Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Transport and Communications
Issue 2 - Evidence for November 24, 2004
OTTAWA, Wednesday, November 24, 2004
The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications met this day at 6:17 p.m. to examine the current state of Canadian media industries; emerging trends and developments in these industries; the media's role, rights and responsibilities in Canadian society; and current and appropriate future policies relating thereto.
Senator Joan Fraser (Chairman) in the chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Good evening and welcome to the committee. This evening the committee will continue its examination of the appropriate role of public policy in helping to ensure that the Canadian news media remain healthy, independent and diverse in light of the tremendous changes that have occurred in recent years — notably globalization, technological change, convergence and increased concentration of ownership.
We will hear testimony from representatives of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada, CEP, one of Canada's largest unions, which is active in a range of sectors across the country, most notably in the news media. We are pleased to welcome Mr. Peter Murdoch, Mr. Joe Matyas, and Mr. John Spears. Please proceed.
Mr. Peter Murdoch, Vice-President, Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada: Honourable senators, thank you for conducting this committee and allowing us to chat with you. The Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada is Canada's largest media union. We have 20,000 members in the media sector; in all of the private broadcasters in Canada, at most of the newspapers and in film and television production.
We are a widespread media organization representing Canada's best and brightest journalists in every area.
I have here with me Mr. Spears who, as you mentioned, is from the Toronto Star and is an activist in our local, and Mr. Matyas who is president of our large newspaper local in Toronto. I will make a few opening comments in a general way and then I will ask Mr. Matyas to talk about the view from the shop floor. He works at the London Free Press and I think you will find his comments interesting in terms of some hard data. Mr. Spears will talk about some of the suggestions we might humbly put forward to you.
We are aware, of course, that yours is not the first committee to look at the media. Just about 30 years ago, I guess, we had a variety of committees over that period of time look at it, the latest being the Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, to some degree. There have been a number of recommendations. Sadly, I do not think there has been one recommendation implemented. Our hope here tonight is to try and convince you of a number of recommendations that we think are do-able, that do not create huge problems for the Government of the day and at the same time address some of the problems within the media.
I have given you a number of documents. Our union just conducted an extensive survey of the media and came up with a media policy. You have a book that I have given out in both French and English. There is another document about journalistic standards that Mr. Spears will talk about, and about a code of principles involving journalists. As well, I have given each of you a CD and I would ask you, when you get an opportunity, to pop this into the computer. That CD is a map of Canada that you will find very interesting because it has levels of concentration of ownership in every major city in Canada, both in broadcasting and in newspapers. We feel very proud of it and if for some reason there is a problem with the CD — I cannot imagine there will be — you can turn to our website, cepmedia.ca.
In a general way — I do not want to go on — I think you have heard a lot of things. Of course, the media is critically important to us. It was only a few weeks ago that the troops in the country of Colombia went into the public broadcaster in Colombia and dragged everybody out the door. That was the end of public broadcasting in Colombia. In just about every major turmoil, the media is key. That is because the media is key in democracy. The reason is that it is the messenger for society. If the media makes sense of society, we are here tonight to try and make sense of the media.
I know we are in a bit of a time line here but I will make a couple of other quick comments. The media probably has become more critical in the past few weeks and months, with the U.S. election. I think honourable senators have read many of the criticisms about the U.S. media coverage. What we have seen in that country is a polarization of the news media; a polarization both of criticism and of coverage and opinion. That polarization, in our view, is not helpful to a democratic society. What we have in this country now with Fox News coming into town, and Al-Jazeera for that matter, is a possibility of polarization of the news media in Canada. Our view is that we must ensure that the polarization that has gone on to some degree and will continue to go on, in my view, in the United States does not happen in Canada. We have to ensure that there is a diversity of voice within the Canadian media, so that a debate can take place around Canadian values and a Canadian view of what the world should be. That is why this committee — in some ways — has become increasingly important as the world changes.
Furthermore, with the advent of Fox News and a variety of others — I was just talking to another witness, Mr. Christopher Waddell — the advent of technological change is huge. Now we have Bell Canada, a telecommunications company, becoming a broadcaster. If you go to Sympatico or Rogers you can pull down newspapers, movies and television. There are now no separate identities. There is a co-mingling of technology. Everybody to some degree that can access the Internet now has access to newspapers, television stations and a variety of other media.
The reason I raise this is because number one on our list at this point in our history is the issue of foreign ownership. I do not think this is the mandate of your committee, but I want to tell you, our union, journalists and media workers across the country are deeply concerned about the possibility of the Paul Martin government selling ownership of the media, broadcasting, telecommunications and cable industries to probably a United States investor. We think that would increase the polarization and, as we say, the person that owns the messenger also owns the message. We would have grave concerns about that. I want to get that out there. I realize that it is perhaps not your mandate at this point to deal with foreign ownership, but it is a deep concern for us. For those who think they may be able to hive off telecommunications or cable from broadcast or print, those days are gone. It is over. They are all one now and they are all in communications and/or media.
Let me just speak somewhat about the convergence of technologies. I appreciate the research this committee has done, and your interim report, which was very helpful for us, I might say, in putting together our policy. As you are aware, cross-media ownership that is allowed in this country and a few other places — it is not allowed in the United States, for instance — is of grave concern to us because just simply it increases the concentration of ownership. I want to point out one thing in terms of that. At the time that both CanWest and CTV applied for their seven-year licence, which was three or four years ago, there were concerns raised at that point with Quebecor, TVA, and the convergence of newsrooms. Let me take CTV/The Globe and Mail, as an example. Their newsrooms that were side by side could be converged and we would have homogeneous messages, the same news messages, coming out of both news outlets. A few years ago — I am not getting that old — I can assure you that if somebody from The Globe and Mail had given a story to the CTV they would have been fired. Now they are rewarded for it. We are deeply concerned and raise concerns, as is the CRTC, at these hearings about the convergence of newsrooms and newsroom management.
Both CanWest and CTV at that time agreed to a kind of code of principles that they would administer in order to stop the convergence of newsrooms. They promised to put together committees to act as oversight for these issues. To the best of my knowledge, I do not think CanWest has put one together. If they have I have never heard of it. CTV put one together. We have no idea what they have done. This was an issue that was a grave concern to the CRTC and our union representing the vast majority of journalists in this country and nothing has been done.
I urge you, as you look into the media to see not just what is there, but perhaps some of the things that are not there. We will get to the other concerns about cross-media ownership later on but, perhaps, I can add this. In some cities — and again your interim report speaks to this — Vancouver being one, Quebec City being another, the concentration of ownership and the control of market is frighteningly powerful.
In the Vancouver newspaper industry, CanWest has not only the dailies, the Vancouver Sun, the Province and the Victoria Times Colonist, but a whole host of weeklies as well, something which is of grave concern to the people of Vancouver.
Our union conducted a poll less than a year ago. It showed that Canadians are deeply concerned about concentration of ownership, about newsroom management. Your committee will not go wrong with some strong recommendations. Canadians will fully support you on this, as they will fully support you on any recommendations you make in terms of foreign ownership.
That is a general overview of our point of view. You will see a variety of recommendations in the media policy that I have given you. I will leave it at that, in the hopes that you will take a look at it.
I will now ask Mr. Matyas to talk a little bit about what has gone on at the London Free Press over the past few years, as that paper has moved from one of the last vibrant independent newspapers in the country to being owned by Quebecor and Sun Media.
The Chairman: Before you do, I want to reassure all of you that our mandate is to examine public policy in regard to these matters. Of course, that includes the examination of foreign ownership. We may or may not agree with the recommendations you bring to us, but you do not have to worry about the fact that you are addressing these issues.
Mr. Joe Matyas, President, Toronto CEP, Journalist, London Free Press, Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada: I appreciate the opportunity to be here. I do not envy your task. I admire your nerve for taking this mission on.
I am sure most of you know that CEP Local 87-M is traditionally known as the Southern Ontario Newspaper Guild. We have a secondary name within our union. It is the Southern Ontario Newsmedia Guild. I mention that because it points out the fact that we now represent broadcast people in our local as well as some Internet portals related to the businesses where we work. This reflects the chain in our industry. We are no longer a craft local.
We are the largest media local in North America. We represent 3,500 members in practically every department that you can name in the news industry, including the editorial, advertising, distribution and production departments, along with others. Approximately 1,000 of our members are journalists, reporters, editors and photographers.
We represent people at most of the major newspapers in Ontario, including The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Toronto Sun, Hamilton Spectator, The Record in Kitchener and the London Free Press.
