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 EnglishCanada.
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.
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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Just released, the Poilievre platform proposes to more than double the funding of the federal Local Journalism Initiative (LJI), from $20 million per year to $45 million. That potentially adds a further 400 journalist jobs in local print media markets across Canada. The locations of those markets line up nicely with Conservative Party ridings in rural areas and outside major metropolitan areas.
The reaction in some conservative circles to Poilievre’s announcement could be described as vein-bulging disbelief. They had half expected a federal news voucher policy, like the Liberals’ now expired reader tax credit. But this?
In The Hub, a conservative publication that rarely allows daylight to show between itself and the Party, Sean Speer fumed the LJI funding was “a massive concession to the Trudeau agenda and a fundamental failure of conservative politics.” The remarks were made on a podcast, so I am not sure whether the word “conservative” was supposed to be capitalized.
The Hub Publisher Rudyard Griffiths chimed in that the federal government controls news content through the LJI, a serious accusation but without a basis in fact.
The Hub’s dismay with Poilievre’s position on subsidies should be put in context.
If elected Prime Minister, Poilievre will defund the English language services of the CBC with its 2,000 journalists.
Oddly in consideration of his repeated castigations, Poilievre’s platform is silent on the federal $65 million QCJO subsidies to about 3,000 print media journalists, dispensed at 35% of salary.
He has promised immunity to Meta for liability under the Online News Act, which puts at risk Google’s compliance with their commitment to pay $100 million per year compensation to news outlets employing 9,000 journalists (at about 15% of salary).
He has also promised $20 million to fund “Indigenous journalism” without providing specifics.
The Hub’s feeling of betrayal by Poilievre runs deep. In the past few months the publication has gone out of its way to celebrate its refusal to take federal subsidies or compensation from Google, proclaiming its disdain for this financial support as part of its marketing campaign for more paid subscriptions.
What’s not well advertised is that two years ago The Hub publisher Griffiths sought and obtained official designation from the Canada Revenue Agency as a “QCJO” news publisher and, more recently, the seal of approval from the Canada Journalism Collective that is administering the Google money.
I asked him about this apparent contradiction and he confirmed that The Hub has the designations, but spurned the money. A month ago The Hub very publicly donated its $22,000 in Google cash to a charity.
As for the QCJO designation, he says The Hub wanted it for the purpose of Press credentials and never applied for the salary subsidy or reader tax credit program. As for seeking and then giving away the Google money, he said The Hub wanted to follow its application through the CJC process so it could verify the integrity of the distribution.
The Hub’s argument with subsidies is about the independence of the press from government, a non trivial concern of course, but the relevant discussion is “independence” from the many vectors of power in our liberal democracy, not only government but big corporations, sponsors, political parties, billionaires, readers demanding ideological conformity and powerful local families.
The Hub‘s success in winning official status raises the concern of how best to administer QCJO designation when it results in the certification of a news outlet so utterly committed to a northstar political party, one that may be governing Canada come Tuesday morning.
That concern is usually shrugged off by those who point to the historic practice of print media mixing its news reporting with politics through opinion journalism and explicit party endorsements. It got us where we are today, so why worry about the close ties between some media and their political champions?
One way to stop worrying about those political allegiances is found in program design for the subsidies. One of the best ways for a news outlet to prove its bona fides of good journalism is through its committment to original and accurate news gathering as the main course in the journalism meal, with opinion as the dessert.
The QCJO criteria for designation has always required that news outlets engage in original news gathering with a fairly high bar for professional standards. The weakness of those rules is that lack of a high bar for volume of news gathering, requiring only that news gathering be carried out on “ongoing basis.” The “ongoing” is left to eyeballing by a certification committee after a news organization has submitted details of its self selected “best three weeks” of news reporting.
If an outlet like The Hub with its acres of opinion writing and occasional news story can get QCJO designation, the bar for frequency of news reporting can’t be very high.
In fact Griffiths told me that as a non-profit he nevertheless decided against seeking the charitable status that would allow him to issue tax receipts to donors because the rules of the government’s less known “RJO” program for non-profits sets the news gathering bar at 51% of published content, a test he says he could not meet.
And then there is accuracy in news reporting, another thing that demonstrates good journalism and, when not done well, undermines public trust.
Recently, The Hub has repeatedly described federal subsidies to news journalism as totalling “$425 million per year.”
Included in that figure is the $100 million Google money as an “indirect” federal subsidy, a highly editorialized way of describing government-enforced news licensing payments between private parties.
