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The CBC reborn: MediaPolicy’s view

(10-minute read)

March 29, 2025

The future of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation hangs in the balance, waiting for the verdict of thumbs up or down. Live. Or die.

We know where the two major political parties stand on this.

If Pierre Poilievre wins a majority in the April 28th federal election he will move quickly to “defund” English-language CBC services. An omnibus bill will remove legal impediments in the Broadcasting Act and his budget will eliminate up to $1 billion in federal spending. If he has that Parliamentary majority don’t be surprised if he also breaks his campaign promise and slashes the Radio-Canada budget, to fend off a caucus revolt over sparing Québec.

Meanwhile the Carney Liberals will be for “saving” a “new” CBC. Voters in Québec expect no less. And in English Canada there are NDP supporters to be poached.

We’ll see if it gets any more complicated than that, but I doubt it. “Defund” or “save.” That’s the choice.

Naive souls like myself would have preferred to have framed this choice within a thorough public debate, even a royal commission, to investigate what it means to defund, save or reinvent the CBC.

There’s a public appetite for this thoughtfulness. It’s worth remembering that an October 2024 poll put the hard core “defund” forces at only 11% of Canadians. An earlier poll found that 76% of Canadians want to keep the CBC but half of that support wants to see “changes.” Heavens knows what “changes” means. That’s where a more considered public policy debate might have helped.

The stale polls on public satisfaction with the CBC may no longer matter. Donald Trump moves the opinions of Canadian voters in a tweet. Fighting off his annexation plan without a CBC: what a scenario that is.

MediaPolicy did its part in stimulating a more fulsome debate, publishing interviews with several commentators who know more about the CBC than I do: Chris Waddell, Richard Stursberg, Ian Morrison, Peter Menzies, Holly Doan, Kate Taylor and Kevin Desjardins. I could have knocked off a couple more.

My hat is off to the grass roots campaigns to save the CBC; not just the Friends of Canadian Media‘s cheeky campaign to “FU__ the CBC,” but also the chat groups popping up on Facebook and Reddit.

But now having the benefit of the views of others, I have something to say that’s a little different.

***

Senator Andrew Cardozo

My starting point is a Parliamentary report on the CBC just released by Senator Andrew Cardozo, “CBC-Radio Canada: An essential service.”

The Senator (“don’t call me Senator,” he likes to say) ticks a lot of boxes for me. He’s a Canadian cultural sovereigntist. He asks more questions than he makes speeches. He’s unfailingly civil. Like most of the Independent Caucus senators appointed by Justin Trudeau, he carries on Senate business in a collegial and non-partisan manner despite his Liberal connections.

Having said that, I don’t agree with everything he recommends. But he got the big stuff right.

***

Cardozo’s big idea is this: cultural sovereignty is essential to Canada. And the CBC is at the heart of a news and media ecosystem that delivers this sovereignty to Canadians. The CBC employs a third of the country’s journalists and is by far the biggest spender on televised Canadian dramas and comedies set in locales across the country.

To agree with Cardozo’s view, you have to let go of the notion that a free market in news and cultural content — a free North American market– is sufficient to nourish and defend our cultural independence. It also means giving up on the argument that the existence of the CBC is only justified where there is a demonstrated “market failure” of Canadian media, like our far north. That’s a journey into the black hole of “which market?” and “how much failure?” from which I suggest no light will escape.

Cultural minorities in Canada have always understood in the pits of their stomachs what cultural sovereignty means to them. It means survival. It means to breathe. Francophones in Québec and the rest of Canada get it. Indigenous peoples get it. Anglophones in Québec, too.

Us garden variety English-Canadians, not so much. American culture is everywhere and tasty too. Until recently, the Americans kept their crazy politics on the other side of the border, so why worry? Vancouver’s sassy libertarian YouTuber J.J.McCullough liked to say we are cultural “North Americans” and “I’m fine with that.” It’s not an uncommon opinion.

