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CAB President Kevin Desjardins says Canadian broadcasting needs a new regulatory bargain

Kevin Desjardins appearing before a Senate committee in 2022.

March 25, 2025

Kevin Desjardins, the President of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, is a zookeeper.

This is not to suggest that our private broadcasters are wild beasts. But they are a diverse menagerie that includes the big cats Rogers, Québecor, and Bell as well as all manner of independent broadcasters in radio, television and streaming, from single-station owners to cross-Canadian networks like Global TV. They don’t all want the same thing, they all want to eat, and given the opportunity they just might take a bite out of the animal in the next cage.

Desjardins is the broadcasters’ unassuming chief spokesperson, the fellow who checks his ego at the door, listens to them, and goes forth to advocate for the industry in measured tones to politicians and journalists who routinely vilify his more notorious animals.

Nobody who can read a CRTC report still contends that broadcasters make easy money (the CAB does not represent the cable operations of the big cats). Meanwhile the unregulated American streamers and Big Tech advertising businesses have broken into the kitchen and are eating the zoo’s food supply.

That means Desjardins gets more public attention now when he says that the decades-old regulatory bargain made between broadcasters and government to spend on money-losing news programming and CanCon drama needs to be revisited.

The CRTC is half-way through a series of policy proceedings (now suspended for the duration of the federal election campaign) that are supposed to strengthen the financing and prominence of Canadian media content while “equitably” distributing the obligations upon US streamers and Canadian broadcasters.

Streamers and broadcasters both say “equitable” means “less.” Canadian public interest groups and even some of Desjardins’ own members dispute that.

Where and how the Commission eventually strikes that balance won’t be fully known for another year, a very eventful year.

MediaPolicy spoke to Desjardins earlier this month:

MediaPolicy: I guess we should start with the urgent. What does Trump and trade war mean for Canadian broadcasting?

Kevin Desjardins: Overall, the economic chaos that has been created through the Trump administration’s tariffs and trade posturing have been the most notable impact. If these America-first policies end up leading to a recession that will likely have an immediate impact on advertising revenues for broadcasters.

From the point of view of tariffs, we haven’t seen anything that immediately affects the sector. But I think there is concern in the longer term as we look at trade issues.

We see the cozy relationship that the largest tech players have had with the Trump administration, and we know the extent to which those global tech companies and streaming platforms have dug in to resist any level of Canadian regulation being placed upon them. They think that making use of the service production industry in Canada [by filming US shows here] is sufficient.

At this point, the largest players in the global advertising business are Google and Meta, and tech is in the process of swallowing Hollywood. If there is a trade war coming, we believe that those global tech and streaming companies will be on the American side of the table, as they were in the CUSMA trade negotiations.

MP: Let’s talk about the CBC. One of the policy issues that pops up over and over again is the overlap or competition between private and public broadcasting. Even if CBC went completely ad-free, there would still be public/private competition for audiences. An ad-free CBC could even be a net negative for private broadcasters. Given that some competition or overlap seems unavoidable, how might CBC and private broadcasting better keep out of each other’s way? Or at least complement each other better?

KD: The CBC is always a bit of a fraught discussion for us, and certainly within the current political climate. There’s some diversity of opinion within our membership as to how to deal with the CBC and Radio-Canada.

But the essence of what we can all agree on is that if there is a role for the public broadcaster, then they have to act like a public broadcaster. And that means they should be driven by their public service mandate, and not by market-based decisions.

The easiest way to clarify this distinction is to get the CBC out of the advertising market. Advertising revenue is additive for the CBC on top of their Parliamentary appropriation, but it is the lifeblood of commercial broadcasters.

The CBC’s continued presence in the ad market distorts that market, and the CBC’s purpose in the Canadian media ecosystem. If they weren’t chasing ad dollars, they would be less likely to spend time competing with private broadcasters for popular programming or talent and focusing their efforts on the largest markets.

And moreover, the CBC should have a greater role in fulfilling some of the cultural policy goals found in the Broadcasting Act. Let private broadcasters be driven by their audiences, and the public broadcaster can fill in places that the market alone doesn’t support.

MP: As part of that, what is the importance of a backstop function of CBC where the private broadcasters recede or fail?

KD: I don’t think it’s a healthy approach to see the CBC as a backstop. In some ways, that lets people off the hook from actually addressing the issues that are holding private broadcasters back from being as successful and as responsive to their audiences as they want to be.

And to my earlier point, I think that market concerns can drive the CBC’s decisions on where and how it provides coverage. I share some of the concerns that our colleagues on the print and digital side have when they see the CBC moving into local markets and competing for local ad revenues.

And it was highly curious to me when the CBC announced their intentions with the compensation money from Google, flowing through the Canadian Journalism Collective. They listed out a number of “underserved” markets where CAB members had already invested significant time and resources to set up community news portals. It seemed as though CBC looks at a market as “underserved” simply because they are not present there.

