OPINION: When the dust settles on the CRTC’s ‘path forward’, will Canada have a better broadcasting system?

By Monica Auer, executive director, Forum for Research and Policy in Communications On May 12, the CRTC announced the first of a three-step process to implement Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act, which had entered into force two weeks earlier. The first step consists of a trifecta of CRTC public consultations – consultation notices 2023-138, -139 and -140 – dealing with “the contributions that broadcasting undertakings … will be required to make to support the creation, distribution, promotion and discoverability of Canadian and Indigenous audio and video content”. The first of the CRTC’s consultations, entitled “The Path Forward”, will culminate in a CRTC public hearing beginning Nov. 20. Step 2 will then apparently involve traditional broadcasters’ tangible and intangible contributions towards Canadian and Indigenous content, while in Step 3 the CRTC will “finalize” the “tailored contribution requirements” of each ownership group or individual programming service. In May 2022 the then-chairperson of the CRTC, Ian Scott, said he thought Bill C-11 “could be fully implemented in two years” – by May 2025, then, if the CRTC’s May 2023 announcement is the starting point. The two key questions for Canadians and Parliament – once the dust settles on the CRTC’s “Path Forward” – is whether the updated Broadcasting Act will actually achieve the government’s objectives and how we will know. Then-Minister of Canadian Heritage Steven Guilbeault laid out three goals for this new legislation when he launched debate in the House of Commons on Bill C-11 predecessor, Bill C-10 – nearly three years ago. He said the new legislation would strengthen Canada’s cultural sovereignty by enabling Canadians to “tell their own stories and express their own culture, now and in the future”, would “generate almost $1 billion in foreign investment in” Canadian “films, television and music” and would“ensure fairness” so that “those who benefit from the Canadian system … contribute to it fairly”. In February 2022, then-Minister of Canadian Heritage Pablo Rodriguez reframed these objectives, saying that the new legislation “updates the rules so that all broadcasting platforms contribute to our culture. That is all. That is what the bill is all about.” Much – if not all – responsibility for ensuring that Canada’s broadcasting system takes the right path now rests on the CRTC, the “single independent public authority” created by Parliament more than half a century ago in 1968 to regulate and supervise Canada’s broadcasting system. At that time, flush with its successful launch of the world’s first geostationary satellite, the Alouette-1, Canada was arguably at the leading edge of progress in communications. The new CRTC raced out of the gate by setting out new policies to guide the development of the new medium of cable television so as to strengthen Canada’s broadcasting system, and to refresh its approach to radio and television programming. The Commission began publishing statistics describing the programming being offered by that system by the mid-70s and updated those data in the mid-80s using desktop calculators and mainframe computers. In the 1979/80 broadcast year, for example, a CRTC publication showed that 69.8% of the programming broadcast by CBC’s English-language TV stations was Canadian, compared to 61.6% of CTV’s programming. Yet the CRTC has taken no interest whatsoever in the broadcasting system’s portrayal of Canadian culture for decades. The data it publishes instead focus on broadcasters’ numbers, their audiences and their financial performance, completely ignoring matters such as the hours or levels of Canadian content now available in Canada’s broadcasting system. One could be forgiven for wondering whether the Commission has any interest at all in broadcast programming, whether online or offline. As for all the jobs that Bill C-11 will create, Rogers recently pointed out in the context of renewing one of its radio licences that the CRTC rescinded employment-data information requirements described in its 2022 radio-renewal application form 25 years ago, in 1997. Although the CRTC offers access to the monthly program logs submitted by TV stations these are essentially raw data. It publishes no analyses of these materials, and recently confirmed through an access-to-information answer that it has destroyed the TV-log data it had previously made available from 1999 to 2013 because new log-analysis software prevented analysis of those logs (that were always capable of analysis through spreadsheet programs such as Excel). The Commission publishes no information about radio stations’ programming, including program logs. In other words, neither Canadians nor Parliament knows where Canada’s broadcasting system is now, when it comes to the presentation of Canadian stories or the reflection of Canada, because the nation’s federal regulator does not to publish the information it has. The bottom line is that neither Canadians nor Parliament actually knows where Canada’s broadcasting system “is” right now. This means in turn that there will be no way of knowing whether the path taken by the CRTC is bringing the broadcasting system any closer to what Parliament wants or whether we are actually walking around in circles. Finding ourselves right where we began is the best way to discourage the creative energy and enthusiasm that Bill C-11 was intended to promote. Many Canadians, three Ministers, their staffs and both Houses of Parliament have invested huge amounts of time and energy in crafting broadcasting legislation for the 21st century. The CRTC should ensure that their time and energy is not wasted, by taking three simple steps. First, the CRTC should immediately begin to publish historical information about the levels and types of original (“first-run”) Canadian and non-Canadian programming that Canada’s radio and television programming services have been and are broadcasting. This will ensure that all parties understand where Canada’s broadcasting system has been, where it is now and where it must go to advance. Second, once it has made a decision about the 2023-138 consultation process it should invite interested parties to join an internal CRTC Committee to evaluate and strengthen the CRTC’s data-gathering processes. Historically such discussions have been limited to the CRTC itself, or the CRTC in collaboration with broadcasters: but standards for openness, transparency and accountability today require a different approach. Third, it should begin to review the manner in which it publishes information about the broadcasting system – specifically, it should provide updates about the programming, employment and financial performance of Canada’s broadcasting system at least twice a year. Annual updates simply no longer work in today’s, 24/7 world. Essentially, when the dust settles on the CRTC’s Online Streaming Act consultations the CRTC must not simply have done its job – it must show Canadians that it is achieving Parliament’s objectives on their behalf. Otherwise – if Canadians cannot assess whether Parliament’s objectives for their broadcasting system are being met – what will have been the point of the last three years of legislative wrangling over C-10 and C-11? Monica Auer is FRPC’s executive director. Monica began her career in communications regulation in the mid-1980s at the CRTC. She worked at CBC head office from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, dealing with issues related to the Corporation’s regulation by the CRTC. THE WIRE REPORT ACCEPTS SUBMISSIONS BY OUTSIDE CONTRIBUTORS WHO ARE KNOWLEDGEABLE ON THE SUBJECT MATTER DISCUSSED. SUBMISSIONS CAN BE SENT TO JCOCULLO@THEWIREREPORT.CA.

OPINION: When the dust settles on the CRTC’s ‘path forward’, will Canada have a better broadcasting system?

News | 08/04/2023 6:21 pm EDT

By Monica Auer, executive director, Forum for Research and Policy in Communications

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