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Catching Up on MediaPolicy – the new season of Stursberg’s CBC – the federal budget – Le Devoir’s Meta work around – Australia will regulate Netflix

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Are you not entertained? Richard Stursberg wants CBC audiences to say yes

November 8, 2025

This week MediaPolicy posted a guest column from Richard Stursberg, the former Vice President of CBC’s English language service, reflecting on the public broadcaster’s recently announced Five Year Plan.

You won’t be sorry you spent five minutes with it. It’s a compelling read. Stursberg is one of the few commentators who puts as much emphasis on CBC’s entertainment programming as he does the news service.

Stursberg sets a simple performance bar for the CBC: is it good television? And then he offers a hypothetical new season(s) of great shows that could meet that standard and bring a real buzz to the CBC’s CanCon offerings, while satisfying our Canadian cultural cravings.

The CBC just got its $150 million booster shot in the federal budget. That money fulfilled an election promise. The 11% increase to the $1.4 billion Parliamentary grant (70% of CBC’s overall $2 billion revenue) won’t necessarily go into a bigger budget for entertainment programming: the Five Year Plan prioritizes local and regional news reporting. But it does give the public broadcaster more options.

The CBC’s new money was the Carney government’s sole increase to cultural funding in this week’s budget. Culture and Identity minister Steven Guilbeault told the Globe and Mail that the public broadcaster had also been spared from the “15% savings” spending review announced by the government several months ago.

Budget announcements for the Canada Media Fund, the Canada Music Fund, TV5MondePlus, Telefilm, the National Film Board and Special Measures for Journalism (community weeklies) are all multi-year extensions of supplemental funding previously put in place by the Justin Trudeau government.

On the other hand, the budget document includes projected cuts to Canadian Heritage expenditures which might be either civil servant salaries or “recalibrated” program spending. Guilbeault pointed out to the Globe that the $93 million savings figure was 5%, not 15% of expenditures.

The numbers on recalibrated programs might include the scheduled reduction of the federal labour tax credit from 35% to 25% of journalist salaries on January 1, 2027. As well, Guilbeault told the Globe the government was exploring a merger of the Canada Media Fund, Telefilm and the National Film Board.

The budget document included a brief note that changes are in the works for the Canadian Periodical Fund that subsidizes weeklies and magazines (the government only told me that the details would be communicated at a later date).

The status quo on cultural funding shouldn’t be surprising, given other priorities in 2025.

Still, TV and radio news outlets were miffed that the government didn’t end its arbitrary exclusion of broadcasting companies from accessing federal aid for their online news websites that —-but for the television and radio properties operated by their parent companies—- would be eligible for the $75 million pool of journalist salary subsidy available to all online news outlets.

***

There’s a useful explainer posted in Paula Clark’s Substack about the Blacklock’s Reporter litigation with the federal government over Parks Canada’s sharing of a paywall password obtained from an individual subscription, giving unlimited access to every article in the Reporter’s database.

The watchdog news website was in court last month, appealing a controversial trial ruling in favour of the government which appeared to bless the government’s actions and give short shrift to copyright protection.

Among the many legal frailties of the trial judge’s decision is that it appears to expand the public right of “fair use” sharing of quotations or text snippets to authorize redistribution of full articles and, thanks to the password sharing, Blacklock’s entire news archive.

It’s a legally complicated appeal, which is why’s Clark’s piece is helpful.

***

As you know, in 2023 Meta responded to Parliament passing the Online News Act by banning most news content from Facebook and Instagram in Canada (a news outlet can pay Meta to post content as an advertisement).

The ban hit the many Canadian news outlets relying heavily upon Meta platforms for content distribution. While the news blackout probably impacted free sites harder, paywalled sites were affected too.

The marketing director at Le Devoir is claiming a measurable success in making up for the lost distribution by working a lot harder at its direct engagement with readers, especially demonstrating the value of content to new subscribers.

Meta hasn’t entirely given up on Canadian news journalism of course. Just last week The Hub published a well argued commentary advocating against the federal government pursuing a digital sovereignty strategy. Meta sponsored the article.

***

The Australian government has moved the yardsticks on implementing something like Canada’s Online Streaming Act for Netflix and the other foreign video streamers, a move it has been mulling over since early 2023.

The legislation hasn’t been tabled with details yet, but the announcement suggests the streamers will have to spend 7.5% of their Australian revenues on local entertainment programming. Australian-owned television companies are already required to meet spending quotas for local content and they see the new law as a measure to “level the playing field.”

The news coverage of the announcement is unclear as to the impact of the legislation, as Netflix already invests in video production shot in Australia. It may depend upon the definition of local Australian content.

Significantly for Canadian observers, Australia is not proposing that the foreign streamers make financial contributions to Australian programming through contributions to third party production funds.

A report by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation speculates on whether the announcement will provoke a reaction from the Trump administration.

***

If you have the twenty minutes, I recommend Natalia Antelava’s incendiary interview of Google’s Richard Gingras in Coda, just for sheer entertainment if not enlightenment. Gingras is Google’s former VP of News and is currently the board chair of Canada’s Village Media.

Antelava goes after Gingras for some of Google’s controversial decisions in foreign autocracies, like agreeing to Vladimir Putin’s demand to spike a voting app set up for the Russian 2021 elections by the dissident, Alexei Navalny, who later died, possibly poisoned, in a Putin prison.

However on the main interview topic of the power asymmetry between Google and the news industry, Gingras sticks to his story that Google’s relationship with publishers is collaborative, not exploitive, which requires him to engage in some grimace-inducing denialism about Google’s abuse of market power over news outlets in Search and digital advertising, both of which have been ruled illegal monopolies by US courts.

Another tidbit: Gingras claims that Google CEO Sundar Pichai was embarrassed by the now famous line-up of tech CEOs attending the Trump inauguration and suggests the photo op was “cleverly staged” by the White House.

“That’s the last photo Sundar ever wanted taken,” says Gingras. “We don’t support this administration.”

Only the ballroom.

Associated Press photo of Tech CEOs Zuckerberg, Bezos, Pichai and Musk.

***

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Are you not entertained? Richard Stursberg’s five year plan for the CBC

November 6, 2025

In October CBC President Marie-Philippe Bouchard unveiled her eagerly anticipated five year plan for the public broadcaster.

MediaPolicy commented on her map here and here. Months earlier, I also provided a platform for a number of guest columns or interviews with former CBC insiders and pundits who offered some broad brushed comments on how the CBC ought to reinvent itself, one of the nation’s great and never-ending dialogues.

One of those guest columns was from Richard Stursberg, the former CBC Vice President of English language programming, “welcome Ms.Bouchard, here’s some advice.”

Now that President Bouchard has weighed in, it’s the right time for another guest column from Stursberg, the author of The Tower of Babble: Sins, Secrets and Successes inside the CBC.

***

The CBC’s Five Year Plan

By Richard Stursberg

In 1965, Robert Fowler, the Chair of The Royal Commission on Broadcasting and The Advisory Committee on Broadcasting, noted in a much quoted observation that:

“The only thing that really matters in broadcasting is program content; all the rest is housekeeping.”

He was, of course, quite right. The measure of a successful broadcaster is the quality and popularity of its shows. All the rest – technologies, personnel, locations, financing, studios and platforms – are housekeeping, there to support programming.

Recently, the new President of the CBC, Marie-Philippe Bouchard, announced her new five year plan for the corporation, her vision for its future. It is called: Here For Canada, 2025-2030 Strategy.

The plan begins by stating – correctly – that “the core purpose of the CBC (is) ‘to contribute to shared national consciousness and identity.’” She then goes on to discuss the audiences she will target and the housekeeping measures she will employ to get there.