MP: OK, so let’s talk about the future of private television. The pessimistic view is that the old business model has been smashed to pieces by streamers taking Canadian audiences and hoarding US programming rights, while Big Tech has gobbled up our Canadian ad revenue. And that Canadian broadcasters are just coasting the long decline to their inevitable demise. The more optimistic view is that conventional TV and cable distribution are still the first choice of boomers and should be for another decade or so, that leaves time to establish a replacement business model. Let’s blue sky: what does that model look like?

KD: At this point, it’s hard to look even a few years down the road to see where the sector is headed, especially given the pace of change globally as tech and streaming advance quickly. Certainly, the foreign tech giants are sucking the vast majority of ad dollars out of the Canadian economy, and we effectively have a trade deficit in our media market.

But I don’t see broadcasting in Canada as being on a road to inevitable demise. And I don’t think the CAB’s members are throwing in the towel.

There’s still billions of dollars of ad revenue and subscription revenue out there for Canadian services to compete for. And Canadian broadcasters still provide an important place for those programs and events that need to reach a broader audience.

Look at the 4 Nations Faceoff hockey final. Between English and French broadcasts and streaming, you’re looking at more than seven million viewers tuned in live to an event, with a very specific Canadian point of view. There’s still lots of value that Canadian-owned broadcasters provide.

If I look ahead, things are obviously going to change, and we need a regulator that allows Canadian businesses to adapt and change as quickly as our global competitors.

I also see how tech companies have this knack for “inventing” digital versions of things that already exist. I think about the hype around [free advertising streaming television] channels [like Paramount’s Pluto TV or Fox’s Tubi], which are essentially just linear channels delivered digitally. And it makes me think about the next thing that consumers are pushing for with “bundling” of streaming services, not unlike how we have bundled programming services [in the cable package] for decades.

I also see that there’s already a push from several Canadian cable distributors to bundle streaming services with their programming services, which might be a way to bring cord-cutters and cord-nevers back into the Canadian system.

All of the foreign streaming services have been increasing their prices globally, not just in Canada. That’s why Conan O’Brien jokingly congratulated Netflix at the Oscars on their “18 price increases this year.” It’s not because of any of their horseshit talking points about a “streaming tax”, but because now that they have reached a certain level of customers around the world, their business model is now about squeezing more money out of each one.

Fundamentally, I reject the notion that somehow Canadian broadcasters are in peril because they haven’t been sufficiently “innovative”. I look at the digital products that they are offering, and they are absolutely providing a great experience for Canadian audiences.

But you can’t deny the simple fact that Canadian broadcasters compete with global platforms, who have access to infinite amounts of capital from around the world, and who need to operate at that global level. Our pool of accessible capital is more limited because of ownership rules, and then our members are expected to support a plethora of cultural policy goals that fundamentally haven’t changed since Sidney Crosby was a toddler.

Canadian broadcasters are willing to invest in Canadian programming and local programming in a way that global streamers won’t, but any investor needs to know that there is a business case for those investments. I think the CRTC never fully appreciated that fundamental reality, because the assumption was always that the broadcasting business was doing fine. Now that the challenges are quite existential, the Commission needs to better situate themselves in their role as an industrial regulator and think about the general health and viability of the Canadian-owned and controlled sector.

MP: We haven’t talked about radio yet. It seems radio is swimming to keep its head above water in the Internet’s attention economy. I thought Bell passed a cruel judgment on its future when it sold those 45 stations. If we get driverless cars it might be the end of a great medium. But then you look at audio streaming: music and talk radio are more popular than ever, so the demand for audio is bigger than ever. How does radio adapt, or is it just living out its old age?

KD: I think that radio’s reach continues to be vastly underestimated. It’s still relevant, and yes, there are literally millions of young people listening to the radio every day across the country.

The challenge is that all of the additional competition in the advertising business, there’s a disconnect now between radio’s reach and where advertisers are spending.

Many of our members are out there in the digital space, either with streaming over apps or packaging their content for the podcast audience. Often, those digital ad dollars don’t make up for the losses on the linear side.

But radio remains incredible relevant at the community level. They are the ones supporting local charities and events, and during the many natural disasters we’ve seen in recent years, radio has stayed on the air when the power went out or cell service went down.

MP: Regarding the CRTC’s new consultation on audio, do you think the Commission hears your concerns about the viability of radio?

KD: Fundamentally, I think that the regulatory bargain has been broken for years, and the Commission is the last to recognize this.

The rationale for regulating the broadcasting sector was the scarcity of spectrum to send out your signal. In exchange for being granted that spectrum, you agreed to certain rules and obligations to fulfill cultural policy goals.

