It being the time of the year, retrospective lists abound.
The MediaPolicy 2024 wrapped list includes posts that are worth reading (again or for the first time) because they cover public policy that Pierre Poilievre has sworn to repeal or at least do something else that looks like he has wiped the Liberal policy slate clean.
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Defunding or defending the CBC
The Poilievre banner campaign to defund the CBC is the right-wing answer to cancel culture. I don’t like you, I silence you.
A Sparks poll in January 2024 suggested overwhelming public support for the CBC, although a big slice of that is soft. Hence the importance of a public discussion of how to improve or re-engineer the public broadcaster.
MediaPolicy posted two interviews and a guest column from media commentators who know what they are talking about when it comes to the CBC: Chris Waddell, Richard Stursberg and Peter Menzies. I have a fourth instalment in this series on the way.
Online Harms
The Liberals’ Bill C-63 obliges social media platforms to come up with content moderation codes. It also empowers the government to order take-downs of revenge porn and content harmful to children. The Justice Minister has split off the more controversial portions of C-63 into a second bill: harsher criminal sanctions for Internet hate and access to human rights tribunals for victims.
The Conservatives are opposed to all of it (they have a more modest proposal) and none of it will pass before the next federal election.
In 2019 the Liberals passed the so-called “$600 million bailout” for Canadian news organizations (except for licensed broadcasters). The $600 million was the over-budgeted amount for five years: the actual spending was less than half of that.
MediaPolicy posted about the alleged relationship between that federal program and declining trust in news organizations. Also I looked at some policy prescriptions that might carry over into a Poilievre government despite his pledge to abolish the program.
News licensing payments
You say “link tax,” I say “compulsory news licensing payments.”
The Online News Act Bill C-18 blew up on the Liberals when Google and Meta decided to play hardball with enough gusto that US legislators would think twice about following Canada, Australia and Europe in making Big Tech platforms share their advertising revenue generated by news links.
I tried to get past the noise on this bill and pinpoint what I believe are the deeper truths about the legislation. The post is now a year old, but still helpful.
Poilievre says he will repeal this bill and, it would seem, refund Google its $100M in annual news licensing payments.
The Netflix Bill C-11
It took them forever, but the Liberals passed the bill that compels foreign streaming giants to share the responsibility with Canadian broadcasters to finance and distribute Canadian audio and video content.
Poilievre has been clear: he will “kill Bill C-11.”
Digital Services Tax
The DST is a stand-in for recouping $900 million in corporate tax avoidance by Big Tech in Canada. That doesn’t always come through clearly in news reports. Unfortunately, leading Canadian critics have displayed an obsequiousness (to Big Tech) or fear mongering (of US retaliation) that is unbecoming.
MediaPolicy posted what I will call a context piece on the DST that I hope is informative.
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A note to readers, MediaPolicy posts will now be available on Substack. The MediaPolicy website on the WordPress platform will continue with its archive of previous postings and resource links.
If you are already an e-mail subscriber, you will continue to receive MediaPolicy posts and will not get a duplicate from Substack (unless you sign up for it).
Substack is a fascinating creature in the news ecosystem. Founded in 2017, it’s a platform for 17,000 writers, including journalists. You can find leading independent Canadian journalists: folks like Paul Wells (30,000 paid and unpaid subscribers); Jen Gerson of The Line (26k), Justin Ling (12k), Terry Glavin (12k), Ken Whyte (7k) and Patrick White (2k). On Subtstack, both writers and readers can pepper the blogosphere with rhetorical outbursts, à la Twitter/X. But for journalists and news junkies, the site’s real draw is full-length opinion and analysis.
A year ago, Substack had about 50 million unique visitors in the month of January. It boasts two million paying subscribers and over 20 million registered readers (after you have opened an account or surrendered your e-mail address to one of your favourite writers). The writer posts are usually partially paywalled, but not always (mine is not).
The most popular Substacker is Heather Cox Richardson (1.8 million), American historian and author of the non-paywalled Letters to an American. Popular Substackers, who usually charge a $5 monthly subscription fee, can make a decent living.
The question arises at to whether Substack is a candidate for stealing yet another big chunk of mainstream media’s franchise by peeling off well known staff journalists who are currently thankful for a regular paycheque.
Having lost classified ads, much of its display advertising, and a range of editorial products to the Internet leviathan, online newspapers have stayed in business by cutting news and news gatherers. To replace the lost news content, we have a great deal more opinion columns. Opinion is popular and, for the news proprietors, cheap. The key has been to concede more of the news hole to the best and well known opinionators.
What if Substack took those marquée writers and their audiences too?
If you mark off 45 minutes of your time, an engaging Canadaland podcast hosted by Jesse Brown and starring Paul Wells, Jen Gerson, and Chris Best (Substack’s Canadian co-founder) talks about the possibility of mainstream media losing its stars to Substack.
Gerson has a trenchant observation: the Canadian journalists enjoying success on Substack are generally those who made their bones and their reputations after years of service in mainstream media newsrooms. That career path, she suggests, doesn’t exist anymore.
Then there’s Substack’s Nazi problem. With that teaser, I recommend the podcast, here.
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He is in fact prolific. And a great deal of his analysis and opinion work is in Canadian media policy. That befits a life spent in news journalism but also a lengthy stint serving on the CRTC (rising to Vice-Chair for Telecommunications). He writes a weekly Substack column.
