OTTAWA – The federal government’s expert panel which has spent 18 months building recommendations on how the various Acts which govern television, radio, broadband and telecom in Canada should, or should not, change, will make its report public early Wednesday afternoon.
Legislation coming from those recommendations will drive the various policies created over the years for the connectivity and cultural sectors and could alter the way Canadians receive electronic media, how Canadian content is made and funded, deliver increased broadband accessibility, change wireless policy, rework the way the federal government treats wireless spectrum and so forth.
Cartt.ca has confirmed with the panel secretariat that panel chair Janet Yale and panel member Monique Simard will be on hand at an Ottawa press conference early Wednesday afternoon to present its recommendations.
When the BTLR panel released it’s “What we Heard” report back in June, it broke down the concerns of the over 2,000 people and organizations which participated in its consultations into four broad themes:
- Reducing barriers to access by all Canadians to advanced telecommunications networks
- Supporting the creation, production and discoverability of Canadian content
- Improving the rights of the digital consumer
- Renewing the institutional framework for the communications sector
The report is set to inform the federal government’s rewriting of the Broadcasting Act, Telecommunications Act and Radiocommunications Act (and potentially the CRTC Act and the Copyright Act, not to mention CRTC and Industry Canada policies). The federal government has promised to introduce new legislation within a year of receiving the report.
As a refresher, when the BTLR panel was created and its process launched, the federal government said panel members were to come up with recommendations which take “into account the realities of Canadian consumers and businesses, and our artists, artisans and broadcasters without increasing the cost of services to Canadians.”
Back in 2018, a Heritage spokesperson also told Cartt.ca the government will “reject all proposals that increase what Canadians already pay.”
All that said, government ministers have since insisted foreign digital companies should be made to pay for the production and discoverability of Canadian content. The revenue earned by those digital giants comes from Canadians, so it remains to see how any shifts in policy, likely to come many months after new legislation is introduced (so, 2022 at the earliest), might end up being “revenue-neutral”, as the CRTC hopes.
The instructions also said the federal government might be interested in hearing about an increase in the levels of allowable foreign investment in the telecom sector, but also that it didn’t want to hear about raising foreign ownership levels in the broadcasting sector. It’s worth noting subscription TV companies, or Broadcast Distribution Undertakings as they’re known in the regulatory world, and whose cash cow is the provision of broadband services in competition with telcos, are technically still regulated under the Broadcasting Act.
The review and the panel were also to be “guided by the principle of net neutrality” and were to “explore opportunities to further enshrine in legislation the principles of net neutrality in the provision and carriage of all telecommunications services,” reads the initial June 2018 instructions to the panel.
Those instructions offered no help on the definition of net neutrality, and we’re unsure if the panel members attempted to divine such a definition.
We’ll find out about all of this and a whole lot more on Wednesday.
Original artwork by Paul Lachine, Chatham, Ont.
