By Ahmad Hathout
The Canadian Media Producers Association (CMPA) has been granted Wednesday a discontinuance of its legal challenge against a CRTC decision that temporarily relieved Corus of some of its regulatory obligations.
The ruling was a consent judgment, meaning the justice acted on an agreement by both parties – the CMPA and Corus – to end the litigation on a without-costs basis.
The decision stands in contrast to what the trade group for independent producers told Cartt in late March, which was that it was going to pursue the legal challenge that sought to argue that the CRTC should not have temporarily reduced the media company’s Canadian content spending requirements because it allegedly failed to fulfill its obligations to independent productions.
On May 23, the CMPA and Corus agreed the application should not be dismissed for delay until May 29.
But: “After discussions between the CMPA and Corus, the CMPA and Corus came to a mutually agreeable resolution of the CMPA’s application for judicial review of Broadcasting Decision CRTC 2024-103,” the CMPA told Cartt in a statement late Wednesday afternoon. “The CMPA does not dispute the validity of the CRTC’s decision. As a result, the CMPA has discontinued its application.”
The Federal Court of Appeal had told the CMPA through a notice of status review in March that it needed to explain why the court shouldn’t throw out the case because the organization failed to file a request for a hearing date or other standard documentation more than 180 days after it filed its notice of application for judicial review of the CRTC’s decision last summer.
The court notice came roughly five months after the CRTC filed on October 31 a confidential record, which would have included information that the CMPA requested.
By February 3, the court registry had sent out a communication that it was prepared to issue the notice of status review, which would have included a warning that the court would close the case for inactivity, according to the case summary.
The CRTC granted relief to Corus on an extraordinary basis last spring, which also included an extention beyond the current licence term, which ends August 2026, for the repayment of certain amounts owed on its Canadian programming expenditure (CPE) requirements that were deferred from the pandemic.