I discovered his writing because over the last several years of Liberal government in Ottawa I noticed that he and I disagreed on seemingly everything. But I also noted that his was usually the perspective I had to grapple with in order to formulate my own.
As for the CBC and its future, Menzies is neither defender nor defunder. He is a critic and he is blunt in his criticism.
One thing that he and I agree upon is that the CBC must be the centrepiece of any cogent public policy for Canadian news journalism. That comes across in an essay he wrote with former CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein in 2023, And Now the News (to which Ivor Shapiro and I responded, here).
Here, Menzies answered my questions about the CBC:
Q. Let’s get right to the point. If something needs fixing at the CBC, what is it?
Too many Canadians, often for ideological but also for regional/cultural reasons simply don’t see their realties reflected in the broadcasts or in the online copy. That needs to be addressed and I’m not sure that’s possible at this stage. Its 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.
And we are moving into a post-Woke, post cancel culture time in which people have tired of reading and watching what they interpret as sermons disguised as news copy. There’s a growing backlash against moral instruction and a deep desire on the part of consumers to have news delivered to them in a fashion that trusts the reader to draw conclusions. There’s work to be done across the industry on that.
Q. It seems to me that the CBC is mired in the classic Canadian paradigm of metropolis and hinterland. Outside of central Canada, it’s viewed as a central Canadian institution with a central Canadian institutional culture. It seems to drive the politics about the CBC. How do you get at changing that?
You probably have to physically relocate. I remember, for instance, when CBC News Network started the day being anchored in Halifax, then moved with the sun to Toronto, then West to an anchor in Calgary and finally in Vancouver. If I had my way – just kidding, sort of – I’d put their head office in Baker Lake, which is the community closest to the nation’s geographical centre but Winnipeg would do.
It needs to have multiple homes spread across the country. The physical infrastructure is there; the mentality is not. Nothing against Toronto but its culture and interests are very unique.
Q. You’ve been writing frequently about a different CBC for several years now, and one constant message has been getting the CBC out of the advertising market in television and digital. You frame it as part of a holistic Canadian media policy, because it would be good for private media too.
Yes, Richard Stursberg said once at a CRTC hearing that the CBC is not a public broadcaster – it is a publicly-funded commercial broadcaster and that has stuck in my mind ever since. Corporately, it shape-shifts so that when it needs government money, it can play the public broadcaster violin but when it sees a commercial advantage, like online news advertising, it can put on its CNN of the North cape and play private sector media. This sort of dualistic life is eating its soul because advertisers want strong GTA numbers which over time impacts how people in a Toronto office measure success and works against the CBC fulfilling its mandate as a truly national institution.
It also undermines efforts by legacy private sector media to transition to digital only by competing there for advertising, which lowers rates and opportunities.
Q. But what about the audience benefits in going ad-free for CBC programming?
CBC Radio One is a leader in almost every major radio market in the country because it is ad free. Private radio broadcasters are generally okay with that because they don’t have to compete with them for advertising revenue.
It’s also popular locally because it’s locally produced and informs people about what’s going on in their community and is important to people. It’s less political – big P and little p – less preachy and people can relate to local on-air personalities. But then it switches to day time programming out of Toronto and, with apologies to folks there, the world according to Toronto doesn’t sell all that well in Antigonish, Thomson or Grande Prairie.
Q. Back to the holistic policy for Canadian journalism: you’ve endorsed the idea of CBC providing its news content to other news outlets for free, like a no-fee syndication service. A creative commons. How would you implement that?
Yes. CBC should be a sister or brother to other media within the national media ecosystem, not a competitor. So long as the content is produced through subsidy, it should be of benefit to everyone – domestically – through something similar to a creative commons license. This could be of significant assistance in so-called news deserts and would need to have reasonable limits but I really think that if we are going to have a publicly-funded broadcaster, the benefits that come from that need to flow through to private media as well. That’s much preferred to the direct subsidies we’ve got going now that destroy trust in media.
Q. To create a real CBC creative commons of local news, CBC might have to invest more in local?
They should do that anyway. Only what is local is real to most people. All media know that but these days almost all of them just offer lip service and centralize everything. CTV and Global used to have General Managers in Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, St. John’s, etc. Now their breakfast and other shows get produced out of Toronto. Headlines in the Star Phoenix are written in Hamilton. It’s suicidal short termisim but it helps executives meet their numbers and get their bonuses. Bit of a rant there but the CBC mandate demands local. But they’ve wandered from that. Their mandate and their CRTC licence conditions are all a charade if no one ever has their performance measured against them.
Q. In an article you wrote for The Line in 2020 —with some hilarious commentary I might add— you suggested the CBC is obsessed with US current events and should stop. Care to elaborate?
Because they are centred in Montreal and Toronto, there is a gravitational pull within the CBC culture that influences their news curation and programming decisions and as I earlier mentioned the advertising incentive exaggerates that. They seem to want to compete with CNN, MSNBC, etc. rather than just serving Canadians. So every Monday morning the national news on radio tends to lead with USA USA USA because Toronto is very USA facing. Of course USA news is important but the entire reason the CBC exists – frig, the entire reason the Broadcasting Act exists – is to ensure that Canada doesn’t just become the 51st state, if not geographically then culturally. I just want them to do their job.
Q. As a follow up to that, some experts on the CBC like Waddell and Stursberg have endorsed a news curation strategy that involves reinvesting in global reporting as a way of “explaining the world to Canadians.” What do you think of that as a programming priority?