We are also involved with just about every major chain that you know about, Torstar, Sun Media, Quebecor, Osprey, Bell/Globemedia, as well as CHUM and Corus.
That is a bit of background on the local.
I am a working journalist. I am a reporter and editor at the London Free Press. Mr. Murdoch wanted me to talk to you about this because it is illustrative of the effects of media concentration and what it does, particularly outside major metropolitan markets. What I am telling you about the London Free Press, which was owned for 144 years by the Blackburn family, is indicative of what happened in St. Catharines when the Burgoynes sold their paper to chains and when the Motts family in Kitchener sold The Record to chains.
I would like to tell you what I have seen at my own place of employment. We have been sold twice. First, we were sold to Sun Media and then to Quebecor, which now owns Sun Media. If you had looked at our operation 10 to 15 years ago, you would have seen that we had 152 people in the editorial department. Today, the number is 77.
When the London Free Press was owned by the Blackburn family, it had twice as many reporters as it does now. It had many more beats. Today, we no longer have reporters assigned to cover agriculture, consumer affairs, environment, labour, religion, social services, and other areas of interest as we once did. The days when the Free Press would routinely send beat reporters to national conventions and conferences to cover their beat areas are gone.
As to the importance of those events, let us consider an example. Let us say that you were the police reporter. You would go to the national convention of the chiefs of police of Canada, as well as to the provincial convention of the chiefs of police of Ontario.
We also had bureaus. Our paper had a bureau in Ottawa and in Queen's Park. The bureaus are gone. Those beats are gone.
The days when our paper would send reporters to Italy, China, Russia or even Northern Ontario in pursuit of stories with local angles are all largely gone.
We do not have the space. We do not have the person-power that we once did. There is not the same commitment on the part of employers to do that kind of work on a local basis.
There is much more chain content in the papers. There is a reduction in local voices.
At my place of employment one of the people who I admired most greatly edited our weekend commentaries section for six years before these takeovers occurred. He tried to continue in his job for one year after we were purchased. He told me he just could not because he had spent six years really beefing up local voices in the paper and, suddenly, we were using Sun Media columnists, many of whom seemed to come out of the same sausage machine. I do not have to tell you about that.
These are the kinds of things that happen. We see it in many ways on a day-to-day basis. I can give you an example of court coverage which comes to mind. When we covered big trials in the past, a reporter would cover the entire trial from beginning to end. Now we have occasions when we switch reporters or, even worse, pick times when we will go to the trial and when we will not. We will go to hear certain witnesses but not other witnesses. I think that is an extremely dangerous practice.
These changes hit us every day and in every way. It is not that the people who work at regional papers do not care. They still care. People work hard. They are committed. However, the whole nature of the beast has changed.
About 10 years ago, I was told by a manager that I was too thorough, and they did not want that. The manager actually apologized to me. He said, ``I hate to say this, but we want quantity, not quality. We want more stories, not fewer good ones.''
You have powers of critical awareness. Look at your papers, and look at how many stories are what I would describe as the two-interview story. That is the way it is today. My employer would rather have reporters doing three or four short stories in a day, say, ten inches, than one or two longer, more informative, more probative stories. We do a lot of the two-interview stories, which is basically get two sides of a question and you have it covered.
Anyone who has been a reporter for a long time and worked under the old methods can tell you that sometimes you do not know the story until you have talked to 10, 15, even 20 people and then finally you realize what the story is really all about.
This is the fallout of mergers and chain ownership. The Blackburn family was happy to make a 10-per-cent return on their investment because they put a lot into the local product. They lived in the community; they were proud of it; they were responsible for it; and they had to account to the people in their own community where they lived and worked.
The owners today live afar, they do not have that relationship and they are making vastly greater profits. In the case of the London Free Press, Sun Media, we are told by recent Sun Media reports that the return was 26 per cent in 2002 and 2003. That money goes outside the community to make other media purchases, to finance other mergers and acquisitions. The money does not remain in the community to create better media where it could be better.
I believe everyone deserves the best media we can provide, not just in major metro centres. If you look at my community and my region, we have issues that are strictly ours. Our raison d'être is to cover our own turf. If we cannot do it as well as before or we cannot do it as well as the biggies in more competitive markets, that is a tragedy.
I will not go on much longer. I have given a little bit of the picture here. Madam Chair, I thank you for clearing this up; since your mandate is pretty broad and does include foreign ownership, I guarantee you that if Canada goes there, if we allow foreign ownership to take over our media, what I have described to you is just going to get worse. Not only is it going to get worse, but the tyranny will not even be Canadian tyranny; it will be American or British tyranny or who knows what.
Mr. Murdoch: Mr. Matyas is talking about a sense of community. Commitment to the community has disappeared. That is the London Free Press, but I can assure you it is like that right across the country, and the statistics are alarming.
While we have some other problems about that lack of commitment to the community, Mr. Spears will suggest a way that we have come up with that might be of some help.
Mr. John Spears, Journalist, The Toronto Star, Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada: I will say a few words about accountability in the media. This is the accountability of newspapers and broadcast outlets to the groups they purport to serve. From Mr. Matyas' remarks, you have heard that his newspaper and others are highly accountable to their owners, and the owners have great tools with which to make them accountable. They can hire, fire, set budgets and demand rates of return.
Media outlets are also highly accountable to their advertisers who provide newspapers with, say, 75 or 80 per cent of the revenue whereas with broadcast outlets it is more like 100 per cent of their revenue. They are aware of that and the advertisers have great force with which to render the outlets accountable.
Newspapers, radio stations, and television stations also purport to serve the public. The great gap in Canada is what means of accountability is there; in what ways are media outlets accountable to the public? Right now there are very few. You write a letter to the editor if you are unhappy with the newspaper policy, but I am not aware of too many papers that have changed their policy on the basis of a letter to the editor. You can complain to an ombudsman or a press council if you have a specific complaint about a specific story. These are useful institutions but they are very limited.
In our media policy passed at our recent convention, we have proposed a media accountability act. Those of you with long memories may recommend many of the elements that were found in the Royal Commission on Newspapers, or the Kent report. Among the things that it would require is that large commercial and public media outlets disclose their ownership. However, one specific thing that I would like to talk about for a couple of minutes is that the act we propose would require them to form media advisory councils to give their audiences a voice that could be heard.
A pre-condition of these councils would be a public contract between the owner and the editor or news director. It would not disclose the compensation or personal financial details, but it would contain the broad goals of the news operation and its principles and standards on which the editor and the owner had obviously agreed, because they are the parties to the contract. To hold the outlets accountable for fulfilling the goals and principles set out in this contract, each outlet would form a media advisory committee. This would be formed by two members appointed by the owner or the owner's representative such as the publisher, two members appointed by the news staff and three members of the public, one of whom would chair the committee. These committees would meet several times a year. They would discuss the performance of the newspaper or broadcaster in terms of fulfilling the editor's contract. If they felt there were serious deficiencies or gaps in the editor's contract they could comment on that. They would also invite the public to comment on whether they think the media outlet was fulfilling its mandate.
Each committee would report annually on its conclusions and the outlet would be obliged to publish this report, which might contain recommendations for different or higher standards.
We are aware that there is a certain freedom of the press and we would say that a broadcaster or newspaper could forego appointing such a committee, but if it did so its advertisers would lose the right to treat money spent on advertising as a business expense. We have proposed some limits on these committees, which might be onerous for smaller outlets or small weeklies that are really one-man operations. There probably are limits below which this would not go.
We see no reason why public broadcasters should be exempt from these provisions, but you may feel that the CBC ought to be treated differently. You might refer in our media policy to section 206, where we have included a brief description of the model used by BBC in Britain, which I might say has local, regional and national advisory councils reporting to the BBC board.
For journalists themselves, our members, we have drawn up a code of principles for journalists against which their conduct can be measured.
We hope this committee is looking for reasonable actions that it might take to foster a healthy and democratic media sector in Canada. We feel that this proposal, particularly, is quite feasible, doable and should receive some public support. It does not intrude heavily into the newsroom and it does not have government intruding heavily into the news room, but it does strike a balance of allowing the public voice to be heard in the newsroom, which we think is lacking.
I hope that public bodies, such as this committee, will take notice of these concerns that we have outlined because these issues have festered for generations. That is a personal comment on my part because my father was a member of the Kent commission. I remember asking him at the time of the royal commission if he truly thought that it would do any good? He said that yes, it was the traditional way of sweeping things under the carpet but that they were serious this time. Unfortunately, he was wrong. He spent the last few years of his life working on the commission and defending its principles. I do not think he ever regretted it, but much work was left undone. These issues have been around for a long time and I hope that your committee would find the determination and courage to act.