Her focus, she says, will be on children and youth, who she acknowledges are largely lost to digital platforms, newcomers, and “non-users and dissatisfied users”. She is planning to focus CBC’s programming on those least likely to consume it. This seems a tough assignment.

She goes on to target small towns, the North and minority language communities. Canadians, however, mostly live in large cities. Almost 60% of the population lives in the ten largest urban areas that produce 75% of the country’s economic output. Her focus on the places where Canadians are least likely to live also feels like a tough assignment.

Having established her target populations, the President describes the housekeeping measures she will employ. She proposes to be “digitally agile”, to emphasise “partnerships”, to get “closer to communities”, to expand “FAST channels”, and to”increase investments in independent productions”, among other things. These are no doubt sensible things to do; they should receive The Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

There is, however, little or no discussion in the President’s plan of programming, “the only thing that really matters in broadcasting”. There is no indication of what kinds of shows will be financed over the next five years. There is nothing in the plan that describes the types of dramas, news, documentaries or comedies that will be produced. It provides no discussion of what Canadians can expect to see, hear or read on the CBC’s many platforms.

Mme. Bouchard is not alone in providing a plan that emphasises housekeeping. Almost all of her predecessors did the same thing. Despite Robert Fowler’s caution, they have produced strategies, plans and visions that decade after decade have been preoccupied with the nuts and bolts of broadcasting, and only rarely with its content.

What, then, might a real plan look like, one centred on programming and not housekeeping?

In producing one, it would be wise to start with Mme. Bouchard’s observation that the core purpose and mandate of the CBC is “to contribute to shared national consciousness and identity”.

It must also recognise that – as the president makes clear – “social and political polarisation are on the rise, as are threats to national sovereignty”. Canada feels badly divided: the West is alienated; Quebec is flirting again with independence; indigenous people are rightly aggrieved; and the young feel deeply disadvantaged. At the same time, Canada is confronted with a belligerent and unpredictable neighbour to the south that threatens the very existence of the country. Whatever program plan is created, it must speak to the moment.

The programming must also stand out in what is a very crowded field. New, beautiful foreign shows are available everywhere There is more content than anyone can consume, and the sheer excess dictates that only the really original, dramatic, relevant and exciting will be watched, listened to or read.

By way of a simplistic formulation, let’s break shared national consciousness and identity into three key questions and see what kind of programming might speak to them. The questions are:

1. The classic: Who are we?

2. The obverse: Who are we not?

3. The Northrop Frye: Where are we?

Here For Canada: 2025-2030: The Program Strategy

Who are we?

Twenty-five years ago, the CBC released Canada: A People’s History. Its narrative connected the different periods of our history into an overall account of Canada’s national identity. It was an enormous hit.

The CBC will produce three new histories.

– An Indigenous people’s history of Canada. The history of the conquered is invariably different from that of the conquerors. For Reconciliation to be achieved, it is essential that all Canadians understand what happened. It will be dramatic and revelatory.

– A history of French Canada. The struggle to preserve French Canada’s language and culture is little known in English Canada. Understanding is the key to shared consciousness.

– A history of Western Canada. The emergence of a Western identity is not well understood in the East; its grievances, triumphs and ambitions are often met with scorn. To create a national consciousness, its story needs to be told.

With these three new histories, the CBC will reclaim its position as the principal source of broad public debate about who we are and the events that formed us. The new histories will inevitably precipitate debate. While we will try to make them as factually accurate as possible, there will surely be controversy. We welcome it. Arguing together is how we find out who we are.

Who are we not?

The answer, of course, is not Americans. Canada has historically defined itself in opposition to the United States, now perhaps more than ever. But not wanting to be American is not the same as not wanting to understand them. In the current circumstances, with the ongoing trade war and threats of annexation, it is essential to understand deeply what is happening south of the border.

The CBC will explore Canada’s relationship to the United States through comedy, news, documentaries and drama.

It will resurrect its comic exploration of the States. A new version of Rick Mercer’s Talking to Americans will be produced, with a sparkling new host.

A new half hour situation comedy will also be commissioned about a Canadian family that has to move to the heart of MAGA-land. It will be similar to Schitt’s Creek, but funnier – if that is possible. Think of it as MAGA Creek.

The news department will expand its coverage of the Republican strongholds in the Red states. It is no longer possible to understand US politics and society with reporters only in LA, New York and Washington; Canadians also need to hear what people are thinking and doing in Florida, Texas, Alabama and Utah.

The CBC will initiate new documentary and current affairs coverage of the key sectors of the MAGA movement, providing in depth explorations of American gun culture, the manosphere, evangelical Christianity, and white nationalism. They will look not only at what is happening in the US, but how these movements overlap developments in Canada. Our coverage of the Americans will focus on how what happens there matters to us.

Finally, a major dramatic series is in development about the invasion of Canada by the US. It has happened twice before.This series is set in 2029 and features tense negotiations. Doomed lovers, drone warfare, blockades, split families cyber attacks, tragedy, excitement and victory – but for whom?

Where are we?

Many of the CBC’s most successful shows have criss-crossed the country, letting us know and laugh at ourselves. The Debaters and The Rick Mercer Report showed us who we are in all our variety. The new season will bring back travelling shows that explore the country’s music, sense of humour, accents and general weirdness in all our regional variety.

A big unscripted exploration is also planned, a sort of Survivors: The Winter. It will be short on swimsuits, but long on snowstorms, frozen lakes, treachery, huskies, snowmobiles, ice fishing and bad behaviour. Where are we if not in The Great White North?

The physical country has increasingly given way to a virtual one. Canadians live more and more online, in social media, through avatars and artificial intelligence, the CBC will explore our new digital environment through news, documentaries, drama and comedy.

The news department will assign journalists to the major platforms, as they are assigned now to major cities. They will be covered as distinct places with, like all places, their own characters, myths, values and events. Their reporting will be enhanced by documentaries on how these worlds are structured, how they treat their citizens, and what they mean for Canadians’ sense of their own identity.

The CBC has a number of dramedies in development that will explore what happens when people are stuck in and cannot escape their favourite social media platforms, how they respond to falling in love with an AI based lover, and what it means to give up normal life altogether for the pleasures of a purely digital one.

These new programs will supplement the great shows the Corporation already produces.

We will also update our flagships with a broader set of views and guests. The National will be modernised; and the News Network will search out a broader set of voices. We will invite Canadians to see not just politicians and “experts” but also the vast range of thought leaders throughout the country: the zany, the ignored, the keepers of secrets, the ideologically marginal and the hilarious.

The CBC will judge the success of its five year plan on how Canadians respond to our programming. We will measure our success not just in terms of audiences, but also the debates and controversies it engenders. Our hope is to be funny, wise, difficult, exciting and unforgettable. Our ambition is to be as charming, cantankerous, funny and well informed as the country itself.

This may not be the best program strategy for the CBC in 2025-2030. It may be too ambitious, too expensive, too hard to execute or simply wrong headed. The point of it is not that it’s right but that it provides a point of departure to talk about what the CBC should be programming over the next five years.

If not this approach, then what? After all, “The only thing that really matters in broadcasting is program content; all the rest is housekeeping”.

***

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

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Canadians don’t want culture thrown under the bus – the CBC’s trust factor – Wikipedia or Wokepedia

(Some classic Canadian humour to start your weekend)

October 25, 2025

MediaPolicy previously made the observation that while Culture and Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault rejects any further trade concessions to Donald Trump on cultural legislation, we haven’t heard from Mark Carney. And probably won’t. The PM is shying away from those kind of red lines as he transitions rhetorically from “elbows up” to bended knee.

Those of you who recall your history might remember that, according to reports, Canada’s theatrical film legislation was the very last thing on the negotiating table when Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan agreed to Free Trade deal number one in 1987. It didn’t go our way.