But now that an infinite amount of content from around the world is always immediately available through the internet, and it is broadcast quality, how can the Commission continue to cling to those old rules?

The Commission will point to the Diversity of Voices rules in their decisions, and it makes me want to pull out my hair. Because it is abundantly evident that there is no shortage of “voices” in the content marketplace. It’s such an example of regulating by looking at the rearview mirror rather than the road ahead.

That’s what we saw with the most recent audio notice, which seemed to suggest their “interim view” was status quo for the rules on Canadian radio, plus additional content quotas. But when it comes to the foreign streamers, their interim views are very quiet, if they are there at all.

It’s completely out of step with the reality of what Canadian listeners want. We see that [on streaming platforms] Canadians are choosing to consume about 10% CanCon, which is about where sales of recorded music stood historically. But our [radio] quotas are 35% and up to 40%, and there seems to be no appetite for even having the discussion if those levels make sense.

In fact, there seems to be some sense that the 10% figure is the problem, and keeping our quota levels so much higher is part of the solution. It’s absurd.

And from the point of view of the artists, there are infinitely more ways for them to get their music out and to be discovered. They can get placed on a curated playlist, and they can use their own social media channels to share their music and promote themselves. Radio is one piece of the puzzle to break artists, but it continues to bear the highest burden.

And yet, the regulatory bargain that was established for the satellite radio operators nearly twenty years ago seems to be the path that they are pursuing. Just pay more and play whatever you want.

There’s also the modernization of the MAPL rules, and again, we’re concerned that the Commission is going to make it harder for Canadian artists to qualify. If they take out the “P” of that equation, and make a song need two-out-of-three points to be considered sufficiently “Canadian”, it’s going to make things harder to qualify, not easier.

Basically, it all comes down to, if the artist is Canadian, it is CanCon. I don’t understand why there’s such resistance to this. The Commission should embrace this, because if they are as “consumer-focused” as they have claimed in recent years, having rules that tell Canadians that Canadian artists aren’t Canadian will only serve to undermine their legitimacy.

MP: Looking at the umbrella organization that is the CAB, you have something like 68 different members that represent such divergent, sometimes conflicting interests. The big TV broadcasters whose parent companies control cable access are in the same tent as small independents who need that access and the opportunity to make money. Big broadcasters are gouging out each other’s eyes to buy the most popular US programming. And you domicile different content businesses that do better or worse under the current regulatory rules. How do you get anything done?

KD: Every member-based association is a balancing act. There are often divergent opinions, and this is especially the case in an industry association. Our members are highly competitive with one another, and we at the CAB have to respect that. It’s not called “show friends”, it’s “show business”.

Our challenge is to make a convincing case to our members that they are better off singing from the same song book. That many voices with the same message creates resonance, and I think that we’ve done reasonably well in recent years of helping to provide that value to our members. If they don’t entirely align with each other, we hope that we can help them find enough common ground within any legislative or regulatory process.

Building consensus isn’t easy, but as Bruce Cockburn sang: “Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight.”

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – Kate Taylor on CanCon – Steven Guilbeault, the sequel – Best Canadian movies

March 22, 2025

Last week MediaPolicy published a new interview with Globe and Mail culture columnist and reviewer Kate Taylor.

The veteran reporter has lead a double life as a Canadian arts journalist and novelist, which arguably makes her especially qualified to comment on Canadian content.

***

Culture & Identity minister Steven Guilbeault – Photo credit Canadian Press

We have a new Liberal Minister of Heritage (rebranded “Culture and Identity”) and it’s a familiar face: Steven Guilbeault who served in the role from 2019 to 2021.

During that first tour of duty he tabled the first version of the Online Streaming Act, Bill C-10.

He also instigated two big public consultations. The first was on the regulation of online harms which invited comment on an edgy, German-inspired model of content take-downs and appeals (later junked and reprised in Bill C-63 with platform self regulation of “awful but lawful” posts on social media and steeper penalties for criminal hate posts). The second initiative, completed under his successor Pablo Rodriguez, was what became the Online News Act, Bill C-18.

That Liberal menu of Internet regulation continues to get high support in public polling.

News of Guilbeault’s appointment provoked the twitter ire of his nemesis, law professor Michael Geist. One of the criticisms was that Guilbeault “delivered the original [Online Streaming Act] with disastrous, inaccurate communications.”

That’s harsh, if partly true. In May 2021 Guilbeault did mangle two English-language national interviews three days apart on CBC and CTV, the latter an old-school grilling from Evan Solomon who recently got the nod as a star candidate for the Carney Liberals.

But people forget that Guilbeault followed up those interviews one week later with a very strong performance at the Heritage Committee. In English and French.