Sure, in an ideal world that might be nice but I wouldn’t do it at the risk of local. In an online world, there are multiple sources of international news that aren’t American that people can go to so I don’t see the same imperative there as I do for who’s covering school boards in Moncton because right now no one is doing that although I’m sure someone in Moncton will correct me. But you get the drift.
Q. Back to news curation, what do you think of CBC’s overall editorial performance?
Journalism in Canada these days is occasionally brilliant, too often disappointing and regularly just bad. There is a general malaise that has come from somewhere – I’m assuming the j-schools are teaching it – that abandons the aspiration to produce news as objectively as possible – the way consumers want it delivered.
I think it is absolutely killing the business. Plus, you now have to have a degree to get a job. Why? It’s not a profession, it’s a trade and a noble one at that. Whatever happened to the blue collar men and women holding the powerful to account? Now you have to have tens of thousands of dollars to go to university for four, five or six years which means chances are your reporters are from upper middle class suburban backgrounds. And why? The basics can be taught in four or five courses over eight or nine months followed by an apprenticeship. If you can’t get the basics down in six months, you won’t get them in six years. Which is a long-winded way of saying the CBC should stop – right now – insisting on university degrees. They misunderstand the business.
And because of that, they misunderstand Canadians.
Q. One thing you hear whenever the topic of reinvigorating the CBC comes up is a recommendation that it pick some priorities and make some hard decisions about programming and services, whether that’s to cut costs or redirect budgets. Do you have any thoughts about how to do that?
I think it’s worth asking whether we need CBC TV daytime programming at all or more than one radio network in each language and what the heck did we do turning Radio Canada International into a domestic multicultural broadcaster? Like, either do the job or don’t but don’t run that scam.
I think it has way too much water in its wine, tries to do too many things and take up too much space in the ecosphere. So I’d be fine with – in English anyway – trimming it down to a single 24-hour news channel with maybe four to six hours of prime time, 100% Canadian, entertainment content. In other words, merge CBC News Network – with mandated stories from coast to coast – and CBC.
Do the same with radio. A single English language radio network with local morning and afternoon drive shows, national programming evening only and move the music into the daytime slots – for instance and dump the national day time programs. I’m not saying this definitively but provocatively to prompt some “why not” thinking to clear out dead wood not only in programming but administratively and bureaucratically. Right now. Because if they don’t, someone’s going to do it for them.
Q. If Pierre Poilievre gets elected sometime in 2025, CBC English services might be walking the plank. In January there will be a new CEO with a new mandate. What would you do if you were in her shoes?
Well the new mandate already is a few weeks behind when we were expecting it but I’m sure Madam Bouchard has a pretty good idea where it’s going. She doesn’t have much time. She needs to move quickly and decisively, unrolling an action – not an aspirational – plan within 60 days and begin implementing it within 30 more days. It’s that simple.
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This week MediaPolicy hosted a guest column on the future of the CBC from Richard Stursberg, the author of The Tangled Garden: A Canadian Cultural Manifesto and the 2012 Tower of Babble, a memoir of running English language services at the CBC. The column welcomes the new President of CBC, Marie-Philippe Bouchard, with some advice.
You see exposed now, my naked agenda: more talk about how to reinvent the CBC and present an alternative to Pierre Poilievre’s promise to defund it. I hope to keep this going with more discussion on this platform.
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Here’s one piece of my mind I offer about the CBC.
Pierre Poilievre has many political goals to be achieved by defunding the CBC, not the least of which is repaying donors so he can convince them his audacity is genuine.
The other purpose of “defund the CBC” is to effect a seismic shift in the media reporting universe. Silencing the CBC through defunding is the right-wing version of cancel-culture, something you might have heard is a bad thing. The reputed CBC “news bias” will be eliminated along with the work of 3000 unwanted journalists.
For a thought provoking video clip, here is CBC news host David Cochrane putting forth a plausible hypothetical in a Canada purged of the CBC:
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On November 15 the CRTC announced that it is commencing hearings on March 31, 2025 that will dive into the meatiest of remaining regulatory issues for video streamers under the Online Streaming Act Bill C-11. MediaPolicy will have more to say about that in mid-week.
Even though the federal cabinet gave the Commission until December 2025 to complete the regulatory “framework” for the bill, the Commission’s laborious pace is awkward given the Conservative election promise to repeal it.
On Friday the Commission made it clear that the best case scenario for completing its work including the specific requirements for online and traditional broadcasters is in 2026 and, as expected, it will pause this work the moment that the election writ is dropped.
That means voters in the a federal election to be held no later than October 2025 will be relying a great deal on what political parties say the legislation is about, rather than how it is actually implemented. We deserve better.
The campaign against C-11 continues uninterrupted.
As covered by MediaPolicy in these twoposts, the coalition representing Spotify and the Big Tech music streamers recently launched the public campaign “Scrap The Streaming Tax,” a reference to the CRTC’s CanCon levy authorized by C-11. The Washington D.C.-based Digital Media Association (DiMA) behind the campaign was fortunate to land Canadian rocker Bryan Adams as an ally and supporter of the campaign.
Now DiMA has sponsored —-paid for—- an opinion column from The Hub’s Sean Speer in which Stephen Harper’s former policy chief proposes the repeal of Bill C-11.
