By Christopher Guly
OTTAWA – As bill C-18 enters its final stretch in the Senate, two former senior officials with the CRTC have proposed alternative ways to support Canada’s struggling news industry beyond the Online News Act, whose aim to redistribute advertising income from such digital platforms as Meta’s Facebook and Alphabet’s Google to new organizations is untenable in their view.
“The industry and public policy-makers need to accept that during a period of disruption such as the one currently underway, there will be companies incapable of surviving,” write former CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein and past CRTC telecommunications vice-chair Peter Menzies in a new paper, …and now, the news. A national news media policy for Canada, for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
“What is necessary is not the survival of all companies currently involved in producing journalism, but that journalism and journalists can transition from unstable platforms to those capable of sustaining the work in the future. Allowing market forces to drive the industry is, ultimately, the solution.”
They present a “news media public policy” featuring several elements, including reforming the CBC, which von Finckenstein and Menzies say is “not a pure-play public broadcaster” and in fact “is also a commercial competitor – heavily subsidized by public funds – to all other private news organizations, distorting the media landscape and limiting opportunities for competition.”
CBC “must no longer be permitted to sell advertising on any of its platforms in competition with other domestic news organizations and broadcasters,” the authors argue. “Not only does this practice distort the market and diminish advertising revenue opportunities for private sector news media, it risks distorting [the public broadcaster’s] mandate by encouraging it to focus on primary advertising markets in Toronto and Montreal at the expense of service to the rest of the country.”
The former CRTC senior officials also believe that “all CBC news content should be made available for reproduction – with credit – to other news organizations in Canada. As this information is publicly funded, it should be considered a public asset available throughout the nation following its initial posting, publication, and broadcast.”
Menzies and von Finckenstein present reforms to their former employer, too. It’s time, they say, to “re-evaluate” the CRTC’s role.
In light of bill C-11 – the Online Streaming Act – becoming law, the commission “will also be given authority over all audio and visual content on the internet, a development that could have considerable impact on the many online-only, currently unlicensed news providers functioning there” necessitating the CRTC to become “a positive contributor to a healthy news economy,” the authors write.
“Therefore, we recommend that in exercising its powers under the Broadcasting Act, the CRTC should take cognizance of [a new] Journalism Support Act and take no decision that will in any way directly or indirectly interfere with the operations of the latter.”
To support the digital transition of Canada’s news media, von Finckenstein and Menzies suggest that all expenditures by eligible news businesses, as defined in C-18, which “involve an investment in digital transformation technology [be] eligible to claim that investment as a capital cost allowance in their first year.”
