The last days of the CRTC

What is the sound of one hand clapping? If you’re the CRTC, it is the cry that does not come, the protest no one makes, the silent death knell for the agency that once controlled just about everything that makes a noise in this country. If it was not clear before, it is now: the last days of the CRTC are upon it.

Consider: the Conservative government has just trampled over a nominally independent regulator, rewriting the rules governing local phone competition, with brusque disregard for the agency’s traditional prerogatives. Henceforth, what we used to call “the phone companies” will be free to set their own prices, wherever they do not enjoy an outright monopoly -- ie in those areas of the country where cable and voice-over-internet providers have invaded the market.

And absolutely no one has risen to the agency’s defence. Not a word of complaint from the Opposition parties, barely a peep even from those most affected by the decision. The CRTC has no defenders left, no constituency -- and, increasingly, no role. Leaderless, purposeless, made redundant by the advance of technology and neutered by a determined Industry minister, it’s curtains for the commission.

It is a remarkable humiliation for the once all-powerful regulator. Was it only 17 years ago that a departing André Bureau could boast, in a letter to his staff, of having issued more than 22,000 decisions in a little more than five years as chairman? And why shouldn't he have? In those days everything was within the CRTC’s purview: local phone service, long distance, radio, TV, the works. Satellite transmission had yet to debut in Canada, the Internet was still a promising experiment at the US Defence department, and pay-TV and cellphones were sufficiently novel that the regulator could plausibly claim a legitimate role protecting Canadians from whatever evils these strange new technologies might portend.

What heady days those were! Bliss was it in that dawn to be a bureaucrat! Who can forget the famous “jerky-motion” decision, for example: Having earlier restricted the Canadian Home Shopping Network to a still-photograph format -- moving pictures being too seductive for tender Canadian eyes -- the CRTC was forced to act when the station responded by broadcasting a series of photographs that approximated live action. How many photos per second were too many? That’s what a regulator was for.

Or what about the attempt by YTV, the children’s network, to escape the confines of its format? Though restricted, under its terms of licence, to evening drama programs featuring “a major protagonist that is a child, youth under the age of 18 years, puppet, animated character or creature of the animal kingdom,” YTV had the cheek to ask that this list be expanded to include comic-book superheroes, legendary or folk heroes, and characters from fairy tales or myths. Naturally, the CRTC turned them down.

On and on it went. Every minute of every hour of every day of programming on every one of the nation’s radio and television stations was logged, recorded and filed with the CRTC. These in hand, the commission wrestled with some of the most perplexing philosophical questions of the day. What’s a hit record? How many times in a day should a radio station be allowed to play it? How many commercials per hour should a television station be permitted to show? What subjects should talk radio hosts be permitted to discuss, and with what tone of voice?

The CRTC protected women and minorities from inappropriate representation, and children from sex and violence, and the rest of us from America. Then there was -- but wait a minute. Why am I speaking in the past tense? They’re still doing it, or trying to. It was only two years ago that the CRTC ordered an entire radio station, Quebec City’s CHOI, shut down, because one of its disc jockeys was rude. And before that there was the Howard Stern decision, and the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers ban, and ...

Local phone service may at last be deregulated, 14 years after long distance, but on radio and TV it’s as if time had stood still. The CRTC is still dictating what can and cannot be shown on television, what songs radio stations can and cannot play, for all the world as if the technological revolutions of the last two decades had never happened. We’ve got satellites in the sky, and the internet under the ground, and digital cable channels out the ears, and I still can’t get HBO.

But even the CRTC cannot fail to hear the sound of silence, the failure of any opposition party to take the commission’s side against the government’s efforts to clip its wings. There’s a reason why Charles Dalfen, the outgoing CRTC chairman, did not seek a renewal of his term. The next chairman of the CRTC is likely to be its last.