It’s good to educate ourselves in anticipation of similar cliffhangers. Last weekend the Globe and Mail’s arts staff writers went all out with a collection of stories about the challenges for Canadian artists and media producers as Canada’s trade relationship with the United States wobbles.

Kelly Nestruck wrote about how television production, stage shows and museum exhibitions are going to manage when access to their main export market, the United States, could be up for grabs.

Brad Wheeler invited Rheostatics’ Dave Bidini to riff on his new album, as well as elbows-up nationalism (“Bumper sticker nationalism is not interesting to me,” says Bidini).

Josh O’Kane looked at the desperate state of Canadian-owned book publishing.

Kate Taylor offered a solid overview of trade deals and US retaliation (and trade law wonks can check out the latest from Hugh Stephens).

Eric Andrew-Gee explained the warm hearth of Québec’s cultural nationalism to anglophones (“The price of having a culture to protect is constant fretting about the state of that culture”).

And last of all Barry Hertz broached the sensitive topic of whether collectively we are up to supporting Canadian culture at all.

Hertz’s column references a new opinion poll just released by Pollara, sponsored by Canada’s independent television and film producers, that shows Canadians want Mark Carney to defend Canadian culture against American trade aggression.

The poll says that 87% of Canadians now support the Liberals’ Online Streaming Act Bill C-11 (up from 67% in May 2022). As for having a fight over Canadian culture with Trump, 68% of Canadians say yes, only 13% say throw it under the bus (the rest don’t know).

It’s true that half of Pollara’s respondents had no clue about C-11 in the first place, but the pollster’s “statement” polling below suggests Canadians’ values are nevertheless strongly aligned with defending cultural legislation.

***

In last weekend’s post, MediaPolicy summarized CBC President Marie-Philippe Bouchard’s plan for reinvigorating the public broadcaster. Her two biggest points were “more local” and “more diversity.”

Bouchard did the Parliamentary rounds last week, appearing before the Commons Heritage Committee and the Senate communications committee.

Bouchard’s line on ‘more local’ —-she keeps using the word “proximity” to capture both geography and audience affinity with content —- is that digital technology means the CBC can pivot back to local without having to build new stations.

Sitting next to Bouchard, CBC’s Regional Services GM Jean Francois Rioux also emphasized affinity. Canadians want to see people “like me” or “like us” on CBC. They also want other Canadians to see and hear their concerns on the national stage that CBC provides.

There are others who have a different take on affinity, and they mean ideological affinity, code for “more conservatism” on CBC.

Bouchard treads delicately on this one, although in her Commons appearance she thoughtfully suggested that the CBC’s retreat to major cities as a response to budget cuts in the 1990s probably meant that coverage skewed to metropolitan values, which can feel “more centre and left” to anyone living in the “more centre or right” hinterland of Canada.

Bouchard was also interviewed by CBC reporter Jayme Poisson on her October 16th Frontburner podcast. Poisson poked reasonably hard on a number of sore points. On ideological diversity, Poisson pointed out that although CBC’s “trust” rating tops the charts, CTV and Global score better with conservative listeners. Maybe more opinion coverage is what’s needed?

Bouchard didn’t immediately bite on the suggestion —- avoiding a debate over whether big-c Conservatives are treated fairly in CBC coverage— but said what was needed was consistent inclusiveness in CBC content:

Well, I mean, there’s all sorts of ways to make people feel reflected and included. It starts by being in the communities where they are. It also means including a more diverse set of points of view. If that’s possible. And it’s also about being constant about it. Not just during an election period or during a specific period of time. It’s just to have that reliable approach to a diversity of points of view.

That sounds like a shift in content curation as a conscious effort. The execution will be the hard part.

***

A public broadcaster that offers affinity as broadly as possible (my new description of being “highly trusted”) is something we need to keep our democracy glued together. It’s important that everyone is motivated to check in with at least one media source that tells them about all tribes, not just their own.

Wikipedia does something similar. The popular website is quietly just there in our Google Search results. If you read it critically, you’ll get both the uncontroversial facts and the contentious points, the latter helpfully linked to content that you can read and then draw your own conclusions.

That’s unless Wikipedia is a woke, left-wing mind control machine, which is how it gets disparaged these days by the MAGA movement. To that point, Elon Musk says he’s about to release his politically recalibrated competitor to Wikipedia.

Here’s an interesting read from the Washington Post about the political campaign against Wikipedia lead by co-founder Larry Sanders.

***

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

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – CBC President unveils a new vision – Anti-porn bill is back in the Senate – did C-18 give Google a get-out-of-jail card on content scraping?

October 18, 2025

Last fall, when the CBC seemed destined to fall at the hands of an incoming Conservative government, MediaPolicy published a number of posts on “what is to be done” if the CBC received a stay of execution.

One post (MediaPolicy’s most popular ever) was a guest column from ex-CBC VP Richard Stursberg welcoming the new CBC President Marie-Philippe Bouchard with some advice for a re-engineered public broadcaster.

One federal election later and we are now getting a clearer picture of what a rethought CBC might look like.

This week Bouchard disclosed an advance copy of her five year plan to Canadian Press which published reports in English and French. The latter story is more in-depth, based on an interview with Bouchard.

Combing through the obligatory recitals for something new, Bouchard’s vision has some promising ideas.

The Plan document makes the familiar aspirational points about connecting Canadians with each other and fostering dialogue.

More concretely, her Plan commits to increasing CBC’s presence in local communities, “aiming to fund additional overage and hire sufficient journalists to cover 15-20 communities with a population greater than 50,000, that currently have no or little local CBC/Radio-Canada presence.”

Keeping that promise no doubt depends on the Carney government following through on its election promise for $150 million in additional funding.

Then there is the CBC’s platform problem. There are too many of them. But the CBC needs to be on them if it’s going to reach the nation’s audience —-multi regional, multi generational, multi lingual and so on. That’s a resource challenge for Bouchard.

Bouchard says CBC has to follow that national audience, youth in particular on digital platforms. The public broadcaster’s analog-to-digital transformation has been underway for years now —over time, television and radio funding has been cannibalized to support digital, especially the CBC News website. Its YouTube audience has grown quickly and TikTok is a must-do opportunity. Bouchard says the logic of the transition necessarily means cutting costs on other platforms, “stopping or transforming certain activities,” though she doesn’t say where or how much.

As for the CBC’s uneasy relationship with private sector media, always frayed because of CBC’s competition for advertising dollars on television and digital, Bouchard wants to focus on where the CBC can collaborate with local media and independent journalists, but also with the content creators and influencers who are popular with youth.

Bouchard also says the CBC should be “a pollinator, a helper to the [journalism] industry.” She told CP that “when we have services to share or offer, we should offer them on terms that are affordable for these media outlets. We have premises, we have space. We can consider facilitating access to [our] assets at zero cost or at a reduced cost that promotes budgetary balance for our colleagues.”

Finally, she grabs hold of the elephant’s leash: the widespread perception that the CBC isn’t ideologically ecumenical in its editorial curation; that it’s insufficiently conservative by content and temperament.

There will be no pleasing the CBC’s harshest critics, but Bouchard says the CBC wants to make a big effort to win over those who don’t tune in or else “undervalue” (what a euphemism!) the public broadcaster’s content. A step in the right direction is devoting more resources to the West and in rural Canada.

But that doesn’t just require money, it requires a migration of corporate culture.

The five-year Plan is officially unveiled on October 28th.

***

There is no sign of the federal government retabling its online harms bill in Parliament. It died on the order table at the last election.

Instead, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne’s has revived her Bill S-209 which zeroes in on harmful pornography being made available to kids. The debate rages in the Senate’s Legal and Constitutional Affairs committee and MediaPolicy reported on it this week.

***

The much-slagged Online News Act Bill C-18 took another hit this week from The Hub publisher Rudyard Griffiths who told the Parliamentary Heritage Committee that C-18 protects Google from potential copyright lawsuits for ingesting and repurposing Canadian news content in its AI tools, Overview and Mode, embedded in its search engine.

