Catching up on MediaPolicy – CBC’s Gaza coverage – New poll on Canadian TV content – Blue Rodeo works its ass off

CBC report from December 2023

March 1, 2025

This week MediaPolicy posted a report on a complaint filed directly with the CRTC by Honest Reporting Canada and the CIJA citing the CBC’s news coverage of Gaza as systematically anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. I don’t offer an analysis of their as yet unrebutted allegations.

But as audience complaints normally go first to the office of the CBC Ombudsperson I took the news item as an opportunity to provide examples of how the Ombud has navigated a steady flow of pro-Israel and pro-Palestine allegations of bias and bad journalism. It’s educating stuff.

By revisiting my earlier post here, I want to add another Ombud review that I overlooked.

It was a pro-Palestinian complaint about the CBC’s televised profile of the late Yahya Sinwar (before he was killed in combat by the IDF).

Sinwar was the Hamas mastermind of the October 7th massacre of 1,200 Israeli civilians, 250 hostage kidnappings and the solicited Israeli hunt and kill operation that resulted in perhaps 50,000 dead Gazans, innocents and terrorists alike.

The allegation was that the CBC report unfairly rendered Sinwar as a sinister and “psychopathic” figure without a matching effort to portray Israeli leaders and actions in a similar vein. (The “psychopath” label was applied by an Israeli journalist, not the CBC, the commentator acknowledging the term was too crude to be useful).

I found the Ombud’s response to the complaint compelling.

Most of all I appreciated his reminder that accusations of “one-sided” coverage need to be taken in the context of the CBC’s body of reporting work, not just one story:

Your third primary complaint was that doing this story represented a double standard, that Israeli officials were not scrutinized or described in similar ways as Yahya Sinwar. In this case, I must pause and say that in my experience, people’s perceptions of media coverage are greatly influenced by their own point of view on the issues at hand. 

In recent months, I have received hundreds if not thousands of complaints from people who would second your assertion that CBC privileges the Israel perspective and undermines the views of Palestinians. But I have also received hundreds if not thousands more from people who want to know why pro-Palestinian views and claims are accepted without challenge, and Israeli officials are challenged and doubted at every turn. 

I am not trying to turn your review into a broader thumbs up or thumbs down on CBC’s coverage of the Middle East. But I am saying that there are endless examples in that coverage of Israel being criticized, challenged or questioned. And that while you are entitled to conclude that the profile of Yahya Sinwar is evidence of a double standard, I do not share that view. 

Although there may not have been precisely the same type of profile done about Benjamin Netanyahu or other Israeli leaders, there have been many reports over time that have included highly critical commentary about them. It was the fact that CBC had done so little reporting on Yahya Sinwar that made this profile valuable to the audience.

The strength of the CBC’s Ombud’s open door policy for audience complaints is its thoughtful and educational analysis of good (or bad) CBC journalism, both as a body of newsroom reporting work and story by story. 

I won’t litigate in this space my personal support for Israel, or the caveats to that support, because this blog is about MediaPolicy, not Middle East policy.

But since October 7th I have perceived a widespread ignorance and lack of education about a hundred years of conflict over a contested homeland.

As in all things, we must do own research, a lot of it in this case.

***

The CRTC’s hearings on regulating video content kicks off on March 31st. It’s just published a third party research report that will add polling and focus group feedback to the public record. 

The commissioned report was authored by the Ottawa-based Phoenix SPI that has also done work for the federal Privacy Commissioner. 

The Phoenix drill-down is about audience views on Canadian programming, more specifically the genres of drama and news. The report combines a 1200-person poll with responses from 90-minute focus groups. The polls oversampled from rural, northern and official language minority communities. The focus groups targeted the same communities but also urban residents and members of equity seeking groups.

The polling numbers sometimes conflict with previous data culled from other sources. For example, outcomes from the Phoenix poll identify a higher market domination of video consumption by streaming platforms (73% of Canadians) with only 44% on cable television (whereas CRTC and Statistics Canada record about a 60% coverage of Canadian households). Whatever the correct figures are, the market dominance of US streamers should drive an even greater sense of urgency at the CRTC.

Since the Commission wants to know what kind of video programs Canadians “primarily watch,” it learned in this Phoenix poll that the leading genres are serial comedy/drama (68%) and news (61%). Happily, those are the CRTC’s top priorities for extra attention in content funding and distribution.

The poll also generated numbers on which objective and subjective elements of a revised definition of a Canadian television program were seen as important.

The poll appears to support the Commission’s bent towards the participation of Canadian producers, talent and crews ahead of identifiable Canadian themes, although it’s a nuanced difference and not black and white: 

There was focus group feedback on Canadian programming that came out a little garbled.

Canadian shows were appreciated as good quality, dismissing the stereotype of CanCon mediocrity. Feelings of pride, connectedness and a certain disdain for the sensationalism and narrative choices of US programming were pointed out.

But then a significant number of voices downplayed the importance of filming Canadian content on location in Canada. This “apparent contradiction” suggested that only quality Canadian content mattered to the participants, not shooting location. The US streamers might take some encouragement from that, but tens of thousands of Canadian television workers will not.

As for news programming, the poll offered surprising results on the choice of video platform, ranking online sources (combined text, video and audio) far ahead of television. This flatly contradicts recent polling. The discrepancy may end up being important to policy choices made by the Commission.

In the end, these polling numbers on news journalism paint a familiar picture:

  • Canadians rank “trust” as the overwhelming priority in choosing their news sources and give high approval ratings to their news outlets for accurate reporting. In the focus groups, the most commonly trusted news source was CBC/Radio-Canada, followed by the mainstream private media. In fact the participants “considered public broadcasters more trustworthy because they are publicly funded as opposed to privately owned.” Haven’t heard that for a while, have you?
  • Canadians have a tepid approval rating for the overall news ecosystem that includes both the sources they choose (and presumably trust) and those they don’t.

***

In the fall of 1985 a friend of mine dragged me to the Horseshoe Tavern in downtown Toronto to see a band I had never heard of. “You have to see these guys,” he said.

The band, Blue Rodeo, was unbelievably good. Rock-country fusion, just my thing. ‘Why are these guys still playing the Horseshoe and how have they not got a record deal?’ I wondered.

Forty years, sixteen studio albums, eleven Junos and a lot of bar venues later, the group is the subject of a new documentary streaming on CBC Gem, Lost Together.

“Blue Rodeo showed that other model,” offers band friend and former NOW publisher Michael Hollett. “Just work your ass off in Canada and you can have a great life as a musician.”

***

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Honest Reporting v. the CBC – Jeff Bezos v. The Washington Post

Amazon and Washington Post proprietor Jeff Bezos, centre, attending Donald Trump’s inauguration as a “special guest.”

February 27, 2025

A CRTC filing by Honest Reporting Canada and the Canadian Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs has garnered a front page opinion column in the National Post suggesting that the CBC has demonstrated a systemic anti-Israel bias in its news reporting on Gaza over the last 17 months.

Honest Reporting is a media watchdog devoted to challenging media coverage it considers anti-semitic or biased against Israel.

Honest Reporting and the CIJA filed their allegations as an intervention on the CBC’s routine application to the CRTC to authorize a radio antenna replacement, an evident attempt to jump the queue of backlogged regulatory matters in Ottawa.

CIJA Honest Reporting ApplicationDownload

The CBC pointed this out to the Commission and suggested the matter ought first to go to the CBC Ombudsperson who regularly adjudicates complaints about coverage and the newsroom’s adherence to the CBC’s Editorial Code. 

CBC ResponseDownload

The CBC didn’t respond to the specifics of the complaint which include the CBC relying on Gaza news reports filed by freelance journalists whose independence is allegedly compromised in the extreme. 