Whatever the case, it’s not clear if Guilbeault is just keeping the chair warm in Culture and Identity because the uber-competent Pascale St-Onge is retiring from politics and perhaps if the Liberals are re-elected we’ll see yet another MP from the island of Montréal in the role (following Melanie Joly, Rodriguez, Guilbeault, Rodriguez, St.-Onge and Guilbeault).

But the Culture and Identity file has only one priority in the coming session of Parliament: the CBC. More precisely, the English-language CBC. That will take a Minister with smarts but mostly great instincts. It will take a Minister from the rest of Canada.

***

51st state? Here’s two thumbs up for two Canadians, journalists Scott Roxborough and Etan Vlessing of the Hollywood Reporter. They’ve put together a new list of the greatest 51 Canadian flicks of all time. Check your seen-it score, make your watch list.

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I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

“Success is based on trusting our artists”: culture reporter Kate Taylor on CanCon then and now.

Kate Taylor, arts Columnist, for the Globe and Mail, is photographed at the Globe and Mail Centre on April 19, 2023. (Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail)

March 19, 2025

Two years ago I was mulling over deep thoughts about the “why” and “what is” of Canadian culture when I noticed that the Globe and Mail reporter Kate Taylor had just published a column on precisely that topic.

Upon reading Taylor I thought to myself, “yeah, like she said.”

Taylor is unusual in that her day job since 1995 has been writing about Canadian media, arts and culture for the Globe, while her side gig has been authoring award-winning novels. You write about what you know.

Another side-gig she had was in 2009 —the year before Netflix began streaming in Canada—- when she took a year’s leave to accept an Atkinson Fellowship, the published output was titled “Northern Lights: Keeping Canadian Culture Ablaze,” available as a download here.

She grappled with the eternal challenges of making popular Canadian culture and the broadcasting regulation that we rely on to solve the riddle of keeping our culture blazing in spite of the American cultural giant that threatens to block out our sun.

Here are just a few timeless headlines in Northern Lights:

“Is a national Canadian culture important?“

“Digital Waterloo for Cancon rules“

“How to make the CBC viable in the digital age“

MediaPolicy asked Taylor what she thinks now.

***

MediaPolicy: I was re-reading your 2010 Atkinson series and found it remarkable not only how accurately you foresaw the challenges faced by Canadian mass media in the decade to follow but how fresh the discussion seems in 2025. Fifteen years is a long time. What do you make of how Canadian media policy has used its time in the intervening years?

Kate Taylor: The Stephen Harper Conservatives wouldn’t touch these issues. Their Heritage minister James Moore used to say they are important to the broadcasting industry but not to the public. Harper himself poisoned the file by labelling cultural levies a “Netflix tax.”

Then, when they had the opportunity, the Liberals moved but too slowly. Sometimes you don’t want to be first out of the gate, and the Europeans have now set precedents. For example, content quotas on Netflix’s European catalogue, that would be useful to Canada. But it took the Liberals a long time to find a minister who could politically champion the ideals behind cultural protections. They did not get it done and dusted before we were faced with the current situation, a trade war just as the CRTC is trying to implement a long-overdue update of the Canadian content regime to include the foreign streaming services.

I note that in the intervening years, the idea of a cash levy on Internet service providers, an obvious update on the levy on cable providers, has been abandoned. That’s too bad. That would have been one way to raise production funds from Canadian-owned sources, especially to support local news which has suffered badly from the collapse of local newspapers.

MP: There’s been a flurry of activity by the CRTC since the Online Streaming Act was enacted in April 2023. What do you make of some of their rulings? The good, the bad, the intriguing?

KT: I agree that the foreign streamers should be asked to contribute to production funds. I leave others to figure out whether the CRTC’s five per cent is fair or not, but I do note that the $200-million total is chicken feed for these companies. I don’t agree with asking them to help pay for local news; that seems opportunistic since it’s not news content with which they have flooded the Canadian market.

The CRTC has yet to deal with any quota on Canadian content in the streamers’ catalogues or for music services, and promotion and discoverability are as important as any content quota. It’s possible that if you got a healthy co-production relationship going, all this would be unnecessary because the streamers would want to promote programs in which they have a stake, but if you look to Europe, especially France, you can see how an insistence on quotas is producing some excellent programming.

The stumbling block is who owns the intellectual property in the show, since historically the Canadian system has insisted that the intellectual property for programming that benefits from the levies remains with Canadians. I would imagine that can be solved by some kind of negotiation on sharing percentages of intellectual property.

The CRTC is now also beginning to address the definition of Canadian content. Many players want it loosened; makes it less cumbersome for them. These debates are usually about economic self-interest. Others argue we should switch from our industrial model –– Canadian content is content made by Canadian citizens in Canada– – to a cultural model: Canadian content tells identifiably Canadian stories and is set in Canada. I disagree. The United Kingdom uses the cultural model but we are a much less culturally homogenous place, and I think attempts to dictate or define Canadian-ness are bound to fail.