The Chairman: Was he not involved as well with the Davey committee?
Mr. Spears: Yes, he was.
The Chairman: He greeted me at the door on the day that I testified before the Davey committee.
Mr. Spears: That committee goes back 10 years before the Kent Commission.
Mr. Murdoch: This relates to what we would ask your committee to do. Mr. Graham Spry, who some consider to be the grandfather of the CBC, queried what kind of broadcast it would be and there were many arguments about it. He said the question they had before them was, the state or the United States? Since that time, we have seen, in the media, the privatization, the pyramiding through the private sector, without any role of government despite the good wishes and recommendations of the Kent commission and the like. We have seen this pyramiding of the media to the detriment of the public interest as described by Mr. Matyas. Now, we need the state to intervene. This does not mean that we expect the anchor on the broadcasting network to wear the colonel's uniform to give the state news. However, we need some intervention by the government, whether that is through the break-up of large chains or whether it is through these advisory councils. We need that intervention because I do not think it is too hyperbolic to suggest that the democratic society is at stake.
Senator Forrestall: My question is brief. I have not heard you allude to, or refer to, the role of labour law. As some of you are aware, we are confronted now with a touchy question of replacements in our essential service areas in the event of strikes. These areas would not necessarily be staffed by people that have that designation.
Does the question of labour law enter into any area that you are presenting to us today? Do you see an effect it might or might not have down the road?
Mr. Murdoch: Certainly our union, like every other union in the country, is not excited about the idea of replacement workers. I would not see your Saturday paper as an essential service. We have had a number of long strikes and the papers, sadly from our point of view at times, have still come out. People have been served by management which, even under replacement law, is allowed to occur.
More importantly for us, to some degree, is what we can collectively bargain through the labour negotiation process with employers for the protection of journalists, aside from wages and benefits. Can we do anything to protect the integrity of journalists? We have made some small inroads but I can tell you that the newspaper ownerships are very strong on the issue and they see that as their journalists interfering with the management of the newspaper.
Our world is much different, sadly, than nurses who stand up for the practice of health care to ensure that we have good hospitals, and teachers who stand up for teaching and education in this country. Those people receive a great deal of support. It will soon be time, with all of this concentration of ownership and some of the biasing by media ownership, for journalists to stand up with the same kind of strength in protection of Canadian journalism.
Senator Phalen: I have a comment and a couple of questions. Please do not misunderstand me and think that I am making light of your presentation this evening, especially on media advisory councils. This committee heard testimony from Mr. Peter Kohl. In his testimony he suggested that having both media representatives and members of the public on the board of a press council, as you suggest, is advantageous because the media members tell the board how the system works. The disadvantage is that the watchdog is in there with the chickens. There are currently provincial press councils in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec. One of the concerns about these current provincial press councils is that they are media-company financed and, therefore, there is a perceived bias. Your brief suggests media financed advisory councils. How would you address the perceived bias?
Mr. Spears: That is a valid point. The media advisory councils would have a budget so low that it would be practically imperceptible. I suspect it would consist of a meeting room and an urn of coffee three or four times per year in a rented public meeting space.
The committee would be proposing a forum in which there were only members of the public and no members of the media, which is an interesting proposition. I am not sure how you would get it off the ground but it is certainly worth considering.
Senator Phalen: We have heard this concept before the committee on other occasions and I have looked at European press councils, and the one that strikes me is in Belgium. The composition of the council is managers, owners, editors, journalists, public, non-media members and legislators. For financing, 50 per cent is contributed by the union, which is reimbursed through a government subsidy. Would you comment on that kind of system?
Mr. Spears: It is a government subsidy in truth because the money is not coming from the union.
Senator Phalen: It is a government subsidy through the union.
Mr. Spears: I think we stayed away from any form of subsidy because the owners are quite touchy about creating a perception that there may be public financing flowing into any form of media enterprise. There are two different threats to media freedom. In some countries, the threat comes from governments and people in jack boots and tanks walking through the door and beating up journalists. Another threat to media freedom is commercial and ownership concentration.
Money has to come from somewhere. These are small amounts of money for the advisory councils. It might influence public perception but we have not been able to think of anything better.
Senator Munson: I have a great deal of sympathy for those affected by the idea of small newspapers being sold out to big chains. I originally come from New Brunswick where some of the radio stations are being served by Broadcast News only. There was once a time, when I worked in Bathurst, when you had to cover City Hall and everything that was happening. That no longer exists.
I sometimes think the CRTC does not have enough teeth to force stations to have at least one reporter in your town to cover news events. Those days are long since gone. Saying that, it is almost impossible to turn back the clock, is not it?
Mr. Murdoch: We have to remember that there are changes that have been made in the quantity, let alone the quality, of people out there covering an increasingly complex society. In order for democracy to work, we need even more reporters because society is getting more complex and more, in some ways, in jeopardy. The reason that they are not there is not solely ideological. In one or two cases it is. It is because a lot of these people, and let us take CanWest for example, are heavily burdened with debt.
They are taking people out of their newsrooms and outside the community and are no longer reporting to the community because they are burdened with $3 billion worth of debt, which has nothing to do with the commitment to the community. That is because we have allowed these mergers and incredible amounts of debt. CanWest is not the only one and now they go hunting for profit. That profit is coming at a cost to the community and to the public interest. Can we turn that clock back? I think we can, with some diversification.
Senator Munson: I am curious about that. We have had a few reporters here who have said that convergence has reached the point where everybody is looking for a level playing field. Therefore, they are not part of the stop- convergence movement. This is part of the testimony. How far do you want the government to go to intervene in all of this in terms of demerging?
Mr. Murdoch: We think if you look at it — and you will see our policy recommends — that we should have yet a further review of some areas in the community where it is very difficult. There should be thresholds set. If the Government of the United States, a few years back, could break up AT&T, I think it is small potatoes to break up CanWest Global. Can it be done? Yes, it can be done. Are there models out there for that kind of break up? There are. Can it be done without sacrificing shareholder profits or value? I think it can.
Senator Munson: One more question, I will play the devil's advocate here. For example, in the CTV newsroom or the bureau in Ottawa associating itself with The Globe and Mail, do you want somebody to intervene? They cannot talk to each other. Is this a wrong thing to do in terms of presenting news for the next day? Do you want to have some kind of thought-police in between the two ideologies?
Mr. Murdoch: I think there are thought-police there now to some degree. I am not suggesting that network necessarily. When you have homogeneity of stories, and Senator Munson you know this as do others, in television as you do in your newspaper and perhaps all newspapers, you do have a kind of police there.
It was agreed upon with Quebecor and TVA that there would be firewalls built to ensure that competition. Management, on one hand, will yell ``we love competition, we love free enterprise,'' but when we want to say, let us maintain competition within the media marketplace because it is beneficial to the wider society, let alone to the marketplace, then they start yelling. They did agree to firewalls. They agreed to these committees that I mentioned. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, I do not know what has happened to them.
Senator Munson: Does the CRTC have any muscle?
Mr. Murdoch: The CRTC, as you know, is a complaint-based agency. It is not a monitoring agency. You can go in there and say anything to the CRTC and they will nod and say, ``Yeah that would be wonderful and we would like that very much.''
Unless there is some citizen out there who is aware of what these broadcasters have promised and who start to complain that they have not been living up to their promises, the CRTC does not have the resources or the mandate to monitor and ensure that those are lived up to, other than prime-time logging shows in terms of Canadian content which a benefit comes from that.
Senator Merchant: This is an aside. It is frequent that two national newspapers have the same front page. When you look at it the picture is the exact same picture. The headline may be different. When you talk about everything being very homogeneous it is so surprising that they both have the same front page.
The other comment is that you lament the lack of commitment to community. This is symptomatic of life in our time. There are all kinds of organizations that say the same thing, that there is not the same commitment to community. I come from Regina, a community of 200,000 people. Our own paper, the Leader-Post has changed. It used to be that you knew the people. They lived in your community, the people that wrote the stories and you knew where they stood, too. This was important to the reader. When they expressed the viewpoint, you may or may not have agreed with them, but because you knew where they came from, you understood it. Because you knew them through the community, you had a better idea of how to interpret what they were saying.
I would like to ask you, because you said something, Mr. Murdoch, about he who pays the piper plays the tune. Would you please explain to us about freedom of the press? Who has freedom of the press? Is it the owners? Is it the journalists? Is it the editors or the readers? What does that exactly mean?