The CBC Ombud posts online its responses to a steady flow of audience complaints about its coverage and the CBC’s reporting on Gaza is a frequent topic (you will find nothing remotely comparable to the frequency and granularity of journalism accountability in the private news media).

In each post, the Ombud reviews the facts of alleged news bias or bad journalism, the CBC’s management response, and renders judgment on how the online, TV or radio news coverage lives up to the CBC’s standards.

One of the key sections of that Code describing the CBC newsroom’s curatorial standards is this one:

On issues of controversy, we ensure that divergent views are reflected respectfully, taking into account their relevance to the debate and how widely held these views are. We also ensure that they are represented over a reasonable period of time.

Here’s a sampling of Ombud reviews of complaints which, for the sake of brevity only, I have designated as “Pro-Israel” or “Pro-Palestine” (acknowledging that the terms are clunky and the complainants might prefer a different designation).

Combatants in the hospital basement

A pro-Palestine complainant identified an online CBC report in which a medical doctor in Gaza was mistranslated as saying there were Hamas combatants in the hospital basement when in fact he said there were Israeli soldiers in the basement.

CBC corrected the news reporting error upon being alerted by the Agence France journalist who filed the initial report, but failed to draw attention to the correction for two weeks, the delay being contrary to its own Editorial Code. 

CBC management said the delay in posting a correction was human error, expressed regret, and promised to do better. The complainant persisted, but the Ombud rejected any attempt to name and shame individual employees.

The “Hamas-run” Gaza Health Ministry

A pro-Palestinian complainant was of the opinion that the CBC was “cheerleading genocide by echoing and amplifying the propaganda points of the aggressor [Israel].”

Specifically, the complaint objected to phrases used by the CBC news reporter: “Hamas-run Health Ministry” and “the Israel-Hamas conflict.” 

With respect to the Health Ministry, the complainant argued that the phrase “Hamas-run” is not a neutral descriptor but meant to discredit the Gaza Health Ministry and the credibility of its death-tolls by associating it with terrorist activity, going on to argue that Hamas’ terrorist actions have been “time-limited” to the October 7th massacre. The complainant claimed there is “zero evidence” that Hamas controls the Health Ministry.

The Ombud dodged the claim that there is no evidence that Hamas, which has governed Gaza since winning the 2007 elections, is in control of the Health Ministry or has the power to influence reporting of the death count.

The Ombud said that “Hamas-run” is factually accurate and might be relevant to particular stories. However he acknowledged that perhaps the repetitive use of the Hamas connection at all times was unnecessary and therefore unfair (presumably to the Health Ministry).

Platforming calls for genocide

A pro-Israel complainant objected to a CBC headline and story asking “what does ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ mean?” 

The complaint suggested that since the phrase is an unambiguous call for the expulsion or murder of all Jews in the region, it was anti-semitic to provide a news platform to justify or sanitize the use of the phrase.

The Ombud said that ignorance about the phrase’s genocidal intent or implications was newsworthy in of itself, but that a better headline would have identified that the article was about how Palestinian supporters didn’t acknowledge or just disagreed with those implications.

Israeli ‘retaliation” or military operations?

A pro-Israel complainant objected to a CBC radio show that described Israeli Defence Force as attacking a Palestinian refugee camp without providing the context of the operational task, i.e. its mission was to root out Hamas terrorists, not retaliate against civilians.

The Ombud said that news services must curate and make judgment calls about how much context is acknowledged through each part of the news narrative and that CBC’s news coverage on the Gaza conflict ought to be judged as a body of work, i.e. the context provided across several news reports. 

Failing to challenge guest point of views

A pro-Israel complainant objected to a radio interview with a guest who presented a pro-Palestinian view and made some strident comments, including accusing Israel of a “potential genocide” which the host did not challenge and appeared to accept.

The Ombud said that judging the CBC’s balance of coverage, especially where diversity of opinion is concerned, is measured in the long run “over a reasonable period of time:

“The concept of providing balanced coverage over a reasonable period of time allows for deeper discussions in the moment without forcing a reflexive “he said/she said” moment into every program.

“At the same time, there needs to be a recognition from [the complainant] and other listeners: a single report, or a single radio interview, is not meant to be interpreted as “CBC’s take” on an issue. When there is a story like this one that has lots of coverage, accept that there will be many different takes. An individual story might have such a narrow frame that it feels like bias. But over time, chances are that you’ll be exposed to a variety of ideas that allow you to form whatever conclusion you like about the issue at hand. And no matter how good a job CBC does, remember that it does not have a monopoly on wisdom or smart sources; I encourage you to get information from a variety of news providers.”

The Ombud said (as in other reviews) that the CBC ought to do a better job, especially after hosting a point-of-view guest, to refer the audience to the CBC’s other commentators or news coverage.

As to the reporter’s failure to challenge strident opinion —-she agreeably replied “right” immediately following the guest’s allegation of genocide—- the Ombud said he didn’t think it was intentional but was badly phrased.

Whose missile?

This was a complaint by Honest Reporting that a news report on a horribly maimed Gazan child attributed her injuries to an IDF missile when the origin of the rocket attack was only alleged by her family, not proven by any other evidence (the added context being the well known misreporting of the origin of a missile strike in October 2023).

A second complaint was that a CBC journalist had tweeted an accusation that the IDF arbitrarily arrested a Palestinian West Bank activist when in fact she was charged with inciting terrorism through some blood-curdling posts to social media. 

The Ombud agreed that it was an error for the CBC National newscast not to clarify that the allegation of IDF responsibility for the missile was an unproven allegation by the victim’s family, although noting that in the circumstances of that news cycle it was more likely to have been an IDF missile rather than a Hamas misfire. 

The Ombud said a better and more contextualized edit of the news narrative would have been to report that the missile hit during the same time period as IDF missile activity in the area. The Ombud said that ultimately the reporting error, in the context of the entire TV report, didn’t meet the Editorial Code threshold of being “significant” enough to warrant a televised correction. 

As for the CBC journalist’s social media post, the Ombud appeared to agree with the complainant and, although the journalist had left the CBC since the incident, advised CBC journalists to be very cautious when posting on social media and to follow the broadcaster’s advice that its journalists should be as disciplined on personal accounts as they would be writing a post for the CBC.

***

I recommend a recent Associated Press news report on Jeff Bezos instructing the Opinion Page Editor at his Washington Post to ban commentary that doesn’t conform to the rubric of “supporting personal liberties and free markets.” The timing of the move is likely a genuflection to Donald Trump. 

The AP news article catalogues the recent run of similar interventions by Bezos: killing a newsroom endorsement of Kamala Harris, spiking an editorial cartoon mocking the Tech Bros’ grovelling before the Trump administration, etc. 

It’s not a novel thing that news proprietors seek to put their ideological stamp on their publications. It’s always a question of how brazen or how manipulative, or whether chief editors are willing proxies in attempting to bend news coverage by journalists. The once-owner of the National Post, the disgraced and convicted Conrad Black, expressed it thus: “I think I ought to be able to open up my own newspaper in the morning without being severely aggravated.”

As the billionaire owner of Amazon, with its finger in so many Big Tech pies, Bezos’ knee-bending to Trump is driven by fear and favour to his business interests. The next red-line to cross or respect will be interference with the Post’s legendary political reporting.

There may (or may not) be lessons to be taken for Canada and our media policy on government aid to news journalism.

As I opined elsewhere, it would be disingenuous to dismiss fears that the Canadian QCJO program unlocking salary subsidies, reader tax credits, and charitable donations to news journalism is free of at least a hypothetical risk to the independence of the free press. Less hypothetically, imagine how a Donald Trump imitator might manipulate news outlets by throttling back and forth with those government levers.

