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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.

***

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The ticking media bombshell: Conservatives want hearings on Travis Dhanraj quitting the CBC

Television host and journalist Travis Dhanraj – CBC Photo

July 12, 2025

The fireworks ignited by television host Travis Dhanraj’s public resignation from the CBC will not be a flash in the pan. Not if the Conservative Party has anything to say about it.

The Conservatives are demanding summer Parliamentary hearings, a sequel to the political inquisition that followed the CBC’s annual payment of performance pay to some staff in late 2023.

Conservative headquarters also launched a volley of fundraising e-mails [download, below] citing Dhanraj’s “bombshell” resignation and reiterating its campaign promise to defund the CBC under the leadership of Pierre Poilievre, now standing in the August 18th by-election in Battle River-Crowfoot.

Dhanraj is a veteran television reporter and host who returned to the CBC in 2021 as a National Affairs correspondent and two years later, to much fanfare, as the host of Canada Tonight. At the time, CBC’s press release highlighted Dhanraj’s commitment to “unfiltered” and “diverse” journalism.

But last week Dhanraj announced his “involuntary resignation,” denouncing the CBC’s commitment to diversity as performative and promising detailed revelations to come. The CBC denied the allegations and cited confidentiality obligations as the reason for the brevity of its public reply. It also announced his resignation had been refused.

It’s difficult to recap the sequence of events leading up to Dhanraj’s pyrotechnic departure: much of it is connecting dots but will become easier to piece together once his lawyer Kathryn Marshall files a human rights complaint on his behalf.

The jumping off point appears to be Dhanraj posting a tweet in April 2024 that criticized the CBC for not making then-CEO Catherine Tait available as a news subject on his show, presumably to answer questions about the performance pay.

A public statement issued by his lawyer in February 2025 suggested that at one point he went on medical leave because of the psychological harm caused by CBC management’s alleged retaliatory actions towards him.

In his own public statement, Dhanraj characterized his resignation this way:

It comes after trying to navigate a workplace culture defined by retaliation, exclusion, and psychological harm. A place where asking hard questions — about tokenism masquerading as diversity, problematic political coverage protocols, and the erosion of editorial independence — became a career-ending move.

In further statements, Dhanraj’s lawyer linked “the colour of his skin” to CBC’s alleged exclusion of conservative perspectives and news guests. Specifically, she said that CBC assumed when it hired him that as a brown man his news hosting would focus on liberal perspectives, to the exclusion of conservative guests and issues. A proven connection to race might violate the federal human rights code, if discriminatory.

Marshall welcomed a Parliamentary hearing and suggested that Dhanraj’s experience was “systemic” and goes to the heart of the CBC’s workplace culture and delivering on its public mandate:

Obviously, the issues that Travis has highlighted in his resignation letter and which will be part of a future legal proceeding are very serious, and they’re not just isolated to Travis. I’ve heard from a lot of other CBC employees who have similar stories. It’s a systemic issue, and it’s a workplace culture issue that goes very deep at CBC, which is very concerning given the amount of public funds going to the corporation and its public-interest mandate.

Sooner or later the Conservatives will take this up at the Culture and Identity committee, with MP Rachael Thomas grabbing the spotlight in the prosecutorial role she relishes. But it may bring more thunder than lightning due to the stifling effects of pending litigation.

If the Conservatives go as far as attempting a filibuster of other Parliamentary business (like government bills), the balance of voting power in committee will be held by Bloc Québécois MP Martin Champoux.

BREAKING CBC BOMBSHELL Download

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – dirge for the DST – Hollywood gets state cash – online harms legislation still cooking – who stole the music grants?

CBC explainer on the repeal of the Digital Services tax

July 5, 2025

Soon the wake for Canada’s digital services tax (DST) will be over and the news cycle will re-fire for the next trade battle with the United States.

Prime Minister Carney’s repeal of the DST was mocked by the victorious White House as a Canadian “cave.” Within hours, Canadian critics were queueing up, condemning Carney’s move as “bootlicking” (Lloyd Axworthy) and “bending the knee” (Le Devoir). On the other hand, Jean Charest described it as “a legitimate choice in a world of very bad choices.”

The MediaPolicy take on it is here.

The CBC has a hip two-minute cut-for-social video explainer narrated by the tattoo-embossed Nick Parker.

And for another take, here’s Paul Wells interviewing Canadian tax expert Allison Christians.

President Trump has promised to re-announce tariffs this week. Carry on Canada.

***

Two months ago when Donald Trump blurted out his desire to tariff US movies filmed abroad he got a tepid response from the supposed beneficiaries, Hollywood studios and the Big Tech streamers.

That’s because the studios and streamers make so many movies in Canada, at a competitive and government-subsidized cost, with world class quality.

What Hollywood really wanted was production subsidies from the US federal government, but so far that has not happened.