The column, illustrated with art from DiMA’s “Scrap the Tax” campaign, signs off “this article was made possible by the Digital Media Association and the generosity of readers like you.”
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The Parliamentary Heritage Committee has issued its final reporton hearings convened in reaction to the political campaigns and news throttles conducted in Canada by Meta and Google in 2022 and 2023. The modest title of the proceedings was: “Tech Giants’ Intimidation and Subversion Tactics to Evade Regulation in Canada and Globally.”
Alas, the committee’s majority report (the Conservative MPs dissented) is anti-climatic. When the hearings commenced, MPs demanded that Meta and Google cough up e-mails that might reveal “astroturfing” alliances between the Big Tech giants and grassroots Canadian organizations opposing Internet legislation.
In the end, there is nothing in the report about those e-mails. It’s just as well. The Big Tech funding patrons and campaign alliances were openly acknowledged by those Canadian organizations.
The Committee made five recommendations for regulating Big Tech’s activities in Canada, four of which are addressed by the Liberals’ Online Safety Act C-63 that currently languishes in Parliament.
The fifth recommendation is a reprise of the Heritage Committee’s 2017 proposal to “Close the Loophole” in section 19.1 of the Income Tax Act that exempts online advertising from the tax presumption against placing Canadian advertisements in foreign media operating in Canada. The policy idea is to encourage Canadian advertisers to reach online Canadian audiences through Canadian media.
A footnote: the Conservative Party’s dissenting statement declares its intention (or that of its committee MPs) to repeal the Online News Act, C-18. While the Party and its leader have repeatedly opposed and criticized the Bill that delivers $100 million annually to Canadian news organizations, this is the first time I have seen them commit to repealing it.
The ability of Canadian governments to regulate Big Tech operations is always limited by the reality that we are a small country and the US is a big one that uses trade power to defend the interests of its corporations. Anything we want to do differently from the US in respect to Big Tech is difficult; anything the US Congress does on its own accord would be easier to mirror in Canada.
So the impact of the Trump and Republican victories in the recent election upon Big Tech is all important. The Washington Post published a summary of the live Tech regulatory issues in 2025 such as AI, child safety, and Elon Musk (he’s his own issue).
The Post speculated that the selection of the new majority leader of the Republican Senate might be crucial to tech issues and indeed the job was captured by South Dakota’s John Thune, despite Musk’s vigorous opposition to his appointment. Thune is sometimes identified as a traditional Republican and more likely to work constructively across the aisle with Democrats.
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When you’re right, you’re right. And if you were right a long time ago, you’re vindicated.
It’s possible that former CBC executive Richard Stursberg is feeling just that, 13 years after leaving the public broadcaster where he served as the head of English language services from 2005 to 2011.
At the CBC, Stursberg’s calling card was that “audiences matter.” His single minded mission was to capture for the public broadcaster, especially in English language television, an audience commensurate with its role as Canada’s leading cultural organization (and its billion dollar Parliamentary funding).
To outside observers, he seemed to be at odds with everyone and not really minding. First there was the lockout of CBC staff in 2005. Then he grabbed the rest of the organization by the scruff of the neck and piloted a revolution in the CBC’s entertainment programming, for example embracing audience-pleasing reality television (remember Battle of the Blades?).
With an all-Canadian line-up, in five years Stursberg moved the needle significantly in CBC’s share of the national television market, closing the gap with CTV and its prime time schedule of hit US shows. Then he fell out with his new boss, CBC President Hubert Lacroix. And so on: read all about it here in his memoir, The Tower of Babble, ranked by the Globe and Mail as one of the best books of 2012.
Along the way, he made some friends, allies and enemies. The enemies he cheekily dubbed “The Constituency,” an assortment of CBC traditionalists and media watchers who might also have been described as “those who rip Richard in public.”
After he left, the CBC lost NHL hockey rights to Rogers and with it a whole lot of eyeballs and connection with Canadian audiences. Netflix ate up market share for Canadian entertainment television. And then Google Search and Facebook devoured the digital ad market. Stursberg tells more of that story in another prize winner, his 2019 book, The Tangled Garden. The job of keeping CBC relevant today is twice as hard as it used to be.
These days Stursberg continues to have his fingers in different cultural pies. He is outspoken on his support for major reforms to the definition of Canadian content, favouring a “cultural theme” test of distinctive Canadian programming over the traditional headcount of Canadian talent.
As a past reinventor of the public broadcaster, it’s his 2024 views on the reinventing the CBC that are worth soliciting in its hour of crisis. As conservative commentator Harrison Lowman recently projected, “CBC, your days are numbered.”
MediaPolicy asked Stursberg, what is to be done? This guest column, his advice to incoming CBC President Marie-Philippe Bouchard, is his response.
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Advice to the new President of the CBC, Marie-Philippe Bouchard
By Richard Stursberg
Welcome to the job.
Given your deep knowledge of public broadcasting you are ideally placed to do well, but you will have significant challenges. Here is some unsolicited advice on how you can succeed from one who also believes in the importance of the CBC/Radio-Canada.
The Structure of the Corporation
First, your most important challenge will be English television. It is the central problem, not because Pierre Poilievre wants to shut it down, but because it has fallen to its lowest audience share ever. Put bluntly, with the exception of the recent Olympic Games, almost nobody is watching it. There are very few viewers for any of its shows, including news. Your presidency will succeed or fail depending on whether you can solve the problem of English television.