But the point to consider is this: in a liberal democracy such as Canada, how do we assess the level of risk in providing government aid to independent journalism, stacked up against the risk of a great deal less independent journalism because news outlets increasingly go out of business or scale back reporting to match their diminished advertising revenue?

And how have those competing risks played out in the last five years? Is there any discernible change in news reporting and curation?

The other point to consider is this: as Bezos’ cringing before Trump demonstrates, politicians seeking to intimidate the free press into a supine posture as part of a strategy to destroy liberal democracy will find a way to do it. There are no government subsidies to media in the US, yet look at the result. 

***

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Catching Up on MediaPolicy – The CBC times two – CRTC launches its audio policy hearing – Juno News and press independence

Graphic courtesy of Sarah Blostein

February 23, 2025

The big media news of the week was Heritage Minister Pascale St.-Onge presenting a 10,000-foot “proposal” to better fund and govern the CBC. MediaPolicy offered an overview here.

The Minister’s recommendations have yet to be endorsed by the Liberal cabinet or contenders to replace Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister. As for St.-Onge, she’s quitting politics. 

Her proposal stole headlines with its bold plan to double Parliamentary funding from $33 to $62 per Canadian, a number she walked back immediately to $50, phased in over five years.

Pierre Poilievre was grateful for the opportunity, messaging that the Liberals were promising “another one billion dollars of your money” for the CBC. He then squandered the point with populist blarney to the effect that the money was “an extra incentive [for the CBC] to campaign day and night to re-elect the Liberal government to a fourth term. A reminder to believe nothing you see or hear on CBC.”

On the other hand, the leading candidates for the Liberal leadership have some thinking to do on how to respond to their colleague’s big idea. 

The McGill poll from October pegged 78% majority support for maintaining the CBC in the face of Poilievre’s threat to defund. Importantly, that 78% was tied to “changes” at the CBC (at some point we ought to poll what Canadians mean by changes).

But other results from the McGill poll are sometimes overlooked. Thirty-four per cent of the same pool of respondents said CBC needs more reliable funding, unchanged from previous polling in 2021. Perhaps surprisingly, the 34% is not skewed by regional differences but support for the CBC and better funding is higher among non-Conservative voters.

The political challenge for the Minister’s plan is that it’s front loaded with money, with the changes to come later. That’s why the pressure is on CBC/Radio-Canada CEO Marie-Philippe Bouchard to describe the changes. 

The political challenge for defunder Poilievre is that Donald Trump has put the CBC top of mind for many Canadians. We’ll wait for some polling on that.

***

Two weeks ago I posted an update on the CRTC’s regulation of foreign music streamers and, as promised, the Commission has announced a June hearing on audio services, radio and online.

Parliament handed the Commission a laundry list of tasks in implementing the Online Streaming Act, the most pressing of which is what’s expected of Spotify and the American music streamers and whether the declining Canadian radio industry can catch a regulatory break.

The Commission’s Notice of Consultation sports the usual hints of what it’s already thinking before the hearings begin. Its code words are “our preliminary view,” “we consider,” and “we propose.”

Here’s a rundown:

  • As the Commission ruled in June, the streamers are going to pay five per cent of Canadian revenues into funds for Canadian musicians and radio news. Perhaps to shore up its legal flank in the face of the streamers’ upcoming court challenge this June, the Commission plans to impose more significant cash contributions on Canadian radio networks that take in at least $25 million in annual revenue (the same earnings threshold as the Commission is applying to the foreign streamers).

CRTC Figures identify five radio broadcast groups exceeding $25 million in annual Canadian revenues

  • As for smaller radio broadcasters, the Commission seems ready to eliminate their half-per cent of revenue (0.05%) cash contributions to musician development funds. The current radio airplay quotas of 35% to 65%, however, are slated to remain.
  • The national pastime of debating the “MAPL” formula for a Canadian song that qualifies to fill airplay quotas will be revived but the Commission seems committed to the modest changes it proposed in 2022. Rules on Canadian co-writing of music and lyrics will be loosened. The Commission doesn’t seem convinced as yet that Canadian studio producers ought to join artists and songwriters in the talent club that satisfies the airplay quota.
  • The Commission is interested in strengthening on-air exposure for emerging Canadian artists and is open to a 5% airplay quota for artists in the first four years of their recording careers. 
  • Similarly, the Commission is interested, in fact very determined, to introduce a 5% airplay quota for Indigenous music.
  • In a typically opaque discussion of news programming, the Commission declares that “news is a priority” (indeed the Online Streaming Act says so) but unlike other policy items it offers no blueprint for how to make the priority into a reality on air. 

But the most difficult policy question is how to close the gap between radio broadcasters and online streamers with respect to the prominence and consumption of Canadian songs. 

As noted by the Commission, CanCon consumption is a mere 10% on streaming platforms operating in Canada, a far cry from the 35% to 65% radio airplay quotas. The consumption of streamed French language music is 8.5% in Québec.

What’s unmissable in the Commission’s public notice is how little it makes of these consumption outcomes, so dismal that they are directly proportional to the Canadian share of the continental market.

It’s safe to say that if the Commission was planning anything bold to address the outcome gap, it would have said so. Instead it says “more information is required to fully understand how online services can facilitate [CanCon] discoverability.”

***

The Liberal-tormenting True North has rebranded itself as Juno News and its boss Candice Malcolm had Pierre Poilievre on her show for a 37-minute video interview last week.

The Malcolm interview is in the vein of the Conservative leader’s famous chat with Canadian expat Jordan Peterson: it falls short of being a softball news interview, it’s more of a tag team narrative (for example, Malcolm responding to Poilievre’s comments as “excellent”). 

So naturally Malcolm introduced the topic of independent journalism.

What was interesting was that Poilievre passed on the opportunity to reiterate his plans for a scorched earth repeal of federal aid to journalism and said Canadians should wait to see his election platform.

Having said that, he expressed concern that some news organizations had been denied eligibility for federal aid for politically motivated reasons. 

All of this is difficult to read, but there seems to be some kind of policy cogitation going on behind the scenes and we will, as the Opposition Leader suggests, have to wait to see his election platform.

***

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A new CBC: Heritage Minister challenges future PM to better fund and govern the public broadcaster

February 21, 2025

What a difference a Trump makes.

A few weeks ago the CBC seemed doomed. Pierre Poilievre’s defunding promises were (are) real, and as the then Prime Minister-in-waiting said, “I can’t wait to defund the CBC.”

Now that promise is an albatross draped around the Conservatives’ neck.

An October poll pegged popular support for the CBC at 78% of Canadians. The big caveat to that number was that most of the 78% were demanding an improved CBC as the price of their support.

The Liberals’ third Heritage Minister in their nine-year run, Pascale St.-Onge, is finally addressing this public desire, five years after the government’s expert committee told cabinet how to accomplish it through amendments to the Broadcasting Act.

But the long delayed policy action is hardly the game changer for the CBC’s chances of survival. Rather it’s the national crisis of pending economic devastation that is the means of Trump’s plan to annex Canada and our abundance of natural resources. In such a crisis, the importance of the CBC is bound to be viewed in a new light by Canadians.

On Thursday, St.-Onge unveiled a “proposal” to revamp the public broadcaster’s mission, funding, and governance. The quotation marks here signify that the Minister is challenging Liberal candidates for the Prime Minister’s job to say yes. 

It’s a sign of the weird political moment we are in that a Minister who has already announced her decision not to run in the upcoming election was green-lit by a lame duck PM Justin Trudeau to propose, not announce, detailed legislative action on a key election issue to those contending to replace him.