Now California is stepping up to the plate. Governor Gavin Newsom is prepared to double existing state subsidies to the tune of $750 million, quite a slice of the pie in what is otherwise a major austerity budget for the state.

***

The Canadian Press has reported that Justice Minister Sean Fraser is having a close look at the federal Liberals’ online harms legislation before re-tabling it.

Bill C-63 died on the order table when Mark Carney called a federal election in March. The core of the Online Harms Bill was to require social media platforms to establish content safety codes, legislation that polling suggests is a winner.

The add-ons to the bill were more controversial. The opportunity for private citizens to file anti-hate complaints against each other under federal human rights legislation, abolished by Parliament in 2012, is to be revived.

And the anti-hate provisions in the Criminal Code are to be strengthened with more severe punishments. MediaPolicy offered some perspective on that, here and here.

Prior to the election, then Justice Minister Arif Virani reluctantly split the controversial from the core elements of the bill into separate legislation. Neither bill was taken up by Parliamentary committees in the months leading up to the election call.

The CP story quotes the new Minister as wanting to make his own “fresh consideration of the path forward.”

At the very least the Minister may steal the best ideas from the Conservative election promise on deep fakes.

***

There are two 15-minute weekend reads on media that I can recommend.

In his personal blog “Fagstein,” the Montreal Gazette’s Steve Faguy has posted a short history of the CRTC’s decades long struggle to keep local television news solvent.

He’s done a great job. I know how hard it was as I tried to do the same in a shorter space in chapter six of my book on the Online Streaming Act. Faguy’s post is the learning resource that has been missing.

The other read is a feature story from the Globe and Mail’s Josh O’Kane. He’s updated his whodunnit reporting on the cyber-theft of $10 million from FACTOR, the music funding organization that distributes dollars contributed by government, radio stations and (subject to a court appeal) music streaming companies to Canadian musicians.

***

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – Can Québec shove aside the federal Bill C-11? – CBC bonus pay, the epilogue – Will Page’s “screwed losers.”

Former CBC President Catherine Tait defended “bonus pay” in 2024

June 1, 2025

Last week MediaPolicy offered an analysis of whether the Québec CAQ government’s Bill 109 might trigger a constitutional conflict with the federal government’s Online Streaming Act Bill C-11 over who can regulate video and audio streaming platforms with the goal of making French language content more prominent in Québec.

Having federal and provincial governments running active public policy on exactly the same thing is a bit of a problem, something Julie Miville-Dechêne immediately pointed out on the floor of Senate.

The Senate’s Government Representative, Marc Gold, replied that the federal government was thinking about Bill 109 and “may have more to say on this in the coming days.”

What the Carney government might or might not say in the coming days will probably follow some off the record conversations with CAQ Culture Minister Mathieu Lacombe who has already said publicly he doesn’t have to negotiate with Ottawa.

The legal question of whether it’s Parliament or the Québec National Assembly that has jurisdiction over the “discoverability” of Internet-borne content is a juicy orange for the many devoted fans of Canadian constitutional law.

Legal expert Pierre Trudel of the Université de Montréal published his view in Le Devoir. He argues that Québec can take legislative action “to ensure that French-language works can be easily found in the mass of available content, even by someone who isn’t searching for them,” because nowadays the delivery of online content depends so heavily upon consumer data that it becomes a matter of provincially-regulated commercial affairs and consumer protection.

Trudel offers as a legal precedent a 1978 Supreme Court case. In that 6 to 3 majority ruling, the Court upheld a Québec consumer protection law governing the exposure of children to advertising content even when it was applied to federally regulated television programming.

***

In the quiet lull following its miraculous survival of Election 2025, the still-funded CBC released its commissioned report from Mercer compensation consultants that answers some of the outstanding questions about the $18 million in “bonus payments” to 1,200 executives and non-union staff that fed the news cycle for so many months in 2024.

The headline is that Mercer recommended to CBC management that its at-risk “performance pay” component of total compensation is a common practice, a good thing, and ought to be retained in the name of effective staff recruitment and retention. In spite of the advice, CBC management rejected the recommendation to stay the course on performance pay and instead converted those dollars into wages.

And perhaps that puts an end to the melodrama manufactured by MPs of all parties, as well as many members of the media commentariat, using the bonus payments as a stick to beat the CBC and its unpopular President because she refused to cancel payments owed under employment contracts in a year that the public broadcaster laid off 141 staff and then narrowly avoided mass layoffs.

Before closing the book on this, there are a few parting observations worth making:

Every MP ripping former President Catherine Tait for not cancelling performance pay was well aware of what Mercer confirmed: an at-risk component of total employee compensation is a prevalent business practice throughout the economy. The idea is to keep high achieving employees hungry for success through good performance. It’s not a perq. It’s not a cash grab.

