Begone, ancient CRTC relics

If you want to check the baseball scores on Canadian television, you have your choice. You can find out that the Jays lost on Rogers Sportsnet. Or you can flip on The Score, where the top story is that the Jays lost. Or you can watch The Sports Network, though you might have to wait until the top of the hour to verify that, indeed, the Jays lost....

If you want the news, on the other hand, you have no choice -- at least if it’s Canadian news you’re after. You can try CBC Newsworld, but chances are they’ll be showing Fashion File or Antiques Roadshow. Or you can turn to CTV Newsnet, where you can get the headlines, over and over and over, but little else. Newsnet would like to give you the whole story, but they’re not allowed to. By law.

The law, in this case, goes by the name of “genre protection,” and like everything else in Canadian television is enforced by the CRTC, that strange relic of another age. The principle behind genre protection is that there is only room in the television marketplace for one of each kind of programming (with the exception of sports scores, apparently, of which one cannot have too much). One Hitler channel, one crime channel, one tattoo channel, and so on.

Of course, that hardly begins to describe the many ways in which the regulator holds the industry in its clammy grip. Canadian content regulations, limits on advertising, must-carry rules, codes of conduct, there isn’t a thing that moves on Canadian television -- or radio -- that hasn’t been approved, monitored, and policed by the CRTC. 

You would think that the broadcast industry would chafe at such suffocating nanny-statism, being not only buccaneering capitalists but creative people to boot. Certainly you would, if you listened to the industry’s rhetoric over the years. 

But just let the CRTC begin to show signs of loosening up just a little, and watch the industry scurry behind its skirts. Let it even consider that perhaps a little competition might not be such a bad idea, or that some of the more counter-productive forms of protectionism might be due for a rethink, and you can practically feel the palpitations in the broadcasters’ fearful hearts.

Hence the industry’s indignant response to a report the CRTC commissioned from two communications lawyers, Laurence Dunbar and Christiane Leblanc. Though described in some news accounts as “laissez-faire”, their report is hardly that. Indeed in some areas it calls for more regulation than before. But it does suggest that genre protection has had its day, and that viewers should be allowed to pay for each channel separately, rather than being forced to take bundles of channels they never watch to get the ones they do.

Most daring of all, Messrs Dunbar and Leblanc have the nerve to point out the obvious: that Canada’s policy of “simultaneous substitution,” by which Canadian broadcasters are permitted to bump an American station showing an American program off the air, and broadcast their own signal of the same program in its place, gives broadcasters a direct incentive to show American programming. 

After all, if they show a Canadian program, they only get their own viewers. But if they broadcast the American fare, they get both channels’ audiences -- and the advertising dollars that go with them. Quite apart from the rank piracy involved -- arrrh, matey, we’ve taken command of your signal -- it’s simply perverse, if Canadian content is your concern.

Well, you’d have thought they’d suggested banning Blue Jays broadcasts. “Absolutely irresponsible,” was the immediate verdict from the Canadian Association of Broadcasters. “The report’s far-reaching recommendations,” it quavered, “could fundamentally undermine the foundation of the Canadian broadcasting industry.” Simultaneous substitution? It’s actually vital to the support of Canadian programming -- because the broadcasters use the money they make from the imported programs they show in primetime, you see, to support the fine-quality Canadian reality shows and pop-culture fluff they slap on in the wee hours.

Sound familiar? It’s the same dodge those in the “cultural industries” always use to justify their position. Remember the film distribution fracas? Or the Borders bookstore tussle? Or the furious rearguard action to block DirecTV from broadcasting into Canada via satellite (the famous “deathstar”)? In every case, what was at stake was not the protection of Canadian content, but control of the import spigot. Give us exclusive rights to the American content, they always demand, and we’ll produce all sorts of lovely Canadian content out of the fat profits we make. Only somehow it never seems quite to work out that way.

It seems bizarre still to be debating this sort of thing, in the age of the Internet and pay TV, when it is neither possible nor necessary to protect Canadian culture -- however defined -- from foreign impurities. But it’s even more bizarre when the report doesn’t even recommend doing away with simultaneous substitution. It just suggests thinking about it. God forbid Canadian broadcast policy should allow thinking.