The bill, Griffiths told MPs, “requires all news organizations [accepting money under C-18] must make all of their content available to Google. If you are a recipient of funding through the Online News Act, you are unable to prevent Google from scraping behind your paywall, scraping subscriber-only content to serve up in their [large language model]”

Sections 2 and 26 of the Act grant a copyright waiver for news content that Google “makes available” on Search by “ranking and indexing” so long as Google reaches a compensation agreement with news publishers.

The Conservatives’ slagger-in-chief of the Online News Act, MP Rachel Thomas, jumped on Griffiths’ claim and posed it as rhetorical question to subsequent witnesses appearing before the Heritage’s committee that is investigating the impact of AI on Canadian media and cultural industries.

As Canadian news outlets have yet to sue Google for ingesting their news content and repurposing it in Overview and Mode, this remains a hypothetical issue for now. If it got before a judge, the court would have to decide if “ranking and indexing” is what an AI tool does, as opposed to ingesting, summarizing and rewriting from multiple sources. The fact that Mode and Overview are embedded in Search, as opposed to a separate AI app, could be important too.

This idea that that Google might have snagged a windfall immunity from copyright challenges to its content-scraping for AI tools arose previously when Google struck its agreement in June 2024 with the Canadian Journalism Collective for the distribution of Google’s $100 million compensation for Canadian news content, a year after the Overview prototype was launched in the United States.

Taking its cue from section 26 of the Act, Google inserted a clause into its agreement with CJC:

7(h) The Collective will not initiate or participate in, and will include a similar requirement of the Members in the Members Agreement, from initiating or participating in, (i) any bargaining process or (ii) proceeding before the Commission, a mediator, an arbitration panel, or a court of competent jurisdiction, in each case related to (A) any bargaining process in connection with Google, any of its Affiliates, or any Intermediaries pursuant to the Act or the Regulations, or (B) infringement of copyright in relation to making available news content of Members by Intermediaries in the manner permitted by the Act. The Collective will enforce such provision in the Members Agreements to the fullest extent and in a timely manner.

When the Google-CJC agreement was submitted to the CRTC for approval, the Commission appeared to say that the copyright waiver didn’t apply to AI tools so there was no need for action “at this time”:

Some interveners, including the CP group, Village Media, The Logic, and Unifor, raised issues with clause 7(h) in the Agreement, which forbids news businesses from pursuing Google for “infringement of copyright in relation to making available news content of Members by Intermediaries in the manner permitted by the Act.” The interventions raised concerns that this would limit their ability to enforce their copyright against Google for uses beyond making news content available on Google Search. In particular, interveners were concerned about potential use on DNIs other than Google Search, or used to train artificial intelligence (AI) models. Google argues that the provision is drafted specifically to reflect the use considered under the Act, namely the making available of news content on the DNI covered by the Agreement.

Section 26 of the Act protects an operator from copyright liability in certain circumstances where its DNI makes news content available. Clause 7(h) of the Agreement extends a similar protection to Google in respect of the making available by Google Search of the news content of news businesses in the collective. (Original Footnote: Clause 7(h) refers to news content made available by “Intermediaries” of Google. Under the Agreement “Intermediaries” is defined as DNIs operated by Google to which the Act applies, which is only Google Search). To the extent that this clause reflects protections from liability set out in the Act, the Commission notes that there is no need for any further action at this time. As a result, the Commission makes no order with respect to clause 7(h) of the Agreement.

So far there’s no copyright lawsuit, so there’s no issue. That might change.

While you’re thinking about news organizations and AI scraping, you might find interesting copyright expert Hugh Stephens’ latest post about the debate that is unfolding at the Heritage committee.

***

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

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Spotify’s coy ignorance – Guilbeault’s agenda – Paramount, HBO and Crave

October 11, 2025

I am guessing the five commissioners running the CRTC’s public hearing on radio broadcasting and audio streaming read Simon Gionet’s column in Le Devoir, published on the last day of hearings, September 29th.

The story conveyed the Québec’s music industry’s message: we’re getting slaughtered and the CRTC better do something about it.

The online streaming consumption of Francophone music in Québec is 4.6% per cent of the top 10,000 songs, according to the latest projections by l’Observatoire de la culture et des communications de l’Institut de la statistique du Québec.

Approximately five per cent. In a province that is 80% Francophone.

This is happening in an environment in which streaming is gradually displacing the sale of digital and physical music formats in Québec; 55% of those sales are French language music. It’s skewed by age: the Observatoire notes that consumption of French language music remains high in legacy media such as physical music sales and radio, but rock bottom on streaming services, the medium of choice for the younger generation.

At the CRTC, the response of foreign music labels and global streamers went like this:

Patrick Rogers of Music Canada (the big three labels Universal, Warner and Sony) told the CRTC “what we don’t support is [a CRTC requirement for] the inclusion of any music, Canadian or otherwise, that wouldn’t normally make‑up that listening experience.”

Xenia Manning, Spotify’s Director of Global Music Policy, offered her coy ignorance of the French language problem. When asked by a commissioner if the Observatoire’s “five per cent” number was accurate for the world’s biggest music streamer, Manning said “we could look into it.”

The best known spokesperson for Québec’s music industry is APEM’s Jérôme Payette. “The future of the music industry as we know it is truly at stake,” he told Le Devoir. “Our Francophone and Canadian musical culture risks virtually extinction or becoming completely invisible and marginalized if nothing is done.”

His ask of the Commission was:

Make the streamers include 50% Canadian music in their song recommendations made to Canadian subscribers, including a French language quota;
Next, collect quarterly data on the consumption of music;
Take further action if the new numbers aren’t good enough, and
Look for an improvement from 2% to 8% consumption of French language music across Canada by 2029 (he didn’t specify a Québec-only number).

Payette’s parting shot to the Commission was “the CRTC has the opportunity… to show that we are capable of standing up to preserve our cultural sovereignty and our culture.”

***

Ah, the federal Heritage committee is back. How I have missed its performative politics.

All roads to Canadian cultural policy run through the ten MPs who sit on this Parliamentary committee, five Liberals, four Conservatives and the lone member from the Bloc Québécois.

It’s useful to parse the committee transcripts for clues on the government’s legislative intentions, as well as what mayhem to expect from Opposition MPs.

First, a report on the mayhem. The Conservatives began their dependable tormenting of the CBC. They also pushed successfully (over Liberal objections) to send three of the committee’s Reports from the last session of Parliament to the House of Commons. Those reports (on Big Tech meddling in Canadian politics, toxic content on social media, and the state of Canadian news media) are now filed in the Commons, with Conservative dissents, so the government owes a written response. More grist for the mill.

Going one Report further, the Conservatives won a new committee investigation into the state of news media, with subject matter, witnesses and committee dates to be determined.

As for the government agenda, Minister Steve Guilbeault appeared at the committee and promised something newsworthy about CBC’s plans for local news would emerge soon.

He was grilled by the Conservatives and the Bloc about where the rumoured Liberal budget cuts to his department’s programs might fall. He deferred to the Finance Minister’s budget on November 4th, but hinted about consolidating the administration of the Canada Media Fund for television, Telefilm, and another program (my guess, the National Film Board). It seems unlikely he can cut 15% of spending over three years without paring back program spending.

The Minister also gave an unparsable answer to a question about retabling Bill C-63, the complex online harms bill that included mandatory safety codes for social media platforms, a revived individual right of complaint against hate speech, and stronger criminal penalties for online hate. While the latter subject matter is arguably covered by Justice Minister Sean Fraser’s Bill C-9, Guilbeault left us guessing about bringing back the safety code proposal.