If the unspoken script to the drama is that CBC employees get paid too much, the Mercer Report put that one to bed. CBC executives and non union employees are paid smack in the middle of the spectrum of total compensation for similar work. In fact they would be slightly below median earnings were it not for a solid pension plan.

Between MPs asking the wrong questions, Tait clamming up in response to political attacks, and the limited information in the Mercer Report, we still don’t know anything about a number of key questions. Did legal entitlement to performance pay depend in any way on whether the CBC was laying off employees ? (Probably not). Did Tait have any option to reduce or cancel them? (Unlikely). Did employees achieve their targets for full at-risk pay or are the payments gimmes for most employees ? (Unknown).

More importantly, now that $18 million of budgeted at-risk pay is being integrated into fixed salary, will that be at a dollar-for-dollar rate or discounted because there is no longer an at-risk portion?

The fact that none of these questions have been pursued, let alone answered, tells you what performative nonsense this has been.

***

Back to the issue of Canadian content made discoverable on the big streaming platforms: I recommend the latest episode of Dan Runcie’s Trapital podcast hosting Will Page, the high profile expert on global music streaming and ex-Chief Economist for Spotify.

Page says that after a decade and a half of audio streaming that fuels “glocalization” of music — where musical cultures cross pollinate across national and linguistic borders — he was surprised at the growth in the US dominance of the global music earnings when he had expected the opposite.

That has implications for Canada:

“I ask you to go to the YouTube artist charts for Brazil…. Google it up and pull down those top 100 artists in Brazil this week.

And you’ll find one, maybe two international artists on that chart is singing in Portuguese, very little Spanish. And if you’re lucky, I think The Weeknd is ranked 95, and Bruno Mars is ranked 65…

Other than that, it’s an entirely Portuguese chart. So there you go. There’s a top 10 global music market that just said, “thank you and good night” to the English language.

If you are a non-English speaking country with a strong identity, glocalization is a force for good. If however, you are an English speaking country that’s not American, glocalization leaves you screwed. So we have winners and we have losers.”

Page has lots more to say about Canada and Canadian music. You can listen to the podcast here.

***

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

Miles to go: the Media Policy work of the 45th Parliament

May 1, 2025

The federal election is over and the CBC is still standing. That’s a milestone achieved, for now.

This next Liberal term of government will probably run light on media policy compared to the last four years of legislative turmoil that swirled around the Online Streaming Act Bill C-11, the Online News Act Bill C-18, the future of the CBC, and Online Harms Act C-63, the latter bill being split into two parts and then wiped off the Parliamentary agenda by the election.

If media or cultural issues appear front and centre of public attention during the 45th Parliament, it will likely be a result of trade negotiations with the Trump administration.

The exception is the CBC: the reinvigoration, rebranding, reinvention or re-whatever of the public broadcaster is a winning file for the Liberals and long overdue. The Carney campaign promised more money, more secure long term funding, more local news and more anything to counterweight online misinformation and foreign interference.

The money —a promised 11% increase of $150 million to the Parliamentary grant — will be in the budget bill. The rest must find its way into law through amendments to the Broadcasting Act. That means getting in and out of the procedural swamp of a Parliamentary committee (the new “Culture and Identity” committee) where there is no reason to expect the Conservatives or the Bloc to hand the Liberals a “win.”

It’s going to take a strong minister to get this CBC overhaul done. In March, the Prime Minister appointed Steven Guilbeault as Culture and Identity minister, doubling up with his Quebec lieutenant duties.

Guilbeault is the wrong guy for the job at this point in history. This seems harsh and counterintuitive in many ways. He’s done the job before (2019-2021). He’s smart, decent, competent and temperate. And he is fluently bilingual. So what’s not to like?

The minister’s number one job in this Parliament is the CBC make-over and selling it to English Canada.

That requires gut-instincts about culture and popular attitudes that you can’t easily learn on the island of Montreal. To be pragmatic about the political task at hand, the face of the CBC’s redemption in English-Canada, particularly the west, cannot be the much vilified environmentalist Guilbeault, no matter how unfair that tag may be.

There are other candidates that fit better: fourth-term Toronto MP Julie Dabrusin knows the cultural file as Guilbeault’s former Parliamentary Secretary, she’s bilingual, and if it matters to anyone she was born and educated in Montreal.

The other media policy file that may move forward is a retabled online harms act. You may recall that when the Liberals put forward C-63 last year it contained a raft of amendments to the hate crimes provisions of the Criminal Code and a separate regulatory scheme that would require social media platforms to establish their own binding content codes that manage the online harms to kids, revenge porn, fomentation of hate, and incitement of violence or terrorism.

The Conservatives have no interest in the content codes other than to politicize them as censorship. The Tories have their own version of an Internet crime bill that focusses on harms to children and jailing the perpetrators.