And now the fate of the CBC will be an elevated election issue, of that we can be reasonably certain. While the CBC has always been emblematic of cultural sovereignty, we are no longer concerned just about cultural sovereignty. In Trump’s new world order, Canadians are thinking about sovereignty-sovereignty. 

St.-Onge was not subtle in making the link, repeatedly, between the importance of the CBC to Canadian democracy and the ability of US social media platforms to flood our zone with election interference, as easily achieved as writing new algorithm code.

As for her conflicting calls for national unity on supporting the CBC and suggestions that Pierre Poilievre’s blood lust for killing the CBC is unpatriotic, that’s politics folks. You can’t say he didn’t ask for it. 

Her proposal responds to the undisclosed advice of her expert committee but also the five public recommendations put forward by the Yale Committee in January 2020. 

Here’s a quick run-down of her proposal:

The headline grabber is a phased-in doubling of the CBC’s $1.4 billion annual Parliamentary funding from an unofficial $33.66 per Canadian to an official funding formula of $62.20 per capita which is the benchmark funding within the G7 (see the chart below). For that kind of money, she understated, Parliament would “expect a general increase in performance indicators.”

The companion to the funding change is to abolish advertising in public affairs programming, recommended by the Yale Committee and included in the Liberals’ 2021 election platform.

There is no recommendation to mirror UK legislation that grants the BBC a multi-year charter inking a mandate and guaranteed funding, but St.-Onge suggested that legislating a funding formula that is independent of Parliamentary budgets, like Old Age Security or federal-provincial transfers, ensures funding is relatively insulated from politics. The legislative guarantee would be subject to five-year reviews by MPs.

Per capita funding of public broadcasters, c. 2022

Not pointed out by the Minister, the doubling of funding would restore historic levels of CBC finances prior to the Harper, Chrétien and Mulroney cuts that fell most heavily upon the CBC’s regional and local television and radio programming. The $62.20 is eye-popping, but the Minister had it walked back to $50 before she took her first question from reporters.

That’s the money. Now for the accountability. St.-Onge’s pitch acknowledged the range of heated passions about the CBC, the in-vogue vocabulary for those strong opinions being “public trust.”

She proposed some widely recommended legislative changes starting with the CBC Board of Directors hiring its own CEO, instead of being hand picked by the Prime Minister. As for the Board itself, she wants to entrench in legislation the practice of appointing from an independently generated list.

While this governance reform is important to any well run public broadcaster, it will elicit yawns from most Canadians. That’s why St.-Onge’s key recommendation of “citizen participation” in governing the CBC is such a missed opportunity:

“As a public broadcaster, CBC/Radio-Canada should reflect the lived experiences, languages and needs of Canadian citizens. To facilitate this responsiveness, the Minister would propose to amend the Broadcasting Act to require that the Corporation include public consultation on issues related to its priorities and strategies in the context of its corporate plans. The amended Act could require CBC/Radio-Canada to indicate in its corporate plans how it satisfies the public consultation requirement, including the results and ways in which these results influence its decision-making and operations.”

In other words, the CBC would listen to Canadians and then write its own reviews, (sometimes known as an annual report).

A bold move (says me) would have been to enshrine a triannual Assembly of Canadians of undetermined numbers who would spend a week in Ottawa debating observations and publishing recommendations for the public broadcaster’s CEO and Board of Directors.

Such a citizen’s town hall should not pull any levers — otherwise it will end up a mock Parliament and tool of disruption— but it would be hard to ignore the people’s thoughtful and well-reported judgment on whether the CBC had in fact “shown a general increase in performance factors.”

There’s not much more the Minister, or a future Parliament, can do to re-engineer the CBC. Much of the really hard work is getting the programming strategy right and setting the right cultural tone. That is the job of the independent CBC Board and its new CEO, not Parliament.

For that, the clock is already ticking.

***

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Catching Up on MediaPolicy – the DST is not a trade issue- the music cartels in Canada- redesigning journalism aid – from the Super Bowl to Manifest Destiny

It’s Flag Day.

February 15, 2025

Before catching up on MediaPolicy, there are two posts I offer up to you.

The first is my speech to the Digital Media at the Crossroads conference from last weekend. It’s a well salted explainer of the CRTC’s implementation of the Online Streaming Act on music streaming, its first efforts having drawn court appeals, trade threats and the launch of the “Scrap the Streaming Tax” campaign.

The Commission is going to announce a further public consultation on audio (including radio) this week.

The other post is an explainer of the federal Digital Services Tax that I wrote last year. Last week stories circulated in the press that the DST would be on the Trump retaliation list. If you didn’t have that on your bingo card, you should have. As detailed in my post, the DST is not a trade issue, it’s a tax issue.

The US digital giants offshore revenue from their Canadian operations (and do the same in other OECD nations) in order to minimize corporate tax.

The DSTs enacted in Canada and Europe are a response to that tax avoidance.

Former US President Joe Biden recognized that when he negotiated a tax treaty to fix it but US Congress refused to ratify it.

The tech bros appear to have backed the right horse.

***

The Public Policy Forum just published a report on local news journalism, The Lost Estate. The report comes out of the Michener Foundation’s conference last October. Written by journalism A-listers Alison Uncles, Ed Greenspon and Andrew Phillips, the report covers familiar ground about the extent of Canadian news deserts and news poverty.

The Report’s public policy recommendations have evolved beyond those recommended in 2017 by Greenspon’s Shattered Mirror study and the roster of federal programs aiding news journalism enacted since then by the Trudeau Liberals.

Here they are:

  • Work harder at getting philanthropic foundations, community organizations and individuals to utilize current tax write-offs for donations to news journalism.
  • Make it easier for news organizations to go non-profit, unlocking those charitable donations.
  • Mirror these contributions to the operational costs of running newsrooms with a public-private-philanthropic capital investment fund for community rescues of failing news outlets.
  • Legislate a requirement that moribund media organizations must give a four-month public notice of closure so that local investors can save the outlet (this would require both provincial and federal action).
  • Redesign Ottawa’s Local Journalism Initiative that funds 400 reporting jobs by matching federal funding to charitable fundraising, something that the recipient news organizations would be responsible for undertaking.
  • Redesign the federal reporter subsidy by requiring staff retention and rewarding new hiring.
  • Introduce an advertiser tax credit for expenditures in local media.
  • Encourage more governments to increase their advertising expenditures in local media.

If there is a theme in these recommendations it is to juice the market-facing incentives in current programs while not abandoning government aid.

As an appendix to its Report, the Forum provided an Ipsos poll covering some familiar questions about public attitudes towards news journalism.

The results confirm a key trend in public opinion: mainstream media is highly trusted and information carried over social media is not.

On the other hand, two questions related to government subsidies to independent news journalism elicited concern that state sponsorship “might” stoke bias and a lack of independence from government.

The most trusted news sources are in fact the most subsidized by government, so give the public credit for agreeing with MediaPolicy: subsidies are a difficult to measure risk to public trust but so far not a harm.

***

I sometimes close this post by recommending content, but consider this more of a referral: the Hollywood-crafted and star-studded Super Bowl ads you didn’t get to see because the NFL sold the Canadian programming and advertising rights to Bell Media’s TSN.

Nobody quite does goofy the way that Hollywood can.

Are you not entertained? You decide.

***

Okay, changed my mind, I will recommend something serious.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only Canadian listening to Trump’s inauguration speech who noticed the President’s reference to “Manifest Destiny,” a long active but recently dormant part of America’s imperial DNA.

Here’s a good piece on that from the US National Public Radio news site.

***

From The Lost Estate Report:

FOR PHILANTHROPY

Expand issue definition: Philanthropy is growing rapidly in the United States around local news. In addition to the small handful of U.S. foundations that are interested in journalism and democracy, a second wave of foundations and donors that were funders of other issues — including domestic violence, hunger, homelessness and poverty — have come to realize they’re not going to make any progress if there’s no local news. Canadian philanthropists should follow suit.

