Tag: trump

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

March 27, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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










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

Kevin Desjardins appearing before a Senate committee in 2022.

March 25, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MediaPolicy spoke to Desjardins earlier this month:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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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Making sense of Trump in ’24

November 6, 2024

The most common Canadian observation about US politics is confusion over what has happened to American democracy.

How could more than 70 million Americans re-elect Donald Trump: felon, racist, fascist and possibly a future dictator? 

For any Canadian older than Generation Zed, American reality no longer jibes with our learned experience of the American public, how they vote, or what they think.

This cognitive dissonance we experience might have something to do with with our inability to place Trumpism within a “political order,” even if we have a clear take on Trump the man.

On that note, a week ago the New York Times’ Ezra Klein, had American historian Gary Gerstle on his podcast show.

Gerstle’s gift of commentary is to organize our thoughts into a sensible narrative, in particular his sketch of American history as a sequence of paradigms of political consensus on political economy and the voting coalitions that support them.

His account begins with the bipartisan political order of the New Deal (Franklin Roosevelt to the administration of Jimmy Carter) eclipsed by three decades of neo-liberalism under Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes and Obama. 

The end and beginning of political orders, he says, are marked by great economic upheaval. The Great Depression of the 1930s. The oil price shocks and stagflation of the 1970s. He identifies the end of neo-liberalism, and the beginning of an as yet undefined new political order, as the financial crisis of 2010 followed by the 2016 election of Trump. 

Gerstle suggests that the class disparities in the economic impact of the financial crisis and recovery tipped the neo-liberal order into a credibility crisis: the exploding income inequality between rich and poor that was supposed to be tolerated so long as working and middle class Americans were incrementally better off was making Main Street America very angry. The Pandemic shock did the same thing.

And in fact the uncertainty over where we are in 2024, and what kind of political order exists, is what causes Gerstle to say towards the end of the engrossing 90 minute podcast that he doesn’t yet know how to define this new paradigm, because there isn’t one. In a nation divided, it’s still contested.

And here we are trying to make sense of it all. This morning my X feed sent me to two video commentaries among thousands. 

Have a listen and a look:

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