If the Liberals have any sense they will ditch the anti-hate criminal amendments which will just chew up the Parliamentary agenda with public debate over jailing free speech. But they should go full steam ahead with the content codes: it’s a winning file and the Liberals can probably get the support of the Bloc to get it through committee.

Outside of Parliament, the battle at the CRTC over implementation of the Online Streaming Act is going to peak in the next few months.

In the next few weeks the Commission begins hearings on three major policy files covering the first-time regulation of video and audio streamers, as well as online distribution chokepoints. Also, the US streamers’ legal challenges to the initial “five per cent” cash contributions to Canadian media funds will be heard in Federal Court in mid June.

Assuming the court upholds the Commission’s levies, it all points to a crescendo of policy pronouncements and trade confrontations in the fall and winter of 2025-26.

Because of this, all other media policy files will probably get ignored.

One such file is the Meta ban on news distribution over Facebook and Instagram, the very unfortunate outcome of the Bill C-18 battle that hurts journalism start-ups and news websites in smaller communities. Pierre Poilievre’s campaign proposal was to just cave to Meta, which the Liberals are unlikely to do and in any event that would just be an invitation for Google to demand the end of its $100 million in annual licensing payments.

(On that point, the Google-appointed Canadian Journalism Collective released the first instalment of a list of eligible news outlets this week).

There is no principled way to solve this policy puzzle, which means it might be solved in trade negotiations.

Another file that needs attention but won’t get it is an overdue redesign of the federal QCJO subsidies to news journalism. The opportunity here is to do some good policy work that doesn’t require legislative amendments and Parliamentary bandwidth.

Lastly, now that we have a new Prime Minister maybe we can get the Liberals to reconsider their ill-tempered and ill-considered support of password sharing on news subscription websites in the government’s litigation with Blacklock’s Reporter.

The government has convinced itself (and a trial level judge) that it’s siding with the angels by giving an expansive and elitist interpretation of the “fair dealing” or “research” exception to copyright: it simply does not match up against the common sense reality of running a paywalled news business.

The fact that Blacklock’s is editorially a thorn in the side of the government is the bad energy behind all of this. It’s a vindictive abuse of state power, made possible only because Blacklock’s is not the Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star. It’s time for fresh government eyes on this.

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

The CBC as “national scold” and “vector of polarization.”

April 24, 2025

Of all the silver linings in Donald’s Trump’s aggression against Canada, I’ve been gratified to discover the renewed popular passion for Canadian culture.

Last weekend I was drawn by the headline of novelist Stephen Marche’s opinion piece in the Globe and Mail, “The new American threat to Canada’s sovereignty requires a new cultural nationalism. Here’s what it should look like.”

The pinning-jelly-against-the-wall quest for a distillation of Canada’s national essence always interests me: I’ve pondered it myself in a previous post and celebrated the thoughts of others on the subject.

Unfortunately, what Marche offered us last week was a fact-free rant against the CBC.

His starting point is a much celebrated allegation: that Justin Trudeau is a proud “post-nationalist” who does not value Canada’s rich history because it is marred by the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and wrongs committed against minorities. Says Marche, our “cultural industries” eagerly signed on to Trudeau’s project of denigrating “so-called Canada” and “the self-critique quickly narrowed into a negligible, impotent stream of identity politics to the exclusion of virtually any other perspective.”

Having named all “cultural industries” in the indictment (including his own, the book publishing industry), Marche’s chief culprit is the CBC. Just to give you a flavour:

The most egregious, and most important, case is the CBC. The CBC has spent a decade turning itself into a big national scold. Literally, their ad campaign from 2023 featured the slogan: “It’s not how Canadian you are. It’s who you are in Canada.” That’s how they chose to promote themselves – a sneer at anyone who might think of themselves as a patriot. I am not sure, at this moment, whether the CBC even likes Canada. You certainly can’t tell by listening to them.

There are no facts or examples provided for this grave condemnation of the public broadcaster as “a big national scold” that “sneers” at “patriots.”

I watch, listen and read the CBC every day: I’ve never witnessed scolding, sneering or anything of the kind. What’s the CBC guilty of? Broadcasting North of North? Or Sort Of?

Once rolling, Marche doesn’t stop:

The Conservatives have, if anything, underestimated the problem. I say this as a small-l liberal: When the head of the CBC cannot name a single Conservative voice on their platform, when they are opposed, as such, to the political views of somewhere around half the country, they are failing in their mandate to represent the country. It is as simple as that.

A small point, Marche’s link is to a podcast that doesn’t verify his statement: former CEO Catherine Tait declined Paul Wells’ invitation to identify “the most interesting conservative commentators on CBC,” she didn’t say she didn’t know any.

