Personally, I like Brian Mulroney. He was always cordial to me, still takes my calls and in fact was important to my career. Mulroney appointed me co-chair of a major study of the entire Canadian broadcasting system. I had a fine old time, learned volumes, met some fascinating characters and in the end saw our most important recommendations ignored.
I'm reminded of that happy period by the ubiquitous TV and newspaper ads by the cable and satellite companies and by the Canadian TV networks insisting that the other side are great rogues trying to milk us, the consumers, for their own greater profits. It brought back memories.
For me the work of our Task Force on Canadian Broadcasting was rewarding in several ways. First, it introduced me to my co-chair and now close friend, Professor Florian Sauvageau of Laval University, who remains one of North America's most respected thinkers in the daunting field of media.
Second, I witnessed a memorable performance from the late Ted Rogers on the day we released our report. I much admired Rogers as a great Canadian pioneer and entrepreneur, but our Task Force rejected the ludicrous recommendations he and the cable lobby urged on us. When Rogers learned of our dereliction, he announced apocalyptically to our little group: “This is a black day in Canada's history.” A quintessential Rogers performance.
Finally, I learned that in broadcasting at least (I would certainly never generalize about all industry), everything the private sector said was wrong, self-serving and insatiably greedy. The only exception was Douglas Bassett, then a big player, who told me the most urgent thing in Canadian broadcasting was keeping the CBC strong. Which was what the Task Force recommended, and why it was largely ignored by the government that appointed us.
There were two main parts to the private broadcasting system in those simple days, the TV boys who had the content and the cable guys who were responsible for distribution. They were a good match in terms of unmitigated chicanery.
The record of the private TV owners was shameless. Almost without exception, in applying to the CRTC for a TV license or its renewal, they promised the moon in terms of expansive Canadian broadcasting and ended up delivering wall-to-wall U.S. programming. Which is what they intended from the word go. For a very long time in Canada, a TV license was a license to print money. (Now it's less the networks than their specialty channels that are so lucrative.) The economics were simple. It cost lots to produce new Canadian programming and little to buy an existing U.S. show. In Canadian broadcasting, the private sector existed to make profits, the public sector to make programs.
The cable industry had exactly the same priority as the TV privateers. Its passionate mission was to import even more lucrative foreign networks, which Canada needed like a hole in the head. The Task Force was not sympathetic. We should have recommended public ownership of the entire system – it made perfect sense in the public interest – but it would have completely discredited us with the government. But we did do our feeble best to stand in the way of cable's Americanizing ambitions.
Speaking of Marx: In nice neat Marxian terms, the capitalists who owned the TV side and those who owned cable were, objectively, part of the same system. You could actually see the reality when you went to the fancy soirees attended by the mucky-mucks of both groups. But their conflict was what Marxists would call a contradiction in the system. None of this has changed in a quarter of a century even while communications and broadcasting have undergone changes so remarkable and complex they make your head spin. As we speak, the content side and the distribution guys (now including cable and satellite providers) are making all Canadian media richer by their extravagant advertising campaigns beating the bejabbers out of each other.
The cable side – big guns like Bell, Rogers, Telus, COGECO, very rich, very profitable – want us to know that despite making almost $200-million in operating profits last year, CTV and Global are lobbying for a new tax that will simply “pad their profits.” The big nets, crying poor as they've done from time immemorial, want the service providers to pay to carry their network signals, which until now have been picked up for free. It would of course take about 10 minutes for Rogers and Bell to pass those costs on to us suckers.
So here's my hard-earned advice. Don't spend a minute trying to figure out the rights and wrongs here. There are only wrongs. When each side describes the wickedness of the other, believe every nasty word. Whoever shouts “Help” – ignore entirely. Neither side should get another penny from us citizens. When Goliaths clash, we Davids get crushed. I'm sure Brian Mulroney would agree.
Gerald Caplan is a former national campaign director for the New Democratic Party and author of The Betrayal of Africa
