GATINEAU – Organizations representing many persistent voices opposed to Canada’s 1999 over-the-air television policy – along with a rare cameo by the Ontario Culture Minister – took the stage Monday for Day 6 of the CRTC’s review of this policy.
The unions and guilds appearing for English and French writers and actors, and for English directors and crew, almost all requested a mix of re-regulation and new rules for conventional broadcasters – a distinct contrast to many broadcasters, who last week called for fewer rules and greater access to revenues.
In what was described as the “first appearance in many years” by an Ontario culture minister, Caroline di Cocco suggested her own blend. On the one hand, the CRTC should provide new money for broadcasters via a fee-for-carriage (FFC) rule that would require broadcast distributors to pay a subscription fee to broadcasters to carry their signals. Broadcasters could use some of this money to upgrade to HD – which is what they asked for last week.
On the other hand, the minister said, the CRTC could support content creators by taking an “expenditure approach to programming requirements.” This would force broadcasters to meet minimum spending targets, as was the case before the 1999 TV policy took effect in September, 2000, and would enable content creators to produce more drama, documentary and children’s content that’s ready for prime time and multi-platforms.
The Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union, which represents employees at TV stations and some independent film and TV production houses, focused on the need for regulations to revive local news programming and ensure viewers hear from a diverse group of voices providing local information.
Pamela Brand, national executive director and CEO of the Directors Guild of Canada, summed up the position of four unions and guilds: “It’s time for a new regulatory bargain. It’s clear that the Canadian broadcasting system needs more original hours of Canadian drama and fewer repeats…more distinctive Canadian series…(and) more support for script and concept development. But mostly…it needs more money from OTA broadcasters. The CTF (Canadian Television Fund) cannot be expected to make up the difference in cost, given the pressures on its funding. Nor can foreign pre-sales or export sales make up the difference.”
But where should “more money” come from? Broadcasters such as CanWest Global Communications argued last week that ad revenue growth and profit margins are down while market fragmentation and programming costs are up. Major and smaller/educational broadcasters stressed the high costs yet to come to convert analog delivery systems to digital. CanWest MediaWorks TV president Kathleen Dore told commissioners the policy review isn’t about “tweaking” regulations to try to funnel more cash to Canadian production, but is rather about whether “private conventional broadcasters will be able to even maintain their current levels of spending on local programming or drama.”
But the labour unions beg to differ. After a week of considering research presented by OTAs on the precarious future of conventional TV, and from such FFC critics as Rogers CEO Ted Rogers, Shaw CEO Jim Shaw and Bell Canada’s Gary Smith, the five commissioners were ready to hear from some of the people who create TV shows.
The Canadian Coalition of Audio-Visual Unions discussed how broadcasters can come up with “more money.” CCAU represents 10 unions, but only four are involved in this hearing: the national English performers union, ACTRA; a technical workers/crew union, NABET Local 700-CEP; the English directors guild, DGC; and, the English writers guild, WGC.
The coalition argues broadcasters receive “extensive benefits and protections” from Canadian laws and regulations, including: “limits to the licensing of competing over-the-air broadcasters; must-carry and priority provisions for local Canadian signals on BDUs;” simultaneous substitution; and, income tax benefits and financial support for Cancon programming from the CTF, among other things. With these benefits in hand, CCAU says, broadcasters are now asking for looser Cancon rules, looser ad rules and FFC.
The coalition responds by asking for a “long-term regulatory safety net” that will guard against the drop-off in Canadian drama production that followed the implementation of the current policy. The central strand in this net requires OTAs to “spend at least 7% of their gross ad revenue on Canadian drama,” said WGC exec director Maureen Parker. “It is a very manageable formula. Spending will go up as revenues go up – and go down if revenues go down. And it would still only result in one-third of what broadcasters spent on foreign drama last year.”
ACTRA national executive director Stephen Waddell says just before the 1999 policy review hearings, “private broadcasters in English Canada spent $73 million on Canadian drama, a new high. But (spending) …dropped to only $54 million last year, the lowest it has been for eight years.”
Some of the 7% would have to be funnelled into concept and script development. DGC national exec director Pamela Brand promised to provide the Commission with specifics, adding a “good amount” would have to be directed to feature film development.
