on “ongoing basis.” The “ongoing” is left to eyeballing by a certification committee after a news organization has submitted details of its self selected “best three weeks” of news reporting.
If an outlet like The Hub with its acres of opinion writing and occasional news story can get QCJO designation, the bar for frequency of news reporting can’t be very high.
In fact Griffiths told me that as a non-profit he nevertheless decided against seeking the charitable status that would allow him to issue tax receipts to donors because the rules of the government’s less known “RJO” program for non-profits sets the news gathering bar at 51% of published content, a test he says he could not meet.
And then there is accuracy in news reporting, another thing that demonstrates good journalism and, when not done well, undermines public trust.
Recently, The Hub has repeatedly described federal subsidies to news journalism as totalling “$425 million per year.”
Included in that figure is the $100 million Google money as an “indirect” federal subsidy, a highly editorialized way of describing government-enforced news licensing payments between private parties.
More seriously, its “$425 million” figure includes $154 million from the Canada Media Fund, a media fund that spends all of its money on Canadian television dramas, documentaries and children’s programming and exactly zero dollars on news journalism. That’s a hugely misleading reporting error.
There is yet another way to demonstrate good journalism: keeping a safe distance from corporate influence. News organizations of all stripes have a chequered history on this, frequently allowing advertisers and sponsors to pay for content in one way or another. Nevertheless “advertorial” that is written and paid for by a sponsor, clearly marked as non-journalist content, is generally accepted and long tolerated.
But the arms length independence from corporate money can get squishy.
The Hub published an article in October that opposed the federal government’s Online Streaming Act, also contested in a “Scrap the Streaming Tax” public campaign launched the previous month by the American Digital Media Association (DiMA) against the CRTC’s ruling that music streamers pay five per cent of revenue to Canadian media funds.
DiMA’s member organizations Spotify, Apple, Youtube and Amazon are notorious news subjects in their opposition to the CRTC’s implementation of the bill and DiMA’s campaign art was used by The Hub to illustrate the content of the article.
DiMA even paid for the article, a fact that was acknowledged at the bottom of the article but still, in my opinion, constituting a repudiation of independent journalism.
***
While I’m on about The Hub, they posted a terrific podcast in their Full Press series hosted by Harrison Lowman and starring independent journalists Tara Henley and Peter Menzies. The topic was the notorious “shit show” of Rebel News turning the election debate press conferences on their end on consecutive nights.
It got going on the first night when a Rebel News reporter chose to ask the only non-Christian leader why he wasn’t speaking out against “ongoing attacks against Christians” and Church burnings, a provocatively staged but nonetheless legitimate question.
But the second night was when it all went to hell and the press conference became so unruly that the election commission cancelled it.
The Full Press podcast has some very intelligent commentary on the whole mess, very relevant to the Internet-induced era of wide open journalism.
***
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Of all the silver linings in Donald’s Trump’s aggression against Canada, I’ve been gratified to discover the renewed popular passion for Canadian culture.
The pinning-jelly-against-the-wall quest for a distillation of Canada’s national essence always interests me: I’ve pondered it myself in a previous post and celebrated the thoughts of others on the subject.
Unfortunately, what Marche offered us last week was a fact-free rant against the CBC.
His starting point is a much celebrated allegation: that Justin Trudeau is a proud “post-nationalist” who does not value Canada’s rich history because it is marred by the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and wrongs committed against minorities. Says Marche, our “cultural industries” eagerly signed on to Trudeau’s project of denigrating “so-called Canada” and “the self-critique quickly narrowed into a negligible, impotent stream of identity politics to the exclusion of virtually any other perspective.”
Having named all “cultural industries” in the indictment (including his own, the book publishing industry), Marche’s chief culprit is the CBC. Just to give you a flavour:
The most egregious, and most important, case is the CBC. The CBC has spent a decade turning itself into a big national scold. Literally, their ad campaign from 2023 featured the slogan: “It’s not how Canadian you are. It’s who you are in Canada.” That’s how they chose to promote themselves – a sneer at anyone who might think of themselves as a patriot. I am not sure, at this moment, whether the CBC even likes Canada. You certainly can’t tell by listening to them.
There are no facts or examples provided for this grave condemnation of the public broadcaster as “a big national scold” that “sneers” at “patriots.”
I watch, listen and read the CBC every day: I’ve never witnessed scolding, sneering or anything of the kind. What’s the CBC guilty of? Broadcasting North of North? Or Sort Of?
Once rolling, Marche doesn’t stop:
The Conservatives have, if anything, underestimated the problem. I say this as a small-l liberal: When the head of the CBC cannot name a single Conservative voice on their platform, when they are opposed, as such, to the political views of somewhere around half the country, they are failing in their mandate to represent the country. It is as simple as that.
A small point, Marche’s link is to a podcast that doesn’t verify his statement: former CEO Catherine Tait declined Paul Wells’ invitation to identify “the most interesting conservative commentators on CBC,” she didn’t say she didn’t know any.
A bigger point is whether the CBC invites conservative commentators onto its shows. On that point, I seem to recall Andrew (“defund the CBC”) Coyne making some rather good conservative arguments on CBC’s flagship At Issue panel for the last decade or so. From my own observation, the CBC regularly seeks out conservative voices on its television news panels, although I suspect it’s difficult when there appears to be a Conservative boycott on the public broadcaster.
Marche’s zippy one-liners continue: the CBC engages in a “ritualized fetish for self-purification”; “its politics seems to derive from the sociology department at York University,” and “the CBC is a force of [information] pollution, they are an active vector of polarization.”
Anyway, you get the gist. By the end of the tirade, Marche tables an unobjectionable list of principles underlying a strong Canadian cultural nationalism. Count me in.
But in the end, Mr.Marche is not a satisfied CBC customer and I am. What about everyone else?
Here’s some feedback from the Reuters-Oxford study of the Canadian news market, the first graph covering radio and television and the second chart covering online news:
These aren’t the numbers you hear about when critics are taking a run at the CBC.
When they do, one of those cherry-picked numbers is the “CBC’s two per cent market share.”
If you look it up, that’s a reference to the CBC National News channel’s share of the cable audience. It may surprise you, but two per cent for a single channel in the 500-cable channel universe isn’t bad. CBCNN’s cost is covered by cable subscriptions and advertising, basically Pierre Poilievre’s formula for a defunded CBC.
