TORONTO – The Commissioner of Competition has put the kibosh on Corus Entertainment’s plan to sell French-language specialty channels Historia and Séries+ to Bell Media.
Corus announced the decision in a statement early Monday, adding that both it and Bell Media are reviewing the decision “and considering the appropriate course of action." Corus also pledged to provide further updates “in due course”.
The $200 million proposed sale, first announced last October, requires both Competition Bureau and CRTC approval, plus “other customary closing conditions," added Corus. The application is currently before the CRTC.
As readers will recall, Historia and Séries+ (plus the…
Continue Reading
GATINEAU – Christianne M. Laizner is the new full-time telecommunications vice-chairperson at the CRTC, a role that she has held on interim basis since last July.
Canadian Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly announced Laizner’s appointment early Thursday. Her five year term will officially begin on July 17, 2018, making her the first female vice-chairperson of telecommunications in the CRTC’s 50-year history.
Laizner (pictured) first joined the CRTC in 2010 as general counsel, telecommunications before being named the Commission’s senior general counsel in 2013, and then executive director of the CRTC legal sector. She was called to the Ontario Bar in 1982…
Continue Reading
YES, A MUST-CARRY TV license is not the lottery win it once was and yes, making a linear ethnic programming service in various languages work as a business within the Canadian TV system has always been a challenge which has only grown more difficult of late.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t people who think they can make a national ethnic TV channel work. In fact, including the incumbent, there are eight companies with some pretty bright ideas.
OMNI has long been the mainstream ethnic channel, serving up a mix of Italian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Punjabi and other programming over the…
Continue Reading
TORONTO and MONTREAL – A group of broadcasters along with the Canadian Media Producers Association (CMPA) have filed a complaint against the Bell Fund pertaining to the guidelines of its new TV Program and the composition of its Board of Directors.
A not-for-profit organization founded in 1997, the Bell Fund invests in Canadian digital media and TV content and is certified by the CRTC as an independent production fund eligible to receive and administer contributions from broadcast distribution undertakings (BDUs). It receives annual contributions of approximately $17 million from Bell TV as part of its BDU contributions.
Blue Ant Media, CBC/Radio-Canada, the…
Continue Reading
OTTAWA – The CRTC has attached a number of mandatory orders to the license renewals of two French-language radio stations.
French-language ethnic commercial AM radio station CJWI Montréal received a two-year renewal, from September 1, 2018 to August 31, 2020, with the Commission noting that the short-term licence renewal will allow for an earlier review of the station’s compliance with regulatory requirements.
The three mandatory orders attached to the station’s new licence pertain to sections 8(1), 8(4), 8(6), 9(2), 9(3)(b) and 9(4) of the Radio Regulations, 1986, which encompass program logs, the annual submission of a statement of accounts, and…
Continue Reading
OTTAWA – The CRTC is demanding that the country’s wireless providers and the National Alert Aggregation and Dissemination (NAAD) system administrator Pelmorex explain “the issues” around last week’s rocky test of the emergency alert system.
“As reported in the media, the visible tests issued during the 2018 EPW (Emergency Preparedness Week) did not achieve full success, and in some instances, the test alerts were not distributed at all on LTE networks of the Wireless Service Providers”, reads the two letters, both dated May 17.
Both the letter to the wireless providers and Pelmorex's letter, which was addressed to regulatory and strategic SVP…
Continue Reading
By Konrad von Finckenstein and Philip Palmer
THE 2017 BUDGET CALLED FOR A REVIEW of the Telecommunications and Broadcasting Acts. The review is both timely and necessary, but it ignores that there is a third pillar of Canadian communications law: the Radiocommunication Act.
The late 1980s and early 1990s proved a fertile time in the history of Canadian communications law. In the years from 1989 to 1993, Parliament adopted a new Radiocommunication Act (1989), a new Broadcasting Act (1991), and a Telecommunications Act (1993).
Both the Telecommunications and Broadcasting acts emerged from policy considerations of the late 1980s. The Broadcasting Act attempted…
Continue Reading
OTTAWA – The CRTC will reimburse almost $600,000 to telemarketers after the total amount paid for violations in 2017-18 exceeded its estimated regulatory costs.
The Commission said Wednesday that $3,892,723 was paid under the Unsolicited Telecommunications Fees Regulations last year, $592,723 more than the $3.3 million it estimated in telemarketing regulatory costs. In accordance with the formula set out in subsection 4(2) of the Regulations, the CRTC must refund the overage.
The Regulator also estimated its telemarketing regulatory costs for fiscal year 2018-19 at $3.3 million. Costs to enforce the national Do Not Call List are covered by fees paid by telemarketers…
Continue Reading
GATINEAU – Content piracy is real, it’s growing, it’s costly, it harms individual Canadians, companies and the economy – and we should be taking a new and reasonable step towards curbing it, reads the FairPlay Canada Coalition’s official response to all of the interventions filed in reaction to its January proposal.
The 30-member coalition is a collection of Canadian artists, content creators, unions, guilds, producers, performers, broadcasters, distributors, and exhibitors who have proposed the CRTC establish something called the Independent Piracy Review Agency (IPRA), which would assist the Regulator in identifying websites blatantly engaged in content theft – and then…
Continue Reading
OTTAWA – The Supreme Court of Canada has agreed to hear appeals from Bell Canada and the National Football League (NFL) over the CRTC’s simultaneous substitution (simsub) ban for Super Bowl games.
In Thursday’s decision, the Court took the unusual step in giving reasons why it agreed to hear the appeal (and even combined it with another case) saying that the appeals “provide an opportunity to consider the nature and scope of judicial review of administrative action” (i.e. CRTC decisions) and encouraged Bell and the NFL to “devote a substantial part of their written and oral submissions on the…
Continue Reading