If you look at music, it’s obvious the only way to define a Canadian song is through the MAPL system or some equivalent. You are hardly going to tell songwriters their lyrics must feature Canadian references!

All systems produce the odd wacko anomaly that critics love to trumpet, but the main thing is to trust the creators. If they are Canadian, living and working in Canada, they will make Canadian content. Some of it will be bad; some of it will be great. That is the reality of cultural production.

MP: Yes, defining Canadian content seems like pinning jelly to the wall. Canadian culture is characterized by both local expression and nationally emblematic totems and stories. You’ve written about this. Care to update your views?

KT: There’s an old line from a Broadway producer: if I knew what was going to be hit, I would only do those. Cultural production is a highly risky, unpredictable business and the Hollywood model is based on huge investments spread across global markets. In trade terms, one could accuse the United States of dumping cultural product in foreign markets. Historically, it cost a Canadian broadcaster far less to buy rights to a U.S. show then to produce a Canadian one.

Canada is actually very successful in international markets – we export both English-language television and music – and I think that success is based on trusting our artists. The more freedom you have to tell your own story or sing your own song, the more likely you are to produce something that will resonate universally.

I often point to the success of Letterkenny as an example. When it first appeared I thought its satire of a particular rural Canadian culture was so specific it might not translate abroad, but it did very well in the States.

I also think audiences like to see themselves in their culture and do hunger for specific local content. Look at the success with Toronto theatre audiences of The Master Plan, a satire about planning issues in the city of Toronto.

A more powerful and ad-free CBC Gem could capitalize on this local-to-universal phenomenon.

MP: Yes that observation about the CBC was one of the take-aways I got from your Atkinson piece in 2010. You talked about the central role the CBC played in Canadian cultural production. So here we are in 2025. Let’s suppose I made you ship’s captain of English-Canadian CBC services. What are your orders?

KT: We all want the CBC to better, by which we really mean English-language television. CBC video content is a missed opportunity. We need an ad-free Canadian streaming service that offers the best of Canadian comedy, drama and documentary to viewers at home and abroad, a Brand Canada niche alternative to American streaming services.

Of course, that costs money, and if CBC managers cling to advertising it is because they don’t trust government to fill the gap consistently. To escape the politics, the CBC needs stable steady funding on a minimum of a five-year basis in return for fulfilling agreed-upon goals – rather like the Charter that governs the BBC.

Still, we need to be cautious about removing ads from the CBC so that it is not reduced to some kind of PBS North. Ratings do matter. They keep you honest and connected. There is a strong desire amongst some English-Canadian elites for the PBS model, a high-end public broadcaster fleshing out a talk-heavy news-dominated schedule with the occasional big-budget drama (always imported from the U.K. in the PBS case.) That works for the U.S. because it has a healthy private market delivering American content. In Canada, it would sideline the CBC even further, making it irrelevant to a majority of Canadians.

Also, the CBC needs to rebuild its local news capacity because of the collapse of local newspapers. That’s an example of market failure, where you want the public broadcaster to step in and provide a public good — but you need to fund it accordingly.

MP: Back to the trade war. Canada is having a nationalist moment right now and it might well be our biggest one. For sure it will last several years, so long as Trump is doing his 51st state thing. Do you see implications for Canadian attitudes towards mass media and culture?

KT: As Canadians remember that we are a separate country, perhaps that will help citizens understand why we need cultural levies and cultural protections in the face of a neighbour now exposed as a bully.

Not many citizens, including some prominent media commentators, understand how the cultural industries work, the amount of investment it takes in multiple projects to generate one hit and the way Hollywood money can buy quality and promotion in a way that is impossible to match without some kind of Canadian content system.

For decades that system produced Canadian programs and music that many Canadians enjoyed. It just needs to be updated for the streaming era.

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I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

We knew what the US was capable of. We just didn’t think it would be us.

March 15, 2025

The magic of Donald Trump is that almost anyone invited to his reality show in the Oval Office is automatically his foil and a civilized person: Trudeau, Macron, Zelensky, Starmer and maybe soon Mark Carney, all avatars of the old international rules-based order. Somewhere, somebody is making book on Trump’s soon-to-be-released diss for Canada’s 24th Prime Minister.

Yes, the civility of the old order is long gone. MAGA’s toxic masculinity is about to have a very long run. You avoided these guys in high school, but now they are in your face.

The old order was run by Americans too. Pax Americana in foreign relations. The “Washington consensus” on open markets and the elimination of tariffs. The “new world order,” ironically.

The credo was so dominant (and the US market so inviting) that in 1988 Canada laid all bets on an open trading relationship and an integrated continental economy: something Canadian governments had pursued on and off since Confederation in 1867.