The other sore thumb is the CBC’s five per cent share of prime-time evening television ratings. It’s competitors CTV and Global no longer disclose their ratings, but they are believed to be higher. That’s not surprising: the evening prime time is when CTV and Global carry popular US programming, while CBC does not.
Here’s a chart from CRTC data (unfortunately a year behind) you might find interesting.
Since 2015 (Table 30), the CBC has slipped in the relevant television ratings (network stations) against the private broadcasters.
Since 2009 (Table 32), the CBC’s production spending on Canadian content slipped a lot, while the CanCon spending of the private networks and specialty channels climbed. The explanation is that the CBC’s Parliamentary funding is stagnant and, in response to new viewing habits, it has shifted its budget from television to online.
This is neither an apology for those television ratings nor a scolding for those that ignore the CBC’s strong ratings on radio and online.
“Not bad” or “good enough” is not the bar, not for the public broadcaster. The CBC should be appreciated and reasonably well loved across the country and if it’s perceived as projecting itself as too urban, too central Canadian, or too progressive that’s a problem it needs to address like it’s life depends upon it.
Which it probably does.
***
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Today the Conservatives became the last political party to publish their “full platform,” which in 2025 seems to be a euphemism for “not nearly as full as before and very late.”
The 30-page Conservative document is down from 160 pages in the 2021 edition. The Liberals have chopped their 2021 page length from 86 pages to 55. That means less real estate for each policy section, including culture, arts and media.
Perhaps because of brevity, the Conservative document is a challenge to decode.
Of course, the Tories say upfront they would defund English-language CBC and permit it to carry on as a “non-profit supported by listeners, donations, sponsorships, ad revenue and licensing revenue.” They expressly exempt Radio-Canada from defunding and in fact promise “to maintain all funding in support of Quebec and Francophone culture.”
The Conservatives would also “repeal Liberal censorship laws.” Since there are none, we’ll just assume that’s a reference to the entirety of the Online Streaming Act which Pierre Poilievre has long promised to reverse.
The Conservatives would “restore Canadians news on Meta and other platforms.” That either means repealing the Online News Act and returning $100 million to Google, or simply granting Meta an exemption from the Act so that it will agree to end its Facebook and Instagram bans against most Canadian news outlets. The CPC reference to “other platforms” is unclear, as there are no other Big Tech companies banning Canadian news.
The Conservatives say nothing about undoing the Liberals’ federal “QCJO” subsidies for journalism salaries at private Canadian print news outlets, but it’s doubtful they’ve had a change of heart about abolishing the $65 million annual program.
Nevertheless the CPC platform proposes to double government full funding of journalist salaries in the Local Journalism Initiative federal program, from $20 million to $45 million annually. A further “$25 million in support of Indigenous language media” is promised, although there are no details beyond that.
The Conservatives also promise to “fund the first made-in-Canada documentaries about Canadians’ contributions to winning the World Wars so future Canadians do not forget the courage and sacrifice of those generations and their stories live on.”
Not to quibble, such state-commissioned documentaries would notbe “the first.” The phrasing of the promise raises the question of whether the federal cabinet would be directing one of the CRTC, the National Film Board, the Canada Media Fund, or private broadcasters to make patriotic content. That might be a first.
The Liberals have a light cultural platform when compared to previous election platforms. They restate Mark Carney’s recent campaign promise to increase CBC funding by 11% and commit to long-term stability in funding.
Other than that the Liberals promise to “increase funding to agencies such as the Canada Council for the Arts, Telefilm, the Canada Media Fund, and the National Film Board.” For those of you that don’t track these things, in practice “increasing” funding often turns out to be adjusting budgets to keep up with inflation.
What’s noticeably absent in the Liberal platform is the government’s Online Safety Act, Bill C-63, which died on the order table in February. Perhaps it fell to the editor’s red pen.
The NDP did not publish a single platform document but provided a series of issue-oriented documents, none of which dealt with the culture, media or the arts; traditional NDP policies.
The Greens and the Bloc Québécois published lengthy documents with detailed cultural proposals that I won’t attempt to summarize.
The Bloc is the only party to propose extending tax rules that provide corporate tax relief to Canadian businesses that advertise in legacy Canadian media to the placement of ads online.
Here are the party platforms (except for the NDP):
The gladiator stands staggered on the sandy floor of the Colosseum, waiting for the thumbs up or down. On federal election day, April 28, the CBC will discover its fate: live or die.
The Mark Carney Liberals have promised to defend the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and even increase its funding.
On the other hand, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre “can’t wait” to keep his promise to defund all English-language services of the public broadcaster as no longer needed. “The CBC provides opinions and coverage that are widely available in a competitive media marketplace,” states the CPC with confidence….
It’s no shocker that cultural issues, even CBC funding, haven’t emerged on any list of key ballot box issues in the upcoming federal election. Most pollsters don’t even bother asking.
The Canadian Media Producers Association nudged the political parties this week by publishing an Abacus poll on how Canadians feel about Canadian content. The CMPA represents television show producers that make almost all CanCon entertainment shows that TV companies buy and broadcast.
The cresting wave of Canadian patriotism is reflected in the CMPA/Abacus polling results. By a measure of 80% to 90%, Canadians believe that our cultural identity is important and would like to see that reflected in more and better Canadian stories on their screens through TV network investments and public funding.
The core value of protecting Canadian culture and identity from the influence of the United States is captured in this graph:
The results have a small skew by political affiliation: Conservative and Green voters are slightly less enthusiastic, but nevertheless a strong majority of those voters back Canadian content.
What’s also unmissable is the evenly spread support across Canada. In sovereignty there must be unity.
Is it a ballot box issue? The same poll says that 58% of Canadians want their political party of choice to back cultural issues, only 3% don’t. That leaves 39% as indifferent. The majority sentiment exists in each voter pool, by party.
Today I attended an all-party forum in Toronto on cultural issues sponsored by the Coalition for Diversity of Cultural Expression. Unfortunately all 50 of the Conservative candidates running in the City of Toronto were busy and the Party went unrepresented.
The CDCE held a similar meeting in Montréal on Monday. Despite the fact that Pierre Poilievre has promised to leave Radio-Canada and cultural spending in Québec alone (“no impact,” he said) he didn’t send anyone to the debate for which he was ripped in La Presse by arts columnist Mario Girard.
