AFTER A DOZEN OR SO years of lobbying the Liberal Party power establishment, the Canadian cable, radio, television and telecom industries will have to start over beginning today.
No matter how long this new Conservative minority government lasts (we sorely hope it’s longer than Joe Clark’s eight months in 1979), those at the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and the Canadian Cable Telecommunications Association, as well as Canada’s large telcos, have brand new friends to make – and influence.
Issues like foreign ownership of telecom and cable companies, or even broadcasters, might get a more friendly hearing under the Conservatives (then again with only 124 seats and the need to build consensus among other parties, maybe not).
What will be interesting is the new government’s reaction to the Telecom Policy Review launched by soon-to-be-former Industry Minister David Emerson in 2004. The report is finished, but its publication was delayed until after the election. Will the new Minister – reports say the Industry portfolio could go to one of Monte Solberg (Medicine Hat), Lawrence Cannon (Pontiac, Quebec) or James Rajotte (Edmonton-Leduc) – feel obligated to take its recommendations? Doesn’t seem like something a new government would do. It could be shelved.
All speculation on the new Heritage Minister centres around former broadcaster (TVO, CTV, CFMT) and CRTC Commissioner Bev Oda. She seems like a slam dunk for the portfolio after handily winning her Durham riding. Liberal Heritage Minister Liza Frulla lost her seat in her Jeanne-Le Ber riding in Quebec to the Bloc in a race that wasn’t really close.
What will Oda say about continued funding for the CBC? To the Canadian Television Fund? What, if any, plans do the Conservatives have for the CRTC or the Broadcasting Act? Oda’s bio speaks to her potential to be more friendly to the Canadian culture establishment (since she knows it backwards and forwards) than those in that establishment fear.
Perhaps the most surprising result of election night was the election of former Quebec City shock-jock Andre Arthur as an independent MP for Portneuf Jacques Cartier (near Quebec City). Arthur is famous for his brushes with the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, the CRTC and courtrooms, due to the things he’s said on the air. But, he gained nearly 40% of the popular vote in his riding, handily beating his Bloc Quebecois challenger.
In 2002, Arthur and his employer at the time, Cogeco Radio, was ordered to pay $420,000 in damages to former Quebec premier Daniel Johnson over on-air allegations about a real estate deal which the court agreed were completely untrue.
“The behaviour used by Arthur isn’t new: insinuation, half-truth, populism, demagogy,” said Justice Carole Julien in her 2002 decision. “He’s looking to awaken the listener’s dormant cynicism. Arthur asserts facts that then become his questions. The average listener can reasonably believe these are established facts.”
More recently, Arthur, when employed by Genex Communications, was at least partly responsible for the CRTC revoking the company’s license for CHOI FM in 2004, a case which the company is pursuing at the Supreme Court.
It should be interesting to see how someone formerly paid to take wild verbal shots at those in power fares as one of the powerful, staring down those media arrows.
