THE TRANSITION TO DIGITAL television in Canada is officially Heritage Minister James Moore’s to deal with, but Industry Minister Tony Clement doesn’t want to see the August 31, 2011 deadline moved.
That was the word we received directly from Industry Minister Tony Clement on Friday during an interview (which you’ll read below) in his Parliament Hill office.
Cartt.ca readers will know we’ve been prodding the industry and the federal government about their inaction on the transition to digital broadcast television. Using our bully pulpit here and directly with the ministers on Twitter (they are @TonyClement_MP and @mpjamesmoore).
In a nutshell, not enough is happening as the deadline approaches.
But, according to Minister Clement, our pursuit of the issue has caused at least some action. Federal Cabinet met recently and decided that because this is a broadcasting issue – and even though Industry Canada oversees the spectrum which the analog over-the-air broadcasters must vacate so that it can be auctioned to wireless companies – the transition from analog TV to digital is squarely the domain of Heritage Canada now.
When we tweeted this on Friday while in Ottawa, we were told that this caught some folks inside Heritage and Industry off guard.
However, because our first question shifted the digital TV discussion to another minister (and yes, we’ve already been asking Minister Moore for anything else he can tell us on the issue), the chat with Minister Clement (pictured) was a high level discussion on many things digital, instead of the nuts and bolts of how the transition to digital OTA television can happen in 16 months. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Greg O’Brien: Well, my first question is about the confusion on the digital transition and who is actually overseeing the file.
Tony Clement: It’s Heritage.
GOB: It is Heritage?
TC: Yes… We double-checked on it after your commentary and the reasoning behind it is that 100% of the stakeholders are Heritage stakeholders. We’re talking about the broadcasters. My stakeholders are telecom, but this is 100% broadcasting, so –
GOB: But even though, and that’s actually one of the things that the CRTC chair spoke about yesterday at a spectrum management meeting, as you said, it’s for Heritage and that part is 100% broadcasting, the certificates to be able to broadcast still have to come from Industry Canada. You manage the spectrum.
TC: Right. Right. Obviously, this is one of these areas that is a grey area, and we’ve talked about it. The Prime Minister’s Office also weighed in, and we’ve decided that it’s going to be Heritage, and that’s fine.
GOB: Okay.
TC: I think it could have gone either way, but the important thing is that there’s a Minister who is responsible and accountable on the issue.
GOB: All right. So what is your point of view then? What is the ministry’s thinking on the transition to digital, because from a cross-boundary point of view, you have to be out of that spectrum by August 31, 2011.
TC: Right. The issues are basically transitional issues in a sense that there’s going to be a certain segment of the population that is going to have to be migrated from analog to digital. And that’s going to require some education. It’s going to require making sure that they have options available to them.
And, obviously, there’s going to have to be a discussion about who bears the costs, if there are costs borne. And the Americans handled it one way, and we’re going to have to decide whether that’s the right approach or not the right approach.
GOB: Well, and that’s kind of how it loops around back to your ministry because there is that question of cost. And that spectrum that the analog broadcasters are on now, the 700 MHz spectrum, will earn the government a lot of money at auction. So is there any thinking among you and your cabinet colleagues that, "Hey, this money that’s coming in can be used to help the CBC go digital right across the country, fund a coupon program for Canadians to get digital over-the-air receivers in places where they can’t afford it or don’t have it"?
TC: I’ll be frank with you. That discussion hasn’t occurred yet.
GOB: Okay. Now, you and Minister Moore have talked about having a digital strategy, a national digital strategy. And that can encompass a lot of things, whether it’s being on Twitter, whether it’s wireless in more places, or whether it’s digital in broadcasting. Does the switch to digital broadcasting marry into that very well?
TC: It’s a small subset. Actually, with the digital economy strategy, I’m the lead Minister on it. James is also going to be part of it because of content and Diane Finley (Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development) is going to be part of it, making sure the population’s trained and educated in the online world. So that’s the general nature of who’s doing what. But the digital economy is a broader subject than just bandwidth and broadband.
GOB: For sure, it goes beyond broadcast, too, into healthcare…
TC: And let me look at it this way, or position it this way: It’s also about how we’re going to be competitive and innovative in the future economy. And part of that is how are businesses – and I’m talking about mining, agriculture, manufacturing, oil and gas – these are all industries that have to do a better job in the 21st century of adopting information and communication technologies so that we are more online and more of our business processes are online using the digital world.
So that to me is the broadest sense of it. And we want to have a digital economy strategy that works for that aspect of competitiveness and innovation, as well as some of the more mechanical aspects of bandwidth, and broadband, and so on.
So we’re going to go out the door – I’m announcing in the next few weeks a consultation process and a consultation paper which will be released (likely to happen here). We’ll be collecting feedback over the spring and summer and that’ll animate our ability to come forward in the fall with our own analysis of the situation.
GOB: Okay. So do you think it would make more sense then if you wanted, as Minister of Industry or maybe the ministry in general, to get out of the nuts and bolts of spectrum, as you mentioned?
Would it make more sense to have the CRTC just deal with all that – and this is something, again, that Chairman von Finckenstein has spoken about – and have the CRTC deal with spectrum auctions and spectrum allocation and giving out licenses – and having the Industry Ministry just oversee national policy, international relations, and that type of thing?
TC: Well, with spectrum auctions there’s a lot of public policy that has to be decided by government because it does raise revenue and I’m not sure we’ve agreed with him that that should be solely a matter the CRTC.