Liberal Culture and Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault used the opportunity to declare cultural issues as being off the trade negotiations table.
We’ll know more when the major parties table their full election platforms.
***
CTV and CBC dominate federal election news reporting on TikTok, but a study released by Reset Tech observes that 13% of videos uploaded by non-Canadian media and influencer accounts make up 45% of election-related video views. Americans, it seems, make popular videos about Canadian elections.
As observed in the Globe and Mail coverage of the report, TikTok videos may be playing a larger role in election coverage because of Meta’s self imposed news ban that blocks mainstream news reporting on Facebook and Instagram.
The Hill Times profiled some of the Canadian TikTokers making election content. Top spot went to a pro-Liberal account, second place to a pro-Conservative, and there is one Canadian journalist in the top ten.
MediaPolicy was able to review Reset Tech’s interim report and other than the viral success of videos uploaded by foreign-based accounts, there wasn’t anything sinister to be found, at least to date.
Of the number of videos uploaded by the top 50 accounts commenting on the election, “progressive” and “conservative” accounts were each at 40%. The remainder belong to neutral accounts such as CTV, CBC and mainstream media.
But by number of views, progressives led conservatives, 40% to 25%. The viewership gap was even wider for videos posted by non-Canadian accounts: half were progressives and 14% were conservative.
TikTok’s Canadian director Steve de Eyre published an explanation of the platform’s approach to content moderation during the election campaign. He describes the policy thus:
Support, criticism, or parody of political leaders and their policies: Allowed.
Misleading AI-generated content of political leaders, false claims about the voting process, or incitement of hate or violence: Not allowed.
Reset will release a final report after the election.
***
Two recommended reads for you.
The first is for serious policy nerds: the McGill Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy has published a comprehensive history and analysis of the Online News Act. It’s lengthy but it has an executive summary.
The other recommendation is more fun (and short). David Wilson, historian and the Editor of the Canadian Dictionary of Biography, has published a timely piece about D’Arcy McGee, an expansionist United States and Canadian sovereignty, circa 1865.
***
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The stock markets roiled by Donald Trump’s tariff yo-yo vaporized a lot of personal savings (ouch), but especially if you held Big Tech stock. Or owned the company.
Alas, shed a tear for Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk and the bros. It must be a weird space to be in: grovelling before Trump in the hopes of an unimpeded path to worldwide AI “dominance,” losing billions in share value on any given day of the week and fending off federal anti-trust lawsuits.
The US Federal Trade Commission’s anti-trust suit against Zuckerberg’s Meta starts at the trial level on Monday and is expected to go day to day through July. The government is challenging the Facebook-WhatsApp-Instagram business as an anti-competitive monopoly in “personal social networking services.”
Matt Stoller will be covering the trial in his Big Tech on Trial Substack.
As the politics play out, the FTC’s litigation team has its work cut out for it on showing monopoly power.
To win its case, the FTC must prove that Meta has a monopoly in a relevant market, and that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp helped Meta maintain that monopoly through something other than competition on the merits.
The FTC can show monopoly power with direct evidence, like the ability to profitably raise prices or diminish quality. But because Meta does not charge consumers money for its services, it’s difficult to show the classic direct evidence of a price increase. Even so, the FTC has introduced evidence that Meta can engage in price discrimination, one sign of market power, by increasing the number of ads shown to users who have greater demand for social networking. In any event, the FTC will likely rely on indirect evidence of Meta’s market power: high market share plus the existence of barriers to entry that prevent others from whittling away at Meta’s share.
Underpinning whether Meta has a monopoly is the threshold question of how to define the “relevant market” in which it has that power. The relevant market for assessing competition is twofold: a product market and a geographic market. The FTC proposes that Meta is a monopolist in a market for “Personal Social Networking Services” (we’ll call it the “PSN market”) in the United States, which is distinguished by a social purpose: a way to connect with family and friends. Inside that market are Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and MeWe. Meta, for its part, disputes that definition and points to other apps that it says it competes with, like LinkedIn, Reddit, and YouTube. The bigger that Meta can make the relevant market, the smaller Meta’s market share in that market, and the more likely it is to defeat the FTC’s case.
“The principle is a fair idea,” he told reporters on the campaign trail. “It’s that these businesses earn revenue here in Canada, so the principle is that they should contribute where they earn the revenue. So I think, on this question, we should keep it in place.”
The Conservatives endorsed the DST in their 2021 election platform at the rate of 3% of Canadian operating revenues, the same amount adopted by the Liberals last year.
The Liberals in 2021 promised a “minimum global corporate tax.” It was successfully negotiated with the US Biden administration but blocked in US Congress and repudiated by the Trump administration. The fallback DST of 3% was implemented instead.
Because of federal regulations, the Canadian independent producers who made the series retain the intellectual property in the show, including the global streaming rights they licensed to Netflix which was a major pre-production investor.
That in itself is hardly unprecedented and neither is it surprising that Netflix is making a big deal of its investment and licensing deal because of the ongoing battle over its obligations to broadcast Canadian content.
What’s more noteworthy is the reporting that the production infrastructure costs of shooting in the high north were so steep that CBC, APTN and Red Marrow —the recipient of all manner of tax and broadcaster subsidies to make the series —— needed a deep pocketed foreign streaming partner to make a show with high on-screen production values and an authentic locale (as opposed to shooting in Sudbury).
It’s a reminder that our television subsidy regime feeds shows that are a million dollars per episode, not five million like American hits.
The CBC is by far the biggest spender on Canadian dramas and comedies at $195 million per year (Bell is second at $93 million) but it still has to spread that cash far enough to cover several series each season in different regions of the country, as viewers and taxpayers expect.
Speaking of the CBC, I’ve got an analysis of the defund v. defend debate coming out next week on the Institute for Research on Public Policy’s website Policy Options.
***
For those of you who wanted to know when the CRTC would reschedule its public consultation on radio and audio streaming, it’s September 18th.
The video and television hearing kicks off on May 14. The consultation on “market dynamics and sustainability” (the gatekeeping of content distribution) begins June 18.
The three-day court date for the streamers’ legal challenge to the CRTC’s five per cent levies benefiting Canadian media funds is set for June 9.