Mr. Murdoch: I will speak to that briefly and allow my two colleagues, who are practising journalists, to speak on that. It seems to me that the press in some ways, freedom of speech, is owned by all of us. It is not the right of ownership solely. It is not the right of journalists solely. It is owned by Canadians. That right is to expect a fair and balanced media, press, and broadcasting.
I would ask Mr. Spears to quickly give a different point of view.
Mr. Spears: I just repeat what Mr. Murdoch said, that initially that freedom of the press is the right of the people. It is not the property of a media-owner and it is not the property of journalists. In spite of saying this, owners often try to turn it into a commercial right rather than a public one. There is a fine balance. Journalists have an obligation sometimes to make themselves unpopular by telling stories that people do not want to hear. If it were put to a vote, some things would never appear in the newspaper or on television, but they are still important stories. Journalists have to have the right to, and the freedom to, write and air those stories. At the same time, that is why we have proposed a code of principles for journalists who can stand up and say, here is why we did it and here is the standard against which it can be judged, and take the flack.
Senator Merchant: You perhaps know that surveys show that Canadians believe that the reporting we get is biased. Would you feel that it serves the public for the readers to know, for instance, there is a publication that requires its journalists to say how they will vote in an election? Do you think that serves a purpose?
Mr. Spears: I cannot believe that there are very many media organizations that actually tell their journalists how to vote.
Senator Merchant: That then gives the reader some parameters.
Mr. Spears: I see, that the journalists would say how they are voting.
Senator Merchant: Yes. Is that important for the reader? Would that instil more confidence in the press, in what the reader is reading, to know? We do not know the journalists any more. That is what I am trying to say. They are not part of our group and we do not know quite why they can put an interpretation or a spin on the news.
I know, for instance, in the West, we think that the CBC is biased. You hear Westerners say this all the time.
The Chairman: Senator Merchant, are you proposing doing away with secret ballots?
Senator Merchant: No. I was asking about how the witnesses felt about it. As one of our witnesses said the other day, Slate Magazine required anyone who works for them to reveal how they vote, even their janitors.
Mr. Spears: That would be an absolute intrusion on the privacy of the ballot.
When talking about accountability, if you say, ``Here are our standards; here is what we are supposed to do; we are trying to cover the community broadly and bring you things of great interest;'' that gives the public the ammunition to say, ``Well we have this issue of global warming going on; we have the population explosion; the world is running out of oil; why does a very large newspaper in a very large city not have an environment reporter?'' I am speaking of my own paper. We have no environment reporter.
Right now, there is really no mechanism for getting at that particular issue. It is not an issue of bias. However, an issue of bias could be raised that way.
If you have those principles laid out and publicly available and some mechanism of getting at them, I think that is where we are heading. Perhaps that addresses your concern, partly at least.
Mr. Matyas: The touchiest issue in our local besides dues, of course, is political action by our local. The reason it is touchy is because our professional journalists are cognizant of the fact that they are journalists. They want to be at arm's length and separated from any identification with any particular political party or point of view. We have a political-action fund. When we try to use that fund, we have people who come to our meetings to scrutinize what we are doing. That is because they do not want to be compromised as journalists by something that the local is doing because we are a union.
Believe me, on the ground floor, where journalists work, we are cognizant of our duty to be fair to people. However, if you read The Toronto Star, the National Post or the Toronto Sun on the same issue, you know as well as I do that they all have their own spin on the same story. That is fine when you have a big market like that. However, when you are talking about a local market, a one-newspaper town, it seems to me that the obligation for that publication to be fair and unbiased is greater than when you have a competitive market situation.
The Chairman: I would like to come back to the question of what I believe you called accountability councils. Like Senator Munson, I will be somewhat of a devil's advocate here. I can remember 1,000 years ago when I started working in journalism, I was working for the number-two paper in its market. It was not a tiny paper but it was definitely the number-two paper. It was responsive to its community all right. It had to be because advertisements were pulled, for example, if you ran something that happened to displease a major local advertiser. It was an independent, family- owned paper. The family was absolutely dedicated to the proposition that we should be a good newspaper with good journalists. However, it lived with very serious realities about the pressures that members of the community could bring to bear on it. It was not just advertisers; there would be other forms of community pressure. If you enrage a sufficiently large bloc of readers and you are already the number-two paper and financially vulnerable, you can face serious problems. The best thing that ever happened to that paper was to be bought by a chain that could bring in capital, new resources, and enough financial muscle to withstand that kind of pressure.
I am also struck by the fact that whenever anybody suggests setting up a community consultative body, whether it be for schools, hospitals or all those vital institutions in a community, in the end, it turns out to be quite difficult to find a broad, representative range of people year after year to serve on those things. They tend to become captured by certain interest groups or by professionals, almost, if you will, professional kinds of activists. I am not saying it always happens. I am saying there is a tendency for it to happen.
How on earth would you avoid having your accountability councils become the captive of exactly the kind of people you do not want them to be the captive of? How can you do that?
I said it is a devil's advocate kind of question because I have always believed that journalists should listen more to the community than they do. Nonetheless, these are concerns that bother me.
Mr. Murdoch: You just gave the history of a large chain buying out the second largest paper. Sadly, there are no longer any second papers left across the country.
The Chairman: The other one died.
Mr. Murdoch: I think I know which one you are talking about. There are not any second papers left.
They now have a monopoly situation in the community, and Regina is a good example. They can devastate the newsroom because they do not have the competition you are talking about. In fact, it has gone topsy-turvy.
I have some comments on the more difficult question you ask, but I will turn the floor over to Mr. Spears.
Mr. Spears: As Mr. Murdoch said, the number-two paper being owned by the worthy family does not exist any more. Initially, my response is that you are arguing for the status quo in which publishers and owners make all the judgments and the public has the right to write a letter to the editor. If the members are chosen wisely, they will not become captive. It comes down to the mechanism by which they are chosen.
In terms of choosing, the Kent commission report suggested that journalist and publisher representatives would agree on two people and those two would choose a third who would be the chairman. If there was no agreement, they would go to the chief justice who would then appoint someone to try to pick these people.
I guess I am not as afraid of the public as you are.
The Chairman: Who, me, afraid of the public?
Mr. Spears: Yes.
The Chairman: Perish the thought. I have always been very concerned about having unintended consequences for mechanisms.
In your paper, Mr. Spears, the paper is proud, famously proud, to be governed by a set of principles known as the Atkinson Principles. Theoretically, what would happen if there were conflict between the principals and the accountability council?
Mr. Spears: I can tell you right now that one thing that is in the Atkinson Principles is respect for working people. One question that the advisory council might ask is: Why do you not have a labour reporter? Right now, there is no mechanism for anybody to do that. We have no labour reporter. I would say, that is not a great respecter of the Atkinson Principles, but there is no mechanism right now by which anyone can do anything about it.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: You talked about the difference between Canadian and U.S. newspapers, and specifically in the elections, the 2004 Canadian election and the 2004 American election. I know we are concerned about certain media outlets in the United States. I do not know much about them, but I think there was dirtiness in the American election that I did not really see in Canada.
As someone who is keen on politics, I was part of many people watching the media and thinking that if this does not change, we are going to lose. It did change in the last few days. I want to know whether there really is a big difference. I will take out that ``dirty'' element which crept into that American election.
You talk a lot about the same story being in the newspaper and on the television because of co-ownership. Is that serious? To me, the story is the story, whether you are talking about the fire that killed nine people in Manitoba, Carolyn Parrish or trans fats. I read the story, usually very fast and not line by line at all. Then, because I care, I turn to the editorial page. Every one of those things probably was covered on the editorial page, although there is not a lot that you can editorialize about a fire tragedy.
Those are two thoughts I had. I do not know whether I am as concerned about one conglomerate owning the newspaper and the television, as you are. For instance, on television, you watch the hard news that you get, all these 30-second sound bites, et cetera, and then if you are interested in one channel you hear Rex Murphy, or if you are interested in another you hear Mike Duffy. How do you feel about those questions?
Mr. Murdoch: Mr. Matyas mentioned that his paper had people on the Hill. I can tell you about newspapers across the country that used to have national reporters but no longer do. What does that mean? For one thing, it means that, yes, at times they may be chasing the same story but they may be developing relationships differently. I may develop a different relationship with some parliamentarian, for instance, than Mr. Matyas does. Out of that may come a leak. Out of that I might get a different story from Mr. Matyas. That is diversity of news. That is how we ensure in some ways that one story is not being told. If one story is being told, we are heading very closely to a totalitarian state.