One last point, I was surprised that the Minister was willing to take the Conservative bait to pass judgment on ex-CBC host Travis Dhanraj, who claims he was mistreated and prevented from inviting conservative guests onto his show by CBC management.

Travis Dhanraj with co-host Karman Wong and guest Kevin O’Leary

The Minister’s comments in French —“d’abord, je tiens à déplorer ce qui est arrivé à cet employé”—- were officially translated as “I condemn,” but were closer to “I lament.” He says he wasn’t briefed on the controversy by CBC President Marie-Philippe Bouchard, so his willingness to express regret stands out. Later in the transcript he qualifies his concern by saying “it’s possible that it went very badly for this individual, I’m sorry about that.”

The Committee is currently engaged in a review of AI impact on media and cultural industries to which MediaPolicy will return.

***

The Hollywood news outlet Deadline is speculating about the rumoured Paramount purchase of Warner Brothers Discovery. Warner assets include studio production, the premier streaming platform HBO Max, and cable properties CNN, TNT Sports, and various nature and lifestyle channels.

Netflix might submit a competing bid, but Deadline immediately dashed that speculation by observing that Netflix wouldn’t want the cable assets (indeed, ask yourself why they would want anything other than the library of titles).

What’s not speculated upon is the knock-on effect on Canada, specifically Bell Media which is hanging on to exclusive Canadian distribution rights to HBO content as the ballast for Crave. Bell’s current deal for HBO still runs for an unknown number of years, probably until 2027 or 2028, and keeping access to premium US television dramas will always be job one.

The unanswered question is whether a Paramount-owned HBO would be more or less willing to renew Bell’s deal for Crave or instead go direct to Canadian consumers like Netflix and Disney Plus.

***

Go Jays.

I thought I was too old for birthday presents, but thanks to @27vladdyjr and @davidortiz for this:

***

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

Catching up on MediaPolicy – Dhanraj tells his CBC story – Kimmel is back, really back – Unifor launches CheckFactHere – Western Standard cashs a federal cheque

September 27, 2025

Last week Culture and Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault showed up at the House of Commons’ heritage committee for his root canal.

The Conservatives were on him immediately about former CBC host Travis Dhanraj’s charges that the public broadcaster violated the Human Rights Act by treating him as a token “brown guy.” MP Rachel Thomas cited CBC’s “toxic environment” as a fact.

Guilbeault appeared to take Dhanraj’s allegations at face value, expressing “regret” at “what happened to him” but distanced himself from the CBC’s handling of the dispute.

MediaPolicy has covered the story here, here and here but I was waiting for more details on Dhanraj’s claims against unnamed colleagues in CBC’s Ottawa bureau and how CBC management handled the whole situation.

Now Dhanraj has given a more fulsome version of his story on episode one of his new podcast, Can’t Be Censored, produced with former CP24 reporter Karman Wong.

The episode is over an hour long and it’s pretty clear that without naming David Cochrane, the host of CBC’s parliamentary show Power and Politics, that is who Dhanraj is identifying as his nemesis (Cochrane has declined comment). Dhanraj says that “three or four” journalists are running the Ottawa bureau’s news coverage as their own club.

Dhanraj’s narrative is that CBC headhunted him, first as a national reporter and then as the host of Canada Tonight, a current affairs show. Dhanraj tried to make the show edgy and popular by inviting controversial guests. They included former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose appearance CBC management vetoed on the grounds that Carlson is a white nationalist, although Dhanraj says in the podcast he doesn’t agree with that description.

What got him into hotter water was inviting Conservative Party deputy leader Melissa Lantsman onto his show while the Conservatives were boycotting Cochrane’s hot seat on Power & Politics. As it turns out, CBC management already had an internal protocol that forbade the Conservatives end-running Cochrane in favour of a preferred host. Dhanraj tried to convince his boss that it was good journalism and better for the CBC’s reputation as a big tent public broadcaster to get the Conservatives onto any CBC show at all. He even quoted the Broadcasting Act. His boss didn’t buy it.

There’s more in the podcast episode on other friction points between Dhanraj and the Corp. Assuming he has offered his best arguments, it’s hard to see his allegation of racist tokenism as anything other than his editorial gloss. Rather his story comes across as a tale of an ambitious television anchor making a play to upgrade a lesser show into a bigger one, some colleagues resenting that, and CBC not accommodating it.

If David Cayley’s new book critiquing the CBC had gone to press a little later, I am sure he would have devoted a chapter to Dhanraj. Earlier this week, MediaPolicy posted a review of Cayley’s book.

***

Bob Iger is writing his own history, day by day.

Iger is the Disney CEO responsible for suspending Live! host Jimmy Kimmel for his mockery of the US President’s odd reply to a journalist’s question about grieving Charlie Kirk’s death. Then the viewer and political backlash hit Disney. Iger turned Kimmel’s “indefinite” suspension into a one week cancellation.

US media commentator Evan Shapiro has a LinkedIn post breaking down the events leading up to Iger’s actions against Kimmel.

Bottom line: the threat by Trump’s FCC chair Brendan Carr to strip Disney’s ABC affiliate stations of their broadcasting licenses was an idle one. Up until now media moguls have blinked because they won’t play the long game against the Trump administration’s campaign to tame mainstream media.

Kimmel’s show is back on the ABC network, but initially two major station affiliates refused to air it. One of them is a big Trump supporter. The other needs the FCC to approve a merger.

That lasted three days. Yesterday the two affiliates that include 56 stations across the US reversed course and agreed to resume airing the show.

It ain’t over. Trump replied on Truth Social, “I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do.”

***

It’s World News Day tomorrow which is a reminder from major newsrooms around the liberal democratic globe that you’ll miss them when they’re gone.

Pairing up with that, my alma mater Unifor —-which represents journalists and media workers across the country—- has launched a middle brow version of the same, a public service campaign branded CheckFactHere.

Video and print ads created by Unifor will appear in Canadian media who are donating the inventory.

***

A few sunny weeks ago MediaPolicy posted a dissent from a Canadian Press story concluding that PM Mark Carney was considering repeal of the government’s Online News Act C-18 and its $100 million tithe on Google that compensates Canadian newsrooms for their stories appearing on Search. I didn’t think that Carney’s mangled response to a Kelowna journalist’s question about C-18 actually said that.

It took some time to pin down the government for a clarification, but Politico.com asked Culture and Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault for comment and his press secretary replied “the federal government has no intention of repealing either of the acts,” referencing both C-18 and the Online Streaming Act C-11.

Then the National Post story added that Guilbeault’s office hedged a bit, saying “for us, currently, the intention is not to repeal those acts… But I can’t pretend to know the end result of the negotiations with the United States” which are “very much” the main factor that will determine the future of both acts.

Somebody needs to put this question to Carney.

While we are talking about C-18, when the Canadian Journalism Collective announced the distribution of the $100 million in August, Media Policy posted that the conservative news outlet Western Standard was getting a $68,000 cheque. What I didn’t mention is that I e-mailed publisher Derek Fildebrandt asking him to confirm that he wasn’t also receiving the federal government’s “QCJO” journalist subsidy. His publication was part of a coterie of anti-subsidy news outlets who published a public oath they would never take that kind of money. Fildebrandt didn’t reply to my e-mail.

Now we know why. He’s taking the money. In an email to his subscribers, Fildebrandt said he couldn’t compete without the federal cash and ——I am reading between his lines here— without Pierre Poilievre in power those subsidies will continue to flow to his competitors.

Fildebrandt’s books aren’t public, so it’s also possible he couldn’t remain solvent without federal and Google money. In any event, my condolences, climbing down from high moral ground is never fun. Just ask Mark Carney.

***

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

How the CBC should get its mind right: David Cayley’s new book

Author and CBC Ideas producer David Cayley

September 24, 2025

David Cayley, The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And How to Get It Back Again), published by Sutherland House (2025).