A bigger point is whether the CBC invites conservative commentators onto its shows. On that point, I seem to recall Andrew (“defund the CBC”) Coyne making some rather good conservative arguments on CBC’s flagship At Issue panel for the last decade or so. From my own observation, the CBC regularly seeks out conservative voices on its television news panels, although I suspect it’s difficult when there appears to be a Conservative boycott on the public broadcaster.

Marche’s zippy one-liners continue: the CBC engages in a “ritualized fetish for self-purification”; “its politics seems to derive from the sociology department at York University,” and “the CBC is a force of [information] pollution, they are an active vector of polarization.”

Anyway, you get the gist. By the end of the tirade, Marche tables an unobjectionable list of principles underlying a strong Canadian cultural nationalism. Count me in.

But in the end, Mr.Marche is not a satisfied CBC customer and I am. What about everyone else?

Here’s some feedback from the Reuters-Oxford study of the Canadian news market, the first graph covering radio and television and the second chart covering online news:

These aren’t the numbers you hear about when critics are taking a run at the CBC.

When they do, one of those cherry-picked numbers is the “CBC’s two per cent market share.”

If you look it up, that’s a reference to the CBC National News channel’s share of the cable audience. It may surprise you, but two per cent for a single channel in the 500-cable channel universe isn’t bad. CBCNN’s cost is covered by cable subscriptions and advertising, basically Pierre Poilievre’s formula for a defunded CBC.

The other sore thumb is the CBC’s five per cent share of prime-time evening television ratings. It’s competitors CTV and Global no longer disclose their ratings, but they are believed to be higher. That’s not surprising: the evening prime time is when CTV and Global carry popular US programming, while CBC does not.

Here’s a chart from CRTC data (unfortunately a year behind) you might find interesting.

Since 2015 (Table 30), the CBC has slipped in the relevant television ratings (network stations) against the private broadcasters.

Since 2009 (Table 32), the CBC’s production spending on Canadian content slipped a lot, while the CanCon spending of the private networks and specialty channels climbed. The explanation is that the CBC’s Parliamentary funding is stagnant and, in response to new viewing habits, it has shifted its budget from television to online.

This is neither an apology for those television ratings nor a scolding for those that ignore the CBC’s strong ratings on radio and online.

“Not bad” or “good enough” is not the bar, not for the public broadcaster. The CBC should be appreciated and reasonably well loved across the country and if it’s perceived as projecting itself as too urban, too central Canadian, or too progressive that’s a problem it needs to address like it’s life depends upon it.

Which it probably does.

***

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

2025 Federal Election platforms leave a lot to the imagination

April 22, 2025

Today the Conservatives became the last political party to publish their “full platform,” which in 2025 seems to be a euphemism for “not nearly as full as before and very late.”

The 30-page Conservative document is down from 160 pages in the 2021 edition. The Liberals have chopped their 2021 page length from 86 pages to 55. That means less real estate for each policy section, including culture, arts and media.

Perhaps because of brevity, the Conservative document is a challenge to decode.

Of course, the Tories say upfront they would defund English-language CBC and permit it to carry on as a “non-profit supported by listeners, donations, sponsorships, ad revenue and licensing revenue.” They expressly exempt Radio-Canada from defunding and in fact promise “to maintain all funding in support of Quebec and Francophone culture.”

The Conservatives would also “repeal Liberal censorship laws.” Since there are none, we’ll just assume that’s a reference to the entirety of the Online Streaming Act which Pierre Poilievre has long promised to reverse.

The Conservatives would “restore Canadians news on Meta and other platforms.” That either means repealing the Online News Act and returning $100 million to Google, or simply granting Meta an exemption from the Act so that it will agree to end its Facebook and Instagram bans against most Canadian news outlets. The CPC reference to “other platforms” is unclear, as there are no other Big Tech companies banning Canadian news.

The Conservatives say nothing about undoing the Liberals’ federal “QCJO” subsidies for journalism salaries at private Canadian print news outlets, but it’s doubtful they’ve had a change of heart about abolishing the $65 million annual program.

Nevertheless the CPC platform proposes to double government full funding of journalist salaries in the Local Journalism Initiative federal program, from $20 million to $45 million annually. A further “$25 million in support of Indigenous language media” is promised, although there are no details beyond that.

The Conservatives also promise to “fund the first made-in-Canada documentaries about Canadians’ contributions to winning the World Wars so future Canadians do not forget the courage and sacrifice of those generations and their stories live on.”

Not to quibble, such state-commissioned documentaries would not be “the first.” The phrasing of the promise raises the question of whether the federal cabinet would be directing one of the CRTC, the National Film Board, the Canada Media Fund, or private broadcasters to make patriotic content. That might be a first.

The Liberals have a light cultural platform when compared to previous election platforms. They restate Mark Carney’s recent campaign promise to increase CBC funding by 11% and commit to long-term stability in funding.

