CAB calls on CRTC to reduce broadcast reporting requirements to boost productivity

The Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) wants the CRTC to reduce the reporting and monitoring requirements it has for radio and television broadcasters, a move the group’s president says would allow them to be more productive. In an interview with The Wire Report, CAB president Kevin Desjardins said that he hopes the CRTC will be willing to “take a critical eye” on some of its administrative processes and ask itself if they are still necessary to achieve the country’s public policy goals. The CAB issued a formal letter to the CRTC on Thursday, Nov. 13, calling on it to implement a series of changes that would cut red tape. “As we think about what the future is going to look like, I think it's important for us to nudge the commission to continue to look at their internal processes and to question them, to make sure that they're still appropriate…,” said Desjardins. The CAB states in its letter that “dated” requirements from the regulator currently require broadcasters to submit “dozens” of reports on a monthly and annual basis, many of which it contends are “duplicative or overlap to a considerable extent.” These submissions — which include multiple kinds of financial, regional, ownership, diversity, accessibility, and advertising reports, local news audits, and reports on tangible benefits — were set up to address “an issue of the day,” the group argues, adding that their continued necessity has not been reassessed. “It is clear that the commission does not have the resources to review each and every one of these reports,” the CAB alleges, “no more so can broadcasters afford to complete these reports each year (or each month) for them only to be shelved once filed with the commission. This long list needs to be rationalized, streamlined and ultimately reduced to only those reports the commission actually needs and actually reviews.” While there are a “handful of large broadcasting groups” that have the resources and staff to handle regulatory issues, the “vast majority” of CAB members “do not have anybody on staff who has regulatory expertise,” said Desjardins. This forces them to divert non-regulatory staff from other areas, which “takes their eyes off the ball of doing the day-to-day work to make their businesses more successful and more productive.” Desjardins acknowledged the CRTC’s decision last month to modernize the rules for radio stations so that their licences will be open-ended with no expiry dates, but he said that was the least of the CAB’s concerns. “While we thought that the commission was moving in the right direction in terms of lessening the administrative burden on broadcasters, we just don't think that it went far enough,” he said. In addition to that recent CRTC decision, Desjardins noted that the CAB’s requests come after the federal government emphasized in its proposed budget the need to streamline regulations to encourage investments in the Canadian economy. A specific request, among others, is to get rid of monthly program logs for television. These detailed logs, providing information on every minute broadcast, are currently the main mechanism for checking compliance with Canadian content exhibition requirements. However, the CAB stated that monitoring advertising duration is no longer necessary because advertising is not subject to limits. Similarly, detailed minute-by-minute information on program genre is viewed as redundant since the commission no longer regulates the genre of Canadian TV services. The log filing process is further complicated by the process behind Canadian certification numbers (C-numbers), which is a unique number assigned by the CRTC or Canadian Audio-Visual Certification Office (CAVCO) to a certified CanCon production. Desjardins explained that there is often a delay between when something is ready to be aired and when it receives its official certification, sometimes due to the CRTC’s own backlogs, causing a back-and-forth with a lot of friction. “There is almost an acceptance at this point that your first submission of a television log is going to come back with multiple errors in it,” said Desjardins. “It becomes this frustrating trial and error and creates unproductive time for broadcasters,” he said, explaining that “you file your logs into an antiquated system and it spits back a whole bunch of errors that you then have to go back and attempt to resolve, then you resubmit it and then there are more errors that come back.” As an alternative, the CAB recommends that the CRTC explore a limited audit-based approach for television, similar to the one for radio, in which the CRTC can call on broadcasters to provide a report for a specific month. Desjardins also highlighted that the CAB’s requests come as the CRTC continues its work to modernize Canada’s broadcasting framework following the passage of the Online Streaming Act. Repeating his association’s calls for a more equitable regulatory environment between domestic and foreign broadcasters, Desjardins said that the CRTC should lower the regulatory burden for traditional broadcasters, in anticipation that the burden for streamers “would not be up to the level of what we have historically been asked to do.” phalentm@thewirereport.ca

CAB calls on CRTC to reduce broadcast reporting requirements to boost productivity

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By Phalen Tynes-MacDonald
|November 14, 2025

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CAB calls on CRTC to reduce broadcast reporting requirements to boost productivity

Broadcast | By Phalen Tynes-MacDonald |November 14, 2025

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