The former producer of CBC’s radio show Ideas has a new book that asks and answers a question too often ignored: what is a public broadcaster and why isn’t the CBC behaving like one?

David Cayley’s “The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And how to get it back)” is prosaically titled but elegantly written. Cayley loves ideas of course and his argument is grounded in a series of cerebral set pieces that situate his message that CBC News is too much the storyteller and too little the convenor of open-minded dialogue.

If theories of media communications and linguistics are your thing, Cayley explores and applies the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Noam Chomsky, The Frankfurt School and a host of other thinkers you may never heard of. If you have a taste for this (I do) or consider yourself a left libertarian, there’s lots to eat. Otherwise, you may need to be patient with Cayley.

Each of his excursions into theory provide the context for his core message, which goes something like this:

For decades now, the CBC has strayed from its Parliamentary mandate, for which it is provided with big subsidies, to be the non-judgmental convenor of public debate instead of just another corps of journalists holding inflated ideas of their clairvoyant understanding of Canadians. The CBC suffers from cultural orthodoxy —let’s call it an overweening confidence in the destiny of liberal progressivism— and the newsroom’s belief that it has a special talent for divining truth and misinformation.

It’s a heck of an indictment and the prosecutor makes his case, beginning with Exhibit A: CBC’s coverage of the Covid pandemic and the three-week occupation of downtown Ottawa by the so-called Freedom Convoy, whose participants “manifested a large and vibrant new public,” according to Cayley.

In his view, the federal government, echoed in its messaging by mainstream media and the CBC, treated the participants in this “generally moderate Freedom Convoy” as enemies of the state and this demonstrates the dangerous polarization of the Canadian polity and the pressing need for more civic dialogue in this country. Cayley just published the relevant book excerpts in the National Post. On the other hand, the CBC Ombud’s judgment is here.

If you choke a bit on that lionization of the Freedom Convoy, you may be recalling that it was riddled with avowed insurrectionists and defiers of public health directives enacted by a democratically elected government in the name of reducing critical infections that threatened to kill untold thousands and overwhelm hospital emergency rooms. The incipient threat of violence associated with clearing the occupation was never far away.

Cayley is a skeptic of anything described as a consensus by the medical and science establishments and he reminds us of this when he lampoons the worldwide public health response to Covid as “comprised of speculative computer models whose probative value lies just north of tea leaves and bird entrails.”

He argues that Convoy participants were vindicated in their opposition to Covid vaccine mandates by later findings that vaccines became less effective over time in preventing the spread of the disease. Meanwhile the CBC and other media organizations disparaged the occupiers’ dissent as “misinformation,” unworthy of serious news reporting.

In this review I am not going to litigate this public health issue, or the openness of media coverage, to a conclusion. But suffice it to say it’s a contentious point on which to rest his argument that the CBC newsroom is swaddled in its own filter bubble.

How the CBC became its own biggest fan, says Cayley, can be traced back to its early departure from a more neutral role in public dialogue and its quest for mojo as an edgy news organization in television shows like the investigative journalism of This Hour Has Seven Days. Despite the fact that Seven Days, which ran only two seasons from 1964 to 1966, was cancelled by CBC management —guaranteeing its legendary status as Canada’s media iteration of the Avro Arrow fighter jet— its strong editorial voice and visually manipulative narrative style exemplifies for Cayley what’s always been wrong about CBC’s news journalism.

Cayley connects the immense popularity of Seven Days with a “populism” that seats media gatekeepers into the role of the audience’s surrogate, as its watchdog over the powerful, its advocate for justice, or (using just one more metaphor) the high priests of a media church sermonizing the congregation, vindicated in their righteousness so long as attendance remains high.

What suffers when the CBC insists on being the audience’s surrogate, he says, is the neglect of its core Parliamentary mandate, articulated by the first two words in its mission “to inform, enlighten and entertain.”

Once upon a time, the old guard in the early CBC were more inclined towards “adult education” and news you can use, rather than theatrical news reporting and laying claim to Canada’s voice. Cayley wants the CBC to get back to that “inform and enlighten.”

Cayley never makes it clear if he wants to blow up CBC’s editorial identity as a news reporting organization entirely or just re-set the newsroom mindset to something better aligned with “inform and enlighten.” He cautions that he is not advocating for a University of CBC.

Mostly, he critiques the CBC’s workplace culture as suffering from a baked-in orthodoxy of thought. He can be quite funny writing about this: his insider account of CBC management’s top-down reset of its corporate culture is relatable to anyone who has ever endured the same. His cheeky disparagement of Jian Ghomeshi’s popular radio show Q may leave a smile on your face or okay boomer on your lips.

But the prosecutor Cayley gets himself into trouble when he puts forward Exhibit B which purports to quantify the pervasive reach of the orthodoxy inside the newsroom.

He begins by citing a Léger poll commissioned by the Macdonald Laurier Institute that self-identified leftists outnumber conservatives in Canadian universities by a ratio of nine to one and that this is killing dissent and fostering self-censorship among the minority. From this poll he links to the CBC’s culture, claiming “the case is the same at the CBC, as I have already shown.”

Well no, he doesn’t show that at all.

To rebut, let me first note that the Léger poll was non-randomized and relied on voluntary participation. It collected lopsided data culled mostly from faculty in the humanities and social sciences —prolix socialists, all— and under participation from STEM departments.

More to the point, where’s the proof that CBC staff are nine-to-one lefties versus righties? Cayley points to three journalists (Exhibit C), one of whom is neither a journalist nor works for CBC but once wrote an analysis of CBC’s news coverage of Saskatchewan’s transgender laws.

He notes the troubling story of a veteran CBC Winnipeg reporter Marianne Klowak who quit in disgust at a management kibosh on her reporting that gave voice to vaccine dissenters.

He cites the departure of CBC Toronto news producer Tara Henley who also quit in disgust, issuing a public indictment of the “cognitive dissonance” created by the CBC newsroom’s groupthink.

Two journalists (make it three including Cayley) out of 3,000 is not enough evidence to support his claim, but to be fair it would be difficult to rely on anything but anecdotal evidence without the kind of newsroom polling that is impossible to provide.

Still, Cayley once lived in the belly of the beast and is likely on to something. Common sense tells you that a newsroom where most reporters live in three big cities may well list to the leftish values of urban progressivism.

On the other hand, my own experience of a lifetime representing reporters and journalists —although never at the CBC — convinces me that the left-right thing is for the opinion pages and eclipsed by the dominant spirit in all newsrooms: a Watchdog ideology that posits white-knight journalists at the service of the public by “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” Nevertheless, Cayley views the CBC’s self-coronation as public champion as the problem that needs replacement by a more passive role as the convenor of civic dialogue, the aforementioned “inform and enlighten.”

His intriguing idea is there for your consideration. But in Exhibit D, the prosecuting Cayley again goes too far when he says that “what is more serious is the way the CBC has lost the country’s attention”.

I beg your pardon, it has not. CBC radio is a market leader across the country. Its online news website earns top ratings, vying each year with CTV for the most consumed or most trusted online source. Even CBC’s much maligned television ratings —which lag behind CTV and Global— are weighted down by flagging audiences for CBC’s entertainment programming which must compete head-on during prime time against American hit shows on private Canadian networks and also a little streamer named Netflix.

Cayley’s overstatements don’t detract from his deepest conviction: that Canada is becoming increasingly polarized, even a “fatally divided polity,” and a public broadcaster needs to engage the participation of all. A more open-minded programming culture of inquiry and intellectual curiosity may be the tonic. More reflection, fewer snap judgments.

Most book-length critiques of CBC tend to focus on news programming rather than television drama, which is too bad (Richard Stursberg being a notable exception). In fact, Chris Waddell and the late David Taras go so far as to recommend jettisoning entertainment programming altogether and saying uncle to Netflix.