So having played by America’s rules, it’s galling that Trump now wants to use tariff warfare to devastate our economy and take our jobs. Deep down we always knew the US colossus had a taste for conquest. We just didn’t think it would be us.

It’s especially grating when Trump lies to the American public, makes up fake numbers about trade deficits, counts goods but not services, and then insists that deficits are inherently unfair (except where America is in surplus).

Last weekend I posted a video of former Unifor economist Jim Stanford providing context to the US-Canada trading numbers. Here’s the detailed text version.

Stanford makes a number of important observations about size of the cross border trade deficit in goods and services and, as any first-year university student would, reminds us that a trade deficit is not a thermometer of economic health, wealth, or fair play.

“Trump’s claims that Canada is benefiting unfairly from the bilateral relationship, and is in fact subsidized by the U.S., are false,” says Stanford, “and Trump’s economic team certainly knows it.”

The US has run a global trade deficit for fifty years in a row. The gap is now approaching one trillion dollars annually. But as a percentage of American GDP, the US deficit is in modest decline to about three per cent of its economy.

What’s not often cited is the fact that the US is a global juggernaut and net winner in services —digital products, e-commerce, tourism, transportation, financial services and so on—all of which tamps down that trade deficit generated in industries that sell “goods.”

Canada is the US’s biggest export market yet our trade of goods and services is the closest to balanced of any major US trade partner.

The US sells 92 cents of goods and services to Canada for every dollar of goods and services we sell to them.

That trade “imbalance” puts us way ahead of the US benchmark of selling less than 80 cents to the dollar with its major trading partners, with nine of those other trading partners more “out of balance” than Canada.

And the south flowing of trade includes duty-free Canadian oil, gas, electricity and coal. Those vital energy products account for the majority share of the US deficit in goods. It may be that Trump wants to wean the US off of Canadian energy (although it will take years to do so) as if we were the unreliable ally.

In fact most Canadian exports to the US are raw materials and inputs to American products. That’s good for American consumers and good for American exports of finished products (including back to Canada, affirming the half-truth that Canada exports raw materials in exchange for finished products).

But commerce in goods is only half of the trade picture. In services alone, the US has a strong surplus with Canada. For decades, Hollywood boasted of the surplus-building role it plays in exporting cultural services (television shows and movies) to Canada and the world. Its Californian cousins in Big Tech are now doing the same thing in digital services.

In addition to counting services whenever measuring trade, says Stanford, the cross-border repatriation of profits and investment capital made by Canadian and American companies in each other’s markets results in an unofficial trade surplus for the US.

Another unofficial trade number that doesn’t show up in conventional statistics, says Stanford, is that Canada (and the rest of the world) buys more US government bonds than the US buys from Ottawa.

The US is mired in massive government debt but bondholders in Canada and abroad are delighted to snap up its treasury notes. That drives up the US dollar and makes US exports more costly than they might otherwise be.

Remember that when you buy Florida orange juice.

Stanford says that most economists agree that its hard to pin down the value of trade in services —which affects the calculation of trade balance— because of how easily masked that value may be:

One challenge in understanding the impact of services trade is the incomplete and approximate nature of statistics on services trade. It is harder to account for cross-border transaction in services (much of which occurs digitally) than to measure cross-border flows of physical merchandise (which is regulated and logged at border crossings).

Another factor is the ambiguity of intra-corporate accounting for transactions between non-arms-length subsidiaries of international corporations; intra-firm accounting for items like administration costs, intellectual property charges, and profits can be easily manipulated, often motivated by efforts to reduce corporate tax liabilities (by artificially shifting bottom-line profits to subsidiaries located in lower-tax jurisdictions).

Officially, the US export of services to Canada is significant and in surplus to the tune of $32 billion. In fact that US surplus with Canada ——what US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick would label as “trade dumping” were it the other way around—— is the US’s second biggest service surplus with any of its trading nations.

Oh, and the largest US service surplus is with….hold your breath now….Ireland.

Ireland.

Why is that? One big reason is that Big Tech books a chunk of revenues and profits in its holding companies parked in low-tax Ireland, a country that taxes foreign corporations at half of American and Canadian rates and one-quarter on earnings from intellectual property.

The holding companies technically own the intellectual property for Big Tech conglomerates that pay themselves for their own IP assets to reduce taxes on revenue earned all over the world.

That’s my parsed version of what Stanford has to say.

His prescription will sound similar to things you have already heard from others:

[We] need to include aggressive efforts to expand trade links with other countries; equally aggressive efforts to reorient Canadian production around domestic (rather than export) markets; emergency fiscal measures to support domestic spending power and household financial stability in the wake of industrial disruption and unemployment (potentially funded in part with revenues from export taxes and/or tariffs imposed by Canada in the event of a trade war); and a national strategy to build alternative domestically-focused industries (including affordable housing, sustainable energy, and human and caring services) to fill the void left by a downturn in export industries.

