Standing Committee discussion centres on putting focus to ongoing broadcast study

The Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage met on Jan. 29 with its two new expert advisors, David Taras and Marc Raboy, to try to get the committee on track. It discussed three options: one, issuing an interim report in light of the fact that the final report is unlikely to be ready at year-end; two, trying to stick to the schedule; and three, extending the deadline for delivery of the report. The members seemed to favour the third option. As well, a committee member noted that at the present, they are "meeting various witnesses and we are going off in all directions." Therefore, the committee attempted to clarify key issues that it would focus on. Below is an edited transcript of the discussions. Prof. David Taras: My sense, in just reading the testimony and the submissions, is that basically, the map is a huge one. There’s a huge alphabet soup here from A to Z, and I’m not sure we can cover it in such a short period of time. The question is, does the committee have a sense of what the key issues are? Is there a precise sense, a highly focused sense, of what the three or four critical issues are? ... Clifford Lincoln (chair): Yes, the researchers and I were chatting yesterday about this very point, and whether we could pinpoint three or four basic areas that we could define as critical ones…When we discussed things with the researchers yesterday in trying to pinpoint what we felt were important areas, we determined Canadian content would be one huge issue. The economics of the industry are another, because I remember that at the (Canadian Association of Broadcasters) conference, outgoing president Mike McCabe was giving his swan song speech. He said this used to be a very profitable industry, but he could see the time when it will dry up completely with competition, and there will be no money left in the system. That was certainly a bit of a shock to a lot of us who thought it was a potentially very prosperous industry, so I thought maybe the economics of the industry, the economic viability…Support for Canadian production is a possible subject, perhaps. How does that happen through government? What are the sources? Local and regional programming is a huge issue with us for sure. It comes up all the time. And maybe organization and regulation by government and the CRTC, all it implies, and the extent to which it does so, are other topics...But you started by saying we have to define broadcasting as such. Maybe that is the most important thing. This is what we are here about today—to just pick your brains and find out. Prof. David Taras: I think there’s a tremendous tie-in between the economics of the industry and its survivability, and I think you and the researchers are right, it is open to question. This is not a money machine. I think the margins for the Canadian networks are very narrow. But it’s also tied in, I think, with changes in technology. I don’t want to give a speech here, but...I would argue that we’re in an era where all media, including television, are converging on the Internet. If you go back to your office and you hook up your computer and put it on, what can you do with your computer? You can get e-mail. You can get music from all over the world, some of which you might want to pay for, some of which you can get for free. You can get any newspaper. You can get TV ads. You can get radio from all over the planet. How long will it be before there’s video-on-demand television, where Hollywood could decide that for a price, maybe even not for a price, maybe for free, they will bypass the networks, they’ll bypass CTV and NBC and ABC and CBC, and feed programs directly to you on your computer, leapfrogging over the networks? When Mr. David Colville gave his testimony, he said the CRTC can’t regulate the Internet, because it’s a vast ocean, it has no borders, it’s a Milky Way. But even if the television business five years from now is made up of just five per cent downloading to individuals, that could be catastrophic for Canadian networks. Prof. Marc Raboy:…Basically, you can reduce that to a couple of buzzwords: technological change and globalization. We need a knowledge base about this context. We need to understand as clearly as possible what is going on, but once we have that the question then becomes, what should we do about it?…My own view is that there is a place for public policy, but what can it be?

Standing Committee discussion centres on putting focus to ongoing broadcast study

Broadcast | 02/15/2002 5:00 am EST

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