GATINEAU – Quebecor Inc. complained to the CRTC in February that the Bell Fund, which gives money to digital and new media projects associated with television productions, had rejected three projects from Quebecor’s TVA network for “non-justified reasons” and that staff of the fund made disparaging remarks about Quebecor.
The Bell Fund rejected the accusations outright, arguing that evaluation criteria for projects is clearly spelled out and the projects in question, while admissible, received “average” grades and simply did not make the cut. It countered suggestions of bias by saying the majority of its administrators are independent of Bell, and that it has approved half of the projects associated with Quebecor channels since 2010 and 2013.
Bell also argued that it is the independent producers, not TVA or Quebecor, who should be complaining to the Commission if they have an issue with the Bell Fund.
The fund distributes $14 million a year from Bell TV’s required contributions to Canadian content, as well as a $10-million endowment created as part of the Bell/CTV acquisition. The CRTC’s rules on such funds require no more than a third of its board to be employees of the contributing company.
In its decision dismissing the complaint last month, the CRTC said that the fund’s evaluation criteria are objective, transparent and detailed, and the fund complies with the rules.
However, it did note that the grid used to analyze applications has no grading scale. “Therefore, nothing indicates why a project is graded 4/10 for content, rather than 7/10,” it said. More importantly, the CRTC also noted that a seat was vacant on the Bell Fund, which meant the three seats taken up by people from Bell made up more than a third of the voting power on the board. “The Commission expects the Fund to appoint an additional member,” it said.
Quebecor had demanded $100,000 in compensation from the Bell Fund. But the CRTC noted that it has no power to impose such monetary compensation from broadcasters.