She adds that as production levels suffer, the DGC has seen a “disturbing increase” in the number of members dropping out of the industry. “Another indicator can be found in the activity of the Actors’ Fund,” she says. The fund is an emergency financial support for members of the major film, TV and theatre guilds, unions and associations. “It is telling that the fund has seen demand double over the last five years.”
On the hot topic of fee-for-carriage, labour advocates – including those speaking for French actors, in the Union des artistes, and writers, in SARTEC – said if fees are granted, the new revenue should be tied to increased spending on Canadian content. Receiving 7% of gross revenues, says Brand, is even better than 7% of gross ad revenues.
"Gross is always better," added Waddell.
On the subject of broadcaster requests to have Cancon time bonus credits increased from a maximum of 150% to 200% – or receiving two Cancon credits for every one program aired – ACTRA’s Waddell says absolutely not. “We’re opposed to time credits, period.” Parker adds, “The purpose of time bonuses is you get less content. Extending those is abhorrent to us.”
Broadcasters also say they’re looking to build ad revenues by convincing the Canadian government to allow them to carry U.S.-style pharmaceutical ads, for example, and to relax controls on product placement. Committee chair Michel Arpin’s mention of this issue prompted two separate presenters to tell the “Oreo story.” They described a program in which a character spends so much time glorifying the delectable cookie’s starring role in his marriage proposal that the program practically “becomes an ad for Oreo.”
“We have to live with (product placement),” concludes UDA president Pierre Curzi, “but we have to oppose increased use because that threatens the integrity of the work.”
Speaking of integrity, Beverley Milligan had numerous suggestions on how the CRTC might speed the improvement of closed captioning. Milligan was representing Media Access Canada, a non-membership based research organization that considers how to improve access to the media for seniors and disabled people.
First she says, a decision’s required on who’s responsible to monitor captioning quality. “Everyone looks at everyone else – Industry, Heritage, CRTC – to say who’s responsible… We’re going to see more and more of this happening with increases in (use of) descriptive video. It costs a lot but viewers often see it as illegible. It’s just completely frustrating if you depend on this” to understand the program.
Asked if she would support a monitoring committee of the type established by Radio-Canada, Milligan says it’s “better than nothing. It’s not my first choice. Maybe what we want to do is hire a “third party” independent research organization….It could be quite simple, where you’d assign a different (numerical) value to different captioning styles.”
Commissioner Ron Williams pointed out that Canadian broadcasters only have to pay to caption domestic, live programming such as news and sports since U.S. programming “arrives fully captioned.” Milligan says various broadcast communities and the CAB have tried to do address the problems. “They have a tremendous sensitivity to the issue of accessible media,” she adds, but in terms of quality, these efforts are not working.
This hearing, she says, is a tremendous opportunity to come up with a solution. “We’d like it to go beyond the CAB.”
Finally, former CRTC commissioner Andrew Cardozo and former Carleton University journalism professor Lionel Lumb, representing the New Canada Institute, took up the issue of cultural diversity on TV in what would become a philosophical discussion with commissioners.
Cardozo says visible minorities, with either Aboriginal or multi-cultural backgrounds, used to be a small proportion of the population. The increased size of these populations in recent years means addressing them must be part of a broadcaster’s business plan. “Certainly,” he says, “the CHUM TV network built itself (this way). But if it was only a business case, everybody would have done it.”
He thanked the Commission for its leadership but emphasized more needs to be accomplished. He cited a recent study which, he says, found that non-white on-air personalities represent about 4%-5% of the whole. But census projections anticipate visible minority populations to account for more than 50% of people in Toronto and Vancouver by 2017.
Lumb added that CTV took its cultural diversity licence renewal commitments very seriously and organized training programs for regional newsrooms. He said that’s a good way to meet the needs of communities and showed “it’s not just about having hosts and reporters from visible minority communities.” If you’re covering a diverse population you need diverse reporters who can get the story and “who can think in diverse ways, offering cultural minutiae, and so on. It’s easier, he said, “to fix the people in front of the camera” than in the management ranks.
If broadcasters “have the will, they certainly have the means.”
The hearing is in recess on Tuesday. Wednesday should be the finale, with 14 presenters scheduled, including the English and French producers associations, CFTPA and APFTQ, the association representing distributors and exporters and two organizations that monitor public broadcasting.
Susan Tolusso is a freelance writer based in Ottawa.