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The possibility of a merger between Montréal’s LaPresse and the six financially vulnerable “CN2i” Québec news outlets is off.
The LaPresse offer to CN2i staff, which reports imply required an unpalatable number layoffs, was blocked at the last minute and LaPresse informed its own employees that merger discussions were at an end.
With LaPresse out of the picture, Pierre-Karl Pélédeau’s Québecor appears to be poised to make its own merger offer to CN2i. The media-telco conglomerate Québecor owns daily tabloids in Montréal and Québec City as well as the TVA television network and Vidéotron cable.
***
It’s always important to media policy to keep an eye on long-term audience trends, especially in news programming.
ThinkTV is the media marketing group that regularly pumps out polling numbers to remind advertisers where the customers are watching, listening or reading.
Its latest report affirms that television and radio continue to hold their own as the top and third most popular media respectively for national news. The way the polling chart is laid out, you can see that mainstream media is vested in video, audio and text, online or otherwise:
On the same note, American media whiz Evan Shapiro has a new post where he suggests that local news is in high demand regardless of age cohort, although he sees a watershed between GenZ/Millenials and GenX/boomers in terms of platform preferences.
The task is for local TV and radio news operators is to fish for the younger generations where they swim.
None of this is breaking news, but it’s Shapiro’s chart that caught my attention. Check out the age statistics on this one (keeping in mind it’s the American market):
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And lastly, I recommend Ken Whyte’s latest blog post on book publishing and the trade war. This quote stayed with me:
Search ‘books and tariffs’ on Google and you’ll find a bunch of articles in which booksellers and librarians are begging to dodge the draft into Buy Canada. Frankly admitting that they depend overwhelmingly on US product, they’re asking Ottawa to exempt American books from Canada’s slate of retaliatory tariffs. Otherwise costs will rise, customers will be unhappy, business will suffer. We’ve locked arms with Danielle Smith.
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The headline is a promised increase of $150 million to the existing $1.4 billion annual Parliamentary grant.
The Liberals’ messaging is that the CBC must be better funded to complete its mission of strengthening local news while neutralizing misinformation.
This is the same pitch that Heritage Minister Pascale St.-Onge made in February when she proposed doubling CBC funding to strengthen Canada’s news media in counterbalance to American-controlled and Big Tech-dominated media.
The Carney campaign is on board and signalled a long-term goal of increasing Parliamentary funding to close the gap with the per capita financing of public broadcasting in the UK, France, and Europe.
Carney also indicated he would pursue St.-Onge’s proposal to enshrine long-term funding in the Broadcasting Act instead of it remaining subject to the budget cycle.
Perhaps a surprise is that the Liberals have no plan to attach the new money to CBC exiting the advertising market.
Carney’s disinterest in St.Onge’s proposal to direct the CBC to stop selling advertising on its public affairs programming may be a pragmatic concession to the fact that the CBC’s $275 million yearly intake of ad revenue still exceeds his proposed budget increase of $150 million.
As far as I know, there is no public figure identifying how much of the CBC’s $275 million in ad revenue is connected to public affairs content. In its 2021 election platform, the Liberal Party promised $100 million annually to the CBC for withdrawing advertising from news and public affairs programming but the platform was never implemented.
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The business journalists of the land have already done a thorough jobcovering the renewed $11 billion, 12-year hockey rights deal between the NHL and Rogers for Canadian audiences.
In a world of escalating costs for sports rights, it’s not surprising that the price doubled since first inked in 2014. The consensus view is that Rogers badly needs Canadian NHL teams to go on deep playoff runs over the next decade if this deal is going to pay.
Rogers owns the Toronto Maple Leafs so it follows that a national broadcasting policy supporting Canadian companies should require the Leafs to win the Cup every year. I am sure you agree.
Two, more serious, reflections on how this deal fits in with broadcasting matters:
First, it’s important that it was Rogers (or any Canadian broadcaster) that secured this multi-year deal given that Apple, Amazon and Paramount are always sniffing around for major league sports rights.
Second, the renewed deal makes it possible to continue the strange accommodation between CBC and Rogers that has been well covered in the media, especially David Shoalts’ 2018 book, Hockey Fight in Canada.
In 2014, Rogers outbid both Bell and the CBC for the public broadcaster’s national hockey rights. (CBC was never seriously competitive in the high-stakes auction).
But the story had an ugly epilogue. The CBC was awarded the consolation prize of broadcasting Saturday night national hockey as an extra platform for Rogers. For free. The advertising revenue for those CBC broadcasts went entirely to Rogers while CBC even agreed to pay its own production costs.
In the deal with CBC, Rogers obtained a truly national distribution of its broadcasts (its six City-TV stations can’t match the CBC network of 27 local stations), the better to monetize its rights so it can pay the NHL.
By broadcasting Rogers’ games for free, the CBC got relief from filling a gaping hole in its prime time TV schedule with costly alternative programming. Rogers predated on that vulnerability.
In the end, the public broadcaster has less revenue to pay for non-sports programming. The NHL gets paid. Rogers gets windfall revenue at the CBC’s out of pocket expense. And, considered from this angle, Canadian taxpayers are subsidizing Rogers and the NHL.
***
This week in Canadian news journalism’s Inside Baseball…
That’s a big-time free agent signing, as they say in baseball.
Gingras was for many years Google’s global Vice President for News. That made him the point-man for Google’s efforts to defeat legislation in Canada, Australia, Europe and (successfully) in the United States; legislation tithing Google to pay mandatory licensing fees for news content linked on Google Search.
Google continues to argue to this day that the presence or absence of news content makes no difference to its 90% market share of global search.
Village Media is, like most Canadian news outlets, a recipient of Google cash. But Elgie has been vocally opposed to the compulsory nature of C-18. Also Elgie was part of the Canadian Journalism Collective’s coalition of small independents that won Google’s favour to become the administrator of Google’s $100 million in C-18 payments to news outlets.
Just prior to Village Media’s announcement of his Board appointment, Gingras published an elegant rumination on the importance of journalism in liberal democracy that I would tack on to a recommended reading list along with Sean Illing’s Paradox of Democracyand Yuval Harari’s Nexus.
The mercifully shorter piece by Gingras tracks the argument made by Illing and Harari that liberal democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction.
