Advocates concerned about CBC licence renewal

Public interest advocacy groups and the union representing CBC/Radio-Canada workers are sounding the alarm about the level of programming discretion afforded to the public broadcaster under the five year licence renewal released by the CRTC Wednesday. The licence, which allows the broadcaster to spread its expenditure requirements out across its digital and linear platforms and contains no minimum expenditure requirements on linear television, could have a "cascading effect" where "the private broadcasters now instantly come back and start banging on the door about changing their conditions of licence," according to Public Interest Advocacy Centre executive director and general counsel John Lawford. "The CRTC," Lawford said in an interview with the Wire Report, "gave the CBC more than they asked for, which is cart before the horse, and inexplicable," and ultimately "indicates a regulator that wants to relax rules to the maximum extent possible, even beyond what what common sense, the , or even the parties asked for." "If I were a private sector – online or offline – broadcaster, I would be popping corks right now," Canada’s Forum for Research and Policy in Communications executive director Monica Auer said in an interview. From the perspective of a private broadcaster with regards to Canadian Content (CanCon) exhibition and expenditure requirements, Auer said, "you would have to be insane to accept limitations on your performance when the CBC has just been granted complete discretion." In a release late Wednesday night, the Canadian Media Guild (CMG) – the union representing CBC employees – called the decision a "stark reversal of decades of support for mandated hours of news production." "Under the guise of modernisation, the CRTC has chosen to give CBC a blank cheque to kill original production, even after a difficult two years when Canadians saw the importance of trusted news," CBC branch president for CMG Kim Trynacity said in a release. "This is a time to invest more in local and regional news, not less. It's shameful that the CRTC failed to see that." "The union representing most of the Corporation's workers calls this decision unreasonable. It fears CBC will use this to cut down television production in favour of spending on online content," the release said, and added that the union is "assessing next steps." In hearings into the CBC's licence in January of 2021, the union cautioned regulators against the CBC’s requested digital flexibility. "What will be deemed to be a television news program online could be filled with who knows what,” Trynacity said at the time. “My concern is if CBC is given that entire flexibility, that we will see a further erosion of quality, and then just the number of hours of programs on local television.” Public interest advocates also criticised the lack of enforcement afforded to the CRTC under the new licence, as the licence removes binding so-called conditions of licence, and replaces them with "expectations," such as an expectation that the CBC will "maintain local, regional and national news broadcasts in a crisis or emergency on its audiovisual and audio services." In removing the exhibition requirements for audiovisual programming, the CRTC wrote that if it maintained them, "not only would the CBC not have the flexibilities required in an evolving broadcasting system, its ability to produce enlightening content that is relevant to and reflective of Canadians could be inhibited," and noted that it was adding "other types of requirements and expectations, along with additional safeguards in the way of new reporting requirements." The expectations and reporting requirements, Lawford said, remove tools from the regulator. "There's really no way to discipline them, other than to say 'oh we didn't expect that,' because there's no more condition of licence. So you can't fine them, you can't yank their licence, you can't call them up to a special hearing," Lawford said. "There's all these things that they could do under the conditions of licence that they can't do now because at best there's a few expectations in there." The CBC must now instead regularly report on its programming activities to the CRTC, a shift which Auer – a former CRTC staffer – said hampers commission powers. "What the commission has done with this decision is really to bind the hands of its successor commissioners, because as a matter of law it will be very difficult to hold the CBC to account for the breach of expectations," she said. Both Auer and Lawford echoed the concerns contained in a dissent from Commissioner Monique Lafontaine about importance of section 3(1)(m) of the Broadcasting Act, which holds in part that "the programming provided by the Corporation should be predominantly and distinctively Canadian." "The determinations in the majority decision not to impose exhibition requirements that require the broadcast of a predominance of Canadian programming are inconsistent with the public policy objectives of the Broadcasting Act," Lafontaine wrote. The "unprecedented removal of all exhibition obligations from an important Canadian broadcaster’s licence," she added in her dissent appended to the licence renewal Wednesday, "such as that of the national public broadcaster, should be done in the context of a policy review, not a licence renewal hearing." The decision, Auer said, is a "complete abnegation of the CRTC's responsibility to Canadians. But more than that, even. It's bad enough that they are betraying Canadians' trust, they are betraying their own duty under the act." Referencing the two lengthy dissents, including one from the CRTC's vice-chair of broadcasting Caroline Simard, Lawford pointed to the chair. "Ian Scott's CRTC is out of control," he said. "Does this decision make the CBC a distinctive publicly funded service?" Auer said. "That's really the question. And I think the answer is: 'no'. This decision creates a not particularly interesting publicly subsidised private vehicle." — Reporting by Michael Lee-Murphy at mleemurphy@thewirereport.ca and editing by Paul Park at ppark@thewirereport.ca

Advocates concerned about CBC licence renewal

Broadcast | June 23, 2022

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