PEOPLE ARE ALREADY CALLING Justin Trudeau our first “selfie” Prime Minister. Images of him on the campaign trail – and the day after the election – mugging with various Canadians who have one arm outstretched and the other around our PM-to-be number in the hundreds of thousands. He’ll apparently even click it for you, if you like.
Of course, those snapshots are then uploaded to the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn or any other sharing platform to display to followers around the country and the world. Just Google “Justin Trudeau selfie”.
Invariably, those images ride on networks built by Canadian carriers using spectrum they paid for, licensed from the federal government. Or, if they were uploaded via free Wi-Fi, on their way to their final destinations those images ride on multi-billion-dollar wired and wireless nets. We are nearing ubiquitous connectivity thanks to all that investment and all of our devices and we need a single federal government ministry to oversee all of this.
Our incoming PM is 43 years old, so the communications revolution that just seems to be constantly revolving (as in, no end in sight) has him firmly in its grasp, too. People use all kinds of devices to watch TV/video in all of its forms on various platforms and apps, to listen to radio and podcasts, read “newspapers” and “magazines” and stream or download info from other sites – along with, alongside, or immersed in the mass of social media we all use.
Our entire lives are quite literally in the device(s) in our hands. Our wives, husbands, kids, grandma and grandpa; our job, friends, banks and insurance; our fun, news, research, schedules, music and entertainment and on and on – is all in our hands, delivered to and from and through the cloud to our handsets, tablets, laptops, PCs and smart TVs over networks which are indispensable.
However, those networks also still deliver Canadian culture (which is the raison d’etre of our Broadcasting Act), be it over-the-air TV and radio, specialty channels and all the digital options our various media companies have made available. Access to content that is Canadian is still really important to most of us, even if so many of our favourite shows aren’t made here.
The big four vertically integrated companies in Canada (Bell, Rogers, Shaw and Quebecor) are all TV carriers, phone companies, broadband providers, broadcasters, digital media innovators, TV producers and over-the-top providers. Three of the four provide national wireless service. All of them have restructured how they operate in order to topple the traditional silos which kept certain parts of the companies away from certain other parts.
Given worldwide media and telecom convergence and the struggles the CRTC has had in forming telecom and broadcasting policy to address the myriad challenges posed by global media and communications upheaval (whose demands also gobble up spectrum), does it make sense anymore to have two different departments, Heritage and Industry, with far different staff, capabilities and goals, manage the moving pieces that is our communications industry?
Not to us.
"In ’91, we were still driven by 1980s technology and Trudeau was a 20-year-old university student possibly still making and listening to mix tapes."
Look, we’re unlikely to see either the Telecommunications Act (1993) nor the Broadcasting Act (1991) rewritten, even though in 1991, “portable” TVs weighed 50 pounds and in 1993 Canada had about a million wireless subscribers – and all their cell phones received was voice. In ’91, we were still driven by 1980s technology and Trudeau was a 20-year-old university student possibly still making and listening to mix tapes. However, a rewrite of the laws, or a combination of the two into one law is likely not in the cards. It’s seen as being just too hard to do.
However, the last Telecom Policy Review Panel, which filed its report back in 2006 (and was launched by the last Liberal government) told us that the industry and its policies should be looked at again in five years, i.e. 2011. Perhaps a Department of Communications could lead a new review of telecom and broadcasting policy?
AT THIS POINT IN TIME (and a new federal cabinet won’t be named for another week; November 4th say news reports) we don’t really know what the Trudeau Liberals are all about when it comes to this business. They did promise more money to the CBC and, as the others did, also made some promises about rural broadband during the campaign. But what are their broader communications policies going to be? Will they be as confrontational as the Conservatives were? We don’t really know. That yet-to-be-named cabinet already has a file to deal with however, as we reported last week.
Liberal MP and former astronaut Marc Garneau has posited some ideas during his seven years as an MP, where he has held positions such as science and technology critic and foreign affairs critic. During his 2012 Liberal leadership campaign against Trudeau, for example, Garneau called for looser foreign ownership rules in telecom, but not broadcasting. Does that mean the Liberal government would open up the possibility of an outsider buying any of the Big Three? We don’t yet know. Would it allow the sale of Wind, for example, to one of the incumbents? Again, not sure yet.
Garneau is also a proponent of broadband for all, telling the CRTC in a presentation to its obligation to serve hearing in 2010 that we can’t allow citizens to become “second class citizens” because they can’t access broadband – and that all should have access to the internet. Now, he was primarily focused on the rural-urban divide in that presentation, but will this government expand beyond that and take a look at the affluent/poor divide and address affordability for people whose homes are already passed by broadband networks but who can’t afford a connection?
As well, at what speed do we mean when we say “broadband”? Currently that means at least 5 Mbps to Canadians and according to the CRTC, 98% of Canadians have access to that speed. Doesn’t 25 Mbps sound better though? Delivering IP video (which is likely how all of our Cancon will be delivered to us in the future) at that speed is far more stable and robust than lower speeds. 25 Mbps the goal of the U.S. What about 100 Mbps? Bell and Telus are rolling out 1 Gbps in major urban centres soon and Rogers says it will have 1 Gb across its whole cable footprint by the end of 2016.
Like I said though, we don’t really know what the new government’s policies are on all of this yet, but perhaps Garneau (who will be a major player in Trudeau’s cabinet) will drive some of them. He’s clearly done the most public thinking about it, from what we’ve seen and read.
All that said, it doesn’t appear from here that we can afford to deal with connectivity and content in two separate silos anymore. It no longer makes sense. We need our content. We need our connectivity. One without the other makes no sense. We need to have the spectrum engineers at Industry Canada in the same building as the cultural engineers at Canadian Heritage and ensure we’re all, if not on the same page, at least reading the same book.
We need to bust apart silos with a new Ministry of Communications.