By this they mean that liberal democracy’s centrifugal strength and centripetal weakness is in each case our unfettered freedom of expression, the essential ingredient to a democracy that protects rights and minorities but also the opens the door wide to demagoguery and the populist tyranny of the majority.
Gingras has a few things to say about the role that journalism can play in saving liberal democracy.
One way is for journalists to “practice the discipline,” to pursue objectivity in news reporting in the same manner that we expect judges or police officers to pursue objectivity in their own public roles.
Another way is for community news organizations to build citizen engagement that keeps the focus on civil dialogue and tolerance, the key to respecting the rights of citizens.
On this point he shouts out the work of Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa’sRapplerand Village Media’s emerging media project Spaces.
In an interview I had with CEO Jeff Elgie last year he described Spaces as a cross between Facebook and Reddit, a volunteer-moderated chat board for local communities with sub-chats such as things to do, local history, welcoming new Canadians, and local walks and photography.
Gingras and Elgie think Spaces is the next big thing, so I am eager for the Toronto Space to launch.
***
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Vancouver’s Michael Bublé hosted the Junos again this year
April1, 2025
The Toronto Starobserved this week that Pierre Poilievre has become eerily quiet about defunding the CBC.
That could be because only 11% of Canadians wanted to defund the CBC when last polled in October. “Defund the CBC” has been a great fundraising and data base enrichment tool for the Conservatives, but that’s mission accomplished now.
Then there’s the roughly 30% of Canadians who, according to a year old poll, put the CBC on probation depending upon undefined “changes” being implemented.
This past weekend MediaPolicy offered an opinion on how to relaunch the public broadcaster, here.
***
This year’s Juno awards for the best Canadian musicians and songs were an opportunity for performers and fans alike to huddle together and feel the warmth of the tribe.
There’s a good background piece on the Junos from radio personality and music historian Alan Cross on why the Junos work, but not as a knock-off of the Grammys.
CBC streamed and televised the awards. Host Michael Bublé kept hitting the right note. Not just the right musical note (although check out the video above) but the right emotional connection. Bublé’s self-deprecating humility was a perfect fit for the occasion and the times.
Done as well as they were this year, the polish without pretence Junos reveal our secret cultural power as a small country.
We all know at least some of the artists with only a few degrees of separation —they are from our home town or we’ve seen them live— in a way that is less likely to happen for Americans in America.
Canada may not have the big market that puts a lot of coin in our artists’ pocket, but we have a lot of love to give them. And if this year’s show is any indication, they know how to give back.
One of the big winners was Alberta’s rising global star Tate McRae (for best artist, single, album and pop album of the year) although she was on tour in Brazil.
McRae’s accolades were an occasion for CEO Steve Jones of Canadian music broadcaster Stingray to publish another instalment in his LinkedIn campaign to make any song performed by a Canadian artist automatically eligible as a Canadian song for inclusion as Canadian content on radio.
Jones archly pointed out that the Juno panel is not wedded to the additional participation of Canadian songwriters, as is the CRTC.
The possibility that the CRTC’s “MAPL” formula for Canadian airplay quotas will be revisited is up for grabs in the Commission’s upcoming public consultation on radio and music streaming.
***
There were a flurry of announcements this week from Canadian broadcasters that typically fly below the radar.
Blue Ant’s Michael MacMillan (Cottage Life, Love Nature) teamed up with investor Prem Watsa to engineer a $100 million merger with Canadian production house Boat Rocker.
Here’s a Bloomberg video interview of MacMillan giving an easily digested synopsis of the deal, but also a neat summary of the entrepreneurial mission of Canadian broadcasters who are making television for global audiences first, domestic audiences second. Blue Ant’s big strength is in nature programming.
It’s a well known strategy that plays in both the television/streaming space ——similar announcements were made by Bell Media and Wild Brain this week— and Canadian music.
The bottom line: making Canadian content doesn’t pay in the brave new world of streamed entertainment content unless you can successfully export beyond our modest domestic market. English-language Canadian broadcasters have always exported successfully to the US cable market, but the global online audience is the future.
That’s not to write off the vital importance of the domestic market to these Canadian broadcasters, all of whom deliver on CRTC-mandated Canadian content. Making margin in their home market is still essential which is why the upcoming CRTC hearings on market dynamics in content distribution will be so hard fought.
As media consumption see-saws slowly from cable-first to streaming-first, the opportunity for Canadian broadcasters to obtain any kind of prominence for their apps or their shows in their home market through a distribution network dominated by American-owned platforms —-whether its Amazon, Roku or the prime real estate of smart television home screens —— is to be considered by the Commission in hearings scheduled in May and June.
The Commission will be especially challenged to address the online opportunities for Canadian broadcasters who by their nature will always rely almost entirely upon the domestic market: CPAC (public affairs), TV5 (French language minorities), OMNI (third language news), and Indigenous broadcaster APTN to name a few.
The Commission’s authority to compel the US distribution platforms to do anything at all is severely limited. That’s because of Parliament’s decision to exclude the online applicability of many of the CRTC’s existing powers over cable platforms that open up the opportunities of Canadian broadcasters to get carriage, prominence and fair commercial terms from the gatekeepers of Canadian audiences.
In the end there will be one set of rules for cable gatekeepers and another for online content distributors, including Canadian online distributors like Rogers Infinity.
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The future of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation hangs in the balance, waiting for the verdict of thumbs up or down. Live. Or die.
We know where the two major political parties stand on this.
If Pierre Poilievre wins a majority in the April 28th federal election he will move quickly to “defund” English-language CBC services. An omnibus bill will remove legal impediments in the Broadcasting Act and his budget will eliminate up to $1 billion in federal spending. If he has that Parliamentary majority don’t be surprised if he also breaks his campaign promise and slashes the Radio-Canada budget, to fend off a caucus revolt over sparing Québec.
Meanwhile the Carney Liberals will be for “saving” a “new” CBC. Voters in Québec expect no less. And in English Canada there are NDP supporters to be poached.
We’ll see if it gets any more complicated than that, but I doubt it. “Defund” or “save.” That’s the choice.
Naive souls like myself would have preferred to have framed this choice within a thorough public debate, even a royal commission, to investigate what it means to defund, save or reinvent the CBC.
There’s a public appetite for this thoughtfulness. It’s worth remembering that an October 2024 poll put the hard core “defund” forces at only 11% of Canadians. An earlier poll found that 76% of Canadians want to keep the CBC but half of that support wants to see “changes.” Heavens knows what “changes” means. That’s where a more considered public policy debate might have helped.