GOB: Oh there are a lot of people in the industry that don’t agree with that.
TC: You know, we were at the Canadian Wireless Telecommunication Association celebration of the 25th anniversary of cellular phone use in Canada earlier this week and the association made the point to me that spectrum auctions and how much revenue is expected to be raised is a key component of the digital economy strategy because if you kill the goose that lays the golden egg, in a sense, we’ll be actually less competitive and less innovative. So there’s always a balancing act, and that I think has to be an inside government policy, rather than a CRTC policy.
GOB: It’s quite a bit of money, to put it bluntly. I mean, the wireless companies, right after the last auction happened, the economy turned sour. And then they saw money going into car companies right away. And so some at Telus or Bell or whatever, said: "Hey, all our money is going to GM. What’s going on? What happened?”
TC: Well, if the car companies weren’t there, there’d be 400,000 people unemployed who wouldn’t be using wireless communications as much, that’s for sure.
GOB: When you look at over-the-air broadcast television, do you think of it as an old, past technology, as something that the digital economy is going to pass by?
TC: When I think of digital economy, I’m referring to things that happen online. And so we know, obviously, that media is increasingly online, and the network broadcasters use online a lot more not only in terms of pushing their content, but also as a means of conversing with their audiences. That’s just a reality of life in the world of media.
But as I say, this isn’t about – it is a little bit about content. That’s why, obviously, James is involved, but… it’s a much broader discussion.
As Industry Minister, I’m really focused on business processes. Let’s take logistics for an example. More of that has to be managed online, and as we’re finding, there’s so much innovation going on in understanding what your consumers are buying and why they’re buying it, and therefore being much more efficient in the delivery of the products at the right time and the right place, which the consumers are demanding.
Now, we’ve got to be better at that as an economy. Not that we’re the poorest at this in the OECD, but we’re kind of fair-to-middling. And fair-to-middling is okay to start at, but we have to reach higher than that. We have to be the best at some of this. We’ve got to use it for our comparative advantage. And that’ll make our economy greener. It’ll make our economy more efficient. There are all these by-products that occur.
GOB: And the new copyright bill blends right into this as well.
TC: Yes, it does.
GOB: And, again, that goes cross industries, too. I mean, my industry, we all talk about media and music, radio and TV, but –
TC: But there’s also software.
GOB: Software, healthcare, or whatever you think of as intellectual property.
TC: Right.
GOB: Any kind of data, really.
TC: Yes. It’s a much broader discussion than musical tastes or how to access a DVD.
GOB: Sure, but what turns people’s (emotional) crank though, is what they see on TV, what they can get online, entertainment, not so much talk of intellectual property that belongs to XYZ healthcare company.
TC: Well, maybe. But, again, when one looks at this from an economic perspective, if you have a modern piece of copyright legislation that has the fair and appropriate balance between creators and users and intermediaries on top of all of that, in the broadest sense of the word, you are actually helping innovation, creativity, and productivity in your economy. So to me, this is as much an economic question as it is a content question.
GOB: So how far are we away from the new copyright bill?
TC: Well, we’re getting closer every day. Time marches on.
GOB: What about Minister Angus’s…
TC: The iPod tax.
GOB: The iPod tax. Or it could even be the BlackBerry tax, or the smartphone tax.
TC: Absolutely, or the Android tax. Look, obviously he was trying to pre-sell his party’s position on copyright reform. Actually, Charlie was talking about a whole series of things, including the best way to, in his opinion, remunerate our artists. But the context of that actually was the broader context of copyright reform. And, you know, there’s no question that we’re going to have a vigorous conversation about this in Parliament.
James and I went out the door last year at this time with copyright consultations across the whole country – town hall meetings, roundtables, online submissions, these kinds of things, even a Twitter feed. We crunched all that information… and are in the process of crafting a bill as a government, and at the appropriate time, we’ll present it to Parliament (Ed note: Some predict it’ll happen in the fall).
GOB: How much worry is it, though, that you’ve gone through all these consultations, which is great, but… technology’s moving so fast that you end up with a bill that’s too late or solves old problems.
TC: It’s got to be technology-neutral. We’re trying to make this as technology-neutral as possible so that the principles that are found in the bill can stand the test of time. So that’s definitely one of the considerations.
GOB: Okay. Well, you sidestepped a lot of my questions on digital television since it’s now Minister Moore’s file.
TC: Yeah, sorry about that. But you should take comfort from the fact that you – forced us is the wrong word – but by your commentary we did a circle check on this, said, "Wait a minute. Okay, let’s review this; make sure we all know who’s covering what." And this is the conclusion that we’ve come to.
GOB: Well, I’m glad to hear it.
TC: I will be helpful later on, just as he’s being helpful on copyrights, I will be helpful to him as we move forward on the spectrum transition there.
GOB: And your friends in the U.S. wireless market want the spectrum free come August 31, 2011. They paid a lot of money for it, and (expect Canadian broadcasters near the border to no longer be using it here)… I’m a big believer in mobile video, but it’s only going to work well with 4G. And we’re not really going to get to 4G until we get the analog broadcasters off the 700 MHz spectrum up here.
TC: Exactly, so it’s got to happen.
GOB: And if they want to push the deadline out, which broadcasters want to do, that’s a problem because as the rest of the world progresses, we’re still worrying about whether or not we’re going to bother going digital in Sudbury, for example.
TC: I’m not a big fan of pushing the deadline off. I think we just have to grapple with the issues and get the education stuff happening. I agree with that.