Second, it is important to understand the CBC is not a normal corporation and lacks a normal Board. It cannot decide its own fate. The overall strategy of the corporation has to be approved by the CRTC; and it cannot raise capital without the agreement of the Treasury Board. It lacks many of the powers of a normal corporation. This makes change very difficult. To succeed you will have to have the Minister of Heritage and the Prime Minister on-side for whatever you plan to do.
Should English TV be Fixed?
The Environment
The TV landscape in English Canada is in serious difficulty. The big conventional networks — CTV and Global — the major private sources of local and national news, have been shedding staff for over ten years and losing money. Their ability to commission Canadian drama and comedy is compromised. They are spending less and — for financial reasons — what they are doing is increasingly American in look and feel.
The cable industry has been losing customers for many years and with them, the fees that they pay to specialty channels. As a result, they too are significantly cutting back their staff and ability to commission Canadian shows.
The groups that own the vast majority of the conventional and specialty broadcasters are in trouble. Corus, the parent of Global, is essentially insolvent. Bell Media, the parent of CTV recently wrote down its broadcast assets by just over $2 billion. It is not hard to imagine that in another five to ten years the English Canadian broadcasting industry will — with the possible exception of the sports channels — no longer exist.
Their loss will mean that CBC TV will be the only broadcaster still producing Canadian drama, news, comedy, public affairs and documentary shows. If we value hearing our own stories told in our own voices, there will likely be nowhere else to see them.
Social fragmentation
The emergence of algorithmically driven social media has encouraged polarization and social fragmentation. Canadians increasingly live inside filter bubbles that act as echo chambers. Disinformation, deep fakes and AI generated falsehoods have compounded the problem. The space of common ground and shared assumptions has grown ever narrower as distrust spreads like a stain across public discourse.
As divisions grow more fractious, it is increasingly important that there be places that can bind the country together and create shared understandings about who we are. They need to provide stories, ideas, news and art that allow Canadians to celebrate, explore, discuss and make sense of their country. And, they need to be true. Truth is an essential component of patriotism.
The CBC is the last great cultural institution in the country that is in a position to do this. It can only do so, however, if its programming is trusted and popular. Unless it reaches big audiences it cannot create the large scale shared space that will provide the counterweight to the endless fragmentation of social media.
One initiative that the CBC might take is to address the challenge of disinformation by creating a news and public affairs portal that hosts not just its content but also that of all the other media in the country that are governed by traditional journalistic standards of truth and fairness. This could include other broadcasters, newspapers, magazines, on-line information sources and bloggers that are committed to ensuring the accuracy of their reporting. The portal’s promise — its brand — would be truth.
The other thing it must do is provide galvanizing programming that speaks directly to Canadians to foster debate and conversation about who we are and want to be. It must take on large projects that transcend the current divisions — whether regional, ideological or social — and provide Canadians a place to laugh, argue and cry. This is very difficult to do.
Can English TV be Fixed?
It will be very difficult. Your most important source of revenue aside from the Parliamentary appropriation is advertising, which has collapsed. At the same time, you are facing brutal competition from the vastly rich, foreign owned, unregulated streamers — Netflix, Apple, Amazon, etc.– who bear none of the costly cultural and social burdens that you do.
Business as usual cannot succeed. To save English TV you will have to develop a radical new plan for its future. The plan needs to reinvent its news and entertainment properties and find significant new sources of revenue. The creation of such a plan will be challenging. Substantive change will be met with criticism from all sides.
How Should the Plan be Developed?
It is important to develop a set of principles to guide the creation of a plan. These might include the following.
1. Focus on what the private broadcasters cannot do. They do not need competition from a publicly supported CBC. They are in tough enough shape as it is.
The space that the privates can no longer occupy is very large. Delivering what they cannot will make you more distinct and give Canadians more reason to view your programming.
2. Focus on serving audiences. The measure of success must always be whether Canadians are watching your shows. They pay for the CBC and can reasonably expect to be offered programs that they will want to watch. There is no public broadcaster without a public.
3. Focus on developing new sources of revenue. Television advertising is dying. Google, Facebook and the other big digital companies have taken it all away. Make a virtue of necessity and get out of ads for your drama, comedy and documentary programming. This proved a very successful strategy for radio and would certainly make CBC TV much more distinctive and attractive to audiences.
You will need to develop a new revenue plan. It can be based on sponsorships, whether from corporations or foundations, charitable giving, levies on the streamers and/or internal reallocations.
4. Ensure that the money you are given by Parliament is allocated fairly and sensibly. The French service receives 44% of the government money. This means that French speakers get a per capita subsidy of $70 per person, while the rest of the country gets $23 per capita. Given your biggest challenge is on the English side, this is both unhelpful and unfair. Only a French President can change it.
5. Do not try to please everybody. You can’t. Instead, focus. Be bold. Take risks. Make big bets.
Some Facts About English Canada’s Media habits
Every week Canadians spend about 20 hours on the Internet and 30 hours watching TV, whether traditional TV or streaming services. These are their most important leisure activities.
CBC English radio continues to perform well. It takes a 16% share of all radio listening and is number one in most markets.
CBC English TV has collapsed over the last ten years. It now has a share of roughly 4% of all TV viewing. Its share is equivalent to that of a specialty channel.
Although CBC likes to brag about the reach of its digital service, it is very lightly consumed. Compared to radio and TV, it performs poorly. Canadians spend about 17 minutes per week on CBC.ca., which is a share of just over 1% of their time spent on the Internet.