More seriously, its “$425 million” figure includes $154 million from the Canada Media Fund, a media fund that spends all of its money on Canadian television dramas, documentaries and children’s programming and exactly zero dollars on news journalism. That’s a hugely misleading reporting error.
There is yet another way to demonstrate good journalism: keeping a safe distance from corporate influence. News organizations of all stripes have a chequered history on this, frequently allowing advertisers and sponsors to pay for content in one way or another. Nevertheless “advertorial” that is written and paid for by a sponsor, clearly marked as non-journalist content, is generally accepted and long tolerated.
But the arms length independence from corporate money can get squishy.
The Hub published an article in October that opposed the federal government’s Online Streaming Act, also contested in a “Scrap the Streaming Tax” public campaign launched the previous month by the American Digital Media Association (DiMA) against the CRTC’s ruling that music streamers pay five per cent of revenue to Canadian media funds.
DiMA’s member organizations Spotify, Apple, Youtube and Amazon are notorious news subjects in their opposition to the CRTC’s implementation of the bill and DiMA’s campaign art was used by The Hub to illustrate the content of the article.
DiMA even paid for the article, a fact that was acknowledged at the bottom of the article but still, in my opinion, constituting a repudiation of independent journalism.
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While I’m on about The Hub, they posted a terrific podcast in their Full Press series hosted by Harrison Lowman and starring independent journalists Tara Henley and Peter Menzies. The topic was the notorious “shit show” of Rebel News turning the election debate press conferences on their end on consecutive nights.
It got going on the first night when a Rebel News reporter chose to ask the only non-Christian leader why he wasn’t speaking out against “ongoing attacks against Christians” and Church burnings, a provocatively staged but nonetheless legitimate question.
But the second night was when it all went to hell and the press conference became so unruly that the election commission cancelled it.
The Full Press podcast has some very intelligent commentary on the whole mess, very relevant to the Internet-induced era of wide open journalism.
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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.
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.
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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 notbe “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):
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….
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 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.
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.
“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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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):
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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.
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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.
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The business journalists of the land have already done a thorough jobcovering 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.
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This week in Canadian news journalism’s Inside Baseball…
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.
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 Democracyand 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’sRapplerand 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.
***
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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.
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.
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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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?
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.
And from the point of view of the artists, there are infinitely more ways for them to get their music out and to be discovered. They can get placed on a curated playlist, and they can use their own social media channels to share their music and promote themselves. Radio is one piece of the puzzle to break artists, but it continues to bear the highest burden.
And yet, the regulatory bargain that was established for the satellite radio operators nearly twenty years ago seems to be the path that they are pursuing. Just pay more and play whatever you want.
There’s also the modernization of the MAPL rules, and again, we’re concerned that the Commission is going to make it harder for Canadian artists to qualify. If they take out the “P” of that equation, and make a song need two-out-of-three points to be considered sufficiently “Canadian”, it’s going to make things harder to qualify, not easier.
Basically, it all comes down to, if the artist is Canadian, it is CanCon. I don’t understand why there’s such resistance to this. The Commission should embrace this, because if they are as “consumer-focused” as they have claimed in recent years, having rules that tell Canadians that Canadian artists aren’t Canadian will only serve to undermine their legitimacy.
MP: Looking at the umbrella organization that is the CAB, you have something like 68 different members that represent such divergent, sometimes conflicting interests. The big TV broadcasters whose parent companies control cable access are in the same tent as small independents who need that access and the opportunity to make money. Big broadcasters are gouging out each other’s eyes to buy the most popular US programming. And you domicile different content businesses that do better or worse under the current regulatory rules. How do you get anything done?
KD: Every member-based association is a balancing act. There are often divergent opinions, and this is especially the case in an industry association. Our members are highly competitive with one another, and we at the CAB have to respect that. It’s not called “show friends”, it’s “show business”.
Our challenge is to make a convincing case to our members that they are better off singing from the same song book. That many voices with the same message creates resonance, and I think that we’ve done reasonably well in recent years of helping to provide that value to our members. If they don’t entirely align with each other, we hope that we can help them find enough common ground within any legislative or regulatory process.
Building consensus isn’t easy, but as Bruce Cockburn sang: “Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight.”
***
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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.
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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.
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.
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51st state? Here’s two thumbs up for two Canadians, journalists Scott Roxborough and Etan Vlessing of the Hollywood Reporter. They’ve put together a new list of the greatest 51 Canadian flicks of all time. Check your seen-it score, make your watch list.
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