The stale polls on public satisfaction with the CBC may no longer matter. Donald Trump moves the opinions of Canadian voters in a tweet. Fighting off his annexation plan without a CBC: what a scenario that is.
My hat is off to the grass roots campaigns to save the CBC; not just the Friends of Canadian Media‘s cheeky campaign to “FU__ the CBC,” but also the chat groups popping up on Facebook and Reddit.
But now having the benefit of the views of others, I have something to say that’s a little different.
The Senator (“don’t call me Senator,” he likes to say) ticks a lot of boxes for me. He’s a Canadian cultural sovereigntist. He asks more questions than he makes speeches. He’s unfailingly civil. Like most of the Independent Caucus senators appointed by Justin Trudeau, he carries on Senate business in a collegial and non-partisan manner despite his Liberal connections.
Having said that, I don’t agree with everything he recommends. But he got the big stuff right.
***
Cardozo’s big idea is this: cultural sovereignty is essential to Canada. And the CBC is at the heart of a news and media ecosystem that delivers this sovereignty to Canadians. The CBC employs a third of the country’s journalists and is by far the biggest spender on televised Canadian dramas and comedies set in locales across the country.
To agree with Cardozo’s view, you have to let go of the notion that a free market in news and cultural content — a free North American market– is sufficient to nourish and defend our cultural independence. It also means giving up on the argument that the existence of the CBC is only justified where there is a demonstrated “market failure” of Canadian media, like our far north. That’s a journey into the black hole of “which market?” and “how much failure?” from which I suggest no light will escape.
Cultural minorities in Canada have always understood in the pits of their stomachs what cultural sovereignty means to them. It means survival. It means to breathe. Francophones in Québec and the rest of Canada get it. Indigenous peoples get it. Anglophones in Québec, too.
Us garden variety English-Canadians, not so much. American culture is everywhere and tasty too. Until recently, the Americans kept their crazy politics on the other side of the border, so why worry? Vancouver’s sassy libertarian YouTuber J.J.McCullough liked to say we are cultural “North Americans” and “I’m fine with that.” It’s not an uncommon opinion.
Then Donald Trump announced his plans to reduce our economy to rubble and annex us. Or just turn us (and Greenland) into a vassal state.
The crazy politics have now swept across the border. As Senator Cardozo says in his report, the times demand an independent Canadian media ecosystem. It’s unlikely any Canadian disagrees. The CBC is the key institution in that ecosystem, he says, and the polls suggest Canadians agree with that too.
Cardozo recalls that the 1928 report of the Aird royal commission proposed a cross-country network of publicly owned Canadian radio stations —later christened the CBC— as essential to defending our popular culture and democratic spaces from being dominated by American voices. If anything, the situation a century later is far more urgent.
***
Here’s the Cardozo plan.
First, forget more money for the CBC, at least for now in this moment of national crisis. That means putting off the widely applauded proposal that the CBC relinquish it’s $270 million cut of the advertising market, which would be a 14% reduction of its finances when we need the CBC the most.
I admire the Senator’s pragmatism but would prefer to rephrase his idea as “let’s get the CBC house in order before we ask Canadian taxpayers for more money.”
Second, make a big bet on local news. No more thoughts and prayers about the growing pockets of news poverty and news deserts in rural and small town Canada, but action lead by the public broadcaster shifting resources away from national news coverage and “radically reducing the budget of national headquarters (Toronto, Montréal and Ottawa).”
In advocating for local programming, Cardozo has picked up on the points made in this country by the Michener Foundation and the Friends of Canadian Media and in the US by Rebuild Local News. Our democracy is fraying because of political polarization fuelled by national politics, while Canadians’ less polarized engagement with local democracy and community events is threatened by the financial precarity of local news outlets.
Public opinion polls repeatedly say that Canadians “trust” local news above all media sources. There’s a craving there to be satisfied.
Cardozo’s proposal for the CBC to double down on local news is compelling. But there are many devils in the details. One is whether this is a good time to cannibalize the CBC national news budget at a time of national emergency. Another is how to divert the CBC’s journalism resources into local markets without elbowing private media outlets in the face. That might have been what the CBC just did by expanding its local coverage into local markets with its $7 million in “Google money.”
The senator’s report does have a practical idea that could be put to good use: “sharing content.”
There have long been proposals for the CBC to share its editorial content with private news outlets, waiving copyright. That could go much deeper with a bigger CBC commitment to joint investigations with private news outlets in local markets. Or the CBC could take a page out of the BBC’s book: the 165-journalist Local Democracy Reporting Service that assigns BBC-paid journalists to work for local news outlets.
Next, the third Cardozo idea is really several issues rolled into one: how to drain the political venom about the CBC out of the public sphere. That means confronting issues of public trust, alleged bias, and accountability.
It must be said first that the griping about “CBC bias” doesn’t measure up to the facts.
Repeat after me: CBC News is the country’s most trusted news source. The slightly overweight negative trust ratings suggest the “defunder” hostility is taken into account.
from Pollara Poll, July 2024
But citing this impressive verdict on the CBC’s trustworthiness is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for its journalism. When you report in the opinion minefields of Gaza, pipelines, and (insert controversial issue here), mistakes are going to loom large. Doing better, more disciplined news reporting is an ongoing project for any news organization. Being publicly owned, the CBC has a higher bar to meet.
Cardozo has some good suggestions.
He’d like the CBC to regularly commission and publish external audits of its news coverage. It won’t convince the CBC haters, but it’s useful if it’s something that CBC managers would go to bed worrying about. I imagine they already do. But Cardozo would make this an important tool in public accountability and transparency.
He’d also like to see more debating of public issues on CBC platforms to foster a stronger Canadian culture of intellectual curiosity and tolerance of different opinions. Amen to that.
Another of his proposals is to eliminate the CBC’s in-house editorial Ombud as the arbiter of public complaints, rerouting critics to the industry-administered Canadian Broadcast Standards Council instead.
I’m not thrilled by this idea. There’s too big a volume of complaints to dump them on someone else’s desk. The Ombud reports are quite fair, if you read them. And you can always appeal to the CRTC. Cardozo acknowledges this an optics issue.
