Comms acts review panel urges ‘practical’ submissions

OTTAWA — Members of the panel tasked with providing recommendations to bring Canada’s communications laws into the digital era are urging public submissions be “concrete” and “practical” to hasten the resulting report’s ability to pass government scrutiny. Janet Yale, chairwoman of the panel tasked by the federal government to review the communications acts, said Thursday the panel hasn’t yet received any submissions to its recently-announced consultation, but expects those who submit to take care to make sure their filings as solid as possible. She was speaking on the second and final day of the International Institute of Communications (IIC) annual conference. The organizers set up the panel to field recommendations and concerns from the audience, with broadcast and telecom sides represented. One of those questions expressed concern about the timeline of the panel’s two reports, the interim report coming next spring and the final one due in 2020. Public comments are due Nov. 30. “We are looking for very concrete recommendations for legislative reform,” Yale said, addressing the question. “The more practical we can be in our final report, the more quickly that report — assuming the government agrees with it — can be turned into legislation.” We “encourage you, to the extent that there is a consensus on issues, that certainly makes it easier for us from a recommendation perspective,” she added. The panel launched the consultation in September. Ahead of that deadline, other members of the panel added their own recommendations to potential submitters to the consultation. “In an ideal world, we have to be as concrete as possible. It’s true that the dream of many research groups is to produce something that is as close to a first draft of a bill, but that’s not always possible,” panel member Pierre Trudel, a professor at the University of Montreal law faculty said in French, according to simultaneous translation. So far, he said it is “quite bold” at this point to go in that direction. Marina Pavlović, a University of Ottawa law professor and member of the panel, also urged those submitters not to assume the group will just adopt the recommendations laid out in the CRTC’s report on programming distribution models, which recommends all players who benefit from the broadcasting ecosystem should contribute to it. “It is not a given that we will adopt any of the recommendations; we will consider them as part of the larger package and I think the opportunity that all of you have is to know that you’ve lived with that report for a while, comment on those recommendations, whether they’re useful, not useful, whether they need to be tweaked or they need to be changed,” Pavlović said, adding participants should think broadly and beyond just that report. But some said they will be crunched to heed those submission recommendations. The deadline to submit comments irked John Lawford, executive director of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC), who from the crowd expressed frustration and asked for a possible two-month extension. Yale, however, said the panel had their deadlines set by the government and that if it offered an extension, it itself would be crunched for time to produce the reports. On Wednesday, Yale sat in front of the senate transport and communications committee and had to respond to criticism of the composition of the board, which the government appointed. The senators re-raised concerns they previously made about the lack of consumer representatives, among others. A day later, she heard moderator of the panel Lawson Hunter, a lawyer at Stikeman Elliott, give his take on the matter. “There has been an issue in this sector for a long time on both the telecom and the broadcast side, that it’s too much dominated by the supply-side, i.e. people in the business, as opposed to the consumers and the viewers,” said Hunter, who is not part of the government-appointed group. Hunter was a co-author of a December 2017 C.D. Howe report called “Strengthening Canadian Television Content.” Some iterations of that report’s recommendations were found in the CRTC report’s recommendations on balancing ISP and broadcast contributions for Canadian content so that new money would flow into the system. Hunter continued: “I would throw it back to you folks that I think there is a real obligation on those affected by these changes to think about what the right policy going forward is, put a little water in your wine and come up with some very practical, hard-nosed but concrete suggestions for the panel as they move through the consultation phase.” — With reporting by Ahmad Hathout at ahathout@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

Comms acts review panel urges ‘practical’ submissions

Broadcast | November 1, 2018

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Comms acts review panel urges ‘practical’ submissions

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