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The Broadcasting Bill, the tempest & the teapot (Cardozo)

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May 10, 2021

The Broadcasting Bill, the tempest & the teapot (Cardozo)

By Andrew Cardozo

The tempest in a teapot and the story of the once innocuous Bill C-10
by Andrew Cardozo

Brian Mulroney was Prime Minister the last time Canada updated the Broadcasting Act. Back in 1981. In the era before the Internet. Broadcasting signals were transferred through cable lines, over the air and the big new thing, via satellite.

Today, five prime ministers and three decades later, the Liberal government is putting forward an updated version of the act which not only addresses broadcasting over the Internet but aims to put the foreign online giants on the same regulatory regime as Canadian broadcasters. We’re not the first country to try this. The world watched as Australia and France planned to regulate to Facebook and Google last year and the web giants threatened to pull out of those countries.

Beating back American cultural dominance has always been at the core of Canadian broadcasting legislation, dating back to the first Broadcasting Act introduced by the Pearson government in 1968. We are the only country that shares a language, a culture and importantly, an accent, with the US, making their programming indistinguishable from ours, but because it is better financed, it is often higher quality. In other words it’s very hard to compete with.

So the question is, do we want to continue to have Canadian programs? If yes, we need regulation to help. And to be clear most countries in the world have some form of regulation to protect and grow domestic cultural product – so as to help their own culture and the protect local jobs.
How the new Bill C-10 is playing out has become a text book case of how the sausage is made. Usually you don’t want to know about it. But how each party plays the game can help or hurt them come the next election. It is a text book case worthy a PhD thesis, which displays the highs, and lows and risks of partisan politics.

So, a government minister introduces the bill – Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault is the minister in charge. A passionate, bright, careful politician. Mean and Machiavellian is not his style.

The Conservatives opposed it from the start, as they have done with almost all Liberal legislation in the past six years. It seemed like a pretty ho-hum bill although the free speech measures were bothering free speechers, including free speechers, who want no limit on speech no matter how offensive, but not easy to take on for a mainstream party.

Broadcasting touches on culture so it becomes an automatic target to oppose for the Bloc Québecois. Ne touche pas à notre culture! And in general, opposing legislation also buttresses their core goal, proving that Canada does not work for Quebec.

So it falls to the NDP to help the bill through. The New Democrats are the traditional Canadian cultural nationalists and will push the government to be stronger on protecting and growing Canadian culture and jobs in the industry.

But a funny thing happened in the sausage factory. A single minor amendment caught the attention of the free-speechers in Conservative ranks and further to their right, and they have made it an instant cause celèbre. Add to that the allegation that the dreaded regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) will regulate what cat videos you can post and BOOM! Oh horrors! User-generated content is under threat!

Now, Guilbeault and the Liberals have contorted themselves into pretzels to add yet another amendment to ensure that your cat videos will not be subject to regulation, but the Tories are not letting this one go. Conspiracy theories are an easy sell. It’s politics after all.

The Conservatives have skilfully made this a case that drives their base apoplectic. A retinue of intervenors from various perspectives have spoken up to support the government’s view, but the Conservatives are not letting go. And to add to it, they found it to be a good wedge upon which they can raise funds from the base. File that under “never let a good crisis go to waste”, and under subtitle, “If there, isn’t a crisis, make one up, and then don’t let it go to waste”. It’s politics!

In the end, each party has to be careful. The governing Liberals have to get the bill through, to modernize broadcast legislation in the age of the Internet and more to the point, push back the threat of the web giants, who are non-state actors who have more power than most governments. And it is high time our laws tacked hate speech.

So who benefits most if the bill dies? The foreign web giants who are gradually wiping out Canadian production and broadcasters. And the free speech ultra-libertarians. The less limits on their speech, the better for them.

The Bloc has to be careful not to get caught up in the Conservative philosophical attack on regulation and the CRTC, which have been strong defenders of Quebec and French language broadcasting.

Message to those who don’t want to do the bidding of the American web giants and angry free speechers: don’t be caught doing their bidding, come up with amendments that will address these two big issues.

It falls to the NDP and the Greens to be the adults in the room, to find ways to make things work. But the challenge for them is not to get too close to the governing Liberals, just months before what is likely to be the next election.

For that PhD student, worth taking a close look at what each party’s political considerations are.

Sadly our adversarial political system does not reward cooperation much, but rewards those who get media attention in the battlefield of the blood sport we call politics.

Andrew Cardozo is president of the Pearson Centre, and a former CRTC Commissioner and Adjunct Professor in communications.