Step up community foundation involvement: There are more than 200 community foundations across Canada, as well as thousands of private foundations. They are just now beginning to channel their impressive fundraising acumen towards local news initiatives: The Winnipeg Community Foundation, for instance, has funded reporting on religion by the Winnipeg Free Press, and the Toronto Foundation is one of several foundations that help to fund The Local. Community foundations should be encouraged to support local news coverage as part of their wider missions to encourage social vitality, community health and local democracy. More media organizations should be knocking on those doors, and more community foundations should be stepping up.

Help enable new local news models, including not-for-profits and charities: Major French-language news outlets such as La Presse and Le Devoir have become not-for-profits and then used that status to apply for Registered Journalism Organization status to take advantage of money from foundations and individual donors. Only four media organizations outside Quebec have done the same; that represents a major missed opportunity to develop a new source of revenue to support local news. RJO status would mean new startup ventures could accept philanthropic support or present an opportunity for community-based fundraising to claim back news outlets from the corporate chains that have abandoned local coverage.

Foundations can help with this step. Achieving charitable status can be complicated, but foundations can offer guidance on how to navigate the rules around registered philanthropic organizations, such as setting up “friends of” charities that can more easily raise money from supporters. If more outlets had charitable status, more foundation help could be unlocked for local journalism.

FOR GOVERNMENT

Reconceive the Local Journalism Initiative: Report for America in the United States provides a good model of a partnership with strategic intent that builds long-term capacity rather than plugging short-term holes. Its stated mission is to “strengthen our communities and our democracy through local journalism” and it funds reporters in local newsrooms for three-year terms, rather than the single year or less of the LJI. Among its other virtues: It provides training for journalists, unlike the LJI; its grants get smaller each year, shifting more onus each year on the news organization to finance its staff; and it helps news organizations learn how to fundraise within their communities. A homemade “Report for Canada” would roll in LJI funds to match those invested by philanthropy. This would provide the added governance benefit of distancing the program from the government of the day and placing authority in an independent board. Public contributions, as with academic granting agencies, would come in the form of multi-year funding.

Mandate a sales notice period: Communities should have an opportunity to rally support for news outlets that are threatened with closure by corporate owners. Specifically, there should be a notice period, perhaps 120 days, before a news operation can be shut down or sold to a non-local buyer. That would give communities time to gather support for local ownership. To help promote local buyers, governments can explore policy interventions that could include training and development, support with restructuring operations, access to expert resources, navigation support of federal and provincial programs, as well as low-cost or no-cost loans.

Tie the Labour Tax Credit to jobs: The LTC is the most important government program supporting news operations at the moment, worth an estimated $67 million in the 2024-25 fiscal year.[42] It should be continued, but with important changes. Organizations should not take money and cut content; the tax credit should carry an incentive to grow newsrooms and should be tied to the increase or preservation of editorial positions and other resources necessary to produce local content. The credit would be higher for those who increase their spending on journalism.

Drive local advertising with a tax cut: Along the same lines, local advertisers should receive a tax credit for spending their ad dollars with independent, locally owned media. As advertising dollars continue to flow to foreign-owned digital sites, depriving local media of funds they need, a tax credit would give advertisers a greater incentive to vote local while leaving the decision about which outlets get support to them, not government. Equitable tax credits for advertisers have the additional benefit of being more likely to withstand shifts in the political winds. That said, local advertising only helps if Main Street can withstand the competition from distant digital retailers, which presents a different set of challenges.

Direct government ad dollars to local news: Governments should earmark a portion of their substantial advertising budgets to local publishers and broadcasters. Ontario is showing the way by requiring that 25 percent of government ad budgets, including spending by four large provincial agencies, be directed to “Ontario-based publishers.” This program, which went into effect in September 2024, is explicitly aimed at “helping to support these publishers and their workers, who are creating local news content for people across the province.” Brought in by a Conservative government, it could be worth some $50 million a year to Ontario publishers. The federal government, other provinces and territories, and municipalities should follow suit. Governments are already spending substantial amounts on advertising and marketing. It makes no sense for them to talk about the need for vibrant local democracy and a healthy local news environment while they continue to funnel their own ad dollars to foreign-owned social media sites.

FOR PHILANTHROPY AND GOVERNMENT

Encourage capital formation: The best way to strengthen local news is to help it remain in local hands in whatever form entrepreneurs believe will work best in each community. In many cases, this will require capital. Programs to encourage capital formation for this purpose would go a long way to preserving the public good that is local news. A sustainable investment vehicle, co-funded by the federal government, provincial and territorial governments, the philanthropic sector, as well as NGOs, could draw lessons from government programs like the Social Finance Fund[43] and the Canada Rental Protection Fund,[44] where federal investment complements other public, private and philanthropic money. The government should explore any mechanism that makes crowding-in more effective, by utilizing a “first-in, last-out” methodology. For philanthropic organizations engaged in social impact investment, local journalism is a perfect match. The same is true for governments that have already put in place measures to encourage employee ownership or support.

***

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MediaPolicy’s speech to Digital Media at the Crossroads: an update on regulating music streamers in Canada

February 13, 2025

Last weekend I did a little speed-dating at the 2025 Digital Media at the Crossroads conference. I had fifteen minutes to give an update on what’s up with the CRTC’s regulatory path for music streaming.

That wasn’t a lot of time. Things like “should we overhaul the ‘MAPL’ eligibility formula for Canadian songs?” just fell by the wayside. But I hope the conference delegates found it a useful summary.

***

I think the reason that I was invited here today is that I wrote a couple of blogs back in fall in response to the music streamers’ petition campaign “Scrap the Streaming Tax.” 

That campaign was launched by Digital Media Association, the American lobby organization that speaks for the foreign music streamers Spotify, Amazon, Apple and Google’s YouTube. The face of the campaign was Bryan Adams, our own legendary rock star.

In the next 15 minutes I’m going to give you a brief overview of what might happen in the CRTC’s implementation of the Online Streaming Act, Bill C-11 for the audio industry, in particular the music streamers. 

Last June the Commission handed down a cash levy of 5% of Canadian revenues to the music streamers — much to their dismay— and next month we expect a notice of consultation that should put discoverability of Canadian music squarely on the table. 

That’s assuming an election doesn’t sideswipe the Commission’s work.

I don’t have to tell any of the radio broadcasters in the room that audio is the neglected child of the broadcasting system, a much smaller ecosystem by revenue than its big brother television and video streaming.

It’s difficult to find an explicit policy discussion of why we regulate the broadcasting of music, whereas there’s plenty of that kind of public debate about television.

What video and audio have in common of course is that Canadian music, like Canadian television or any other kind of mass media, swims up current in a continental market dominated by large foreign-owned media giants. 

So we regulate in order to carve out an adequate space in the Canadian mass market for Canadian songs, composed and performed by Canadian artists.

I suggest that means we are not content that a handful of high achievers like Drake, The Weeknd, Justin Bieber and Tait McRae have become international superstars.

For Canadian music to have real prominence and presence in our domestic market we have to nurture a musician middle class in Canada, which is a small market, and especially Québec, which is an even smaller market. 

Ditto, ditto for Indigenous music.

If that’s why we regulate, we then have to consider what we’re up against in terms of the distribution of music in Canada, and the distribution of the money made from that.

Streaming is now the dominant distribution architecture .

And streaming is run by an oligopoly of foreign media companies.

Let’s just look at a couple of slides here.

You’ve probably seen this one: streaming saved the music industry from piracy and financial oblivion… and then became its master. 

