Tag: media

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

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

March 19, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

Here are just a few timeless headlines in Northern Lights:

“Is a national Canadian culture important?“

“Digital Waterloo for Cancon rules“

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

MediaPolicy asked Taylor what she thinks now.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

March 15, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remember that when you buy Florida orange juice.

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

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

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

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

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

Ireland.

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

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

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

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

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

This is a daunting scenario, but not impossible.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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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.

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

March 13, 2025

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

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

Continue reading at Cartt.ca…

***

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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.

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

March 8, 2025

I have video clips to recommend.

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

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

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

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

Have fun.

***

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

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

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

Economist Jim Stanford

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

March 5, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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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.”

***

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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.

***

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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.

***

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Catching Up on MediaPolicy – the DST is not a trade issue- the music cartels in Canada- redesigning journalism aid – from the Super Bowl to Manifest Destiny

It’s Flag Day.

February 15, 2025

Before catching up on MediaPolicy, there are two posts I offer up to you.

The first is my speech to the Digital Media at the Crossroads conference from last weekend. It’s a well salted explainer of the CRTC’s implementation of the Online Streaming Act on music streaming, its first efforts having drawn court appeals, trade threats and the launch of the “Scrap the Streaming Tax” campaign.

The Commission is going to announce a further public consultation on audio (including radio) this week.

The other post is an explainer of the federal Digital Services Tax that I wrote last year. Last week stories circulated in the press that the DST would be on the Trump retaliation list. If you didn’t have that on your bingo card, you should have. As detailed in my post, the DST is not a trade issue, it’s a tax issue.

The US digital giants offshore revenue from their Canadian operations (and do the same in other OECD nations) in order to minimize corporate tax.

The DSTs enacted in Canada and Europe are a response to that tax avoidance.

Former US President Joe Biden recognized that when he negotiated a tax treaty to fix it but US Congress refused to ratify it.

The tech bros appear to have backed the right horse.

***

The Public Policy Forum just published a report on local news journalism, The Lost Estate. The report comes out of the Michener Foundation’s conference last October. Written by journalism A-listers Alison Uncles, Ed Greenspon and Andrew Phillips, the report covers familiar ground about the extent of Canadian news deserts and news poverty.

The Report’s public policy recommendations have evolved beyond those recommended in 2017 by Greenspon’s Shattered Mirror study and the roster of federal programs aiding news journalism enacted since then by the Trudeau Liberals.

Here they are:

  • Work harder at getting philanthropic foundations, community organizations and individuals to utilize current tax write-offs for donations to news journalism.
  • Make it easier for news organizations to go non-profit, unlocking those charitable donations.
  • Mirror these contributions to the operational costs of running newsrooms with a public-private-philanthropic capital investment fund for community rescues of failing news outlets.
  • Legislate a requirement that moribund media organizations must give a four-month public notice of closure so that local investors can save the outlet (this would require both provincial and federal action).
  • Redesign Ottawa’s Local Journalism Initiative that funds 400 reporting jobs by matching federal funding to charitable fundraising, something that the recipient news organizations would be responsible for undertaking.
  • Redesign the federal reporter subsidy by requiring staff retention and rewarding new hiring.
  • Introduce an advertiser tax credit for expenditures in local media.
  • Encourage more governments to increase their advertising expenditures in local media.

If there is a theme in these recommendations it is to juice the market-facing incentives in current programs while not abandoning government aid.

As an appendix to its Report, the Forum provided an Ipsos poll covering some familiar questions about public attitudes towards news journalism.

The results confirm a key trend in public opinion: mainstream media is highly trusted and information carried over social media is not.

On the other hand, two questions related to government subsidies to independent news journalism elicited concern that state sponsorship “might” stoke bias and a lack of independence from government.

The most trusted news sources are in fact the most subsidized by government, so give the public credit for agreeing with MediaPolicy: subsidies are a difficult to measure risk to public trust but so far not a harm.