Then Donald Trump announced his plans to reduce our economy to rubble and annex us. Or just turn us (and Greenland) into a vassal state.

The crazy politics have now swept across the border. As Senator Cardozo says in his report, the times demand an independent Canadian media ecosystem. It’s unlikely any Canadian disagrees. The CBC is the key institution in that ecosystem, he says, and the polls suggest Canadians agree with that too.

Cardozo recalls that the 1928 report of the Aird royal commission proposed a cross-country network of publicly owned Canadian radio stations —later christened the CBC— as essential to defending our popular culture and democratic spaces from being dominated by American voices. If anything, the situation a century later is far more urgent.

***

Here’s the Cardozo plan.

First, forget more money for the CBC, at least for now in this moment of national crisis. That means putting off the widely applauded proposal that the CBC relinquish it’s $270 million cut of the advertising market, which would be a 14% reduction of its finances when we need the CBC the most.

I admire the Senator’s pragmatism but would prefer to rephrase his idea as “let’s get the CBC house in order before we ask Canadian taxpayers for more money.”

Second, make a big bet on local news. No more thoughts and prayers about the growing pockets of news poverty and news deserts in rural and small town Canada, but action lead by the public broadcaster shifting resources away from national news coverage and “radically reducing the budget of national headquarters (Toronto, Montréal and Ottawa).”

In advocating for local programming, Cardozo has picked up on the points made in this country by the Michener Foundation and the Friends of Canadian Media and in the US by Rebuild Local News. Our democracy is fraying because of political polarization fuelled by national politics, while Canadians’ less polarized engagement with local democracy and community events is threatened by the financial precarity of local news outlets.

Public opinion polls repeatedly say that Canadians “trust” local news above all media sources. There’s a craving there to be satisfied.

Cardozo’s proposal for the CBC to double down on local news is compelling. But there are many devils in the details. One is whether this is a good time to cannibalize the CBC national news budget at a time of national emergency. Another is how to divert the CBC’s journalism resources into local markets without elbowing private media outlets in the face. That might have been what the CBC just did by expanding its local coverage into local markets with its $7 million in “Google money.”

The senator’s report does have a practical idea that could be put to good use: “sharing content.”

There have long been proposals for the CBC to share its editorial content with private news outlets, waiving copyright. That could go much deeper with a bigger CBC commitment to joint investigations with private news outlets in local markets. Or the CBC could take a page out of the BBC’s book: the 165-journalist Local Democracy Reporting Service that assigns BBC-paid journalists to work for local news outlets.

Next, the third Cardozo idea is really several issues rolled into one: how to drain the political venom about the CBC out of the public sphere. That means confronting issues of public trust, alleged bias, and accountability.

It must be said first that the griping about “CBC bias” doesn’t measure up to the facts.

Repeat after me: CBC News is the country’s most trusted news source. The slightly overweight negative trust ratings suggest the “defunder” hostility is taken into account.

from Pollara Poll, July 2024

But citing this impressive verdict on the CBC’s trustworthiness is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for its journalism. When you report in the opinion minefields of Gaza, pipelines, and (insert controversial issue here), mistakes are going to loom large. Doing better, more disciplined news reporting is an ongoing project for any news organization. Being publicly owned, the CBC has a higher bar to meet.

Cardozo has some good suggestions.

He’d like the CBC to regularly commission and publish external audits of its news coverage. It won’t convince the CBC haters, but it’s useful if it’s something that CBC managers would go to bed worrying about. I imagine they already do. But Cardozo would make this an important tool in public accountability and transparency.

He’d also like to see more debating of public issues on CBC platforms to foster a stronger Canadian culture of intellectual curiosity and tolerance of different opinions. Amen to that.

Another of his proposals is to eliminate the CBC’s in-house editorial Ombud as the arbiter of public complaints, rerouting critics to the industry-administered Canadian Broadcast Standards Council instead.