Streamers are now the retail face of the recorded music industry and the ingestion point for two thirds of its income.

When streamers distribute that revenue they keep a third for themselves, half goes to labels and artists, and 15% goes to songwriters.

Canada is a rich market for a small country. Canadian consumers are significant streaming adapters on a per capita basis.

Two-thirds of Canadians are on streaming platforms, listening to about 15 tracks per day. Ninety per cent of Canadians under the age of 30 are signed up for streaming; it’s clearly the future of the industry for as far as we can project.

The streamers themselves may not be a tech bro oligarchy, but they are an oligopoly. And Spotify stands first, with twice as many paid subscriptions as its fellow giants.

What’s more, the streamer oligopoly negotiates licensing fees with another cartel, the major music labels. 

Such is the market power in the industry that carves up the revenue pie, which arguably results in more financial precarity for artists and songwriters than might otherwise be the case.

As I mentioned, Canada hits above its weight in music consumption but also is an overachiever in producing global superstars.

Check out this Spotify Top 10 artists list.

But the question for Canadian media policy is not whether a handful of Canadian stars become rich and famous, it’s whether we are filling the music distribution pipeline with enough good music to achieve an adequate share of the domestic music market for our own artists.

In short, the question is whether we can nurture a Canadian musician middle class where enough artists can make enough money over a long enough time to develop their craft and their audience.

Broadcasting regulation and adjacent public policy like the Canada Council address this problem on both the supply side and the demand side.

What do I mean by that?

We stimulate audience demand through radio airplay quotas and financial support, usually through media funds like FACTOR, for sound recording, live performance and marketing.

We stimulate the supply of musician income from music sales and licensing, radio royalties and support for other income generating gigs.

One of the frustrating things about public policy in this area is that for a variety of reasons we don’t have good data on musician incomes.

But we do have data on consumption of Canadian music, and when it comes to consumption on the biggest platform, music streaming, it’s underwhelming to say the least.

This slide shows that Canadian musicians have only a ten per cent share of the Canadian music streaming audience. 

Here are two benchmarks for that 10%. 

The unregulated market in theatrical release films has infamously resulted in a three per cent (one per cent in English Canada) revenue share for Canadian films in our own domestic market. 

At the other end, the CRTC’s radio airplay quotas range from 35% to 65% airplay for Canadian music or French language music.

There’s enough information about artist compensation from music streaming that we can estimate that a “musician” —which is a business with multiple artists and mouths to feed—  has to stream about 6 million songs annually on Spotify to earn $100,000 USD from all income sources.

And if you’re wondering how many Canadian bands achieve that 6 million, and who they are, you are out of luck. As I say, data poverty is really holding back public policy here.

The Canadian economist Gerry Wall looked into this a few years ago for Heritage Canada and concluded that, putting aside a few superstars, not enough Canadian musicians were making enough money. He concluded that ‘there has been a “hollowing out’ of the middle class of music creators.’ 

Then we have the dire case of Québec and French language music. If ever there was a canary in the coal mine for Canadian culture, the dramatic under consumption of French language music on streaming platforms would be it. 

The Canadian francophone market is obviously small at 8 million in population and some argue that the small market problem is compounded by streamer algorithms that are believed to confer prominence on songs that have reached at least one million plays, again a small market challenge.

The outcomes couldn’t be worse.

Eight per cent of streamed music in Québec is French language. 

The highest ranked streamed French language song, in Québec, is in 49th place.

Let that sink in.

I asked the Digital Media Association about that, and the publicist hired by DIMA for Scrap the Streaming Tax campaign issued a statement saying….that the global export market for French language music is strong and that the top French language song in North America belongs to Patrick Watson, a well-known Québécois artist.

As for the 8% outcome for French language music streamed in Quebec, the publicist opted not to return my email. 

How will our broadcasting regulator respond to these issues, the under consumption of French language streamed music and the broader problem of nurturing a Canadian musician middle class?

As you know, the Commission handed down a five per cent cash levy on the streamers this last June. 

I believe the streamers were genuinely gob smacked by this.

The Canadian content cash levy on radio broadcasters is a tenth of that, at 0.5%.

The music streaming tax in France is 1.2%.

The streamers should have expected something more than the half-per cent that radio broadcasters pay, since radio broadcasters make such dramatic airplay contributions to Canadian music.

And the streamers also knew that Sirius Radio, which has much softer CanCon airplay quotas than conventional radio, pays 4%.

But it didn’t assist the streamers that at every opportunity they have told Parliament and the Commission that they have no interest in taking any additional steps to make Canadian music more prominent in their playlists and streaming channels.

The trouble is, Parliament ordered it so.

Here’s the text of section 3(1)(r) of the Online Streaming Act, an amendment sponsored by the Bloc and supported by the NDP and the Conservatives in committee.

It says music streamers must use any means at its disposal to recommend and promote Canadian songs.

I’d suggest to you that “any means” includes integrating a higher prominence for Canadian songs into playlist algorithms.

But the CRTC, perhaps unintentionally because they were preoccupied with YouTube videos, appeared to rule this out within hours of the Online Streaming Act becoming law in April 2023. 

However, the federal cabinet left the door ajar on this in its Policy Direction to the CRTC in November 2023.

The streamers’ pitch on its current efforts to promote Canadian songs and Canadian artists is that if you ask for Canadian, you will get it. 

They will curate all-Canadian playlists. 

They will promote Canadian new releases. 

They will engage in musician development, sponsorship, and workshops. 

And they want those efforts to be the sum total of their promotion of Canadian content.

But under no circumstances do they want their proprietary and secret algorithms to be regulated for outcomes or anything else. 

That’s obviously a hard-line position, and perhaps that’s to be expected in the first sovereign country to propose regulated prominence outcomes in music streaming.

This is not like video streaming, where the EU plowed the regulatory furrow before we did.

It’s too bad we are so entrenched at this moment. 

There do seem to be win-win regulatory solutions. 

For example, Spotify has a third-party research paper posted on its website that suggests that reserving a prominent space on the home screen for local content works well for local artists and delivers better results for the streamer objective of keeping people listening longer and without interruption. 

There are obvious discoverability tools that the Commission could order including home screen prominence for local content and Canadian airplay quotas for the DJ-curated channels that the streamers carry, for example Apple Music does a lot of this.

But moving the needle of Canadian music consumption, especially in Québec, may require more dramatic measures.

So if we ever get to this Commission consultation on audio streaming I would expect a showdown on song curation and recommendation algorithms.

In the meantime, the streamers are engaged in an all-out campaign to sabotage Canadian regulation.

As you may know, they are challenging the 5% levy in court. They are running their publicity campaign in Canada.

My guess is they have given Conservative MPs an earful by now and are hoping Pierre Poilievre will become Prime Minister and “Kill Bill C-11.” And they are running to US legislators in Congress to put the Canadian Online Streaming Act in the trade war crosshairs. 

There’s so much drama and chaos in our relationships with American media companies and American Presidents, I wouldn’t want to predict what happens next. The velvet gloves are off. 

Like everything else in broadcasting regulation, we take it day by day. 365 days per year.

***

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Catching Up on MediaPolicy – choosing CBC news or entertainment – Libs reverse the Meta ad ban – the economics of Canadian book publishing

February 10, 2025

As a federal election gets closer, the fate of the CBC gets nearer. 

The worst thing that can happen to the CBC (and the 78% of Canadians who support it) is that Pierre Poilievre gets elected to majority government. He will indeed defund the CBC, the only question is how quickly and completely. 

The second worst thing that can happen is that the Conservatives don’t come to power and Ottawa hits the snooze button on re-engineering the public broadcaster. Recall, the McGill poll from November 2024 reaffirmed broad public support for the CBC but only if it addresses its major criticisms. 