But the elephant in the room is that too many Canadians view the CBC as —how shall we say—- insufficiently representative of what makes them feel Canadian.
Too urban. Too central Canadian. Too insulated from those that pay the tax bill.
You can dismiss these dyspeptic public attitudes if you want. After all, the polling supports a far higher degree of satisfaction than dissatisfaction. For sure, some of CBC hating is a culture war cynically fomented by political foes who want to diminish mainstream media, the better to fill that void with right-wing opinion.
But we have a historic opportunity to make popular satisfaction with the CBC deeper and wider if we face the dyspepsia head on.
Cardozo’s big idea (and others including the government’s expert committee have proposed it too) is to implement a version of the British practice of a social contract between the public broadcaster and the people’s elected representatives.
That negotiated BBC charter secures multi-year funding for an eleven-year term, freed from the gyrations of annual government budgets, in return for specific performance expectations. At the expiry of the charter term, it’s judgment day for the public broadcaster.
A CBC charter would be about more than long-term planning and financial stability. It could be a new and different way to make the CBC accountable to the people and for it to feel real in doing so.
Contrast the charter idea to the accountability we have today. Currently the Broadcasting Act provides apple-pie policy objectives for the CBC, but few specifics. The Prime Minister handpicks the President of the corporation to manage the place for five years. The CRTC weighs in with five-year licensing conditions for the CBC to earmark spending for different programming genres. The last time around the CRTC botched it and was directed by cabinet to try again.
This type of governance of the CBC might hit the right balance of accountability versus keeping the ruling party’s mitts off of programming decisions and the day-to-day management of the corporation. But it does nothing to make Canadians feel that it’s “our” CBC.
A CBC charter would be better. Going in that new direction still retains a threat to the CBC’s independence from government: which political party will be in power when the charter expires and is up for renewal? The BBC just dodged that bullet when an election expelled “defunder” Conservatives and welcomed a Labour government. But Cardozo would argue it’s still better than our current approach. It is.
MediaPolicy has two other ideas to institutionalize more public confidence in the CBC.
First, move CBC headquarters from Toronto to Winnipeg. Sounds crazy, I know, but hear me out.
Much of the disaffection with the CBC is articulated as the public broadcaster being a central Canadian hyper-urban “woke” institution. Fairly or not.
So “leafy downtown Toronto”.” So “île des génies.”
The gloss on that critique is that the CBC’s programming content gets torqued towards audiences and advertising dollars in the Toronto and Montréal television markets.
And one can only add this respectfully: a staff of journalists and content creators living in big cities are naturally inclined to be culturally simpatico with the urban neighbourhoods where they reside. That’s a problem for a national institution.
Moving headquarters and staff anywhere is a big, hugely expensive deal. It’s a lot to ask in the name of moving the needle on staff culture and assuaging hinterland hostility to the Toronto and Montréal metropoli. And if it’s done, it should be gradually and without hemorrhaging experience and talent.
The second MediaPolicy idea is even more out of the box, but bear with me.
We should legislate a constituent assembly of randomly chosen CBC listeners, readers and viewers ——200 from one end of the country to the other—- to convene every two years and publish its assessment of the CBC’s performance and direction. This would be especially helpful in shining a light on what Cardozo describes as the CBC’s “blind spots.”
In the corporate world, they call these shareholder meetings. In the public world, they call them town halls. A constituent assembly would give CBC managers and elected politicians better feedback than high-level polling results. It would offer cogent (or not) thoughts about the CBC from Main Street Canada.
***
The idea of a robust CBC anchoring an independent (of the US) Canadian media is of the moment. “To let it go,” says Cardozo of defunding, “would allow for the complete domination by America of our communications system.”
It’s commonplace to observe that American-owned social media platforms are the perfect conduit for misinformation to flood into Canada in a prolonged Trump campaign to destabilize and annex us. It’s also hard to ignore that the Republican blueprint to move the US much further to the right, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025,advocates the elimination of government funding to public broadcasting on the explicit basis that it’s “left-wing.”
But there are still those that would argue that a strong Canadian media can and should do without the CBC except in localities where audiences are so sparse that the private news enterprises can’t succeed.
That’s tied in to yet a longer discussion of the financial viability of Canadian news reporting (as opposed to news opinionating) and whether to continue federal subsidies to news journalism.
The same policy conundrum applies to non-news programming. With Canadian private broadcasters so pinched that they are demanding relief from CRTC mandates to produce local news and Canadian entertainment content, how big a cultural hole might there be to fill if the CBC isn’t there to do it?
***
If the CBC survives and isn’t defunded by the next government, there’s an opportunity to make profound changes, as outlined in this post.
But even without big changes, the new President of the CBC Marie-Philippe Bouchard has an inbox full of strategic and programming decisions to make right away.
Forty million Canadians have forty million opinions on how to do that, some of them based on nothing more than our idiosyncratic cultural tastes and technological preferences.
Bouchard must manage unreasonable and unmeetable expectations with tough management decisions on complex questions.
Should the CBC stay on every major media platform, treating each as equally important? Or should it make bigger bets on fewer digital channels?
Would we be better off with one CBC Radio network instead of two, despite the strong ratings?
Should the CBC invest more of its television drama budget in high-budget iconic Canadian shows or keep faith with charming serials in authentic local settings?
Should the CBC find its way back into sports, avoiding the unaffordable price tags of big league programming rights?
If the CBC puts more into local news, what programming is going to get less?
These are management decisions that almost none of the forty million have an educated opinion, informed by a detailed knowledge of audience data and budget dollars.
As Richard Stursberg signed off on his advice to the new president Bouchard, “good luck.”
***
That’s the MediaPolicy view.
Let me close by recalling that one of the experts MediaPolicy interviewed in December, Peter Menzies, may have nailed it when he said the CBC’s “biggest problem is not that – at least for the English part – so many Conservatives want to kill it, it’s that a large number of people just don’t care if it lives or dies.”
I doubt that’s true any more, thanks to Donald Trump’s plan for Canada. But if the next election keeps the CBC alive, instead of killing it, a rebirth of the public broadcaster is an historic opportunity not to be squandered.
***
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Earlier this week MediaPolicy published an interview with the chief spokesperson for Canadian broadcasters, Kevin Desjardins. The President of the CAB pitches his case for a new regulatory bargain between Canadians and the 68 private sector media businesses that form his Association.