Other than that the Liberals promise to “increase funding to agencies such as the Canada Council for the Arts, Telefilm, the Canada Media Fund, and the National Film Board.” For those of you that don’t track these things, in practice “increasing” funding often turns out to be adjusting budgets to keep up with inflation.

What’s noticeably absent in the Liberal platform is the government’s Online Safety Act, Bill C-63, which died on the order table in February. Perhaps it fell to the editor’s red pen.

The NDP did not publish a single platform document but provided a series of issue-oriented documents, none of which dealt with the culture, media or the arts; traditional NDP policies.

The Greens and the Bloc Québécois published lengthy documents with detailed cultural proposals that I won’t attempt to summarize.

The Bloc is the only party to propose extending tax rules that provide corporate tax relief to Canadian businesses that advertise in legacy Canadian media to the placement of ads online.

Here are the party platforms (except for the NDP):

Change CPC Download

Canada-Strong LPC Download

Choisir le Quebec BQ Download

Change Vote for It Greens Download

The high stakes of defunding the CBC

April 18, 2025

The gladiator stands staggered on the sandy floor of the Colosseum, waiting for the thumbs up or down. On federal election day, April 28, the CBC will discover its fate: live or die.

The Mark Carney Liberals have promised to defend the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and even increase its funding.

On the other hand, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre “can’t wait” to keep his promise to defund all English-language services of the public broadcaster as no longer needed. “The CBC provides opinions and coverage that are widely available in a competitive media marketplace,” states the CPC with confidence….

….Continue reading at PolicyOptions.irpp.org in English or en français

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Zuckerberg on trial – Poilievre endorses Liberal DST – No merger deal at CN2i – North of Netflix

April 12, 2025

The stock markets roiled by Donald Trump’s tariff yo-yo vaporized a lot of personal savings (ouch), but especially if you held Big Tech stock. Or owned the company.

Alas, shed a tear for Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk and the bros. It must be a weird space to be in: grovelling before Trump in the hopes of an unimpeded path to worldwide AI “dominance,” losing billions in share value on any given day of the week and fending off federal anti-trust lawsuits.

The Washington Post has a good story on this.

The US Federal Trade Commission’s anti-trust suit against Zuckerberg’s Meta starts at the trial level on Monday and is expected to go day to day through July. The government is challenging the Facebook-WhatsApp-Instagram business as an anti-competitive monopoly in “personal social networking services.”

Matt Stoller will be covering the trial in his Big Tech on Trial Substack.

Here’s the kernel of his analysis from his opening post describing the legal battle to define “the relevant market” that is allegedly manipulated by Meta market power:

As the politics play out, the FTC’s litigation team has its work cut out for it on showing monopoly power.

To win its case, the FTC must prove that Meta has a monopoly in a relevant market, and that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp helped Meta maintain that monopoly through something other than competition on the merits.

The FTC can show monopoly power with direct evidence, like the ability to profitably raise prices or diminish quality. But because Meta does not charge consumers money for its services, it’s difficult to show the classic direct evidence of a price increase. Even so, the FTC has introduced evidence that Meta can engage in price discrimination, one sign of market power, by increasing the number of ads shown to users who have greater demand for social networking. In any event, the FTC will likely rely on indirect evidence of Meta’s market power: high market share plus the existence of barriers to entry that prevent others from whittling away at Meta’s share.

Underpinning whether Meta has a monopoly is the threshold question of how to define the “relevant market” in which it has that power. The relevant market for assessing competition is twofold: a product market and a geographic market. The FTC proposes that Meta is a monopolist in a market for “Personal Social Networking Services” (we’ll call it the “PSN market”) in the United States, which is distinguished by a social purpose: a way to connect with family and friends. Inside that market are Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and MeWe. Meta, for its part, disputes that definition and points to other apps that it says it competes with, like LinkedIn, Reddit, and YouTube. The bigger that Meta can make the relevant market, the smaller Meta’s market share in that market, and the more likely it is to defeat the FTC’s case.

***

After keeping his head down on the merits of Chrystia Freeland’s Digital Services Tax on big tech operations in Canada, CPC leader Pierre Poilievre has offered his muted endorsement, tax or no.

“The principle is a fair idea,” he told reporters on the campaign trail. “It’s that these businesses earn revenue here in Canada, so the principle is that they should contribute where they earn the revenue. So I think, on this question, we should keep it in place.”

The Conservatives endorsed the DST in their 2021 election platform at the rate of 3% of Canadian operating revenues, the same amount adopted by the Liberals last year.

The Liberals in 2021 promised a “minimum global corporate tax.” It was successfully negotiated with the US Biden administration but blocked in US Congress and repudiated by the Trump administration. The fallback DST of 3% was implemented instead.