The public debate about those criticisms of the CBC, and what to do about them, finds commentators speaking from two different viewpoints. No, not for and against. But rather “news” versus “entertainment.”

Most of the high profile commentators are journalists who focus on the democratic imperative of saving CBC News in a shrinking journalism ecosystem. After all, about a third of Canada’s 10,000 professional journalists are employed by the public broadcaster. The journalist corps representing the other two-thirds, employed by privately owned media, is steadily shrinking despite the federal government financial aid that Poilievre also says he will defund.

There’s been a useful public debate on how CBC News could do the trifecta of improving programming, defending its audience share (at risk among young Canadians) and mollifying its critics in the political class.

Chris Waddell and Peter Menzies, both interviewed here on MediaPolicy, have offered useful ideas on how to do it. Their views were supplemented last week by the journalist and policy analyst Ed Greenspon and independent (and very much ex-CBC) news producer and writer Tara Henley. 

If there’s at least one common theme to all these opinions, it’s to decentralize or re-regionalize CBC News. As it happens, this rhymes with the talking point that the new CBC President Marie-Philippe Bouchard is making by extolling “local” and “proximity” as the CBC’s greatest virtues.

Decentralizing CBC News would address at least two problems: first, give Canadians more of the local news they want. Second; mitigate the hinterland anger directed at a richly endowed public broadcaster that is dug deep into the Toronto streetscape where its main newsroom is steeped in a metropolitan bias, the natural outcome of where most of its employees live. 

Another common theme among the news-first proponents is the lack of interest in preserving or improving CBC’s entertainment programming. Waddell and Henley want to toss it overboard entirely and cry uncle to the US streamers, while Greenspon just doesn’t mention it at all.

The CBC is the nation’s biggest platform for Canadian entertainment content, in particular television drama and documentaries (leave aside CBC sports television programming for now, that’s a different discussion).

The private Canadian broadcasters are spending less and less on “Programs of National Interest” (PNI)—-don’t be distracted by the awkward CRTC jargon—- for a variety of macroeconomic factors that can’t be bargained or reasoned with.

The ad market for television has deflated.

Canadian broadcaster revenues and profit margins have been falling steadily because of cord-cutting and the success of foreign television and music streamers.

Corus Entertainment (operator of StackTV and Global TV) is almost insolvent.

Bell Media runs its news division at a massive loss and is barely profitable only because of an entertainment portfolio anchored by its long-term deal to retail HBO programming in Canada.

Rogers is focussed on sports programming.

At last weekend’s Digital Media at the Crossroads conference, Richard Stursberg projected that English-language Canadian broadcasters will be collectively in the red by 2028.

Indeed, the trends are all going in the wrong direction.

Spending on Canadian TV dramas by the English language Canadian networks has shrunk 65% (in real dollars) over the last decade according to a recent study commissioned by the Director’s Guild.

Meanwhile the streamers have set a new, stratospheric bar in rising per hour production budgets. Canadian broadcasters can either respond with bigger budgets (they can’t or haven’t) or allow the gap in on-screen production values to widen. (The APTN/CBC/Netflix co-pro North of North could not have been made without the Netflix investment that made filming in Iqaluit possible).

Enter the CRTC’s white-flag-of-surrender idea of abolishing the regulatory category of “PNI” in hopes that when it orders Netflix, Amazon and Disney to make “Canadian content” the streamers will by default make dramas. Meanwhile, abolishing PNI for Canadian broadcasters would mean Bell, Global, Rogers and Québecor can opt to shift their spend from money-pit dramas to profitable unscripted television and lifestyle programming. 

Quite apart from whether it’s a good idea to outsource Canadian television dramas to American studios looking to sell back into their own market, the question is whether Canadian broadcasters would ever make a drama series again if the CRTC doesn’t require it.

Those who were around to win the regulatory battle for Canadian television drama back in the 1980s will have an opinion on the matter.

If we have to take a defunded English language CBC out of the funding equation for Canadian television drama we subtract a programming budget north of $120 million annually, as the public broadcaster is the nation’s biggest buyer of Canadian dramas.

Bell spent $70 million on English-language Canadian drama in 2023-24 (its budget was $75 million ten years ago) and Corus spent $37 million (it was $96 million as Shaw and Corus combined in 2014).

The numbers speak for themselves.

***

News publishers call the federal Liberals’ latest move “as dumb as a bag of hammers” and Ottawa’s reinstatement of its government advertising on Meta’s social media platforms wasn’t on anyone’s bingo card. The spending ban was in retaliation for Meta’s blackout of Canadian news on Facebook and Instagram.

Friends and foes of the Online News Act Bill C-18 will say the predictable things. What a spineless, election-motivated reversal. What a foreseeable debacle.

News Media Canada took the opportunity to hurry new survey results to press: a solid majority of Canadians want the federal government to spend more advertising in newspapers and less on social media.

According to its press release, “almost two thirds (63 per cent) of Canadians trust advertising in newspapers/news sites, while just 28 per cent trust ads they see on Facebook/Instagram.”

The publishers’ alliance applauded the Ontario government’s decision last July to boost ad spending on newspapers while pointing out that the federal advertising budget allocates only two per cent of its dollars to print.

***

I often recommend Ken Whyte‘s Substack column SHuSH and do so again.

Whyte is the owner and operator of the Canadian book publisher Sutherland House and as such automatically qualifies as an expert in the economics of Canadian media. He’s also the former editor of Maclean’s Magazine, ex-President of Rogers Publishing, and once Editor-in-Chief of the National Post. Additionally, he writes like a dream.

In his last column he contemplates what a Trump tariff on books would do to Canadian publishers who are mostly small independents that hold, collectively, a minority share of the Canadian market that is otherwise dominated by foreign giants.

Sound familiar?

***

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – Canadian culture first – Spotify the Colossus – the CRTC’s better late than never – The Shapiro Oracle speaks to Will Page

February 1, 2025

The illegal Trump tariffs begin today, heralding trade war.

Last week MediaPolicy posted an editorial of sorts, calling for elected politicians to greet America First with Canada First in trade negotiations over culture. 

A flimsy “cultural exemption” in our free trade deal with the US dates back to 1987. As intended, it offers no more than a speed bump to powerful US media and tech companies determined to dominate Canadian cultural consumption. It needs to be locked down.

How and when that happens in the permanent state of Trump chaos that we’ll endure for the next 1500 days isn’t clear.

Tariffs now, tariffs later,

tariffs done or undone.

How’s the weather in Newfoundland?

***

Spotify is feeling it. 

In this week’s corporate blog post, the Netflix-of-music-streaming stands triumphant.

As the colossus of the audio industry, Spotify is more than twice the size of any of its nearest competitors TenCent, YouTubeMusic, Apple and Amazon, with over 220 million paid subscribers. 

As the proud vanquisher of Napster and the torrent pirates, Spotify reports that every industry metric is looking up. Altogether, audio steamers have a half-billion paid subscribers signed up around the world. Spotify music VP David Kaefer says a billion is the next goal. 

Kaefer also says musician earnings are way up over the last ten years, with the top 10,000 musicians on Spotify —out of 10 million— earn at least $100,000 USD annually. That money is shared with band members and songwriters.

Spotify earnings are 25% of a typical “musician’s” total income, he estimates, adding to income from other streaming services, downloads and live performances. 

The “long tail” of music creators uploading to streaming platforms, to quote music economist Will Page, “is very long and very skinny.”

***

The CRTC is expected to announce in March a public consultation on a policy framework for audio streaming and radio.

