The Canadian government is taking advantage of the ongoing economic and social disruption of the Wuhan Coronavirus to widen their existing regulation of both broadcasting and internet entertainment. It’s not just a bit of maple-flavoured cultural imperialism, but it’s also a blatant cash grab:
Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapture from CPAC video.
I see, in the Globe and Mail, that Justin Trudeau and Steven Guilbeault want to further regulate the broadcasting services in Canada. Their goals seem to be, in part, a cash grab ~ online streaming services, like Netflix, are offering Canadians, for a price, what they want, while the CBC offers Canadians, thanks to a $1+ Billion annual subsidy from taxpayers like you and me, what we, pretty clearly, do not want to watch and the Liberals want a share of that money ~ and also an appeal to those who play identity politics.
I think we need to look at the “products” of broadcasting ~ information (news and “public affairs” and documentary programmes) and entertainment, including sports, as “consumable products,” rather like food and, say, soft drinks.
We do allow, even demand that governments exercise some important regulatory functions in regard to food and soft drinks: we want to make sure that they are safe to consume and Canadians want to know what is in the food we consume.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) was, originally, conceived to solve a fairly simple problem: allocating broadcast licences. Government engineers calculated how many radio channels could be used in any given place but they didn’t want to have to decide who should get to use them. Politicians didn’t want to do it, either, because while the successful applicant was (usually) happy the more numerous unsuccessful ones were disappointed and politicians hate to disappoint people. Thus they created an arms length agency to make the tough decisions for them. Licence allocation is still an important job for the CRTC. But the CRTC’s mandate was expanded with the birth of cable TV. Companies, like Rogers, built cable systems ~ and they received both direct and indirect government support to reach more and more Canadians ~ and then “sold” access to consumers. In the normal course of events one might have thought that the government would attach some business conditions to its loans, grants and tax deductions, but there was an ever-growing demand, from the Canadian cultural community ~ based almost entirely in Montreal and Toronto ~ to regulate the fledgling cable and “pay TV” market to ensure that Canadian programmes were not shut out but, in fact, could have privileged positions in the cable lineup, which led to the government, in the 1960s, telling the CRTC to regulate how companies like Famous Players, Maclean Hunter and Rogers configured the private product they sold to individual consumers.
The initial government argument was “we regulate all kinds of things for the common good: that’s why we all drive on the right, for example, and the delivery of broadcasting by cable is like that.” “No it’s not,” the cable operators replied, “you build and maintain the roads, using taxpayers’ dollars, so you’re allowed to regulate how they’re used, plus it’s a safety issue. Cable service and ‘pay TV’ are private, commercial transactions between us, the companies who built and operate the systems, and the individual consumer who wants to subscribe to what we offer. You don’t presume to regulate, beyond the laws against libel and pornography, what people can read in MacLean’s magazine or the Globe and Mail, why is ‘pay TV’ and cable different?” It’s still a good question. But the cable operators surrendered gracefully and the CRTC has been, broadly, for the last half-century, protective of the rights of incumbents in the infotainment markets. In return the cable and internet operators have agreed to “tiers” of programming which means that if you want to watch, say, BBC World Service or Deutsche Welle or Fox News, you must also pay for CBC News Network and CTV News Channel and, no matter who you are and what your individual preferences might be, when you subscribe to a cable/internet service you must also support a number of French stations/channels; it’s the law. And now Minister Guilbault wants to ensure that you pay for the output of indigenous producers, writers, actors and so on, on both indigenous networks ~ to which you must already subscribe if you have a “basic” Canadian cable or satellite TV package ~ and, it appears to me, in programmes produced by Canadians and even by Netflix.