Cayley discusses entertainment programming briefly, mostly in the context of the unstoppable tide of American shows that sets the cultural tone for Canadian content.

He calls upon the CBC to rely less on knock-off genres of television drama, set in classic Canadian landscapes, and more on historical and contemporary stories of Canadian self-discovery. Amen to that, but it’s not clear to me that the CBC isn’t already doing this with the limited production budgets that it has. When it wants to step up its game for bigger audiences, it makes co-venture deals with Netflix.

Finally, Cayley says almost nothing about Radio-Canada, an understandable limitation on the scope of his essay. The application of his critique and his solution, the question and answer about the CBC’s public broadcasting mission, might provoke more insights if anyone in Québec were to take up and explore his views.

***

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

Saying the quiet part out loud: Radio-Canada’s anti-Semitic report from Washington

September 18, 2025

On Monday, Radio-Canada’s Washington correspondent Élisa Serret, appearing on the network’s afternoon news show “Sur Le Terrain,” was asked by the host how it was that the US government seemed unable to distance itself from Israel following the IDF attack on Hamas leaders who were meeting in Qatar, a US ally.

The veteran host Christian Latreille asked why the US administration “has such difficulty distancing themselves from Israel, even in the most difficult moments?”

Serret’s answer was that it was because of the “big machine” of Jewish influence in American politics.

Specifically, what she said (as translated in the National Post story) was that “my understanding, and that of multiple analysts here in the United States, is that it is the Israelis, the Jews, that finance American politics a lot.

“There is a big machine behind them, making it very difficult for Americans to detach themselves from Israel’s positions. It’s really money here in the United States. The big cities are run by Jews, Hollywood is run by Jews.”

You can watch the video here. Her broadcast comments were covered by the French language press here and here.

It was a gobsmacking statement. There are pro-Israel lobby groups in the US, as there are many groups that lobby US politicians on everything under the sun. There are Jewish Americans who make campaign donations, as there are plenty of non-Jewish Americans who do the same.

Then’s there’s the canard about “Hollywood” being “run by” Jews and putting the whammy on all thinking Americans. As for Jews dominating the ranks of big city mayors, I think that’s a new conspiracy theory, although demographically fictitious (three out of fifty US big city mayors are Jewish).

Serret is a ten-year veteran of Radio Canada and holds a graduate degree in global and international studies.

The host, an award-winning veteran of broadcast journalism, including the last eleven years as anchor and Washington correspondent, did not interrupt, contradict, or ask Serret to clarify.

After Serret was called out on X, Radio Canada apologized for Serret’s “stereotypical, anti-Semitic, erroneous, and prejudicial allegations against Jewish communities.”

Serret has been suspended by her employer pending investigation, although she is still listed on the Radio Canada website as the show’s Washington correspondent. Audience complaints will no doubt be filed to the network’s Ombud and we’ll get a published report after he interviews Radio-Canada management.

This is one of the moments where the casual, ingrained anti-semitism in Canada smacks you in the face. As a friend reminded me, Serret “just said the quiet part out loud.”

What he means by that, or what I mean by that, is the matter-of-fact manner in which anti-Semitic conspiracy narratives about Jewish control and manipulation of non-Jews and government are culturally reproduced, century after century, day after day, everywhere.

What happened here is that a well educated veteran journalist carried around these conspiracy theories in her head for years and finally had a chance to offer them on-air as conventional wisdom. The awkward question is whether her views were already known and condoned. As for the host Latreille, he either regarded her comments as legitimate journalism or he froze, which doesn’t say much about his level of professional abilities.

Serret’s assumption that she could state these conspiracies as analysis, in a broadcast to a national audience, suggests she believes her views are widely shared with the audience.

I’d like to think they aren’t, and the Culture & Identity Minister’s denunciation was appreciated, but as any member of any Canadian community targeted by hate will tell you, that hate is dangerous to our health.

***

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

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Kings, jesters and cable lords – the AI Death Star – PBS and NPR defunded – the next Dhanraj leak – how to fix the CBC

July 24, 2025

It’s a sheepish admission I make this week, but sometimes American culture wars can be so darn entertaining.

Take the recent exchange of verbal gun fire between President Trump, the US cable lords, and late night TV hosts that began with Stephen Colbert slagging his show’s owner, Paramount, for paying off on a meritless Trump lawsuit against CBS.

In case you’ve been ignoring it all, here’s a short news report from Global News explaining it.

More to my low brow taste, I enjoyed Jon Stewart’s satiric bird-flip to all those bending the knee to Trump, “Go Fuck Yourself.”

***

And then there’s the end of the world as we know it, otherwise known as AI.

I say this only half facetiously. What AI tools like Google Overview appear poised to do to news journalism may well be catastrophic, it depends on consumer adoption.

But it’s entirely plausible that Big Tech’s scraping of copyrighted Internet content —-there are now third party web crawlers that steal and sell paywalled stories to AI companies —— could mean that a handful of global AI engines become our dominant “news” outlets so long as there remain employed journalists somewhere to be scraped.

The US Senate is holding some hand wringing hearings on AI scraping but, so far, it has a performative feel to it. Congress doesn’t do anything anymore without the White House saying so.

Our own federal government is taking a wait and see approach. Or to put it in their own words, AI Minister Evan Solomon is “closely monitoring the ongoing court cases and market developments.”

***

There are no obituaries written yet for public broadcasting in the United States.

Congress finally passed the defunding of NPR radio and PBS television. In the US, public broadcasting was not as robustly funded as it is around the rest of the world. The annual Congressional allocation of $500M (USD) was about half of CBC funding for eight times the population and ten times the number of stations.

The federal dollars were only a sliver of overall funding of 1,000 local NPR stations, 350 PBS outlets and the national flagship operations. But funding was always heavily weighted towards local stations and local programming: the “left wing” national content that Republicans so despise is almost entirely privately funded.

The precise consequences of defunding at the national and local level will unfold in the coming months after the scheduled September payment doesn’t arrive.

Perhaps it’s not a surprise that NPR CEO Edith Chapin just quit.

***

The real-life CBC drama of Travis Dhanraj’s lawsuit and public campaign against his former employer released another episode this week.

The National Post posted a story sporting a “leaked” audio clip of Dhanraj and his union representative in a meeting with CBC manager Andree Lau. The occasion was a discussion of his April 2024 X-post criticizing CBC President Catherine Tait for declining to be interviewed about CBC finances on his show, Canada Tonight.

The edited audio file is a bit of a nothing burger. Dhanraj tries to get Lau to spar with him about the journalistic ethics of CBC coming down hard on him for the post. He gets the better of the argument, mostly by default. That’s about it.

It’s not clear from the clip whether the meeting was a formal grievance meeting, normally a privileged and off the record discussion. CBC responded to the Post story by saying Dhanraj broke his promise not to record the meeting.

***

The McGill University Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy released a report on its two-year study of what is to be done about the CBC. The Hill Times covered it here and CBC News reported on it too.

You may recall that the Centre published an opinion poll in October 2024 that revealed very high public support for the CBC, qualified by strong desire for “changes.”

One of the weird things about this result is that the CBC-is-no-longer-needed vote goes up after a hypothetical addressing of major criticisms.

As the report authors observe dryly, it’s difficult to distill “a single perspective” about what needs improvement other than the fact that 78% of Canadians want to keep the CBC running.

One thing the report is very good on is that “Canadians need to be assured of the value of the product they will be paying for. Regular and in-depth demographic reviews of the audience should be established to determine the kind of content Canadians require and the way they need to receive it. Models for this form of consolation include nation-wide town hall meetings, citizens’ assemblies and comprehensive surveys of the public (not merely existing members of the CBC/Radio Canada’s audience).”

