I have looked at your series on Canadian content. Any discussion with respect to television has to deal with cable carriage and simultaneous program substitution. While the flavour of the subject is there, some basic facts need clarification, and with my background as first a cable system owner operator and later an employee of the CRTC for 27 years, I felt I should comment.
Program protection with respect to cable is not a Canadian invention. That notion is false. That process started on the American side of the line in 1966 when U.S. border stations requested protection from Canadian television stations with the pre-release of U.S. shows. The Federal Communications Commission granted the relief by ordering U.S. cable systems to delete the offending programs. That grant set in motion a number of other things that still impact U.S. cable systems today.
The new Canadian Radio and Television Commission, later the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) came into being in 1968; wherein it had a clean slate and needed to put into place rules and policies to help promote the Canadian broadcasting system. A policy was released in the summer of 1971 that discussed program substitution and commercial deletion. Over the years, these two items have been intermixed in describing the process of each, but each process is independent of the other.
Commercial deletion is still on the books but is not now practiced in any form in Canada. There was a small trade war with the U.S. and we lost. We were trying to protect and repatriate a portion of $20 million in Canadian advertising going to the U.S. While the Supreme Court of Canada said what was being done was legal, the U.S. disagreed or took exception to our position. The Americans retaliated by eliminating the U.S. tax deduction on Americans attending conventions in Canada, a move with the potential of costing Canadian hostellers $45 million.
The substitution rules in Canada were very reasonable compared to the draconian rules applied in the U.S. in 1966. The essence of the rules was that cable viewers would not be denied the program. The difference was they would only see the local version of the show and the distant station’s version of the program would not be available. Most believe that meant American stations were kept out of the market. While that is true to some extent, it should be noted that for the first ten years of the 1976 regulations, 55% of all substitutions were done against other Canadian stations, a fact that surprises many.
There are a lot of problems with the way simultaneous program substitution was implemented in Canada and a lot of people, mainly cable viewers, disliked the process. There are still issues with the process today and there is enough material to write a book on the subject, but that is not purpose of this note.
Good series – keep it up!
John Feltmate
CEO, Consulting Services
