MONTREAL – With the CRTC having indicated in its upcoming review of broadcast distribution undertakings and specialty services that it is prepared to let market forces begin to dictate how the TV industry works here, a group of artist and cultural business groups are demanding something different.
They have asked Canadian Heritage, Josée Verner, “to use her power to issue policy direction to the CRTC so that the Commission gives primary consideration to social and cultural factors, as required by the Broadcasting Act, in all its decisions to do with the broadcasting sector,” says a press release.
The release was issued late Wednesday, just days prior to the Canadian Association of Broadcasters annual convention in Ottawa where both CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein and Verner will both be speaking. The release was issued on behalf of 18 Canadian cultural groups.
“This reorientation of CRTC priorities goes against the Act, the CRTC’s mission, and the fragile reality of our cultural industries,” said ADISQ president, Paul Dupont-Hébert, in the release. “The Act clearly obligates the CRTC to give primary consideration to the broadcasting system’s social and cultural contribution to Canada’s cultural identity. It does not ask the CRTC to become an agent of deregulation.”
(Ed note: The Act’s meaning is certainly in the eye of the beholder, as groups on the other sides of the arguments often have very different viewpoints.)
The group pointed to 10 CRTC decisions, and a similar number of statements from the CRTC chairman, that show the Commission now favours market forces in its regulatory decisions, “to the detriment of the social and cultural objectives it is duty-bound to protect and promote,” continues the release.
As readers will recall, former Industry Minister Maxime Bernier made it his mission to ensure that telecom regulation be dramatically scaled back in favour of market forces.
Among these decisions the group cites is: the new CRTC policies for commercial radio and live television, “which completely ignore the needs of the cultural sector in terms of both visibility and financing; and the attention given to the Dunbar-Leblanc report, which specifically challenges such well-established policies as Canadian content and French language music quotas on broadcast radio,” reads the release.
“Culture is not a commodity like any other,” added Vincent Leduc, chairman of the Board of APFTQ. “There is no such thing as a fair market for cultural works in an economy like Quebec’s or Canada’s. Without strongly applied cultural policies, our artists and our independent production companies are bound to be steamrollered by the foreign competition.”
The groups behind the release are: ACTRA, AQTIS, APFTQ, PMPA, ARRQ, ADISQ, AQAD, CMAQ, CQM, CQT, GMMQ, RAAV, RQD, RIDEAU, SARTEC, SPACQ, UDA and UNEQ (a web search will help you figure out this amalgam of anagrams).
“When the CRTC no longer strongly supports the policies under its responsibility, it sends a message that all of our cultural support framework can be called into question,” added Raymond Legault, president of UDA:
The coalition’s spokespeople noted – as they have in the past – that the CRTC’s “regulatory drift” has accelerated, but goes back as far as 1999, they say, when the CRTC decided not to try something as futile as attempting to regulate the Internet.
“For some years now, certain decision-makers in Ottawa have been using the burgeoning development on the technological front as a pretext for saying that our cultural policies are outdated. They are making a serious mistake. Casting doubt on our cultural policies is casting doubt on our culture. It’s casting doubt on Canada,” said Richard Hardacre, national president of ACTRA.
“Minister Verner can put an end to it through her power to issue policy direction for the CRTC, and thus she can act to have the CRTC re-establish social and cultural contributions as central to its broadcasting-related decisions. This kind of policy direction would send a message to creators, artists and producers, as well as Canadian society as a whole, that our government, in accordance with the international convention it ratified, does not consider culture to be a commodity like any other, but one that needs to be protected from the indiscriminate laws of the marketplace,” adds the release.
“The Minister has the power to make a difference, and she must act now.”
