This is a very timely analysis of the whole CanCon issue and, with luck, a precursor to a long-overdue policy review by government. Despite technology neutral definitions in the Broadcasting Act, so many elements of broadcasting law, policy and regulation are, like SimSub, deeply anchored in pre-Internet technologies, ideas and marketplace realities. The Act itself was largely based on the 1986(!) Report of the Caplan Sauvageau Task Force.
Canadian governments have, since the Massey Report, pursued the same core objective of promoting Canadian content in all fields of cultural expression: from the visual and performing arts, to publishing, audiovisual, broadcasting and on-line media. The tools used to promote this core objective have been tailored to the particular realities of different media. This objective remains valid today. What is outdated, and increasingly inefficient and ineffective, are many of the tools being used to pursue that objective in broadcasting, as that medium, like many other media, gets subsumed by the Internet.
"Broadcasting" has been a closed, one-way, domestically controlled, "walled-garden" medium since its inception. By contrast, the Internet is open, interactive, global, transactional and user-driven. Internet users worldwide – and Canadians are among the most active and sophisticated among them – have rejected walled-garden models on-line. And the Internet is re-making "broadcasting" in its own image: tearing down the walls around once-protected gardens and enabling any-time, anywhere, user access to content. So the medium is the message…
The notion that tools designed to promote CanCon in a one-way, walled-garden environment like broadcasting will be effective on the Internet is simply out-of-touch. We need to be looking at new ways, better suited to the Internet environment, to promote CanCon in on-line audiovisual and other content — not looking for solutions in the rear-view mirror of "broadcasting" policy and regulation. That’s just sooo 20th Century.
Len St-Aubin
Telecom Industry Consultant
