Peter Menzies: The CRTC, having made things worse and fixed nothing, prepares to do more
The Americans, not at all keen on the idea that their companies have to subsidize another country’s cultural ambitions, are watching all of this with great interest.
By: Peter Menzies
Sometime early in the new year, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is expected to cross its fingers and issue a decision that will define how Canadians can watch streamed content and, probably, how much more they’ll inevitably have to pay for it.
And it will do so with a small prayer that its ongoing efforts to outsource the burden of funding for the Canadian film and television industry to Netflix and the other U.S. streaming giants won’t make U.S. President Donald Trump any more grumpy than he already is and trigger retaliatory action against Canada for picking on American companies.
This will be the second major announcement from the CRTC. A couple of weeks ago, Nov. 18 to be precise, the federal regulator announced a new method of defining Canadian content (Cancon). That was the first of two decisions stemming from a wide-ranging consultation and the second, which it said will be published “in the near future,” involves spending and prioritizing Canadian programs, including news. That’s where the rubber is expected to hit the road.
Significantly, the decision will have taken the CRTC, which these days is causing real economic harm by setting unprecedented standards for sloth, well over a year to develop since posting its first notice of consultation. When the Online Streaming Act passed in April, 2023, both the heritage minister of the day, Pablo Rodriguez, (who has since assumed a new chaotic role in Quebec politics) and the CRTC chair, Vicky Eatrides, were expressing full confidence its implementation would be completed before the end of 2024. That, as some experienced people — ahem! — attested at the time, was at best delusional and at worst stated knowing it was misleading. Let’s just carve it down the middle and label it naively incorrect.
As it stands, and given that earlier decisions prompted three different court challenges that regardless of their still-pending outcomes are likely to be appealed to the Supreme Court, the dust won’t settle on this baby until at least 2030. That’ll be long after Eatrides’ term expires on Jan. 4, 2028. How many jobs will have been lost in the meantime due to failed or stranded investment is impossible to calculate. All that is known at this time is that, while the CRTC’s staff has increased by 50 per cent since I first signed on there almost two decades ago, eight of its 11 decisions stemming from the Streaming Act (Bill C-11) have taken more than eight months and three have required more than a year. Broadcasting licence renewals were essentially put on hold to make room for these ponderous processes, applications for new licences/investment are gathering dust and routine disputes once dealt with in 12-18 months at most now can take closer to four years, further discouraging investors, if not breaking them.
Throw in the fact that Quebec is busy implementing its own version of C-11 — Bill 109 — that unbelievably calls for French language quotas to be applied to user-generated content on social media and, hey, we’ve got an unholy mess complicated by a looming federal-provincial jurisdictional dispute. Let’s put it this way: if you were a broadcaster or a streaming company, would you invest in Canada, where one of the provinces just introduced what the nation’s leading expert, Michael Geist, calls “The most unworkable internet law in the world?” Will Britbox, faced with an obligation to carry original (non-dubbed) French language content, stick around?
And then there’s the news. From the look of it, broadcasters both major and minor don’t want to be obliged to bother with it anymore unless the CRTC comes up with a way to further fund/subsidize it for them. TV and radio operators, still miffed that their major competitor, the CBC, got $150 million in additional funding while they continue to be denied accreditation for the Journalism Labour Tax Credit, will be looking to the CRTC to make up the difference in this next big decision. If it does, companies like Spotify and Disney+ will continue to wonder what kind of logic forces music and movie companies to subsidize a genre — news — that they have nothing to do with.
The Americans, not at all keen on the idea that their companies have to subsidize another country’s cultural ambitions, are watching all of this with great interest. Keep in mind that decisions are going to be made next year regarding CUSMA, whether it remains in place and, if so, how so. Anything that will further complicate those free-trade negotiations isn’t going to be welcome and while these aren’t matters that the CRTC is supposed to take into consideration, let’s just say it will be aware.
Speaking of news, two years (count ‘em) after then-heritage minister Pascale St-Onge first asked the CRTC to investigate, the regulator finally got around to concluding that even while a few people copy and paste news text and post frame grabs of headlines, the Online News Act will not be imposed on Meta. Due to that legislation, Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, chose in 2023 to stop allowing news links to be posted on Facebook. The value of those links to the news organizations, said Meta, in terms of readers finding news content via Facebook, was close to $220 million annually. The entire act was based on the lie that social media companies were “stealing” news media content, and was supposed to save the industry. It didn’t. All it did was increase and entrench its dependence on government- and CRTC-mandated subsidies, despite which Postmedia still recorded a loss of $77.3 million last year.
The Online Streaming Act, meanwhile, was, according to Rodriguez, going to deliver an additional $1 billion a year for the production of Canadian programming by 2025. If the CRTC’s initial levies survive court and Trump challenges, they might produce a fifth of that and, as noted, it’s almost 2026.
Remarkably, none of this has elicited so much as a blink. CRTC stakeholders, while privately appalled, dare not speak ill publicly regarding the regulator’s mordant inefficiency. His Majesty’s Official Opposition appears either oblivious to or content with this status quo while the government, having just made its eighth heritage minister appointment since 2015, certainly isn’t going to point to its own failures.
This is Canada’s new normal. Don’t you dare say it’s broken.
Peter Menzies is a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, past vice-chair of the CRTC and a former newspaper publisher.
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Please tell the CRTC on my behalf that as a retired Canadian reference librarian who consumes online information daily, and was doing online research professionally back in the 1980s, before most people even knew what the internet was, I have never been concerned to know what proportion of the information I consume is Canadian. All I want to know is whether what comes to my attention is interesting, accurate, relevant and useful. Government bodies or policies that attempt to regulate, censor, or shape information flow in any way are unacceptable threats to the health of the information commons.
As I read the history of information diffusion, the major premises underwriting CRTC reasoning and decision-making are all false, and the CRTC would best serve the interests of Canadians by consigning itself to nonexistence. The CRTC's helping hand rests on the shoulders of citizens with a weight reminiscent of that of Orwell's Big Brother; a phrase like 'delusional bureaucratic overreach' seems hardly adequate to describe an impulse that arrogates to itself responsibility for controlling what an entire country sees and hears. No government agency has the wisdom to fulfill such a mandate, nor the ethical right to claim it on your behalf or mine.
There is so little to watch on any streaming services now and with commercials making it no different from cable which we haven’t had ( nor satellite) for over 33 years we have talked about getting rid of it altogether. Sooner or later, if Donald doesn’t set us free ;) that will be our decision. Lose, lose