The question is, in some ways, the snowstorm in Halifax is probably going to be told to a certain degree by the same media and it might be more dramatic on television than it is in the printed press. On many larger issues, such as the environment, our democratic institutions, or our justice system, the more people that we have covering those things, the more different stories there are. That allows us then to make our democratic choice. It is absolutely critical.
On the issue of the American media, we have a grave concern. I think all of you who pay attention to the American media understand that during that election the largest and some of the most prestigious news organizations in this country were called everything, including communists. There was this polarization about the media that said that you cannot trust these media outlets that you used to be able to believe in because they are all left-wing communists. That kind of polarization is very dangerous.
That is not to suggest that the National Post should not have its point of view, and The Toronto Star should not have its point of view, but the polarization of the media to the point that citizens in a democratic society can no longer feel they can trust the information coming to them causes us to be in very dangerous territory.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: It is much more extreme in the United States.
Mr. Murdoch: Absolutely, and I am sorry to say it may become more extreme in this country.
Senator Munson: Briefly, there were some sobering comments about the Kent commission report and what did or did not happen with that report. I was a reporter for a long time and only a politician for less than a year. We will go through all kinds of testimony and witnesses and then we will file a report. You will read the report. Thousands of journalists will read that report. What makes you think — and I guess I am asking myself rhetorically what makes myself think — that we can really bring about change that you are asking for this time?
Mr. Spears: Senator Munson, you are a legislator. You are a member of the Parliament of Canada. The Senate, in theory, has equal rights to the House of Commons. It is your responsibility to propose and debate and dispose. You have signed on and that is your job. Therefore I am somewhat astonished to hear a legislator come and say, ``Well, what do you expect me to do about it.'' You have real power.
Senator Munson: I did not say that. I said, that was said the last time, too. I would like to push change and we are one committee that will push and advocate change.
Mr. Spears: Last time the Parliament had power and chose not to exercise it.
Senator Munson: Let us hope it changes this time.
Mr. Spears: As an eminent Canadian once said, ``You had a choice.'' You still have a choice.
Senator Munson: Well, just watch us.
Mr. Murdoch: I just want to say, as I said earlier, Canadians want to ensure that we continue to have a democratic media and want to ensure that there are some safeguards in there. In terms of the politicians, they can take some comfort in that. What we realize — and I know this will sound somewhat like union rhetoric — is we are up against some big, powerful companies here. The question is — just to echo Mr. Spears — whether politicians, you and the folks in the other House there, have the will to take on some of these big media companies that have enormous political clout. We certainly hope that you do and I can tell you I have faith that something will come out of this.
The Chairman: You have certainly made a very forceful presentation of your position and we thank you for it. At the very least I would — not that I think Senate committees do not have effect because I do believe Senate committees have an effect — remind you of Heisenberg's Principle, which is, if memory serves, that the mere fact of being observed can make a difference.
Mr. Spears: It is called the uncertainty principle.
The Chairman: Someone's principle says that the mere fact of being observed can make a difference.
Honourable senators, our next witness is Professor Waddell from the School of Journalism at Carleton University. For many years, Mr. Waddell was known as a most eminent journalist across Canada. Mr. Waddell, please proceed.
Mr. Christopher Waddell, Carty Chair in Business and Financial Journalism, Carleton University, As an Individual: Thank you for inviting me to speak this evening. I have noted the specific areas that were suggested to me as possible subjects for my comments, and we will touch upon some of them. Obviously, if there are other questions that arise, I would be pleased to try to offer any thoughts. I have also read the interim report that the committee produced earlier this year, and I would be prepared to talk about some of that, if senators so choose.
I will speak to some of the implications flowing from the changes that have taken place in the Canadian media over the past few years. I will address the area that I spent the most time on in the past one and one-half decades — national political coverage. It is a field where there have been huge changes. I will confine my comments to the English-language media because that is the media I know best.
When I started in Ottawa in the mid-1980s there was a vibrant radio-news scene with a national all-news radio network, and several broadcasters had radio news bureaus in the gallery. Some members of this committee even worked at them. There was fierce competition for radio news. Today, none of that exists. Canadian Press had a bureau of about 36 people. It has half that now and probably does less than half of what it used to do. CBC TV had about a dozen reporters in its Ottawa bureau in the years leading up to and prior to the start of CBC Newsworld. Now it has half that and it operates a 24-hour news channel in addition to everything it did before.
Many newspapers had Ottawa bureaus — reporters assigned to Ottawa to cover national politics from the perspective of their communities: The Windsor Star, the London Free Press, the Hamilton Spectator, The Leader-Post in Regina, The Star Phoenix in Saskatoon, the Calgary Herald, the Edmonton Journal and the Montreal Gazette. I was in Ottawa from 1985 to 1989 working for The Globe and Mail, and then went back to Toronto. By the time I returned to Ottawa in 1993 to work here for CBC television, most of those bureaus had either been reduced in size or had disappeared. In the succeeding years there has been a further erosion in the number of journalists. I asked myself if that makes any difference.
I tried to think about ways to try to quantify what impact, if any, shutting down bureaus might have. My working hypothesis was something like this: what would happen to attendance at Ottawa Senators' games if the Ottawa media decided it would no longer cover the team? It would print stories from wire services about the games but it would provide no more detailed coverage than that, and no specific coverage. My guess was that it would not take long before attendance started to fall at hockey games.
For politics, voter turnout is one way to count attendance and interest. I did a quick assessment of voter turnout in Hamilton, Windsor and London — three cities that formerly had full-time reporters based in Ottawa. I forwarded a copy of that analysis to the clerk of the committee so I will not repeat its contents in detail. However, it does appear that the decline in turnout in those communities is steeper than the provincial decline in turnout in the years after the paper shut their Ottawa bureaus. I then looked at voter turnout in three other Ontario cities whose newspapers had never had reporters in an Ottawa bureau — Sault Ste. Marie, Niagara Falls and St. Catharines. In those cities turnout did not fall as steeply as it had in the first three communities whose papers had shut down their Ottawa bureaus. There may be many reasons for this but I suspect that the end of local coverage of national politics played a role in the decline of voter turnout. I make this point primarily to suggest to the committee that decisions made by media organizations have consequences for our communities and, in this case, for political discourse in those communities.
Not only have some news organizations closed their Ottawa bureaus, most, with the exception of The Globe and Mail, have sharply reduced the number of reporters they have in Ottawa. Like closing bureaus, that has an impact as well, magnified by the concurrent growth of demands placed on existing reporters, thanks to all-news television and the Internet. The few reporters that news organizations have in Ottawa are being asked to file more frequently across a wider range of media and the result is a decline in quality, content and comprehensiveness. Much of this is because there has been a widespread abandonment of the beat system in news organizations.
The claim is that there are not enough reporters to build walls around individuals such that they only cover certain issues. Instead, more and more reporters are treated as general assignment reporters doing a different story each day. They may cover same-sex marriages at the Supreme Court one day, the government's plans for the Kyoto Protocol the next day and the federal-provincial health negotiations the day after that. In that world there is never enough time to develop any expertise.
I will speak to television specifically for a moment. With barely enough people to file every day, the only option is to turn your reporters into general assignment reporters. That means they match newspaper stories, cover Question Period and attend staged events — the release of reports and news conferences organized by interest groups. The result is that more and more reporters know less and less about what they are covering. What are the implications that spring from that? Simply put, I think it means that, increasingly, national politics, and I suspect many other issues across the country as well, are covered as though everything that happened that day has never happened before and will never happen again. There is a lack of context and perspective in how stories are reported and played in the media, and there are plenty of examples of that. There is a second, related issue. No matter how little you might know about a subject area, there are always two things you can cover: personality and conflict. Is it any surprise that media coverage of politics and public policy is increasingly centred on personality and conflict? There are many examples of that to point to as well. I suspect the result is that we have a public that knows less and less about the issues and is, therefore, less and less engaged in the debate that is essential to shaping public policy and future directions for the country.
I believe there is another related level of concern that relates to the issue of how well our media informs Canadians about the world around them. The answer to that is also, less and less. There has been a steady retrenchment among the Canadian media and the U.S. media from international coverage, reversed in the U.S. only to deal with aspects of the fight against terrorism and the foreign deployment of U. S. troops in combat roles. There are fewer reporters overseas and those that remain tend to be clustered in a few cities, flying out to cover stories and then returning to their home base. That does two things. First, it distorts coverage because there must be a reason to send a reporter — usually a disaster. Second, the only way to cover a story or a region is to be there and, in most cases, Canadians are not there. Allow me to give you an example that is not truly international: the United States. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I do not believe any Canadian news organization has any full-time reporters located in the United States other than in Washington or New York. The Globe and Mail and CTV had reporters in Los Angeles for a while but I do not think they have any now. I believe those bureaus are closed. Is it any wonder that Canadians were surprised that George Bush won re-election so easily when you consider how our media covers the United States? Is the U.S. not an interesting enough place that the CBC could run a one-hour show about it every week? Our media simply is not there, even in the United States, although it is technologically easier, and constantly becoming cheaper, to report from the U.S.
