STOP US IF you’ve heard this before: “Psst, I hear (insert name here) is going to be the next CRTC chair.”
Today it’s Jean-Pierre Blais, a former executive director, broadcasting at the CRTC (during CRTC chair Francoise Bertrand’s tenure), former assistant deputy minister of international and intergovernmental affairs and former ADM of cultural affairs both at the Department of Canadian Heritage – and current assistant secretary of the government operations sector at the Treasury Board. He was the senior bureaucrat in charge of the federal government’s pre-budget strategic and operating review, so he is quite familiar now to the Conservative cabinet and MPs.
A lawyer by training, Blais has a solid resume is solid and there’s nothing to say he couldn’t be an effective chair of the CRTC (assuming he wants the unofficial consumer title of That Guy Who Blocks all the Superbowl Commercials and Other Good Stuff From Getting to Canada…). Monday morning the Globe and Mail had a story saying his appointment is imminent.
That may well be so, but we at Cartt.ca heard the same thing a month ago from some good contacts in Ottawa about the very same candidate (Blais is pictured at right). We chose not to publish because we have also heard, in no particular order over many months leading up to and since former chair Konrad von Finckenstein's departure, that Bernard Lord, Lawrence Cannon, Luc Lavoie, Len Katz, George Addy, Tom Pentefountas, Michel Morin, Sylvie Courtemanche, Ann Mainville-Neeson, and a few others were either in the running or, my favourite description because I’m a golfer: “the leader in the clubhouse.”
Honestly, we can’t tell anymore what could be right and thought repeated publishing of the speculation was making us look silly as the industry waits for the government to make a hire.
“Maybe we’re just repeating the same names to each other over and over and it seems new every now and then,” is what one senior Ottawa legal pooh-bah told us a couple of weeks ago – which is the comment that rings truest.
However, even with all that said, it does seem like more people than usual are now talking about an imminent announcement coming from the Prime Minister’s Office. Whether that means anything at all remains to be seen (the PMO also needs to appoint a board chair for the CBC and an Ontario regional CRTC commissioner as well as decide whether or not telecom vice-chair and acting CRTC chairman Len Katz and CBC president and CEO Hubert Lacroix will be renewed later this year) but if there was an announcement on a new CRTC leader coming, perhaps it’ll happen after the CRTC hearing, going on now in Toronto, wraps up next week.
– Greg O’Brien