This is a daunting scenario, but not impossible.

***

Over the past four years of posts to MediaPolicy.ca I have written about US-Canada trade relationship in cultural products.

The narrative is always a story of Canadian legislative initiatives and the corresponding US trade threats.

There are three books that are helpful to read if you are interested.

In 2004 Peter Grant and Chris Wood published “Blockbusters and Trade Wars: Popular Culture in a Globalized World.” It’s a superb explainer but begs to be updated. The analysis in Part One (the economics of the global cultural economy) and Part Three (US trade power) still rings true.

In 2019 Richard Stursberg published “The Tangled Garden: A Canadian Cultural Manifesto in the Digital Age.” The third chapter on “The Mulroney Years” is a good read because Stursberg was a senior civil servant and insider in the midst of the US-Canada free trade deal that set the rules in cultural trade for the next generation.

Gary Neil’s 2019 “Canadian Culture in a Globalized World” explains the mechanics of how these trade deals work and impact culture.

Did I say three books? A fourth is my 2024 “Canada vs California: how Ottawa took on Netflix and the streaming giants.” You’ll recognize a lot from the other three books, summarized in Chapter 1.

Also, here are some MediaPolicy posts that cover the thorny US-Canada trade relationship in culture:

325. A “Canada First” trade policy for Canadian culture – January 28, 2025

264. Catching Up on MediaPolicy – US Reps rattle trade sabres over #C11 – Québec Loi 57 breaks new ground in regulating online harms – CRTC relief for Corus and Québecor – May 19, 2024

212. Catching Up on MediaPolicy.ca: Fox News gets CRTC reprieve, unblocking Ezra, US Congress threatens Canada – September 21, 2023

189. The US Trade Bear, Red in Tooth and Claw – May 26, 2023

159. Catching up on MediaPolicy.ca – Postmedia layoffs – Rogers Shaw update – Home Depot gave your email to Facebook – US DOJ targets Google’s AdTech – US trade threats, again. January 29, 2023

156. The billion-dollar cultural trade war that was: the 1999 Canada-US split-run magazine dispute – January 21, 2023

152. The half-billion dollar trade war that wasn’t. The story of Country Music Television – January 5, 2023

149. The American shakedown of Canadian cultural sovereignty is the real ‘trade irritant’ – December 16, 2022

***

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

To broadcasters’ dismay, CRTC’s radio consultation doesn’t budge on airplay quotas

March 13, 2025

This week, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters let howl a primal scream of protest against the CRTC’s recent notice of consultation on radio broadcasting and audio streaming. In an open letter the CAB says the commission’s notice, full of “preliminary views” on key regulatory points, “absolutely missed the mark” and is so bad it should be rescinded and the CRTC should go back to the drawing board.

The CAB voiced a similar if toned-down protest in December 2022 when the commission issued its review of commercial radio. But that was more than two years ago in a declining radio industry. At the time, the commission promised to look at radio with fresh eyes once the Online Streaming Act was enacted.

Continue reading at Cartt.ca…

***

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Catching up on MediaPolicy: why we’re so funny – no Netflix taxes anymore – a Québec media merger ?

March 8, 2025

I have video clips to recommend.

If by some miracle you missed CBC host Jeff Douglas’ reprise of his 2000 “I am Canadian” video, I think you will enjoy “We are Canadian.” (click above).

Also, Friends of Canadian Media released a new campaign video this week: “FU__ the CBC.”

Yes vulgar, but the humour works (says me, who once considered calling this blog “I call bullshit.”).

Maybe it’s our Canadian superpower to punch above our weight in comedy, thanks to a guileless working class humour that has inspired 22 Minutes, the McKenzie Brothers, Corner Gas, Red Green, Trailer Park Boys, Shorsey, et cetera, et cetera.

Have fun.

***

One of the weirder things on Donald Trump’s trade list is Canadian GST paid on subscriptions to US streaming services. Yes, that GST.

As of this week, one less Canadian pays GST on a Netflix Canada subscription. I cut the cord this week. Sorry Ted, call Donald.

That provides me with a segue to recommend a 30-minute video explainer on tariffs and trade from Centre of Future Work whiz Jim Stanford (click below).

Economist Jim Stanford

Trump’s media trade hit list goes beyond the federal sales tax. MediaPolicy posted a few months ago about the Digital Services Tax that so torments the President and his Tech oligarchs.

Since this trade war will end in a trade negotiation, Canada needs to establish its own Canada First agenda (I claim trademark on this, Pierre).

Previously I wrote about the Canadian cultural exemption and this week I posted about an old idea that is new again; extending corporate tax deductibility laws governing analog media into the online space.