The same is true about many other parts of the world that are the birth places of more and more Canadians. Our media is not there either and, in many cases, is running little or nothing in the way of news from those regions. That does not mean that information is not available to Canadians because it is available, thanks to the Internet. In most cases it is still free. This committee wanted to know about young and old Canadians and how they are receiving news and information. There is no question that the Internet is taking over much of what used to be the domain of newspapers and television.
I tell my business journalism students that most things that happen in the United States usually happen about six months to one year later in Canada. Consider some of the findings of the surveys done by The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in the United States over the past couple of years on the dramatic growth and use of the Internet for political news and information during the U.S. election campaign. That is happening here too. I can only echo Mark Starowicz's comments to the committee that there will be a merger between television and the Internet in which people will watch TV on the Internet. That is happening now.
If you look at a program like Politics on CBC Newsworld, you can watch that show on the Internet almost immediately after it is gone to air. That will be true for all sorts of programming as viewers watch when they want to watch, not when a network has scheduled something. That is already happening with personal video recorders and video-on-demand from web servers. Next, there will be web broadcasting, which we are just starting into and will happen much more in the future. It is not just for video that the Internet is becoming a dominant media. The Internet is already an integral part of how high-school and public-school students study, research and commune. I think every child with a home computer is on MSN Messenger, or the equivalent instant messaging system, most nights. They certainly are at my house. Many teenagers spend more time doing that than they do watching television. It is public- school kids and high-school kids as well. For too many students, the Internet is also their primary research tool, with all the attendant problems that it creates. While the committee asks about media literacy studies in schools, I wonder whether the more appropriate course is not library study, to remind people there is a world of information beyond what search engines can produce in the next ten seconds.
For the consumer, the Internet opens the world. Unlike the U.S., in Canada there is an almost complete lack of research about changing public habits in media consumption. However, anecdotally, I believe those Canadians interested in the world around them or in the world their relatives and ancestors left for this country, and interested in international affairs and debate about public policy have found all of that on the web in newspapers, websites and media located in other countries, whether it is The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph, and I could continue for a few minutes. They are all available and usually free as the media has, with the exception of the The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, generally been unable to figure out way to make money on the Internet. I suspect we have a situation where those Canadians interested in public affairs and the world around them are increasingly abandoning the Canadian media for what they can find elsewhere, thanks to the Internet.
When the reduction of international coverage is combined with much of the Canadian media's downgrading of coverage of public policy and politics at all levels — national, provincial, and local — the result I believe is a media that has increasing less importance, interest and relevance to precisely the segment of Canadian society that has traditionally led the discussion, debate, and consensus-building essential to the formation of good public policy. That is a problem. It is not a problem that I believe can be addressed by government regulation and I would urge the committee not to propose such an approach. I do not see any evidence that regulation now in place, with the exception of Canadian content and music on radio, has improved the quality of the Canadian media. Endorsed by the existing regulatory system, there has been an abandonment of news and current affairs on radio, a significant consolidation of ownership and the introduction of cross-ownership in the media, with no evidence that I can see that the quality of the media and journalism has improved as a result.
This is where I differ from the group that appeared just before me. I would argue the best option is to promote more competition by eliminating some of the regulation that is currently in place. I would suggest eliminating rules of foreign ownership in the Canadian media, and open the doors and let anyone who wants to, come in, either with new enterprises or to purchase existing Canadian media properties. If government believes regulation is necessary to achieve public objectives — which I would argue is in the broadcasting field and not in print for the usual reasons about public ownership of the airwaves — then regulate content and not ownership. Regulate it with real rules written precisely and directly to achieve specific objectives with real monitoring and real and punitive sanctions imposed for anyone who violates those rules.
I began by talking about hockey. Let me finish with something that is linked to hockey; alcohol. During the free- trade negotiations with the United States in the mid-1980s, there was a fierce lobby put up by the vested interests in the wine and beer industries. Our wine industry, we were told, would be destroyed by free trade and the flooding in of foreign and American products. There would be no more Baby Duck and no more Gimli Goose. Similarly, there was a beer plant in Ohio that could produce enough beer for Canada, and Canadian brewers would be out of business in a flash. The cries from the vested interest were ignored and where are we, 15 years later? We have an extremely vibrant wine industry that has created spin-off industries in wine tourism in the Okanagan and Niagara regions with other regions of the country, such as Prince Edward County in Ontario trying to duplicate those successes on a small scale. Small wineries are booming and at least one big winery, Vincor, has used their success in an open market in Canada to become a major international player in the wine industry.
On the beer front, there is an equally booming micro-brewery industry in the country with one of the breweries who started small, Sleeman, now a significant player in the country's beer industry. Where are the two major beneficiaries of all those years of protection? One is now owned by a combination of Brazilian and Belgium interests and the other is on the verge of being merged into a U.S. brewer. How did it happen — when both the wine and beer industries realized there was a market for a quality product, and people would pay for that quality. There was a public interest in something more than the lowest-common-denominator, while at the same time, the cost of getting into those businesses and of distributing their products have fallen significantly. Suddenly, it was economical for new competitors to enter a more open market.
Those conditions are all present in the media business in Canada today. There is a demand and an interest in quality journalism. Too much of what is produced in the country is lowest-common-denominator. It has never been cheaper to get into the media in terms of capital equipment and distribution, and it is getting cheaper all the time. To me that says open up the market on the ownership side. Let us see who wants to come here and what they want to do. I believe that, as in many other businesses, competition will improve the range and diversity of Canadian media; and readers, viewers and listeners across the country will be the beneficiaries.
The Chairman: For clarification, you are talking about getting into the electronic media, the Internet, and that kind of distribution.
Mr. Waddell: For which?
The Chairman: For new entrants.
Mr. Waddell: The whole business. If people want to come into the country and buy newspapers, let us allow them to do it.
The Chairman: You are not arguing that the equivalent of a microbrewery could start a national daily.
Mr. Waddell: I do not know that it could start a national daily, but it is a lot easier than it ever used to be to start a local newspaper.
The Chairman: I wanted to know whether you were only talking about new media.
Mr. Waddell: I am talking about existing media as well.
Senator Tkachuk: Mr. Waddell, that was very interesting. When you talked about controlling content, or I am not sure if you talked about controlling content or if we saw media as vehicles for nation-building, you are splitting off the concept of ownership with what public policy would direct these people to cover or write. I am not sure exactly what you mean by that. How would go about doing that?
Mr. Waddell: I am not suggesting there should be regulation of what is in newspapers. I am suggesting that there is existing regulation of broadcasting. There are rules about Canadian content on television, but I am suggesting that those rules are not necessarily, particularly, well enforced. They are not written in a rigid fashion to try to achieve. For instance, if there is interest in promoting Canadian drama on the Canadian air waves, then the regulator has the power to regulate in an effective fashion to ensure that there is Canadian drama on the Canadian air waves, if that is deemed to be in the public interest. I do not believe there should be regulation of the content of newspapers.
Senator Tkachuk: You have no concern that Americans, or Europeans, or Asians would own television networks or newspapers in this country?
Mr. Waddell: No. Other countries allow Canadians to own television stations and networks in their countries. It has not led to the collapse of Ireland, New Zealand or Australia. I do not think it will lead to the collapse of Canada either. The issue, it seems to me, is content not ownership. There is nothing necessarily benevolent about domestic ownership.
Senator Tkachuk: Do you think that, perhaps, we consider this stuff to be much more important than it really is? Does it really matter one way or the other what people write, who owns what, in other words, that there be no restrictions whatsoever?
Mr. Waddell: There are a lot of different answers to that question. It comes back to one of the issues that the committee talked about earlier, that is, the marketplace of ideas. In other words, is there a marketplace of ideas and what happens if someone controls too much of it? The difficulty is not trying to sort that through; it is that there is a whole bunch of different marketplaces of ideas. It is difficult to write rules one way or the other that guarantee a certain amount of openness on one level or ensure lots of different participants.
Senator Tkachuk: That can be controlled through the Competition Bureau, in that you would not have one person owning all the media; newspaper, radio and TV. You could have regulations.