***

I sometimes close this post by recommending content, but consider this more of a referral: the Hollywood-crafted and star-studded Super Bowl ads you didn’t get to see because the NFL sold the Canadian programming and advertising rights to Bell Media’s TSN.

Nobody quite does goofy the way that Hollywood can.

Are you not entertained? You decide.

***

Okay, changed my mind, I will recommend something serious.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only Canadian listening to Trump’s inauguration speech who noticed the President’s reference to “Manifest Destiny,” a long active but recently dormant part of America’s imperial DNA.

Here’s a good piece on that from the US National Public Radio news site.

***

From The Lost Estate Report:

FOR PHILANTHROPY

Expand issue definition: Philanthropy is growing rapidly in the United States around local news. In addition to the small handful of U.S. foundations that are interested in journalism and democracy, a second wave of foundations and donors that were funders of other issues — including domestic violence, hunger, homelessness and poverty — have come to realize they’re not going to make any progress if there’s no local news. Canadian philanthropists should follow suit.

Step up community foundation involvement: There are more than 200 community foundations across Canada, as well as thousands of private foundations. They are just now beginning to channel their impressive fundraising acumen towards local news initiatives: The Winnipeg Community Foundation, for instance, has funded reporting on religion by the Winnipeg Free Press, and the Toronto Foundation is one of several foundations that help to fund The Local. Community foundations should be encouraged to support local news coverage as part of their wider missions to encourage social vitality, community health and local democracy. More media organizations should be knocking on those doors, and more community foundations should be stepping up.

Help enable new local news models, including not-for-profits and charities: Major French-language news outlets such as La Presse and Le Devoir have become not-for-profits and then used that status to apply for Registered Journalism Organization status to take advantage of money from foundations and individual donors. Only four media organizations outside Quebec have done the same; that represents a major missed opportunity to develop a new source of revenue to support local news. RJO status would mean new startup ventures could accept philanthropic support or present an opportunity for community-based fundraising to claim back news outlets from the corporate chains that have abandoned local coverage.

Foundations can help with this step. Achieving charitable status can be complicated, but foundations can offer guidance on how to navigate the rules around registered philanthropic organizations, such as setting up “friends of” charities that can more easily raise money from supporters. If more outlets had charitable status, more foundation help could be unlocked for local journalism.

FOR GOVERNMENT

Reconceive the Local Journalism Initiative: Report for America in the United States provides a good model of a partnership with strategic intent that builds long-term capacity rather than plugging short-term holes. Its stated mission is to “strengthen our communities and our democracy through local journalism” and it funds reporters in local newsrooms for three-year terms, rather than the single year or less of the LJI. Among its other virtues: It provides training for journalists, unlike the LJI; its grants get smaller each year, shifting more onus each year on the news organization to finance its staff; and it helps news organizations learn how to fundraise within their communities. A homemade “Report for Canada” would roll in LJI funds to match those invested by philanthropy. This would provide the added governance benefit of distancing the program from the government of the day and placing authority in an independent board. Public contributions, as with academic granting agencies, would come in the form of multi-year funding.

Mandate a sales notice period: Communities should have an opportunity to rally support for news outlets that are threatened with closure by corporate owners. Specifically, there should be a notice period, perhaps 120 days, before a news operation can be shut down or sold to a non-local buyer. That would give communities time to gather support for local ownership. To help promote local buyers, governments can explore policy interventions that could include training and development, support with restructuring operations, access to expert resources, navigation support of federal and provincial programs, as well as low-cost or no-cost loans.

Tie the Labour Tax Credit to jobs: The LTC is the most important government program supporting news operations at the moment, worth an estimated $67 million in the 2024-25 fiscal year.[42] It should be continued, but with important changes. Organizations should not take money and cut content; the tax credit should carry an incentive to grow newsrooms and should be tied to the increase or preservation of editorial positions and other resources necessary to produce local content. The credit would be higher for those who increase their spending on journalism.