What are the Key Elements of a Plan?
Local News
Much of local news has vanished; Canada has entered a local news desert. Most small town and community papers and supper hour newscasts have died. All market research indicates that local news is the most important form of news, since it is about the events that directly affect people’s lives. Where local news dies, electoral participation falls and local corruption increases.
Consistent with the principle of doing what the private sector cannot, CBC should expand its local news presence. Recently (November 12, 2024), it announced a significant expansion of its local news presence.
To strengthen its local news further, it would be wise to leverage its strength in radio and have radio promote to and complement the CBC’s local news sites. This has proven a successful strategy in some very small towns in western Canada and Ontario.
Strengthening local news would also help your national news. There is a powerful correlation between local shows on radio and Canadians’ propensity to listen to the national ones as well.
National and International News
The National needs to be refocussed. Some evenings it draws less than 200,000 viewers at 10:00. CTV typically draws two to three times as many viewers for its late night news at 11:00, although in fairness The National gets many more viewers on Youtube and CBC Gem.
Aside from the Globe and Mail, almost nobody except the CBC has any foreign bureaus or investigative capacity. The National — and the News Network — could be dramatically strengthened by using these resources to shift the focus of their journalism. Instead of “telling” Canadians the news, they should give priority to making sense of it by providing background and context.
By way of example, the recent coverage of the US election focused on it as a horse race. There was much discussion of polls, performance at rallies, the Electoral College, more polls, swing states, etc., all accompanied by hand wringing and pearl clutching. Through it all, there was little or no discussion of what a Trump victory might mean for Canada. What will we do when he starts to deport “illegal” migrants when they appear at our border looking for sanctuary? How will we respond to his demand that we turn on the “tap” and divert our water to the parched southwestern states? How do we respond when he withdraws from NATO? The point of foreign bureaus is to make sense of what is happening in other countries for Canada.
In a similar vein, the coverage of the health care crisis focuses on Canadians’ lack of family doctors, overcrowded emergency rooms, and long waits for elective surgery. It does not explore how Canada might fix its broken system by looking at what other countries get right. Why are France, Sweden, Denmark and Norway doing better than we are?
A promise to answer these kinds of questions and embrace Solutions Journalism would go a long way to restoring the relevance of The National and The News Network.
Entertainment and Documentaries
Like the news, the entertainment and documentary shows are doing poorly, particularly the newest ones. The older shows are holding up better: Heartland (season 18), Murdoch Mysteries (season 18), This Hour Has 22 Minutes (season 45?). The newer shows like Crime Scene Kitchen and My Mum Your Dad (a dating show) draw hardly any viewers.
The problem with the new shows is that they are not unique; they do not fill any unmet need. Similar offerings can be found on lots of specialty channels. They are also not particularly Canadian.
A new strategy must be based on commissioning shows that Canadians cannot get anywhere else. They need to be big, daring, appointment pieces that speak to our unique history, dreams, fears and sense of humour. They need to be about us, our neighbours, fellow citizens and friends. To be relevant, they must be distinctly Canadian and squarely rooted in Canada. The private broadcasters will never do this.
By way of example, one of the CBC’s most successful series was Canada: A People’s History. It drew tremendous interest and precipitated great controversy. For years, it was used in schools and with immigrants to help explain who we are. Surely the time is right for an Indigenous People’s History of Canada. To achieve reconciliation, it is essential that people understand the truth of what happened from the point-of-view of Canada’s original inhabitants. Like its predecessor, it would be a multi-part series that starts with first contact and comes up to the present day. Inevitably, it would be expensive, controversial and — if done properly — galvanizing. Nobody else in Canada has the resources or the expertise to make it.
As for fiction, one can imagine a show about our relationship to the US. The premise is simple. The southwestern states have run out of water (which they have). Canada has more fresh water than any country in the world. The Americans face an existential challenge: they must save Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and southern California. They must have the “tap” turned on even if it means war. Again, no private broadcaster would make this; they could never sell it in the States.
Radio-Canada has been very good at producing extremely popular shows that reflect Quebec in all of its remarkable diversity and energy. Every Sunday night “Tout le monde en parle” (Everybody Is Talking About It) provides a funny, charming and thoughtful window into the cultural, social, political, athletic, musical, business and religious life of Quebec. It is the most successful talk show in Canadian history. It is must see viewing. Why is there no English equivalent?
To do these kinds of things, you may have to restore the financial balance within the English network. Over the last ten years roughly $200 million has been stripped from English TV and radio to finance digital, the worst performing service.
Conclusion
English TV can and should be saved, but it will require difficult and bold restructuring. It will need a plan that is based on making great shows that speak to English Canadians’ desire to see themselves and explore their country in ways that are exciting, beautiful and moving. Whether news, documentaries or entertainment shows, table stakes for programs are — in the current intensely competitive environment — quality, originality and relevance. Nothing less will do.
The plan must also ensure that the necessary resources are in place to make it happen. This is likely to involve very controversial decisions about the reallocation of money across the corporation and within English services. It will also require the development of new sources of funds (the major banks could easily sponsor an Indigenous People’s History of Canada).
Although you have a deep understanding of public broadcasting, I understand that your experience is principally on the French side of the corporation. The English and French markets are very different, both in terms of their levels of competitive intensity and the kinds of conventions that underpin successful TV. It might be a good idea for you to move to English Canada for a few months. Watch all the shows and newscasts, both those that are working and those that are not. Talk to everybody: the employees of the CBC, the heads of the big English media companies, the audience measurement experts, the independent producers, everyone.