Mr. Waddell: The role of the Competition Bureau has traditionally been seen as looking at competition, not as it pertains to editorial content but as it pertains to advertising. Does one owner or one media outlet control enough of the advertising market within a community to set the prices and drive other people out of the market? I know the Competition Bureau has looked at questions surrounding editorial content, more particularly, when the same people own Internet portals and a variety of other sorts of things like that. The Competition Bureau has primarily been interested not so much in editorial content. I do not think it is at all interested in that. It is interested in the control of the advertising marketplace, which is obviously important but which is a different issue.
Senator Tkachuk: Do you think Canadians have the appropriate amounts and appropriate quality of information insofar as international, national or regional issues in Canada are concerned? Are they well served by the media that exists today?
Mr. Waddell: I do not think they are as well served as they used to be in many respects.
Senator Tkachuk: I disagree with you there.
Mr. Waddell: I say that for the reasons that some of the previous witnesses spoke about in terms of the number of journalists on the ground working and looking for stories. I do not think we are particularly well served in terms of foreign coverage.
We are better served than we ever were before in terms of our ability to access different things being written by people around the world, in an immediate time period through the Internet. The evidence would suggest there are fewer Canadian reporters out there working for Canadian organizations around the world.
Tied to that, there is not much that has been done to adapt the Canadian media to the fact that an increasing number of people who are Canadians come from parts of the world that traditionally our media has not spent much time on.
Senator Tkachuk: In my province, we always had single-newspaper towns, just with different owners. At one time, there were the Siftons who owned it all. Then, there were the Thomsons who owned the locals. I think Asper owns it all now. Before that it was Black who owned it all. I am not sure if at any one time we got a better newspaper or a worse newspaper but there was a newspaper. It might have been a golden age when everything was at its perfect place. Growing up in Saskatchewan, we never had any media, frankly. All politics was local. People were interested in local affairs. We never had a newspaper. We got the radio which played early rock and roll music. Once in a while there would be a newsman, and 80 per cent of the population turned out to vote. Everybody was involved.
There is a lot to be said for having no media at all. Nowadays, everybody thinks they are brilliant and smart. Everybody wants to vote on every issue. After reading one article on the Internet, everybody is an expert. It drives politicians crazy. I am not sure that the citizenry is better served.
I do we not know where I am going with this. Nonetheless, I am trying to start a discussion on this matter.
Mr. Waddell: I do not know how to answer that other than to say that I think the public is better served when it learns more about how it is governed. It is better served when it learns about the decisions that are made by government, corporations and other institutions in our society, and how those decisions affect people. I think the public is better off when they learn about issues that pertain to the environment, social policy and a wide variety of different areas. It is always up to the public to decide whether they want to pay attention to it or not.
Senator Phalen: I am in the same area as Senator Tkachuk on the question of your submission which suggests that the decline in Canadian voter turnout is related to local media coverage.
In 2000, in United States, the turnout was 51.3 per cent. I looked back at the last four presidential elections in the United States. The average turnout in those elections was 51.4 per cent. In Canada, in the last four federal elections, the average turnout was 67.4 per cent, or 16 per cent higher than in the United States.
It seems to me that in the United States citizens are bombarded with press coverage. I do not know if that goes down to local coverage or not. I am not sure of that. In fact, you probably know better than I would. It seems to me that these statistics do not bear out what you are suggesting in respect to local media coverage.
Mr. Waddell: Let me be clear. The thesis that I put forward is one which can never be proved. There are many reasons as to why people may not be voting.
When local newspapers like the London Free Press, the Windsor Star or the Hamilton Spectator send a reporter to Ottawa, most of the time that reporter is not here to cover the same stories that Canadian Press is covering. If they are here to cover that story, they will probably go to their members of Parliament and say to them, ``Well, Member for London West, what is your view on this and how does it affect your community?'' They are also trying to take national issues and events and demonstrate how they have an impact on their own community.
When those reporters are no longer there — no longer writing about the local members of Parliament and no longer looking at those issues from a local perspective by making the links, the analogies and the references to local things going on in the community — but instead are replaced by a wire service story or a news chain's bureau story that is a generic story that does not make those particular references, then the community loses something. It seems to me that if nobody is writing about that in a way that relates to the community, it might not be a surprise that some people may think that what is going on here is not that important. Perhaps I am wrong.
Certainly, in many other areas, if nobody was writing about movies, and newspapers were not full of stories about movies, would everybody be going to the movies? If everybody stopped writing about the NHL and stopped covering hockey, would anyone be going to see the games? Why does that not to some degree also apply to politics?
Senator Phalen: Would the local paper not still get the national issues?
Mr. Waddell: It is different. Let us say a bill is before the House on a specific issue, or a policy emerges on a specific issue, there is a way to write that story so it is a generic story. In that way, it could run in every newspaper across the country. If you are the Hamilton Spectator reporter in Ottawa, there is also a way to write that story so that it makes the links to events that have happened in Hamilton, that talks about Hamilton personalities, that takes that issue and explains it in a context that someone sitting in Hamilton could say, ``I understand that now because it would have an impact on this social service,'' or, ``It would have an impact on this road,'' or it would have an impact on whatever the issue might be.
I do not know how to prove this, but it seems to me when you take that away and you write in a more generic sense, it is easier for the public not to understand what some of those links are between what goes on in far-off Ottawa and what impact it might have in our community.
Senator Phalen: You are saying this is a recent thing, are you?
Mr. Waddell: I am saying that those news organizations had reporters in bureaus in Ottawa through the 1980s, and they closed them all in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
I am not 100 per cent sure on this, but I think the Calgary Herald has a columnist who also writes for the National Post. I do not believe the Calgary Herald has a separate reporter here anymore. I do not think the Edmonton Journal has a separate reporter here any more. The chair may know this better than I do, but I believe The Gazette in Montreal has one reporter, when they used to have three, at least, including a columnist.
I do not know how to do it more thoroughly, because ultimately there are many reasons why people do not vote and are not interested in politics. I could offer you a plausible suggestion that said by 1993 the country had been at the psychiatrist for the last 25 years, through a range of events that started with the FLQ crisis and that did not end until the last vote in 1995 on sovereignty for Quebec. The public was tired of politics and did not want to hear about politics and all the conflict that went on, running out of events such as oil shocks, The National Energy Program, free trade, Meech Lake, Charlottetown, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe people did not vote for that reason, too. I do not know.
It just seems to me that it is an interesting question to ask. If you break that link between a community, and taking national politics and translating it down to a local level, does that have an impact on how many people are actually interested in national politics?
Senator Tkachuk: I was really interested, and so were most people in Saskatchewan, in the NHL when I grew up. We had no local people writing about it and no local coverage. All we had was CBC Radio doing the broadcasts, and I could buy the bubble gum cards. Is it possible that it is the quality of the coverage and not the quantity of the coverage that is affecting why people are turning it off and not becoming involved in politics?
Mr. Waddell: I am sure quality has an impact as well, sure. You are talking about the quality of the media's coverage of politics?
Senator Tkachuk: Yes.
Mr. Waddell: Absolutely. Again, in the 1980s, when the Canadian Press had a bureau that is twice the size that it is at the moment, I suspect they had reporters at most committees. I do not think they do that any more. As I said, for most news organizations, it was a beat system, and if you had a news bureau in Ottawa where you had five, six or seven reporters, you would try to break them down. You would make one reporter your foreign affairs reporter, so he or she would be responsible for a cluster that might be the Canadian International Development Agency, CIDA, defence, and foreign policy. You would have someone else who might be your social affairs reporter. He or she would be responsible for employment insurance, labour-related issues, health care and all those sorts of things. That allows those reporters to spend some time and develop the knowledge and expertise they need to meet the people, understand the issues, and figure out what is important. Hopefully, that allows them to be able to write stories that have context and a broader sense of what the issues are, and what is at play in any given case.
When you take that all away and reduce your reporters to general assignment reporters, then they get their assignment first thing in the morning, do the story they are given that day and go home at five o'clock that night. Their research and knowledge consists of whatever they can discover on the Internet in five minutes, which is a huge problem because much of the Internet is like the party game where you whisper something in someone's ear and you wait until it comes back around the circle again. There is no guarantee that anything anyone is researching on the Internet is accurate. That is also true if you are using websites of legitimate news organizations who may have printed stories that were not correct, or had stories with errors that were not caught and corrected.
The quality of media coverage is certainly an issue, but what strikes me in this particular case, and the difference with you in Saskatchewan and the NHL, is that you did not have a team in Saskatchewan and then have it taken away. You did not have people covering hockey in the same way these cities did when they lost their Ottawa reporters. It struck me as curious that that happened at the same time this change took place. Maybe it is relevant; maybe it is not relevant. I do not know.