***

There’s an industry buzz created by Netflix about its launch of Red Marrow Media’s North of North, the drama-comedy series shot in Iqaluit and premiered on CBC and APTN.

That’s interesting for many reasons.

Because of federal regulations, the Canadian independent producers who made the series retain the intellectual property in the show, including the global streaming rights they licensed to Netflix which was a major pre-production investor.

That in itself is hardly unprecedented and neither is it surprising that Netflix is making a big deal of its investment and licensing deal because of the ongoing battle over its obligations to broadcast Canadian content.

What’s more noteworthy is the reporting that the production infrastructure costs of shooting in the high north were so steep that CBC, APTN and Red Marrow —the recipient of all manner of tax and broadcaster subsidies to make the series —— needed a deep pocketed foreign streaming partner to make a show with high on-screen production values and an authentic locale (as opposed to shooting in Sudbury).

It’s a reminder that our television subsidy regime feeds shows that are a million dollars per episode, not five million like American hits.

The CBC is by far the biggest spender on Canadian dramas and comedies at $195 million per year (Bell is second at $93 million) but it still has to spread that cash far enough to cover several series each season in different regions of the country, as viewers and taxpayers expect.

Speaking of the CBC, I’ve got an analysis of the defund v. defend debate coming out next week on the Institute for Research on Public Policy’s website Policy Options.

***

For those of you who wanted to know when the CRTC would reschedule its public consultation on radio and audio streaming, it’s September 18th.

The video and television hearing kicks off on May 14. The consultation on “market dynamics and sustainability” (the gatekeeping of content distribution) begins June 18.

The three-day court date for the streamers’ legal challenge to the CRTC’s five per cent levies benefiting Canadian media funds is set for June 9.

***

The possibility of a merger between Montréal’s LaPresse and the six financially vulnerable “CN2i” Québec news outlets is off.

The LaPresse offer to CN2i staff, which reports imply required an unpalatable number layoffs, was blocked at the last minute and LaPresse informed its own employees that merger discussions were at an end.

With LaPresse out of the picture, Pierre-Karl Pélédeau’s Québecor appears to be poised to make its own merger offer to CN2i. The media-telco conglomerate Québecor owns daily tabloids in Montréal and Québec City as well as the TVA television network and Vidéotron cable.

***

It’s always important to media policy to keep an eye on long-term audience trends, especially in news programming.

ThinkTV is the media marketing group that regularly pumps out polling numbers to remind advertisers where the customers are watching, listening or reading.

Its latest report affirms that television and radio continue to hold their own as the top and third most popular media respectively for national news. The way the polling chart is laid out, you can see that mainstream media is vested in video, audio and text, online or otherwise:

On the same note, American media whiz Evan Shapiro has a new post where he suggests that local news is in high demand regardless of age cohort, although he sees a watershed between GenZ/Millenials and GenX/boomers in terms of platform preferences.

The task is for local TV and radio news operators is to fish for the younger generations where they swim.

None of this is breaking news, but it’s Shapiro’s chart that caught my attention. Check out the age statistics on this one (keeping in mind it’s the American market):

***

And lastly, I recommend Ken Whyte’s latest blog post on book publishing and the trade war. This quote stayed with me:

Search ‘books and tariffs’ on Google and you’ll find a bunch of articles in which booksellers and librarians are begging to dodge the draft into Buy Canada. Frankly admitting that they depend overwhelmingly on US product, they’re asking Ottawa to exempt American books from Canada’s slate of retaliatory tariffs. Otherwise costs will rise, customers will be unhappy, business will suffer. We’ve locked arms with Danielle Smith.

***

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

Catching up on MediaPolicy – Carney’s CBC platform – Rogers renews NHL deal – Google’s Richard Gingras joins Village Media

The latest from Canada Post

April 5, 2025

On Friday the Carney Liberal campaign announced its CBC/Radio Canada platform.

The headline is a promised increase of $150 million to the existing $1.4 billion annual Parliamentary grant.

The Liberals’ messaging is that the CBC must be better funded to complete its mission of strengthening local news while neutralizing misinformation.

This is the same pitch that Heritage Minister Pascale St.-Onge made in February when she proposed doubling CBC funding to strengthen Canada’s news media in counterbalance to American-controlled and Big Tech-dominated media.

The Carney campaign is on board and signalled a long-term goal of increasing Parliamentary funding to close the gap with the per capita financing of public broadcasting in the UK, France, and Europe.

Carney also indicated he would pursue St.-Onge’s proposal to enshrine long-term funding in the Broadcasting Act instead of it remaining subject to the budget cycle.

Perhaps a surprise is that the Liberals have no plan to attach the new money to CBC exiting the advertising market.

Carney’s disinterest in St.Onge’s proposal to direct the CBC to stop selling advertising on its public affairs programming may be a pragmatic concession to the fact that the CBC’s $275 million yearly intake of ad revenue still exceeds his proposed budget increase of $150 million.