Drive local advertising with a tax cut: Along the same lines, local advertisers should receive a tax credit for spending their ad dollars with independent, locally owned media. As advertising dollars continue to flow to foreign-owned digital sites, depriving local media of funds they need, a tax credit would give advertisers a greater incentive to vote local while leaving the decision about which outlets get support to them, not government. Equitable tax credits for advertisers have the additional benefit of being more likely to withstand shifts in the political winds. That said, local advertising only helps if Main Street can withstand the competition from distant digital retailers, which presents a different set of challenges.

Direct government ad dollars to local news: Governments should earmark a portion of their substantial advertising budgets to local publishers and broadcasters. Ontario is showing the way by requiring that 25 percent of government ad budgets, including spending by four large provincial agencies, be directed to “Ontario-based publishers.” This program, which went into effect in September 2024, is explicitly aimed at “helping to support these publishers and their workers, who are creating local news content for people across the province.” Brought in by a Conservative government, it could be worth some $50 million a year to Ontario publishers. The federal government, other provinces and territories, and municipalities should follow suit. Governments are already spending substantial amounts on advertising and marketing. It makes no sense for them to talk about the need for vibrant local democracy and a healthy local news environment while they continue to funnel their own ad dollars to foreign-owned social media sites.

FOR PHILANTHROPY AND GOVERNMENT

Encourage capital formation: The best way to strengthen local news is to help it remain in local hands in whatever form entrepreneurs believe will work best in each community. In many cases, this will require capital. Programs to encourage capital formation for this purpose would go a long way to preserving the public good that is local news. A sustainable investment vehicle, co-funded by the federal government, provincial and territorial governments, the philanthropic sector, as well as NGOs, could draw lessons from government programs like the Social Finance Fund[43] and the Canada Rental Protection Fund,[44] where federal investment complements other public, private and philanthropic money. The government should explore any mechanism that makes crowding-in more effective, by utilizing a “first-in, last-out” methodology. For philanthropic organizations engaged in social impact investment, local journalism is a perfect match. The same is true for governments that have already put in place measures to encourage employee ownership or support.

***

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MediaPolicy’s speech to Digital Media at the Crossroads: an update on regulating music streamers in Canada

February 13, 2025

Last weekend I did a little speed-dating at the 2025 Digital Media at the Crossroads conference. I had fifteen minutes to give an update on what’s up with the CRTC’s regulatory path for music streaming.

That wasn’t a lot of time. Things like “should we overhaul the ‘MAPL’ eligibility formula for Canadian songs?” just fell by the wayside. But I hope the conference delegates found it a useful summary.

***

I think the reason that I was invited here today is that I wrote a couple of blogs back in fall in response to the music streamers’ petition campaign “Scrap the Streaming Tax.” 

That campaign was launched by Digital Media Association, the American lobby organization that speaks for the foreign music streamers Spotify, Amazon, Apple and Google’s YouTube. The face of the campaign was Bryan Adams, our own legendary rock star.

In the next 15 minutes I’m going to give you a brief overview of what might happen in the CRTC’s implementation of the Online Streaming Act, Bill C-11 for the audio industry, in particular the music streamers. 

Last June the Commission handed down a cash levy of 5% of Canadian revenues to the music streamers — much to their dismay— and next month we expect a notice of consultation that should put discoverability of Canadian music squarely on the table. 

That’s assuming an election doesn’t sideswipe the Commission’s work.

I don’t have to tell any of the radio broadcasters in the room that audio is the neglected child of the broadcasting system, a much smaller ecosystem by revenue than its big brother television and video streaming.

It’s difficult to find an explicit policy discussion of why we regulate the broadcasting of music, whereas there’s plenty of that kind of public debate about television.

What video and audio have in common of course is that Canadian music, like Canadian television or any other kind of mass media, swims up current in a continental market dominated by large foreign-owned media giants. 

So we regulate in order to carve out an adequate space in the Canadian mass market for Canadian songs, composed and performed by Canadian artists.