I’m not thrilled by this idea. There’s too big a volume of complaints to dump them on someone else’s desk. The Ombud reports are quite fair, if you read them. And you can always appeal to the CRTC. Cardozo acknowledges this an optics issue.

But the elephant in the room is that too many Canadians view the CBC as —how shall we say—- insufficiently representative of what makes them feel Canadian.

Too urban. Too central Canadian. Too insulated from those that pay the tax bill.

You can dismiss these dyspeptic public attitudes if you want. After all, the polling supports a far higher degree of satisfaction than dissatisfaction. For sure, some of CBC hating is a culture war cynically fomented by political foes who want to diminish mainstream media, the better to fill that void with right-wing opinion.

But we have a historic opportunity to make popular satisfaction with the CBC deeper and wider if we face the dyspepsia head on.

Cardozo’s big idea (and others including the government’s expert committee have proposed it too) is to implement a version of the British practice of a social contract between the public broadcaster and the people’s elected representatives.

That negotiated BBC charter secures multi-year funding for an eleven-year term, freed from the gyrations of annual government budgets, in return for specific performance expectations. At the expiry of the charter term, it’s judgment day for the public broadcaster.

A CBC charter would be about more than long-term planning and financial stability. It could be a new and different way to make the CBC accountable to the people and for it to feel real in doing so.

Contrast the charter idea to the accountability we have today. Currently the Broadcasting Act provides apple-pie policy objectives for the CBC, but few specifics. The Prime Minister handpicks the President of the corporation to manage the place for five years. The CRTC weighs in with five-year licensing conditions for the CBC to earmark spending for different programming genres. The last time around the CRTC botched it and was directed by cabinet to try again.

This type of governance of the CBC might hit the right balance of accountability versus keeping the ruling party’s mitts off of programming decisions and the day-to-day management of the corporation. But it does nothing to make Canadians feel that it’s “our” CBC.

A CBC charter would be better. Going in that new direction still retains a threat to the CBC’s independence from government: which political party will be in power when the charter expires and is up for renewal? The BBC just dodged that bullet when an election expelled “defunder” Conservatives and welcomed a Labour government. But Cardozo would argue it’s still better than our current approach. It is.

MediaPolicy has two other ideas to institutionalize more public confidence in the CBC.

First, move CBC headquarters from Toronto to Winnipeg. Sounds crazy, I know, but hear me out.

Much of the disaffection with the CBC is articulated as the public broadcaster being a central Canadian hyper-urban “woke” institution. Fairly or not.

So “leafy downtown Toronto”.” So “île des génies.”

The gloss on that critique is that the CBC’s programming content gets torqued towards audiences and advertising dollars in the Toronto and Montréal television markets.

And one can only add this respectfully: a staff of journalists and content creators living in big cities are naturally inclined to be culturally simpatico with the urban neighbourhoods where they reside. That’s a problem for a national institution.

Moving headquarters and staff anywhere is a big, hugely expensive deal. It’s a lot to ask in the name of moving the needle on staff culture and assuaging hinterland hostility to the Toronto and Montréal metropoli. And if it’s done, it should be gradually and without hemorrhaging experience and talent.

The second MediaPolicy idea is even more out of the box, but bear with me.

We should legislate a constituent assembly of randomly chosen CBC listeners, readers and viewers ——200 from one end of the country to the other—- to convene every two years and publish its assessment of the CBC’s performance and direction. This would be especially helpful in shining a light on what Cardozo describes as the CBC’s “blind spots.”

In the corporate world, they call these shareholder meetings. In the public world, they call them town halls. A constituent assembly would give CBC managers and elected politicians better feedback than high-level polling results. It would offer cogent (or not) thoughts about the CBC from Main Street Canada.

***

The idea of a robust CBC anchoring an independent (of the US) Canadian media is of the moment. “To let it go,” says Cardozo of defunding, “would allow for the complete domination by America of our communications system.”

