THE NINE MOST FRIGHTENING words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” according to an old joke popularized by former U.S. president Ronald Reagan. It’s funny ’cause it’s true.
Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly and her communications team must have forgotten this as they prepared for the announcement last week of her new Creative Canada policy framework (which offers some vision but punts many details down the field) – and augmented it with a shiny headline – the announcement Netflix will invest $500 million in Canada over the next five years.
Beyond her speech and…
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Quebec’s TV lords are upset
I RECALL THE DELEGATION of the Quebec media production types appearing before us – a panel of CRTC commissioners – when we were considering the extension of the Broadcasting Act to the Internet.
The issue was whether every Canadian website should be licenced by the state, and taxed, to supply funds for Canadian video programming. When asked whether they understood of the scale of government intrusion into communications, one of the panelists slammed her fist on the table and said "regulate it first, then we'll figure out what it means!".
Ah, the true descendants of Louis XIV…
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OTTAWA – New CRTC chair and CEO Ian Scott (pictured) will make his first public speech at next month’s New Developments in Communications Law and Policy.
Presented by the Canadian Chapter of the International Institute of Communications, the event will take place November 14 -15 at the Shaw Centre in Ottawa. The conference will provide opportunities to hear from and network with the lawyers, regulators and business leaders at the heart of the Canadian communications industry.
Other newly confirmed speakers include Grace Koh, special assistant to U.S. President Trump for Technology, Telecom and Cybersecurity, as well as U.S. FCC Commissioner…
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TORONTO – As it threatened weeks ago, Unifor, the union which represents journalists and television employees at Rogers’ OMNI TV, has filed a complaint with the CRTC over the broadcaster’s decision to hire Fairchild TV to create its Chinese news broadcasts.
The union believes that violates its CRTC licence.
“The CRTC gave Rogers a special licence with guaranteed income to bring back the Chinese language daily news for the nation’s largest immigrant community,” said Unifor media director Howard Law, in a press release. “Instead of producing the show themselves and adding to the…
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WHEN HERITAGE MINISTER Mélanie Joly delivered her Creative Canada vision statement last Thursday in Ottawa I was extremely pleased on behalf of Canadian screenwriters — at last, a vision for Canada that puts creators at the centre.
While “creator” can mean many things, when it comes to screen-based entertainment, it means the showrunners and screenwriters that the Writers Guild of Canada represents. However, I wasn’t only pleased for WGC members because I also felt genuine hope — for the first time in a long time (remember the long, Canadian-arts-and-culture-dry years of the Harper government?) — for Canada. The direction of…
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Looks like Netflix is chilling with Ottawa
OTTAWA – The Canadian TV biz held a three-hour, industry-wide affair in Ottawa on Wednesday evening, where the Canada Media Fund showcased internationally competitive primetime broadcast TV series to local bureaucrats and politicians (and juuust before Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly outlined her vision to change a bunch of things.)
Netflix and other foreign Internet players, and their impact on local producers and broadcasters, loomed large at the National Press Center event and Joly only sent along her Parliamentary Secretary, Sean Casey, to address the industry gathering and praise Canadian TV producers.
In stage-side comments to…
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OTTAWA – In a speech today at an Economic Club of Canada event, Minister of Canadian Heritage Melanie Joly officially unveiled the federal government’s long awaited digital content strategy. Dubbed 'Creative Canada', the plan has angered some and sated others and calls for increased investments to support both domestic production as well as the promotion of Canadian content abroad.
The release of the strategy comes a day after news leaked that the federal government had inked an agreement with Netflix that would see the online broadcaster and distributor invest a minimum of $500 million in Canadian productions over the next…
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GATINEAU – On Thursday, new CRTC chairman Ian Scott received his “welcome letter” from the two ministers who oversee the Commission, Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains.
The former government called such letters “mandate letters” which sounded a lot more like directives so this welcoming letter is more visionary, even though it uses the word mandate in its opening paragraph. We’ve copied it below and highlighted what we think might be the most important parts.
However, this being Ottawa, where everything is infused with politics, we’ll leave the reading between the lines to…
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OTTAWA – The Governor-in-Council, as directed by Minister of Heritage Mélanie Joly, has told the CRTC to get cracking on a new report – which must be done by June 1, 2018.
The new Order-in-Council, released Friday – just in advance of the Minister’s release of her review of Canadian content in a digital world today, tells the Commission, with all the appropriate “wherases”, that:
“Whereas Canada ratified, in November 2005, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions; Whereas the Government of Canada has announced a review of…
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Like, will broadcaster rules now apply to the streamer?
REPORTS LATE MONDAY said that the centrepiece of Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly’s 17-months-in-the-making strategy to energize, or backstop, the production of Canadian content in our always-on-and-everywhere digital age is that she has secured a commitment from Netflix to spend $500 million over five years “on the production and distribution” of Canadian content.
On the face of it, this is welcome news. Who in the creative industries wouldn’t like to see another $100 million spent annually on Cancon?
However, I hope this plan, which Minister Joly will officially announce in Ottawa today, has a…
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