Angry in the Great White North

This post is a direct rebuttal to the column that appeared today in straight.com.  Charlie Smith thinks Stephen Harper is going to have to tread carefully before helping out CanWest:

I'm guessing that by this time next year, our prime minister's surname is probably going to be Ignatieff and not Harper--in part because Harper will have misread how the public would react to a bunch of legislative changes designed to benefit private broadcasters.

And how does Smith come to this remarkable conclusion?

Nobody should be surprised that the Harper government will pull whatever levers it can to ensure the Asper family retains control over Canwest.

It's an important ally of Prime Minister Stephen Harper because it owns Global TV, the Vancouver Sun, the Province, the National Post, the Vancouver Courier, the North Shore News, the Delta Optimist, the Now papers, the Richmond News, and the Royal City Record as well as daily papers in several other Canadian markets.

The Aspers and Harper have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. Harper ensured that the family patriarch Izzy Asper's dream of a human-rights museum would come to fruition in Winnipeg, courtesy of massive sums of public funding.

And the Aspers helped ensure that Harper would remain prime minister when Canwest newspapers provided supportive editorials before the 2008 election and then hammered the idea of a Liberal-NDP coalition government supported by the Bloc Quebecois.

Don't be surprised if Harper returns the favour by providing generous tax breaks to the private broadcasters, including Canwest.

Gee, I thought Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff killed the coalition.  Never mind.

And then if great gobs of tax cuts don't work?  Smith recycles the foreign ownership bogeyman:

It might not be enough to ensure the Aspers remain in control. After all, the corporation is struggling with a $3.7-billion debt.

But not to worry. If things are on the verge of falling apart, Harper can make regulatory changes to allow a foreign media giant to come to the rescue by purchasing a big share of Canwest.

I can only assume Smith is referring to Rupert Murdoch.  Whenever people start bleating about foreign ownership, they usually mean Rupert Murdoch.

Now here's the thing.  CanWest is not agitating for any of this.  They want the system rebalanced for fairness.  From the Joint Submission: CTVglobemedia and Canwest Media Inc, delivered January 25, 2008:

Parliament recognized that private broadcasters can only contribute to the creation and presentation of Canadian programming to the extent that they have the resources to do so. There is therefore a direct statutory relationship between the contribution to Canadian programming the OTA sector is expected to make and the resources that are available to that sector from time to time. As resources diminish, so too must the obligations that OTA broadcasters are required to shoulder.

In our view, the regulatory regime currently applicable to the private OTA sector has reached a point where the regime is no longer "encouraging" the achievement of these public policy goals [development of Canadian talent] - because broadcasters simply do not have the financial and other resources that are necessary to achieve them.

So what are the burdens placed on broadcasters?

Over the course of many years, numerous policies, regulations, conditions of licence, licence commitments and expectations have been imposed on local OTA broadcasters, including:

• Requirements for the exhibition of Canadian programming (not less than 60% of the broadcast year and not less than 50% of the evening broadcast period);
• Requirements for the exhibition of specific types of Canadian programming during specific time periods (i.e. the priority programming regime);
• Commitments to specified numbers of hours of news and information and other local programming;
• Requirements that 75% of Canadian priority programming aired by OTA broadcasters be produced by independent production companies; and
• Social commitments like closed captioning and described video.

This list doesn't include the $300 million that the broadcasters will have to spend to upgrade to digital signals by 2011.  That upgrade that will free up the current spectrum used for analog TV for a new auction, allowing the CRTC to raise millions, perhaps billions, for the government, and nothing for the broadcasters.

So how do the broadcasters want this fixed?  Is CanWest asking for millions in tax breaks?  Is CanWest asking for a rule change to allow a foreign buyer to buy them out?

The simple answer is "No".

The solution to the crisis in OTA television is to provide OTA broadcasters with the resources they require to sustain their contributions to the system - just as Section 3(1)(s) of the Act contemplates.

This can be accomplished by:

1. requiring BDUs to compensate local OTA broadcasters for the programming they provide, and
2. allowing broadcasters to control the distribution of their signals beyond their local markets.

Neither of these proposals is novel and the principles that support them have long been recognized by the Commission. The problem is that these principles have been traded off over the years in favour of regulatory constructs that are now no longer sustainable.

That's the big change.    To get paid for what you make, and to have some measure of control of how it is distributed.

Hardly groundbreaking stuff.  And not the sort of thing that will bring down a government.

But what about the increase in cable costs?  I mean, if the broadcasters get compensation from the cable and satellite companies for filling a third of the programming grid seven days a week every week, that cost is going to go to the consumer (about fifty cents a channel, give or take).  That could bring down a government, right?

Consumers also support the notion that OTA broadcasters should be compensated. In a survey attached to this submission as Appendix B, Nanos Research found that 80% of respondents were in favour of local stations receiving a portion of their monthly payment and almost 70% of customers thought they were already paying for OTA signals as part of their basic cable or satellite service.

I don't see torches and pitchforks wielded  by angry mobs, do you?  Canadians are generally a fair-minded folk.  The polling research shows that Canadians are surprised to find out that the broadcasters aren't being paid, and most Canadians think that's unfair.

I guess Charlie Smith isn't like most Canadians.

Charlie Smith and his ilk can peddle elaborate conspiracies involving foreign takeovers by marauding broadcasting pirates who want nothing more than to scrub our airwaves clean of Canadian content while the Conservative government strikes sweetheart deals in return for support on the editorial pages.  It's a free country, after all.

But make no mistake, it's all a fiction.  In fact, write it up in script form, and Charlie Smith's piece could count as Canadian content as a television broadcast, but it would bear no more relationship to reality than an episode of Corner Gas.

If the situation has gotten so grave that tax breaks are needed to get through the storm, then blame the people who have refused to listen to the warnings that this day was coming.  But CanWest doesn't want bags of money, because that won't solve the problem.  CanWest wants respect and fairness in the system.  I don't understand why Charlie Smith is so threatened by that.

A side note: I don't know why CanWest is getting so much attention.  Remember, it is CTVglobemedia that has actually closed five local stations down.  CanWest is working hard to avoid having that happen.  Sounds to me like a company with a distinct concern when it comes to preserving local Canadian content.

Check out other stories from the CanWest archive.