It’s commonplace to observe that American-owned social media platforms are the perfect conduit for misinformation to flood into Canada in a prolonged Trump campaign to destabilize and annex us. It’s also hard to ignore that the Republican blueprint to move the US much further to the right, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, advocates the elimination of government funding to public broadcasting on the explicit basis that it’s “left-wing.”

But there are still those that would argue that a strong Canadian media can and should do without the CBC except in localities where audiences are so sparse that the private news enterprises can’t succeed.

That’s tied in to yet a longer discussion of the financial viability of Canadian news reporting (as opposed to news opinionating) and whether to continue federal subsidies to news journalism.

The same policy conundrum applies to non-news programming. With Canadian private broadcasters so pinched that they are demanding relief from CRTC mandates to produce local news and Canadian entertainment content, how big a cultural hole might there be to fill if the CBC isn’t there to do it?

***

If the CBC survives and isn’t defunded by the next government, there’s an opportunity to make profound changes, as outlined in this post.

But even without big changes, the new President of the CBC Marie-Philippe Bouchard has an inbox full of strategic and programming decisions to make right away.

Forty million Canadians have forty million opinions on how to do that, some of them based on nothing more than our idiosyncratic cultural tastes and technological preferences.

Bouchard must manage unreasonable and unmeetable expectations with tough management decisions on complex questions.

Should the CBC stay on every major media platform, treating each as equally important? Or should it make bigger bets on fewer digital channels?

Would we be better off with one CBC Radio network instead of two, despite the strong ratings?

Should the CBC invest more of its television drama budget in high-budget iconic Canadian shows or keep faith with charming serials in authentic local settings?

Should the CBC find its way back into sports, avoiding the unaffordable price tags of big league programming rights?

If the CBC puts more into local news, what programming is going to get less?

These are management decisions that almost none of the forty million have an educated opinion, informed by a detailed knowledge of audience data and budget dollars.

As Richard Stursberg signed off on his advice to the new president Bouchard, “good luck.”

***

That’s the MediaPolicy view.

Let me close by recalling that one of the experts MediaPolicy interviewed in December, Peter Menzies, may have nailed it when he said the CBC’s “biggest problem is not that – at least for the English part – so many Conservatives want to kill it, it’s that a large number of people just don’t care if it lives or dies.”

I doubt that’s true any more, thanks to Donald Trump’s plan for Canada. But if the next election keeps the CBC alive, instead of killing it, a rebirth of the public broadcaster is an historic opportunity not to be squandered.

***

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Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Say his name – Shopify’s Tech Bros have their sights on Canada – MAGA puts PBS and NPR on trial

March 27, 2025

Earlier this week MediaPolicy published an interview with the chief spokesperson for Canadian broadcasters, Kevin Desjardins. The President of the CAB pitches his case for a new regulatory bargain between Canadians and the 68 private sector media businesses that form his Association.

However the CRTC’s hearings on said regulatory bargain are now on hold. As expected the Commission has paused three key Online Streaming Act files for the duration of the federal election period: video content policy, audio content policy and gatekeeping in media distribution.

The media policy scene now switches from the pageantry of CRTC hearings to the battlefield of electoral politics. The contestants in the run up to the April 28th election will no doubt spark debate over media policy. We’ll have to wait for their official election platforms.

But a reasonable prediction is that media policy won’t get much traction beyond the political class —with the exception of CBC funding, which will be consequential— while the leaders and voters will be focussed on whatever Donald Trump wants us to be, for example 25% auto tariffs and more coming next week.

In the coming weeks I will try to address both the trade war (if it affects Canadian media and cultural sovereignty) and media policy.

As for the trade issues, I was unsuccessful in provoking the CAB’s Desjardins on what Trump means for Canadian broadcasting. He only speculated that a tariff-induced recession would affect advertising revenues for everyone, including broadcasting.

That’s a bit like refusing to say “Voldemort.”