Use all that you learn to make a real plan, one with teeth and targets, recognizing that it will take two to three years to bear results. Then, find yourself a media executive who agrees with you and has the skills, contacts, experience and daring to execute it.
Once the plan is ready, make it public. It is essential that Canadians understand and support what you are trying to achieve. Let them see that you understand what they need and want, and that you are daring enough to try and deliver it. Let them hold you accountable for the spending of their money.
Building a public constituency for your plan will provide a powerful counterweight to the forces that will resist change. You will need all the friends you can find.
The plan may also be a good answer for Mr. Poilievre – if elected – and his Heritage minister. You will also need them.
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Last week I was in Charlottetown attending a conference on local news.
I posted a brief summary of the keynote speech delivered by Steve Waldmanhere.
Waldman is the American journalist who heads the Local News Project and the Report for America intern program. If you want to place him in the Canadian constellation of public journalism, consider him an American counterpart to our Ed Greenspon or Margo Goodhand. The headline graphics above and below are from Waldman’s slide deck.
Waldman’s pitch, and the idea behind the conference, was that saving local news journalism is job one.
The argument he makes is that there is a great deal of evidence in the US suggesting that towns and rural areas living in news poverty —with too few or no community news outlets — are ripe for misinformation circulating on social media and also political polarization when searching for news on more partisan sources at the national level.
There is a connection, he says, between being underinformed or misinformed about local events, issues, and politics and on the other hand the rising national tide of political polarization where citizens sort themselves into tribes and stop listening to each other.
One should be cautious about copy and pasting Waldman’s analysis from the US to Canada, but his view will strike many as true.
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The National Post scored some of outgoing CBC President Catherine Tait’s e-mails, commenting on the Conservative “defund the CBC” campaign, through an access to information request. Alas, her comments weren’t very juicy.
Tait’s replacement is due to be announced by the Heritage Minister any day now: LaPresse and Le Devoir had stories claiming it will be Marie-Philippe Bouchard. She is currently the CEO of the Canadian broadcasting consortium TV5 Unis that partners with global francophonie broadcaster TVMonde. She was at CBC-Radio Canada for 26 years before that.
Bouchard’s reputation precedes her, at least in Québec, where reaction to her possible appointment was roundly positive.
Appointing Bouchard to replace Tait would fall in line with the important tradition of alternating between Québec and English Canada.
Peter Menzies raised the obvious question: it’s the current state of English-language CBC that needs review in response to Pierre Poilievre’s promise to defund CBC but not Radio-Canada, so why not pick someone from another province?
The answer may be that she spent 12 of her 26 years at CBC working as legal and regulatory counsel for both sides of the corporation. You can expect the question to be raised again if Bouchard is appointed.
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A notable absence from the Charlottetown local news conference was Jeff Elgie, CEO of the expanding Village Media chain of local digital media sites.
Elgie has seemingly defied gravity for the last ten years by growing from one local site in Sault Ste. Marie to more than thirty in Ontario. Along the way he’s built a popular proprietary publishing system and even added a legislature news bureau.
I interviewed Elgie back in March and it is one of the most popular posts in MediaPolicy’s short history (he’s only got a 100 or so employees, so it’s not what you think).
Besides launching his first Toronto site in the next weeks, his next big idea is “Spaces,” a social media platform for chat groups moderated by community hosts.
I just signed up, so wait for a report.
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My recommended read is for media nerds only. Doug Shapiro has another crystal ball blog, this time about the impact of Generative AI on video creation. It has the feel of David Bowie’s famous 1999 “tip of the iceberg” prognostication about the Internet.
Here’s a teaser from Shapiro’s “GenAI as a New Form” about what might lie below the water line:
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We are into year seven of Toronto Metropolitan University’s Local News Research project issuing regular reminders of the steady decline of local news outlets and the matching rise of “news poverty” (no news, or less news) in communities across the country.
The most recent report is here. Represented graphically above as a tally of closings and start-ups (not necessarily in the same communities) it presents a disturbing picture of Canadian news poverty.
The Michener Awards Foundation —the public service journalism organization that co-manages its well known annual awards with the Rideau Foundation— just assembled a meeting of 40 or so independent news publishers and editors in Charlottetown, hoping to survive and chart a path to “innovation and sustainability.”
The first two hours of the conference were the most compelling as news outlets swapped strategies of audience engagement. The common denominator could be summarized as “independent local ownership equals brand trust and community engagement with readers, advertisers and community organizations,” the latter being particularly effective in generating popular local content.
The keynote speaker was up next: Steve Waldman of the American Rebuild Local News project and the national intern program, Report forAmerica. His elevator pitch was already known to anyone tracking the news poverty crisis. Measuring by polling metrics, citizens living in communities that have lost most or all of their local news outlets are prey for misinformation spread on social media, increased political polarization and alienation. It’s a democratic crisis, not a business crisis. Or as one publisher told the crowd, “this is not a business. This is a public service that I have to run as a business.”
Familiar to Canadians, Waldman’s prescription is a variety of public policy solutions, that is subsidies of one kind or another at the state or federal level.
After speaking, Waldman sat down and tried to eat his sandwich while MediaPolicy and others peppered him with questions about the American experience with public policy solutions (he was just as interested in what Canada is doing).
