Terms of debate for Canadian media
The Canadian media “ecosystem” has a specific history, and it is important that this history be the kept at the fore when you’re talking about Canadian media. A lot has been written on the American news industry, which serves as useful a case study, but it is important not to transpose any lessons we learn from it onto the Canadian media industry without adjusting for Canada’s specificities.
Those specificities, which still largely structure the terms of debate in the Canadian media industry to this day, originate in the earliest days of broadcast media in the 1920s, when the Federal Canadian government first began to develop policy for regulating mass media. They include uncertainty on the relationship between the public and private sectors and whether the government should regulate the private sector at all, commitment to public broadcasting along the lines of the BBC, a belief that there was an inherent public service component to broadcasting but a national interest mandate for the public broadcaster, the CBC, leading to much contestation over what “national interest” should mean, particularly when it came to the relationship between Ottawa and Quebec.
Although, it is noteworthy that Quebec wasn’t the only region of Canada that complained to be underserved by the CBC because of its national focus. The Maritimes, Manitoba and British Columbia all voiced regionalist sentiments, complaining that CBC coverage was overly focusing on Ontario and Toronto. Indeed, most radio and television station during the period between 1920 and 1970 were serving a local audience, of which national news was just one component, local news being equally as important.
In the early days of mass radio, the federal government declared the airwaves a public resource due to their limited capacity, which necessitated that the government be involved in issuing licences for broadcasting to ensure only the highest quality broadcasters used the limited broadcast frequencies. This concept of broadcast frequencies being a public utility reinforced the belief that broadcasting had a public service component, and most radio and later television stations had a significant news production element in their initial programing. Later, this premise would be upset by the arrival of satellite television, as well as cable television companies that received many satellite television signals with receptor dishes and then wired them into the homes of their subscribers. The Canadian government would struggle to adapt policies crafted in an era of over the air broadcasts and limited broadcast frequencies to the essentially unlimited capacity of satellite and cable.
Any analysis of the current Canadian media ecosystem should dwell on this technological component. The terms of major points of contention in Canadian media were set up in a context of limited broadcast capability, and that premise was made increasingly irrelevant by technological advancement. Surveying Canadian news media today reveals that it is coalescing around the internet as the primary mode of distribution making capacity for media distribution infinite.
There are the CanCon rules as well, of course, first put in place as part of the Broadcast Act of Canada in 1968, requiring broadcasters to show 60% Canadian content yearly, lowered to 55% for private broadcasters in 2011.
These rules were put in place to repel encroaching American cultural imperialism, which was also to justify the nationalist mandate of the CBC.
Arguments over CanCon are most prevalent, most notably recently, Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly was lambasted over her deal with Netflix, which would exempt them from taxation and regulation in exchange for a $500 million dollar investment in CanCon.
Issues stemming from the increasing use by Canadians of streaming services such as Netflix represent the beginning of the next phase of the Canada government having to overall how it approaches media regulation in response to changing technology. The internet stands to be much more disruptive policy that satellite technology was, and the freedom by which the internet allows people to consume media from all over the world will pose a serious challenge to Canada’s desire to regulate its media landscape.
Moreover, if in 20 years from now everyone is simply consuming their favourite television shows or even news media on demand over streaming services, how does the concept of dictating what percentage of broadcast time is CanCon even apply? Will streaming services be required to dedicated 55% over their offerings to CanCon?
Lastly, when it comes to the news industry there are other considerations brought about by the internet. New, scrappy digital news startups are relatively easy to get off the ground, starting small (with one weekly podcast, perhaps) and scaling, all they need is a big enough audience to be sustainable. This, of course, completely redefines what we’re talking about when we talk about the private sector for news companies. Although, few of these digital startups have managed to become financially sustainable due to small audiences in Canada.
In news media, rather the most pressing issue, obviously is money. The legacy newspaper industry is lobbying the federal government for a bailout to assist the industry’s transition to digital. However, a few of the larger voices in the world of digital news startups are against this idea, arguing that they could do the job of news creation better than legacy companies and they should be allowed to die off, leaving the way open for small, more agile outfits to move in on what’s left of advertising revenue.