The main lobby groups for Hollywood and Big Tech have been demanding the White House begin a scorched earth trade war against Canada ever since Parliament enacted the Online Streaming Act and the Online News Act in 2023, followed by the much delayed Digital Services tax in 2024.

Those expected industry demands were dutifully transcribed into formal warnings delivered to Canada from the US Trade Representative (a member of the Biden cabinet) that the US considered Canadian legislation might violate our CUSMA free trade deal. But you will note that the Biden White House did not act on those threats.

Long before Donald Trump got the idea of launching illegal tariffs in defiance of the CUSMA agreement, US trade strategy included a Break-Glass option of just ignoring the cross border trade agreement and launching tariffs against Canada under section 301 of the US Trade Act.

The last time occurred in 1999 in response to Canadian legislation impeding split-run magazines like “Sports Illustrated Canada” that were trade dumping into our domestic market. At least in that case, the US had won the trade litigation at the World Trade Organization before it set a deadline for section 301 sanctions against Canadian steel, plastics, and wood products.

This time around, Hollywood and Big Tech definitely have their “Break-Glass” man in the White House.

The official spokesperson for Big Tech, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), has been filing briefs on Capitol Hill and with Trump’s Trade Representative demanding retribution for Canadian legislation.

Note to file, Canada’s Shopify belongs to the CCIA.

CCIA briefs are always packed full of allegations that foreign countries are violating this or that chapter of trade agreements. The better to load up the bargaining table. For the benefit of US legislators, CICA’s rhetoric is salted with bewildered outrage that foreign legislatures are regulating global American enterprises.

The trade allegations should not be dismissed out of hand just because they are inflammatory. But the CCIA sometimes loses touch with reality. In 2023 a CCIA brief informed US legislators and the US Trade Representative that Canada had once agreed that in exchange for the US not retaliating against Canadian regulation of US television access to our domestic market we would never regulate broadcasting over the Internet. It was a brazen fabrication. And the Biden White House no doubt ignored it.

The CCIA’s opening salvo in the anticipated Trump trade war was delivered this past December in a 238-page aggregation of Big Tech’s trade allegations against 53 countries and the 27-state European Union.

Although trade deficits and surpluses are irrelevant to whether trade agreement have been breached, the CCIA got right to the politics by pointing out that “digital services and goods represent a key driver of US export power, with the technology industry delivering a hefty digital trade surplus of $266.8 billion for the United States in 2023.”

Put plainly, Big Tech does some heavy lifting in keeping the overall US trade deficit lower.

In a new filing in January, Big Tech put its emphasis upon America’s interests in intellectual property that, says the CCIA, is impacted by “discriminatory non-tariff barriers” (i.e. regulation) in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the European Union.

The point of course is not whether such “non-tariff barriers” exist, it’s whether they are truly discriminatory against US companies competing in foreign markets and violate the trade agreements that the US negotiated, signed and ratified with these countries. “Non-tariff barriers” may be the pretext for Trump tariffs next week.

In February, the CCIA got down to brass tacks, providing the US Trade Representative with its list of priorities for trade action.

Top target: the Digital Services taxes imposed by 14 countries, including Canada.

Next: news licensing payments to journalism outlets (Google money) in Australia, Canada, and the EU.

Next: for US video and music streamers, domestic content requirements and cultural cash levies in Canada, France, and other EU countries. In other words, eliminating the Online Streaming Act root and branch.

And so on. The CCIA is also targeting potential Canadian regulation of high-impact AI systems contained in our Bill C-27 (proposed legislation that died in January when Parliament was prorogued).

Whether any of that fits into He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named’s plan to hit Canada and the rest of the world with “reciprocal tariffs,” we may see that on April 2nd.

***

Canadian legislators aren’t the only politicians with a taste for staging show trials of public broadcasters.

Yesterday MAGA ultra Marjorie Taylor Greene convened US Congress’ new Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency with subpoenas issued to PBS and National Public Radio.