As far as I know, there is no public figure identifying how much of the CBC’s $275 million in ad revenue is connected to public affairs content. In its 2021 election platform, the Liberal Party promised $100 million annually to the CBC for withdrawing advertising from news and public affairs programming but the platform was never implemented.

***

The business journalists of the land have already done a thorough job covering the renewed $11 billion, 12-year hockey rights deal between the NHL and Rogers for Canadian audiences.

In a world of escalating costs for sports rights, it’s not surprising that the price doubled since first inked in 2014. The consensus view is that Rogers badly needs Canadian NHL teams to go on deep playoff runs over the next decade if this deal is going to pay.

Rogers owns the Toronto Maple Leafs so it follows that a national broadcasting policy supporting Canadian companies should require the Leafs to win the Cup every year. I am sure you agree.

Two, more serious, reflections on how this deal fits in with broadcasting matters:

First, it’s important that it was Rogers (or any Canadian broadcaster) that secured this multi-year deal given that Apple, Amazon and Paramount are always sniffing around for major league sports rights.

Second, the renewed deal makes it possible to continue the strange accommodation between CBC and Rogers that has been well covered in the media, especially David Shoalts’ 2018 book, Hockey Fight in Canada.

In 2014, Rogers outbid both Bell and the CBC for the public broadcaster’s national hockey rights. (CBC was never seriously competitive in the high-stakes auction).

But the story had an ugly epilogue. The CBC was awarded the consolation prize of broadcasting Saturday night national hockey as an extra platform for Rogers. For free. The advertising revenue for those CBC broadcasts went entirely to Rogers while CBC even agreed to pay its own production costs.

In the deal with CBC, Rogers obtained a truly national distribution of its broadcasts (its six City-TV stations can’t match the CBC network of 27 local stations), the better to monetize its rights so it can pay the NHL.

By broadcasting Rogers’ games for free, the CBC got relief from filling a gaping hole in its prime time TV schedule with costly alternative programming. Rogers predated on that vulnerability.

In the end, the public broadcaster has less revenue to pay for non-sports programming. The NHL gets paid. Rogers gets windfall revenue at the CBC’s out of pocket expense. And, considered from this angle, Canadian taxpayers are subsidizing Rogers and the NHL.

***

This week in Canadian news journalism’s Inside Baseball…

Richard Gingras has joined Jeff Elgie’s Village Media as Board chair.

That’s a big-time free agent signing, as they say in baseball.

Gingras was for many years Google’s global Vice President for News. That made him the point-man for Google’s efforts to defeat legislation in Canada, Australia, Europe and (successfully) in the United States; legislation tithing Google to pay mandatory licensing fees for news content linked on Google Search.

Google continues to argue to this day that the presence or absence of news content makes no difference to its 90% market share of global search.

Canadians will remember the Google public campaign —including a short lived news throttle—during Parliamentary debates over the Online News Act Bill C-18 and then its renewed threat to throttle news permanently after the legislation was passed. As New Zealanders are now discovering, that’s still page one of the Google playbook.

Gingras remains a senior advisor at Google.

Village Media is, like most Canadian news outlets, a recipient of Google cash. But Elgie has been vocally opposed to the compulsory nature of C-18. Also Elgie was part of the Canadian Journalism Collective’s coalition of small independents that won Google’s favour to become the administrator of Google’s $100 million in C-18 payments to news outlets.

Just prior to Village Media’s announcement of his Board appointment, Gingras published an elegant rumination on the importance of journalism in liberal democracy that I would tack on to a recommended reading list along with Sean Illing’s Paradox of Democracy and Yuval Harari’s Nexus.

The mercifully shorter piece by Gingras tracks the argument made by Illing and Harari that liberal democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction.

By this they mean that liberal democracy’s centrifugal strength and centripetal weakness is in each case our unfettered freedom of expression, the essential ingredient to a democracy that protects rights and minorities but also the opens the door wide to demagoguery and the populist tyranny of the majority.

Gingras has a few things to say about the role that journalism can play in saving liberal democracy.

One way is for journalists to “practice the discipline,” to pursue objectivity in news reporting in the same manner that we expect judges or police officers to pursue objectivity in their own public roles.

Another way is for community news organizations to build citizen engagement that keeps the focus on civil dialogue and tolerance, the key to respecting the rights of citizens.

On this point he shouts out the work of Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa’s Rappler and Village Media’s emerging media project Spaces.

In an interview I had with CEO Jeff Elgie last year he described Spaces as a cross between Facebook and Reddit, a volunteer-moderated chat board for local communities with sub-chats such as things to do, local history, welcoming new Canadians, and local walks and photography.

Gingras and Elgie think Spaces is the next big thing, so I am eager for the Toronto Space to launch.

***

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

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