However the CRTC’s hearings on said regulatory bargain are now on hold. As expected the Commission has paused three key Online Streaming Act files for the duration of the federal election period: video content policy, audio content policy and gatekeeping in media distribution.
The media policy scene now switches from the pageantry of CRTC hearings to the battlefield of electoral politics. The contestants in the run up to the April 28th election will no doubt spark debate over media policy. We’ll have to wait for their official election platforms.
But a reasonable prediction is that media policy won’t get much traction beyond the political class —with the exception of CBC funding, which will be consequential— while the leaders and voters will be focussed on whatever Donald Trump wants us to be, for example 25% auto tariffs and more coming next week.
In the coming weeks I will try to address both the trade war (if it affects Canadian media and cultural sovereignty) and media policy.
As for the trade issues, I was unsuccessful in provoking the CAB’s Desjardins on what Trump means for Canadian broadcasting. He only speculated that a tariff-induced recession would affect advertising revenues for everyone, including broadcasting.
That’s a bit like refusing to say “Voldemort.”
The main lobby groups for Hollywood and Big Tech have been demanding the White House begin a scorched earth trade war against Canada ever since Parliament enacted the Online Streaming Act and the Online News Act in 2023, followed by the much delayed Digital Services tax in 2024.
Those expected industry demands were dutifully transcribed into formal warnings delivered to Canada from the US Trade Representative (a member of the Biden cabinet) that the US considered Canadian legislation might violate our CUSMA free trade deal. But you will note that the Biden White House did not act on those threats.
Long before Donald Trump got the idea of launching illegal tariffs in defiance of the CUSMA agreement, US trade strategy included a Break-Glass option of just ignoring the cross border trade agreement and launching tariffs against Canada under section 301 of the US Trade Act.
The last time occurred in 1999 in response to Canadian legislation impeding split-run magazines like “Sports Illustrated Canada” that were trade dumping into our domestic market. At least in that case, the US had won the trade litigation at the World Trade Organization before it set a deadline for section 301 sanctions against Canadian steel, plastics, and wood products.
This time around, Hollywood and Big Tech definitely have their “Break-Glass” man in the White House.
The official spokesperson for Big Tech, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), has been filing briefs on Capitol Hill and with Trump’s Trade Representative demanding retribution for Canadian legislation.
Note to file, Canada’s Shopify belongs to the CCIA.
CCIA briefs are always packed full of allegations that foreign countries are violating this or that chapter of trade agreements. The better to load up the bargaining table. For the benefit of US legislators, CICA’s rhetoric is salted with bewildered outrage that foreign legislatures are regulating global American enterprises.
The trade allegations should not be dismissed out of hand just because they are inflammatory. But the CCIA sometimes loses touch with reality. In 2023 a CCIA brief informed US legislators and the US Trade Representative that Canada had once agreed that in exchange for the US not retaliating against Canadian regulation of US television access to our domestic market we would never regulate broadcasting over the Internet. It was a brazen fabrication. And the Biden White House no doubt ignored it.
The CCIA’s opening salvo in the anticipated Trump trade war was delivered this past December in a 238-page aggregation of Big Tech’s trade allegations against 53 countries and the 27-state European Union.
Although trade deficits and surpluses are irrelevant to whether trade agreement have been breached, the CCIA got right to the politics by pointing out that “digital services and goods represent a key driver of US export power, with the technology industry delivering a hefty digital trade surplus of $266.8 billion for the United States in 2023.”
Put plainly, Big Tech does some heavy lifting in keeping the overall US trade deficit lower.
In a new filing in January, Big Tech put its emphasis upon America’s interests in intellectual property that, says the CCIA, is impacted by “discriminatory non-tariff barriers” (i.e. regulation) in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the European Union.
The point of course is not whether such “non-tariff barriers” exist, it’s whether they are truly discriminatory against US companies competing in foreign markets and violate the trade agreements that the US negotiated, signed and ratified with these countries. “Non-tariff barriers” may be the pretext for Trump tariffs next week.
In February, the CCIA got down to brass tacks, providing the US Trade Representative with its list of priorities for trade action.
Top target: the Digital Services taxes imposed by 14 countries, including Canada.
Next: news licensing payments to journalism outlets (Google money) in Australia, Canada, and the EU.
Next: for US video and music streamers, domestic content requirements and cultural cash levies in Canada, France, and other EU countries. In other words, eliminating the Online Streaming Act root and branch.
Whether any of that fits into He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named’s plan to hit Canada and the rest of the world with “reciprocal tariffs,” we may see that on April 2nd.
***
Canadian legislators aren’t the only politicians with a taste for staging show trials of public broadcasters.
Yesterday MAGA ultraMarjorie Taylor Greene convened US Congress’ new Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency with subpoenas issued to PBS and National Public Radio.
The committee session was officially dubbed “Anti-American Airwaves.” No hidden agendas for Greene: “I think the important thing for Americans to ask is: Is this where our taxpayer money needs to go? To extremely left-leaning broadcasting and political bias that doesn’t represent all of America?
“[PBS and NPR are] radical left-wing echo chambers for a narrow audience of mostly wealthy, white, urban liberals and progressives who generally look down on and judge rural America.”
Greene did score a couple of points on the PBS refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story (apology made) and the NPR chief’s pre-employment tweets calling Donald Trump a “racist and a sociopath” (also apology made).
It wasn’t all one way traffic as the Democrats on the committee had their turn. Theatre-goers were treated to political satire from Californian Congressman Robert Garcia.
Another Democrat, Jasmine Crockett of Texas, accused Republicans of the right-wing version of Cancel Culture.
“Free speech is not about whatever it is that you all want somebody to say,” she said. “And the idea that you want to shut down everybody that is not Fox News is bullshit. We need to stop playing because that’s what y’all are doing in here. You don’t want to hear the opinions of anybody else.”
The speculation is that Republicans in control of both chambers of US Congress will finally make good on threats to eliminate federal support for public broadcasting, currently budgeted at $535 million USD annually. That’s about 1% of NPR’s combined private-public financing and 15% of the total PBS budget.
The influential non-MAGA conservative opinion columnist George Will recently advocated defunding, saying that government contributions to PBS and NPR funding are a subsidy for affluent audiences.
***
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