Once upon a time, broadcasters were easy to spot. Tip-offs included blinking signage, the guy who reads the six o'clock news hanging around the back door smoking, and a large metal antenna behind the building, beeping in Morse code and visibly emitting radio waves. You couldn't miss them, especially if you were a politician with an itchy regulatory finger.
What a muddle we're in now. Keeping tabs on Canadian broadcasters has become a great deal more difficult since the Internet came along and upended everything. Television stations are becoming webcasters. Citizens are acting like television stations. Stage actors are cashing in on YouTube. Radio stations are piping their music online.
And finally the CRTC is wading into this mess to defend the cause of Canadian content, armed with its trusty toolkit of regulations and levies. Ten years ago, the commission decided that the world of new media was too nascent to be regulated. Now, it's revisiting that decision.
So it is that, in a windowless room in Gatineau, Que., a line of deputants from the cultural and telecom sectors have taken the mike at the CRTC hearings. In broad strokes, Canada's cultural sector, convinced that it would be lost in a sea of foreign imports without government intervention, is demanding that the CRTC take action.
What exactly “action” means is a little fuzzy, but the CRTC has mooted the idea of raising a $100-million Canadian content fund by slapping a levy on Internet service providers such as Bell and Telus, who own the pipes that all this content flows through. The Internet industry, to the surprise of exactly no one, doesn't much like the sound of that.
The odds seem good that any levy slapped on Internet Service Providers would get passed along to consumers, winding up on your monthly bill. So what appears to be a newfangled new media question is in fact a pretty old one: How do Canadians feel about paying a surcharge to fund the production of Canadian content?
If the chatter online is any indication, not thrilled. In fact, the vocal and persistent crowd that likes to write off anything Canadian as second rate (usually while grumbling something about Trudeau) is having a positive field day with this one.
There will always be Cancon malcontents. But the levy argument is a tougher sell online than anywhere else because it goes against the grain of online culture. Web culture is hostile to many things, chief among them things that impede the ability to share cultural products as freely as possible.
Worse still is the threat of shaking up its illusionary social structure. The Web likes to think of itself as a strict meritocracy, in which producers are freed from their institutional bonds, and where products of great cultural value (which, in practice, often seems to equate to products of great distraction) rise to the top on their own.
Seen from this mindset, the union-bound, protectionist mindset of Canada's culture industry seems noxious indeed. When, for instance, the anybody-can-make-it-big mindset of viral Web videos runs up against the actors' equity system – which rigidly dictates who is allowed to act professionally and who isn't – fur is bound to fly.
All the same, the cultural sector has a point here. The free-for-all of the Internet has not led to an abundance of high-quality free video content; it has instead yielded pockets of brilliance in a sea of YouTube pet videos. And Canadian artists have always relied on public support; there's no reason to believe that those working in new media shouldn't as well. The free market has always had tacky taste in art, no matter what medium it's in.
There is a balance to be found here. What we need is more money and fewer rules. Mandating Canadian content is a recipe for silliness, but supporting the people who make the good stuff has paid dividends so far. In these days of billion-dollar bailouts, it's always good to remember how far a little bit of arts funding actually goes.
The trick is not to get too bent out of shape about what medium they're working in. If old media and new media are converging, then why should we fund them separately? Unpopular as it may be, it's reasonable to ask Canadian Internet users to help fund Canadian culture. But to set aside a giant pot of money just to pay for Canadian websites is missing the point: Culture is culture, and a lot of it is going to wind up online, whether it originated on stage, screen or page. Let's fund creators, not mediums.
The fact of the matter is that, in this upside-down age, nobody knows what a broadcaster is any more. The bleeping radio tower has been replaced by a thousand bleeping Wi-Fi signals. Instead of pushing a broadcast mindset onto a new media landscape, let's start there.
