By Ahmad Hathout
The CRTC ruled Thursday that Rogers does not need to continue putting money into the Shaw Rocket Fund past August 2025, rejecting the fund’s request to extend that date by at least a year.
The Certified Independent Product Fund (CIPF), which bankrolls children’s programming, had asked the CRTC last summer to stop Rogers from pulling the plug on the funding, which was a condition of its acquisition of Shaw. The fund argued that the CRTC’s 2023 renewal of Rogers’s licence to August 31, 2026 is just an extension of the current licence term, which means the cable giant must continue delivering the funds through to that date. Rogers countered by arguing that the regulator approved a “fixed, time-limited” commitment to the fund, which does not extend beyond the end of its licence term at the time — August 2025 — and that the licence renewal had no bearing on that.
On Thursday, the CRTC confirmed that Rogers’s 2021 commitment to place half of its CIPF contribution toward the Shaw Rocket Fund was “temporary in nature” and that the 2022 direction was to “continue to the end of the licence term in effect at the time the direction was given,” which was August 31, 2025.
“Consistent with the Commission’s long-standing approach to administrative renewals, the Commission considers that administrative renewals do not extend a licence term but rather constitute a new licence term,” the decision read. “This interpretation is supported by previous versions of the Broadcasting Act (the Act), which limited the Commission’s authority to issue licences for a maximum period of seven years. As such, administrative renewals do not operate to extend an existing licence term since doing so would have, in many cases, extended a licence term beyond what the Commission was legally authorized to grant.”
The regulator also determined that, even if the renewal extended the licence term and conditions, it could not have extended the direction because it was not a condition of service or term of licence.
“We are deeply disappointed by the decision and the effect it will have on the Canadian children’s media sector,” the fund’s President and CEO Agnes Augustin told Cartt in a statement. “While we acknowledge the Commission’s position, which differs from our own, this decision not only impacts an important additional year of funding for this essential sector, particularly critical at this time, but also affects the right to a public proceeding.
“We will continue to fight for the Canadian and Indigenous children’s and youth media sector.”
The fund had asked that if the regulator did not immediately extend the date, then it should at least hold a public consultation on the issue. But the CRTC on Thursday said because the funding direction was not a condition or term of Rogers’s licence, and because the direction’s expiry did not amend the licence, the law mandating such a hearing was not triggered.
That’s one area where Bram Abramson disagreed. In a dissenting opinion, the Ontario commissioner argued that the CRTC did not closely examine the public interest implications.
“Once the licence renewal carried a foreseeable consequence for a specific public-interest measure brought to the Commission’s attention, was the Commission required to address whether a public hearing was necessary in the public interest? On the wording of the Act, it was,” he argued.
Abramson said the CRTC should have viewed the public hearing question not through the direction’s expiry or regulatory precedent, but through the lens of the current environment: the consequences of allowing much-needed financial assistance to a leading funder of children’s programming to lapse at a time when consumption of children’s content continues to evolve in the online world. (The CRTC is currently reviewing the relationship between programmers and distributors, with one point of focus being what to do about children’s services.)
“The SRF supports children’s programming, a genre that at its healthiest does not sustain itself on market logic alone,” Abramson writes. “Whether that support should continue into Rogers’ renewal term is the kind of public-interest matter the Act’s procedural architecture is designed to surface, examine, and decide. The Commission’s failure to ask whether a hearing was required is not a technical lapse. It bypasses the Act’s basic mode of self-governance.”
Abramson noted that the administrative renewal decisions “reserve substantive issues for later consideration,” which he said was not afforded here.
It’s a point on which Ellen Desmond, commissioner of the Atlantic region and Nunavut, agreed in her own dissenting opinion. She argued that the fund was not afforded procedural fairness because it was not given that promised opportunity to comment on the extension of licences if they ended up inducing “substantive issues” such as this one.
