By Steve Faguy
MONTREAL — Quebecor has cut funding for MAtv, Videotron’s community channel in Montreal, by 45%, prompting an anglophone member of its advisory committee to resign in protest.
Fortner Anderson, a local artist, said he can “no longer in good conscience” remain on the committee because the latest cuts “will substantially alter and reduce the benefits MAtv provides to the English language community of Montreal, and because they will diminish the vitality of that community.”
The 45% cut is the result of Quebecor’s decision to take advantage of an allowance the CRTC gave large vertically-integrated companies in 2016. As part of its Let’s Talk TV review, the Commission decided that corporations owning both distribution systems and local commercial stations could redirect some of their required Canadian programming funding from community services to those commercial stations to fund their local newscasts.
Under the 2016 policy, the vertically integrated companies could redirect 100% of community channel funding in metropolitan markets including Montreal and up to 50% in other markets. The Commission estimated that this would free up $65 million a year in additional funding for local news.
Bell, Rogers and Shaw took advantage almost immediately, shutting down community TV services (once called cable access channels) in large markets and reducing budgets in smaller ones. According to their 2018-19 filings with the CRTC, Bell, Rogers and Shaw redirected $28 million, $29 million and $13 million respectively to CTV/CTV2, Citytv/OMNI and Global stations, respectively, for a total of about $70 million.
Their community channels, meanwhile, took a big hit. Between 2015-16, before the new policy was put in place, and 2018-19, Bell’s community channel funding dropped from $16 million to $8.5 million, even as revenue from its Bell Fibe IPTV service increased 30%. Shaw cut its community funding from $30 million to $13 million, and Rogers from $39 million to $22 million over that time.
Videotron, meanwhile, chose not to redirect anything from community TV to local stations, until now, according to its filings. And even with this cut, Videotron is keeping its MAtv community channel in Montreal.
Quebecor won’t say how much money the channel will lose exactly (the company does not make public the geographic breakdown of its revenue), but Videotron spent $18 million a year on community TV in 2018-19, so this could mean up to $8 million a year in additional revenue for TVA stations if the 45% cut was applied to all 27 MAtv channels. Quebecor-owned TVA stations spent $27 million on news programming in 2018-19.
Steve Desgagné, senior director of MAtv, said “there shouldn’t be such a big impact in terms of programming” because of the cut, which was made last month. “We’ll have to learn to work another way,” he told Cartt.ca. Community channels also still rely heavily on volunteers to create programming, something which has been dramatically affected during the Covid-19 crisis.
He said there would not be a major impact on the fall schedule, which will still feature programs like the twice-weekly City Life. “This fall, we’re in continuity mode,” he said. He couldn’t say exactly how the cuts would be managed, but said there might not be the same number of hours of programming in the winter.
MAtv Montreal is a bilingual channel, formed in 2015 after the CRTC denied Videotron’s application to double its 2% community channel deduction by launching a separate English channel. MAtv chose at the time to make about 20% of its programming in English, to reflect the linguistic breakdown of its service area.
“We had warned the CRTC about this in previous hearings that of course this would occur at some time and it would hurt the English community in Montreal, and they disregarded our advice.” – Fortner Anderson
That breakdown will remain, even though all of the redirected funding will go to Quebecor’s French-language TVA stations.
For Anderson, this means Montreal’s English community will suffer. “A betterment in French-language local news is laudable, however, the English-language subscribers to the Videotron cable system will lose the benefits of their community television station and receive no improvement in their local English-language news programming,” he wrote in his resignation letter, which was copied to officials at the CRTC, the Commissioner of Official Languages, Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault and official languages minister Mélanie Joly.
“The last budget cut was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Anderson told Cartt.ca in an interview. “We had warned the CRTC about this in previous hearings that of course this would occur at some time and it would hurt the English community in Montreal, and they disregarded our advice.”
He said he believed MAtv’s days in Montreal are numbered, and eventually it will likely disappear entirely. “The beef isn’t with Videotron per se, they followed the regulations,” Anderson said. “It was the (CRTC) that fumbled this whole affair.”
Desgagné said he was “disappointed” by Anderson’s resignation from the advisory committee, which helps choose public access programming projects. “Fortner was one of those people who came to us to present the idea of doing anglophone programming at MAtv,” he said. “He gave us good advice.”
Anderson will be replaced on the committee, which was imposed by the CRTC in 2015 after it found Videotron was not respecting the access mandate of the community channel. “Anglophone representation is important for us,” Desgagné added, admitting that outreach in the anglophone community is more of a challenge and “we have to work harder to find projects.”
In a statement to Cartt.ca, Videotron said “access to quality news has never been more important, that’s why it was decided to transfer part of the contribution to community programming of MAtv Montreal to TVA for the production of local news as permitted by the CRTC since 2017.
“The television market is evolving rapidly, so the sharing of available financial resources will permit more investment in local news production. MAtv Montreal remains community television at the service of citizens of the metropolis.”