I suggest that means we are not content that a handful of high achievers like Drake, The Weeknd, Justin Bieber and Tait McRae have become international superstars.

For Canadian music to have real prominence and presence in our domestic market we have to nurture a musician middle class in Canada, which is a small market, and especially Québec, which is an even smaller market. 

Ditto, ditto for Indigenous music.

If that’s why we regulate, we then have to consider what we’re up against in terms of the distribution of music in Canada, and the distribution of the money made from that.

Streaming is now the dominant distribution architecture .

And streaming is run by an oligopoly of foreign media companies.

Let’s just look at a couple of slides here.

You’ve probably seen this one: streaming saved the music industry from piracy and financial oblivion… and then became its master. 

Streamers are now the retail face of the recorded music industry and the ingestion point for two thirds of its income.

When streamers distribute that revenue they keep a third for themselves, half goes to labels and artists, and 15% goes to songwriters.

Canada is a rich market for a small country. Canadian consumers are significant streaming adapters on a per capita basis.

Two-thirds of Canadians are on streaming platforms, listening to about 15 tracks per day. Ninety per cent of Canadians under the age of 30 are signed up for streaming; it’s clearly the future of the industry for as far as we can project.

The streamers themselves may not be a tech bro oligarchy, but they are an oligopoly. And Spotify stands first, with twice as many paid subscriptions as its fellow giants.

What’s more, the streamer oligopoly negotiates licensing fees with another cartel, the major music labels. 

Such is the market power in the industry that carves up the revenue pie, which arguably results in more financial precarity for artists and songwriters than might otherwise be the case.

As I mentioned, Canada hits above its weight in music consumption but also is an overachiever in producing global superstars.

Check out this Spotify Top 10 artists list.

But the question for Canadian media policy is not whether a handful of Canadian stars become rich and famous, it’s whether we are filling the music distribution pipeline with enough good music to achieve an adequate share of the domestic music market for our own artists.

In short, the question is whether we can nurture a Canadian musician middle class where enough artists can make enough money over a long enough time to develop their craft and their audience.

Broadcasting regulation and adjacent public policy like the Canada Council address this problem on both the supply side and the demand side.

What do I mean by that?

We stimulate audience demand through radio airplay quotas and financial support, usually through media funds like FACTOR, for sound recording, live performance and marketing.

We stimulate the supply of musician income from music sales and licensing, radio royalties and support for other income generating gigs.

One of the frustrating things about public policy in this area is that for a variety of reasons we don’t have good data on musician incomes.

But we do have data on consumption of Canadian music, and when it comes to consumption on the biggest platform, music streaming, it’s underwhelming to say the least.

This slide shows that Canadian musicians have only a ten per cent share of the Canadian music streaming audience. 

Here are two benchmarks for that 10%. 

The unregulated market in theatrical release films has infamously resulted in a three per cent (one per cent in English Canada) revenue share for Canadian films in our own domestic market. 

At the other end, the CRTC’s radio airplay quotas range from 35% to 65% airplay for Canadian music or French language music.

There’s enough information about artist compensation from music streaming that we can estimate that a “musician” —which is a business with multiple artists and mouths to feed—  has to stream about 6 million songs annually on Spotify to earn $100,000 USD from all income sources.

And if you’re wondering how many Canadian bands achieve that 6 million, and who they are, you are out of luck. As I say, data poverty is really holding back public policy here.

The Canadian economist Gerry Wall looked into this a few years ago for Heritage Canada and concluded that, putting aside a few superstars, not enough Canadian musicians were making enough money. He concluded that ‘there has been a “hollowing out’ of the middle class of music creators.’ 

Then we have the dire case of Québec and French language music. If ever there was a canary in the coal mine for Canadian culture, the dramatic under consumption of French language music on streaming platforms would be it. 

The Canadian francophone market is obviously small at 8 million in population and some argue that the small market problem is compounded by streamer algorithms that are believed to confer prominence on songs that have reached at least one million plays, again a small market challenge.