On the streaming side, the cash contribution of 5% of Canadian revenues was established by the CRTC last June, so this new consultation will likely focus on other things; the discoverability and prominence of Canadian songs being the logical focus.

The Commission just now put out a request for proposals for a third party research study of the prominence and discoverability of Canadian audio and video content. 

Well, better late than never, no? The results won’t be reported until November and will be unavailable for the policy framework.

In response to a MediaPolicy inquiry, commission staff said the report findings would be available when the commission moves into its third phase of setting tailored regulatory terms and conditions for streamers in 2026.  

***

The recommended podcast for the week is an episode of Bubble Trouble, music economist Will Page’s platform. 

He’s invited media oracle Doug Shapiro onto his show. MediaPolicy often recommends Shapiro’s Substack page, The Mediator. 

If you follow either tech or media news in the most cursory way, you’re going to find this interview about the past, present and future of media as riveting as I did.

If podcasts aren’t your thing, I found a LinkedIn post from Midia Research’s Mark Mulligan who has some out of the box thoughts about how music streaming algorithms that chase listening time above all else will drive away some artists, hardcore fans, and discerning listeners, into the emerging ecosystem of Do-It-Yourself distribution.

***

Here’s an update on my January 1st post about polling conducted by TMU’s The Dais School of Public Policy. 

No thin skins for them, the folks at The Dais acknowledged the point I raised about how its annual survey questions failed to solicit the experiences of Jews and women with online hate. 

The Dais also saw some merit in my observations that their poll questions testing Canadians’ susceptibility to misinformation on the basis of political ideology were torqued towards right-wing conspiracies and misinformation. 

To its credit, The Dais is going to review these issues in preparation for its 2025 survey.

***

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A “Canada First” trade policy for Canadian culture

January 28, 2025

In the permanent state of chaos that Donald Trump’s presidency has unleashed on our trade relationship with the United States, Canadian political leaders are racing to put together a unified and coherent approach to defending Canada’s interests.

Trump’s “America First” tariff threats against Canada are a repudiation of both the letter and spirit of our bilateral CUSMA trade treaty and the multi-lateral General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, both of them products of 75 years of trade liberalization.

The situation is so chaotic we don’t know who will be the Prime Minister who comes to terms with Trump or the nature of the outcomes for domestic industries and Canadian wallets. The Liberal government and most provincial premiers wisely say that “everything is on the table” in terms of countervailing tariffs. But the public discussion of which trade issues should be on the table is only just beginning….

Continue reading at Cartt.ca

***

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – The Tech Bro line up – the cost of QCJO subsidies

Batter up: Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sundar Pichai (Google) and Elon Musk (X).

January 25, 2025

The memorable line-up of US tech bros attending Donald Trump’s inauguration as special guests is an early candidate for Photo of the Year, although it’s possibly been eclipsed by Elon Musk’s nazi salute of the same day.

What the Trump victory means for Canadian regulation of Internet services seems ominous and Michael Geist is first out of the gate with “I told you so.”

In the months ahead you’ll find a different perspective here on MediaPolicy, I promise.

Thanks to Trump, we are headed into a nation-defining crucible, as Jean Charest just argued persuasively on CBC News. Of course media policy is just one thing on the table and you can’t eat cultural sovereignty.

Forty years ago, a majority of Canadians voted against a free trade deal with the United States as an over commitment of our economic fortunes to a single dominant trading partner.

Despite quite a few rough spots with a trade partner that never plays by the rules, we muddled through until Trump the Sequel.

But if we stick together and get decent political leadership, we can come out the other side as a greater country and more independent of the United States.

Now is our time. Courage, my friends.

***

And now for something micro, not macro.

Dean Beeby just posted a Substack column reporting on per diems and expenses paid out by Revenue Canada to five veteran journalists serving on the Independent Advisory panel who give the thumbs up or down to  media organizations applying for “QCJO” federal aid to online news journalism.

The Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization seal of approval unlocks reporter salary subsidies of 35% and reader tax credits of up to $75 per year in subscriptions paid.

The drift of Beeby’s article is that the news subsidies are bad —a debate for another day— and expensive to administer. Also, he says the costs of the entire program are not transparent because so little effort is made to publicize them.

The “$275 million” paid out in labour subsidies (spread out over six years, it’s worth mentioning) are reported in the government’s annual tax expenditure report.

The annual cost of the reporter subsidy was about $35 million until the government almost doubled its cost last year in response to the shortfall in anticipated news licensing payments from Google and Facebook. (The subsidy was boosted from 25% to 35% of a mid-range reporter salary of $85,000).

In addition to the $35 million labour subsidy, the reader tax credit has cost the public treasury about $15 million per year. With little fanfare, that subscription tax program expired on December 31, 2024.

The tax expenditure of a third QCJO program —-tax write-offs for private donations to non-profit journalism—- has never been released if it has even been tracked.

As for the Panel members’ compensation, Beeby notes that annual billings to the taxpayer have averaged $47,000. That’s divided among its five members. Most of their time is spent reviewing news articles submitted by QCJO applicants seeking to demonstrate “ongoing” (i.e. frequent) and “original” (i.e. not harvested from other sources) reporting of “news” (not opinion) that is of “general interest” (i.e. not niche or specialized). 

I’m advised by panel Chair Colette Brin that its members bill the government on an hourly basis, with detailed timesheets, against the federal daily tariff of $275 to $450.

Since the program’s inception, the five panel members representing regions across the country have met online eighteen times rather than convene in Ottawa, except for a single in-person meeting costing $8000 in total travelling expenses.

Spitballing the three-part QCJO program cost at $90 million annually, the Panel’s administrative costs are 0.05% (half of a tenth of one per cent). The CRA did not provide Beeby with a costing of civil servants processing tax claims.

On the other hand, as Beeby points out, the lack of the government’s interest in pro-active transparency about the identity of the program recipients is baffling.  

The Revenue Canada website does identify 191 news outlets whose readers are eligible for the now-expired QCJO reader tax credit (and therefore also the labour subsidy), but it does not reveal the unpaywalled news sites that only collect the labour subsidy. There may be as many as another 200 recipient news outlets basking in anonymity. As the reader tax credit has expired, it’s possible the list of 191 news outlets will disappear from public view.

The panel itself asked for more transparency as far back as 2019. 

So have news organizations. Asked for comment, Paul Deegan of News Media Canada told MediaPolicy that “transparency is a necessary precondition for trust and accountability. We fully support making the list of QCJOs public, and we have asked the Government of Canada to do so.”

By comparison the $20 million per year Local Journalism Initiative, administered directly by Heritage Canada rather than Revenue Canada, requires recipient news organizations to identify the reporter subsidy on their mastheads. 

In addition to identifying recipient news organizations so that readers can reach their own conclusions about accepting subsidies, there is the absence of employment and subscriber data that would permit public analysis of the programs’ effectiveness. 

Did the $75 reader tax credit bring in new readers, or just subsidize the existing news junkies? Are labour-subsidized news organizations still laying off reporters or have numbers stabilized?

Transparency is the low hanging fruit in any public policy, especially a controversial one. It’s a harsh judgment on this federal government for not taking the simple steps here.

***

Here are two rabbit holes to dive down this weekend.

The first is an excellent backgrounder by Matt Stoller on the up-for-grabs US Congressional ban on TikTok, now delayed 90 days by President Trump. If you want a deeper (and Canadian) perspective, check out law professor Jon Penney’s guest column in the Globe and Mail.

The second is a Broadcast Dialogue podcast interview of Brodie Fenlon. The CBC Editor-in-Chief has many candid things to say, including some illuminating comments on the “niche casting” challenge for CBC News to meet younger audiences fragmented across the Internet, as well as TV viewers whose portal to content is the app menu embedded in foreign-made smart televisions.

***

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