***

Back in August, the Montréal digital news daily LaPresse and the six Québec regional outlets operating as the non-profit Coopérative Nationale de l’information Indépendante (CN2i) announced they were exploring “collaboration,” talks that might lead to merger.

There’s no outcome to those discussions as yet: but Pierre-Karl Pélédeau’s Québécor made a dramatic intervention last month by publicly expressing frustration that an exclusivity and confidentiality agreement between La Presse and CN2i was keeping Pélédeau from pitching a superior offer.

CN2i newsrooms are staffed by 145 journalists and Le Devoir reporting on the private talks speculates that these reporters (but not their non-editorial colleagues) might wind up in a merged La Presse newsroom. CN2i and La Presse already share editorial content and customer service.

There are old ties that bind. Up until 2015, La Presse shared a corporate roof under the Desmarais family’s Power Corporation with the six CN2i dailies in Ottawa-Gatineau (Le Droit), Trois-Rivières (Le Nouvelliste), Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean (Le Quotidien), Québec City (Le Soleil), Sherbrooke (La Tribune) and Granby (La Voix de l’Est).

CN2i wants to go all-digital by 2026, making it a natural fit with LaPresse. It’s a sign of the times that in a media-mad francophone environment, with extra provincial subsidies stacked on top of federal aid, the regional dailies are looking for synergies and scale to remain viable.

Québécor can offer synergies too: in addition to broadcasting properties, it operates Le Journal de Montréal and Le Journal de Québec. Pélédeau wants to make CN2i an offer but has been told nicely to cool his heels.

***

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Buy Canadian (media): “close the tax loophole” revisited

Inauguration Day: the Trump-Tech photo that just won’t quit

March 5, 2025

Canadian news outlets have chosen an opportune moment to revive a long standing proposal to update a federal tax law that incentivizes Canadian advertisers to patronize Canadian online media instead of US tech.

The decades-old section 19 of the Income Tax Act allows businesses to deduct corporate expenditures on advertising placed in Canadian print, radio and television media, but not their US media counterparts.

However the law has never been revised to include ads purchased on digital media, the result being that a Canadian advertiser can deduct the cost of an ad placed in the online nytimes.com but not the New York Times print edition.

The idea of extending the Buy-Canada tax law to online media resurfaces in Ottawa from time to time.

Well if there was ever a time, we’re currently loading for a trade war.

While the Internet loophole in the Tax Act can be closed with the stroke of a Parliamentary pen, it will certainly move to the top of the Trump-Tech Oligarch hit list that already includes our digital services tax, the Online Streaming Act, the Online News Act and even the GST on Hollywood streaming subscriptions.

The tech bros including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai have cast their lot with Donald Trump, willing to become protagonists in a gambit for political sovereignty and not just a garden variety trade dispute.

Assuming a tax law update can survive our current trade war —-we may be living in a world of steep cross-border tariffs for some time —- this kind of Buy Canada tax law raises the question of “buy which Canadian product”?

There is one big digital advertising option ready to go: Canadian news and information websites as well as a host of sports and entertainment streaming sites operated by Canadian television companies. Those homegrown media outlets provide a broad reach to millions of Canadians with purchasing power on a national, regional and local level.

But as a long term media policy, closing the 19.1 loophole would do much better if there were Canadian alternatives to Google and Meta’s products offering low cost and data-enriched ad-targeting.

We should keep in mind that the analog version of the advertising tax law that currently drives Canadian advertisers to our own radio, television and print newspaper media was particularly effective because it was based on different technological and practical realities.

It’s never been practical for American print newspapers to compete with Canadian print dailies in a meaningful way, so the US has always let sleeping dogs lie and turned a blind eye to our tax incentives.

On radio and television, US Congress long ago mirrored Canadian tax laws to incentivize American advertisers to patronize US border stations instead of Canadian border stations. That was probably because Hollywood supported a strong Canadian television industry that re-sold US television programming after Canadian networks paid for territorial distribution rights north of the border. Canadian networks needed Canadian advertising revenue in order to afford US programming.

But the analog situation is not quite the same in Internet-based media distribution that does not need to obey any of the commercial, practical or technological realities described above.

US tech products are direct-to-Canadian-consumer. They are not retailed through Canadian media networks. There are no Canadian Googles or Metas that Americans want to keep out of their own market (except Shopify, which explains CEO Tobi Lutke opposing Canadian tariff retaliation).

Under the ordinary circumstances of trade peace, Parliamentarians and Heritage Canada officials have been cautious about embracing a new tax policy, weighing up the pros and cons.

But this is war. Or at least trade war. If Canadian politicians are looking for a muscular trade strategy in the face of Trump tariffs, closing the digital loophole on this tax incentive is available.

***

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

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.”

***

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

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.

***

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

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.

***

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

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