The outcomes couldn’t be worse.

Eight per cent of streamed music in Québec is French language. 

The highest ranked streamed French language song, in Québec, is in 49th place.

Let that sink in.

I asked the Digital Media Association about that, and the publicist hired by DIMA for Scrap the Streaming Tax campaign issued a statement saying….that the global export market for French language music is strong and that the top French language song in North America belongs to Patrick Watson, a well-known Québécois artist.

As for the 8% outcome for French language music streamed in Quebec, the publicist opted not to return my email. 

How will our broadcasting regulator respond to these issues, the under consumption of French language streamed music and the broader problem of nurturing a Canadian musician middle class?

As you know, the Commission handed down a five per cent cash levy on the streamers this last June. 

I believe the streamers were genuinely gob smacked by this.

The Canadian content cash levy on radio broadcasters is a tenth of that, at 0.5%.

The music streaming tax in France is 1.2%.

The streamers should have expected something more than the half-per cent that radio broadcasters pay, since radio broadcasters make such dramatic airplay contributions to Canadian music.

And the streamers also knew that Sirius Radio, which has much softer CanCon airplay quotas than conventional radio, pays 4%.

But it didn’t assist the streamers that at every opportunity they have told Parliament and the Commission that they have no interest in taking any additional steps to make Canadian music more prominent in their playlists and streaming channels.

The trouble is, Parliament ordered it so.

Here’s the text of section 3(1)(r) of the Online Streaming Act, an amendment sponsored by the Bloc and supported by the NDP and the Conservatives in committee.

It says music streamers must use any means at its disposal to recommend and promote Canadian songs.

I’d suggest to you that “any means” includes integrating a higher prominence for Canadian songs into playlist algorithms.

But the CRTC, perhaps unintentionally because they were preoccupied with YouTube videos, appeared to rule this out within hours of the Online Streaming Act becoming law in April 2023. 

However, the federal cabinet left the door ajar on this in its Policy Direction to the CRTC in November 2023.

The streamers’ pitch on its current efforts to promote Canadian songs and Canadian artists is that if you ask for Canadian, you will get it. 

They will curate all-Canadian playlists. 

They will promote Canadian new releases. 

They will engage in musician development, sponsorship, and workshops. 

And they want those efforts to be the sum total of their promotion of Canadian content.

But under no circumstances do they want their proprietary and secret algorithms to be regulated for outcomes or anything else. 

That’s obviously a hard-line position, and perhaps that’s to be expected in the first sovereign country to propose regulated prominence outcomes in music streaming.

This is not like video streaming, where the EU plowed the regulatory furrow before we did.

It’s too bad we are so entrenched at this moment. 

There do seem to be win-win regulatory solutions. 

For example, Spotify has a third-party research paper posted on its website that suggests that reserving a prominent space on the home screen for local content works well for local artists and delivers better results for the streamer objective of keeping people listening longer and without interruption. 

There are obvious discoverability tools that the Commission could order including home screen prominence for local content and Canadian airplay quotas for the DJ-curated channels that the streamers carry, for example Apple Music does a lot of this.

But moving the needle of Canadian music consumption, especially in Québec, may require more dramatic measures.

So if we ever get to this Commission consultation on audio streaming I would expect a showdown on song curation and recommendation algorithms.

In the meantime, the streamers are engaged in an all-out campaign to sabotage Canadian regulation.

As you may know, they are challenging the 5% levy in court. They are running their publicity campaign in Canada.

My guess is they have given Conservative MPs an earful by now and are hoping Pierre Poilievre will become Prime Minister and “Kill Bill C-11.” And they are running to US legislators in Congress to put the Canadian Online Streaming Act in the trade war crosshairs. 

There’s so much drama and chaos in our relationships with American media companies and American Presidents, I wouldn’t want to predict what happens next. The velvet gloves are off. 

Like everything else in broadcasting regulation, we take it day by day. 365 days per year.

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