In addition, the report says that Parliament should enshrine a cycle of five-year mandate reviews of the CBC so that the relevance of the public broadcaster to what Canadians want keeps up to date.

Times two, I say.

The report goes on to say that the CBC must “create meaningful, not performative, representation [in its content]. This goal addresses equity, diversity and inclusion, but more broadly, political and regional diversity as well.”

Put bluntly, the CBC needs to convincingly reflect an audience that is broader than the heavily urban demographics of its newsroom if it’s going to be funded and enjoyed by all Canadians.

Parliamentary funding of CBC is of course the bottom line, whether up or down. The Carney government has adopted former Heritage Minister Pascale St.-Onge’s report on the CBC and made European levels of funding its aspirational long-term target. According to St.-Onge, that would mean the moving the yardsticks from $32 per Canadian annually to $62.

Give the authors of the report credit, they have broken the taboo on pointing out that French-language Radio Canada already matches European levels of funding of $79 per head while English-language services (from which Indigenous language programming is financed) languish at $25 per capita.

The taboo remains powerful enough that the report doesn’t recommend what to do about this funding gap.

In the end the authors suggest their own idea of what Canadians want out of the CBC: “information sovereignty.” In other words, a public broadcaster that protects the national interest in reliable news and information.

Their argument is made in the context of rising existential threats to our national security; including extreme weather catastrophes, pandemics, threats to our territorial sovereignty, and the surprising aggression from the United States, a country that controls much of the media we already consume. They might have added AI as yet another existential threat to information sovereignty, as noted above in today’s post.

The 80-page report comes with a three page Executive Summary.

***

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Catching Up on MediaPolicy – The CBC’s nightmare – Canadian ban on TikTok down to the wire – ‘Empathie’ on Crave

July 17, 2025

Travis Dhanraj’s lawyer is shovelling more coal into the litigation furnace by calling upon disaffected CBC staff to e-mail her with their complaints.

In a video interview with Candace Malcolm of Juno News, Kathryn Marshall issued a series of claims to illustrate former news host Dhanraj’s allegation that there are systemic violations of employees’ human rights at the CBC. Marshall said her inbox was full of e-mails from former staff and invited more.

It’s doubtful that any e-mails Marshall solicits from CBC staff past and present would be legally admissible in the human rights proceedings she says she is initiating on Dhanraj’s behalf.

But they can be theatre props in the public trial that Conservatives hope to schedule at the Culture and Identity (formerly Heritage) parliamentary committee in the Fall.

The feeding frenzy of conservative attacks on the CBC occasioned by the Dhanraj controversy is hardly surprising, it’s a permanent feature of our political landscape.

The blood in the water would be salacious evidence of feuding between Dhanraj and the CBC Parliamentary bureau, described by Marshall in her Juno interview. Specifically, her claim is that “a very close knit gang of Ottawa correspondents” were resentful of Dhanraj’s success in getting Conservative Party guests on his show and tried to bar those guests.

Marshall said she has “names, receipts and e-mails.” Those revelations, says Marshall, are “the CBC’s nightmare.”

Marshall also told Juno News that the CBC sought to punish Dhanraj for his X-post about then CBC President Catherine Tait by taking away his show, demoting him, and demanding he sign a gag order. She described CBC’s actions as “Stalinist” and later in the interview accused Dhanraj’s union the Canadian Media Guild of collaborating with the CBC (which would be illegal).

You get the picture.

The point of this kind of public campaign as an accessory to a legal claim is to define the public narrative. So far that story is not only how Dhanraj was treated by the CBC, but the credibility of CBC news journalism itself.

The credibility of the CBC might appear to be in jeopardy according to Dhanraj and conservative critics, but that does not seem consistent with public polling.

Last week Pollara released its annual poll on Canadian news media. CBC News continues to top the charts on both consumption and public trust. In fact, it went up over the last year, as the graphic below shows.

Still, the endless right-wing barrage against the CBC destabilizes the public broadcaster (I exempt from this tar-brushing the perceptive podcast episode posted today by The Hub’s Full Press, which is worth your time).

The CBC has done nothing to counter the Dhanraj narrative of a corrupt news culture —-it’s issuing rote denials while awaiting the filing of Dhanraj’s human rights complaint. The result is that a bunkered public broadcaster leaves a vacuum for others to fill and they are obliging.

The appointment of a new CBC President in January is now seven months old. After an early spate of interviews given by Marie-Philippe Bouchard, we’ve heard very little about any new direction or bold plans to meet criticisms or disappointments expressed about the public broadcaster.

That might be because Bouchard doesn’t know yet if the Prime Minister intends to keep his campaign promise to boost CBC funding by 11% this year, and more over time. That was complicated by this week’s disclosure that as part of its spending review the Carney government has asked CBC to submit a draft plan for deep budget cuts in 2026-2027.

Or it could be that Culture and Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault is still working on a new bill to implement election promises of better CBC governance and long-term financial independence that would require amendments to the Broadcasting Act.

MediaPolicy asked the CBC if there are any significant announcements coming and was told to expect something in the Fall. A similar inquiry to the Minister’s office did not get a reply in time for publication.

***

AI-generated image

This past week TikTok ramped up political pressure to convince the Carney government to undo the federal government’s 2024 decision to ban TikTok the company from Canada, but not the app.

The Liberals’ decision on TikTok followed US legislation to ban both the company and the app on the grounds of national security. Subsequently it was given a stay of execution by Donald Trump in his effort to force a sale of the Chinese-owned social media company to American interests.

Like the US law, the Canadian ban is based on undisclosed and/or hypothetical national security concerns about data security and the distribution of malevolent content, sponsored by China.

TikTok says it is winding up its Canadian operations to comply with the federal ban. Meanwhile it has bought media advertising pleading its case to the Canadian public, posted a posturing letter asking for a meeting with Industry Minister Melanie Joly, planned layoffs of its 350 Canadian staff and withdrawn its funding of Canadian creator development and event sponsorships.

Aside from the sponsorship largesse, TikTok is a major distributor of Canadian cultural content. According to Scott Benzie of the creator group Digital First Canada, TikTok has engineered its algorithm to be a heavy distributor of local content for users that activate the location service on the app, perhaps as high as 50% of “Nearby” and “For You” video recommendations. That’s something that foreign streamers won’t commit to.

With a lawsuit against the federal government on the go, TikTok says Ottawa has taken “measures that bear no rational connection to the national security risks it identifies.”

For its part, the government insists its investigation under the Investment Act in 2023 revealed “clear and legitimate concerns.”

When the ban was announced in November 2024, then Innovation minister François-Philippe Champagne said “I’m not at liberty to go into much detail, but I know Canadians would understand when you’re saying the government of Canada is taking measures to protect national security, that’s serious.”

The entire mess feels a lot like the Facebook ban on Canadian news even though the circumstances are quite different.

Michael Geist has published several articles on the TikTok ban, including this one, which apart from the familiar Liberal-bashing on digital policy I found persuasive (and it’s worth marking the occasion).

Another angle on the problem is something every Canadian is painfully aware of these days: when the American elephant rolls over, we can easily get crushed. And the crushers run the White House.

The troubling question is who isn’t cynical about the merits of the American ban of TikTok in the first place? Or that we are just obediently playing a vassal state by following suit?

The answer to the dilemma is for Carney to publicly defend the ban with as much disclosure of the national security threat assessment as possible, or to repeal it.

***

The Big Tech/Big Hollywood court challenge to mandatory cash contributions to Canadian media funds might get an answer from the Federal Court of Appeal before Labour Day.

Until then, the MediaPolicy boycott of streamer subscriptions (Netflix, Amazon and AppleTV) continues. I don’t miss two of them.

In their absence, I’ve made better use of my CraveTV subscription. That allows me to recommend an excellent new Canadian series, Empathie, a sad and funny drama set in a Montréal mental health facility.

***

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

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