His political reporter’s account of US legislation falling short by a whisker —in US Congress and at the statelevel— make it clear that bipartisan Republican and Democrat support is indispensable but within reach.
That political reality offers a segue to our own Canadian politics of saving local news. The publishers at the conference were grimly aware of Pierre Poilievre’s invective against government assistance to media.
If the likely winner of the next federal election cannot be persuaded to see the wisdom in the current federal program of subsidies tied directly to the employment of news gathering journalists in communities, it’s possible he might be enticed into a re-design that keeps some form of that program and expands the market-facing policy solutions.
On the other hand it may be necessary to take Poilievre’s nihilism at face value. His hostility to the mainstream media in general and federal aid in particular is, when combined with his prowess in reaching voters directly through social media, a little too close to Donald Trump’s political strategy.
Steve Waldman’s presentation deck includes this slide charting American public policy proposals for funding local news, compared to Canada. The chart would appear to be missing the Big Tech news licensing payments flowing from Canada’s Online News Act:
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Let’s start this weekend with something inspirational.
I’m half-way through the four-episode documentary No Dress Rehearsal on the glorious music career of Kingston Ontario’s own The Tragically Hip.
It’s gold (say I, as a diehard Blue Rodeo fan).
The documentary was made by Mike Downie, older brother to late Hip frontman Gord Downie. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last month. You can watch it now on Amazon Prime.
The Hip was the X/millennial generations’ iconic Canadian band in both its songwriting and success. Perhaps because of their international appeal, the documentary’s streaming rights were snapped up by Amazon Prime, instead of Bell Media’s Crave.
Filmmaker Downie is interviewed by The National’s Ian Hanomansing here.
If you want to dwell a little deeper on your connection to “Canada’s band” and the signposts in their music to Canadian experiences, have a listen to Elamin Abdelmahmoud’s CBC radio show here.
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You may have noticed two weeks ago that CTV National News stepped into a big puddle of mess with its reporting on the Conservative Party’s efforts to bring down the Trudeau government through a Parliamentary motion of non-confidence.
CTV took up a story angle linking Pierre Poilievre’s motion —–which he branded as Canadians deserving an opportunity to vote in a carbon tax election— to the possibility that the Liberal-NDP dental program would be the collateral damage of a fallen government. CTV’s spliced video of Poilievre’s stand-up edited out his reference to the carbon tax which, of course, wasn’t the story angle.
I was waiting for the dust to clear for a clearer picture of what happened. The fired staff aren’t speaking publicly (the unionized editor has filed a grievance and the non-union reporter hasn’t done a Lisa Laflamme-style video giving her side of the story).
But Rewrite commentator Peter Menzies did some digging and has an informed take on it, here.
The controversy shed light, retrospectively, on yet another CTV National face plant, a story covering the capital gains tax increase in the Liberals’ spring budget.
Three weeks ago the industry self regulator, the Canadian Broadcasting Standards Committee (CBSC), found against CTV in a complaint filed by two Canadians who pointed out egregious factual errors in a newscast that misstated Canadian tax law and as a consequence wrongly identified tax liabilities for children inheriting the family cottage.
The CBSC ruled that CTV breached the expected standards of “accuracy” in news presentation.
When pressed by the complainants to make a further finding of CTV’s “bias” against the Liberal government, the CBSC ruled that “to make a finding of bias, the report would need to use incorrect facts for the purpose of pushing a specific agenda. This was not the case with the CTV report.” (Emphasis added).
As far as we know, no one got fired.
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We are only weeks away, one hopes, from something very big on the CBC.
A story on the CBC website, quoting an anonymous Heritage Canada source in Minister Pascale St.-Onge’s department, says that within the month we can expect the Minister’s announcement of her government’s new vision of the CBC along with the appointment of a new CEO to carry it out.
With a federal election looming, St.-Onge appointed an expert panel in May to advise her on a CBC re-boot.
She’s been posting social media videos about a new CBC for the last two weeks, stating that questions about the CBC’s mission need answering. Soon we will get a peak at what her answers are.
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Another big Canadian broadcaster —it’s Facebook I have in mind— still makes available original news journalism produced by a Canadian television broadcaster and uploaded by its news subject, Pierre Poilievre, on August 23rd in brazen defiance of its year-old ban on posting Canadian news.
MediaPolicy commentedpreviously on the selectivity of Meta’s news blackout on its Facebook and Instagram platforms.
Meta’s Canadian news ban is easily evaded, and apparently not policed by the company, through uploads of news story screen shots and modified hyperlinks.
In the high profile case involving Narcity, the news outlet was reinstated to active posting of news articles because its content was rejected for journalism salary subsidies by Revenue Canada due to an insufficient volume of original news-gathering.
Now there’s yet another on ramp to Facebook and Instagram for those wishing to evade the ban: news outlets can pay Meta for a boosted post of their news journalism.
Lauren Watson has the story in the Columbia Journalism Review.
UPDATE: On October 4, 2024, the CRTC asked Meta to explain reports of a selective news blackout, Meta’s response to be filed by October 11th.
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The new centre-right New Zealand government is on track to pass a bill similar to Canada’s Online News Act, Bill C-18. In response, Google is threatening to remove news links from Search.
The bill was tabled two years ago by the ruling Labour Party and opposed by the National Party. But the new government has had a change of heart.
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