The committee session was officially dubbed “Anti-American Airwaves.” No hidden agendas for Greene: “I think the important thing for Americans to ask is: Is this where our taxpayer money needs to go? To extremely left-leaning broadcasting and political bias that doesn’t represent all of America?

“[PBS and NPR are] radical left-wing echo chambers for a narrow audience of mostly wealthy, white, urban liberals and progressives who generally look down on and judge rural America.”

Greene did score a couple of points on the PBS refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story (apology made) and the NPR chief’s pre-employment tweets calling Donald Trump a “racist and a sociopath” (also apology made).

It wasn’t all one way traffic as the Democrats on the committee had their turn. Theatre-goers were treated to political satire from Californian Congressman Robert Garcia.

Another Democrat, Jasmine Crockett of Texas, accused Republicans of the right-wing version of Cancel Culture.

“Free speech is not about whatever it is that you all want somebody to say,” she said. “And the idea that you want to shut down everybody that is not Fox News is bullshit. We need to stop playing because that’s what y’all are doing in here. You don’t want to hear the opinions of anybody else.”

The speculation is that Republicans in control of both chambers of US Congress will finally make good on threats to eliminate federal support for public broadcasting, currently budgeted at $535 million USD annually. That’s about 1% of NPR’s combined private-public financing and 15% of the total PBS budget.

The influential non-MAGA conservative opinion columnist George Will recently advocated defunding, saying that government contributions to PBS and NPR funding are a subsidy for affluent audiences.

***

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

This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2025.

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

Kevin Desjardins appearing before a Senate committee in 2022.

March 25, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MediaPolicy spoke to Desjardins earlier this month:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

March 22, 2025

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

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

***

Culture & Identity minister Steven Guilbeault – Photo credit Canadian Press

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

***

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

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

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

March 19, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

Here are just a few timeless headlines in Northern Lights:

“Is a national Canadian culture important?“

“Digital Waterloo for Cancon rules“

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

MediaPolicy asked Taylor what she thinks now.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

CBC report from December 2023

March 1, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canadians have a tepid approval rating for the overall news ecosystem that includes both the sources they choose (and presumably trust) and those they don’t.

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

Graphic courtesy of Sarah Blostein

February 23, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Here’s a rundown:

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

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

As for smaller radio broadcasters, the Commission seems ready to eliminate their half-per cent of revenue (0.05%) cash contributions to musician development funds. The current radio airplay quotas of 35% to 65%, however, are slated to remain.

The national pastime of debating the “MAPL” formula for a Canadian song that qualifies to fill airplay quotas will be revived but the Commission seems committed to the modest changes it proposed in 2022. Rules on Canadian co-writing of music and lyrics will be loosened. The Commission doesn’t seem convinced as yet that Canadian studio producers ought to join artists and songwriters in the talent club that satisfies the airplay quota.

The Commission is interested in strengthening on-air exposure for emerging Canadian artists and is open to a 5% airplay quota for artists in the first four years of their recording careers.

Similarly, the Commission is interested, in fact very determined, to introduce a 5% airplay quota for Indigenous music.

In a typically opaque discussion of news programming, the Commission declares that “news is a priority” (indeed the Online Streaming Act says so) but unlike other policy items it offers no blueprint for how to make the priority into a reality on air.

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

So naturally Malcolm introduced the topic of independent journalism.

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

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

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

***

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

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

February 21, 2025

What a difference a Trump makes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Per capita funding of public broadcasters, c. 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For that, the clock is already ticking.

***

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

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

February 10, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ad market for television has deflated.

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

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

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

Rogers is focussed on sports programming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The numbers speak for themselves.

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Sound familiar?

***

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

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

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

January 25, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now is our time. Courage, my friends.

***

And now for something micro, not macro.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Here are two rabbit holes to dive down this weekend.

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

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

***

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

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