Broadcast news tax credit exclusion means cuts ‘inevitable’: CAB

The independence of the panel that will determine which print news organizations will get tax credits has been “compromised” because the government had already decided to exclude broadcasters from the handouts, according to a March letter sent to the government by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters. In its fall economic statement late last year, the federal government announced nearly $600-million in new tax benefits over five years for the struggling media industry. In the last budget before the October election, the Liberals unveiled details of the initiative, which excluded broadcasters from qualifying for the credits. Three days later, on March 22, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters sent a letter -- obtained by The Wire Report from the CAB last week -- to Finance Minister Bill Morneau and Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez which expressed “huge disappointment” in the decision to leave out the broadcasters. The support measures include a tax credit for journalism organizations, a tax credit for subscriptions to Canadian digital news, and charitable tax incentives for not-for-profit journalism. “Nowhere does Budget 2019 provide a rationale for excluding broadcasters from the news tax credits,” said the letter, which is signed by Lenore Gibson, CAB board chairwoman and regulatory counsel in BCE Inc.’s media division. “In fact, despite pledging to appoint ‘an independent administrative body that will be responsible for recognizing journalism organizations as being eligible for any of the three measures,’ the government has compromised the independence of that body by excluding broadcasters from the tax credit scheme.” In a March press release, the CAB, which represents private broadcasters including Bell and Rogers Communications Inc., called the exclusion of broadcasters from the credits “arbitrary and unfair policy.” But the letter to the ministers was not public. The panel will be made up of members based on the recommendations of eight associations: News Media Canada, the Association de la press francophone, the Quebec Community Newspaper Association, the National Ethnic Press and Media Council of Canada, the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ), the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec, Unifor, and the Fédération nationale des communications. That process has come under criticism. For example, the Conservatives have said Unifor’s inclusion on the panel-recommendation team weakens its credibility because of the union’s past partisan statements. And the CAJ only agreed to participate if the government waived the confidentiality agreement requirements for panel members. The list of individuals recommended by the associations to make up that panel of experts was revealed in mid-June. It includes the CAJ’s Esther Enkin, who’s spent a large chunk of her career in broadcasting. The expert panel's recommendations for who gets the credits are expected in July. The broadcast exclusion, the letter said, “ignores the significant investments made in the production of original news content by local broadcast journalists in large and small markets…penalizes the over three quarters of Canadians who prefer to obtain their news from TV and radio...discriminates in favour of newspaper owned digital news sites over broadcaster owned digital news sites fails to recognize that, like print, broadcasting is also suffering from significant revenue and profit declines.” For these reasons, the letter said leaving broadcasters out “makes no apparent public policy sense.” Worse yet, “maintaining the current exclusion will make broadcaster news cuts inevitable,” said the letter, which also requests a meeting on the matter “as soon as practicable.” In April, Cogeco Inc., which has a large stable of radio stations in Ontario and Quebec, registered the issue in its federal lobby files to convince the government to allow broadcasters to be eligible for the credits. The letter also raised the absence of any compensation for TV broadcasts who are forced to move transmitters in the most recent budget as "compounding" the issue. The Wire Report reported that the government had declined all requests to compensate TV broadcasters for their migration off of the 600 MHz band to make room for mobile wireless use. The 600 MHz auction was held in March and yielded the government about $3.5 billion. The CAB revised to $60 million an earlier estimate that suggested the 600 MHz reallocation would cost local TV stations $106 million, “because of broadcaster decisions not to transition certain rebroadcast transmitters.” — With reporting by Ahmad Hathout at ahathout@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

Broadcast news tax credit exclusion means cuts ‘inevitable’: CAB

Broadcast | July 2, 2019

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Broadcast news tax credit exclusion means cuts ‘inevitable’: CAB

Broadcast | July 2, 2019

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