Senator Munson: It is my view, Mr. Waddell, that when you have fewer voices as reporters in democracy, democracy is diminished. In your opening remarks, you spoke about these bureaus closing and fewer Canadian Press reporters. At the same time, we see in Vancouver there is a single voice in newspapers, radio and television. Is democracy being any less diminished because there is a single ownership of all these different news organizations? We do not see a reporter here from BCTV. We do not see a reporter here from The Vancouver Sun. We do not see any reporter from British Columbia except for the national reporter who is based here who is serving his master.
Mr. Waddell: I do not see any benefits to journalism in cross-ownership of media. I think we were better off when we did not allow that. Vancouver is something of a particular case in that Pacific Press has always owned both the papers, and it has for a long time. Even during the Southam period, it owned both The Province and The Vancouver Sun. The question is whether there is a threshold at which that becomes more of a problem than other problems.
Senator Munson: Yes, because the previous people who were here spoke about government stepping in and stopping this sort of thing, saying that this cannot continue across the country.
Mr. Waddell: It is easy for government to step in and say there should not be cross-ownership in media and that we should not have cross-ownership of media. Lots of other countries do the same thing. I am not quite clear exactly why we changed our policy in this country. I do not say this to denigrate the CEP, but what is ironic in some of the debate is that for a long time in this country, we had a policy where we did not allow cross-ownership in the media, with one prominent exception. I believe the only exception was London and CFPL, which is where the Blackburn family owned both CFPL and the TV station, but that was deemed to be acceptable. I do not believe anyone actually raised any concerns about that. I do not see that we are better off by allowing the same people to own newspapers and television stations. I do not think we are better off in terms of coverage. I do not think we are better off in terms of more journalists on the ground. I do not think we are better off in terms of a greater diversity of voices.
Senator Munson: On a personal basis, what are you telling your students and what are your students telling you? What are you telling them to expect in this new world? Are you telling them that they are going to have to blog, go on the Internet, report for a six o'clock newscast and report for the morning newspaper? That is beyond being a general reporter; that is being quite diverse in your work. What are they expecting when they step out of there?
Mr. Waddell: Of students who graduate from a journalism school, probably only about 20 or 25 per cent want to be journalists anyway. A group of them at that point cannot wait to get out just because they cannot wait to get out of university. Another group have really convinced themselves that this is a big mistake and want to go off and do something different. A third group is using it as a basic degree to go off and get a secondary degree. I do not mean secondary, but another level of degree, whether it is a master's in Political Science or International Affairs or a variety of other areas. Another group is using it as a basic degree and then going off to law school, to teach and do a variety of things like that.
Of the people who decide they want to be journalists, you try to alert them to what the real world is like, and the real world has two sides. One is the side that you talk about. The other side is that there are also opportunities and the potential for lots more opportunities in new media and new forms of media that are emerging, whether it is writing for the Internet or working for those sorts of publications. There is also more and more opportunity to go and freelance in some cases, because freelancing, both television and in print, is much cheaper and easier than it used to be. There is also still a market out there for the same thing that there has been for a long time, and it is something I encourage my students to do, which is to go and work in small-town newspapers. Of my students from the last two or three years, one is in Prince Rupert at the moment working for a community paper, and another is in St. Paul, Alberta. One walked out of my class and got a job as the editor of the Ottawa Construction News. Being the editor of the Ottawa Construction News meant that she was the editor, the reporter, the headline writer and everything else. The person who hired her told her that she would have that job for two years and at the end of that she would say she had enough of this and would want to go off and do something else, which is true.
Those sorts of things still happen, but you also try to alert them to the fact that the world is a different place. They also come out with many different skills than people did quite a while ago, too, which tends to make them more adaptable and flexible. Many of them have the ability to shoot television pictures and many of them can edit television pictures now, if they are interested in television.
We have an Internet publication. We teach them how to work on the Internet and to do things like that. There are opportunities like that as well.
Senator Phalen: Would you be aware of what the percentage is of the ones that are really going to be journalists and are not going to another degree?
Mr. Waddell: I would say it is somewhat split. At our school we have both. To give you the numbers, we take about 200 undergraduates every year into first year in journalism. That gets reduced to about 100 after first year. You have to maintain a certain level of standing or you go back into general arts. That is further reduced to somewhere between 85 and 95 by the time they get to fourth year and come out. We also take in 20 graduate students a year, roughly 20 to 25, and that is a two-year program for most of them. We are graduating about 100 to 110 students a year. The graduate students, because they are taking it as a second degree, having previously done something else — political science, history or whatever — most of them are more motivated to be in journalism than the undergraduates.
A significant proportion of the undergraduates, I should also mention, want to go into public affairs, communications and those sorts of jobs, too. Of the undergraduates I would say 20 to 25 per cent want to be journalists by the time they get to fourth year. However, I should temper that by saying some of them say they want to do that but they want to go off and do something else for a year or two, and then will come back and try to do something.
Senator Merchant: Professor, do you see some correlation that as television consumption goes up and newspaper readership goes down, and perhaps you can bring the Internet in here, it decreases the voter turnout? I am really interested in young people. In the 18-to-25 age group, I believe only about 20 or 25 per cent of them vote.
Mr. Waddell: Young people increasingly, I believe it is fair to say, are not watching television either. They certainly do not read newspapers.
Senator Merchant: They have the Internet.
Mr. Waddell: They use the Internet for other things. They use it a lot for communication with their friends, and they use it for a lot of other things like that. Some use it to read and do those sorts of things.
The thing that I did was something off the top of my head that sort of said it seems to me that these things are related. It may be possible to do a more rigorous and systematic study that might produce something. There are many reasons why people may not vote and it is very difficult to trigger one. Many people make the argument that young people do not vote because they do not think much of what goes on in politics is relevant to their lives.
Senator Merchant: That is not just young people. Other people do too because voter turnout goes down and down.
Mr. Waddell: That is true, although in the last election voter turnout in some parts of the country, like Ontario, actually went up, although nationally it went down a bit.
Senator Merchant: It went up in Saskatchewan, as well.
In the last election we saw something different, where at least two, if not three, of the major television networks sent out a caravan. They had a reporter who went to communities all over the country. How did you see that? What was that about?
Mr. Waddell: I believe it was mostly about the fact that it had been done in the United States so we figured we should do it here too. As soon as one person decided they would do it everyone else decided they would do it as well.
I do not believe that is a real alternative for actually telling people what politicians are saying, and trying to analyze what their policies would actually do and what the impact would actually mean, that would allow people to make a vote choice on that basis.
I do not know whether you put someone in a motorhome and drive them around and you take a camera out on the street and you ask someone the same on the street. You get different people on the street. I suppose you get someone in a campground or you get people walking down a street. There are many different ways to do it. I do not think in the end it really had much impact.
The problem as well is that, for a news organization, if you are covering an election, at the outset of the election campaign you do not really know — from a news manager's point of view — what the election campaign is going to be about, necessarily, when it comes down to the last three or four days of the campaign. You do not know where the campaign is going to be most intense. You do not know what parts of the country are going to be the most influential in terms of determining each party's fortunes on election night. You have one motorhome and Canada is 5,000 kilometres long. I do not think it is a substitute for real reporting.
Senator Merchant: I have to agree with you.
Mr. Waddell: It is an entertaining gimmick, perhaps.
Senator Merchant: Exactly. They would have been better off to cover the politicians. The trek became the story and there was really, very little value I found, in helping people make up their minds or giving people enough information so that they could make decisions.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: I wanted to ask a couple of questions based on this research.
If you took the city of Ottawa, where there is a lot of political coverage in the local paper, how would this compare to what has happened in London, where you have a decrease of 5 per cent over that period you studied, and Windsor, where you have a decrease of 3 per cent?
Have you compared these declines in the cities you have mentioned to trends in provincial elections that might affect your data? Do you know whether there was a similar decline, for instance, right here in Ottawa? Would it have been comparable to places like London, Windsor or Hamilton?
Mr. Waddell: I do not know the answer to that. The premise of what I did was based on the fact that there used to be reporters in those three communities writing about national politics from the perspective of those communities. There was one major newspaper in each of those communities and each of those communities had a reporter who lived here and was placed full time in Ottawa writing back to those local communities. That is obviously a different situation in Ottawa.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Except in Ottawa there is a significant amount of local news written. The people in Ottawa may not think it is written for them, but they are at the heart of this.
Mr. Waddell: I could not answer that. I do not know.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: I wondered if it would compare.
The other thing I note is that on page 1 you talk about whether the vote makes any difference or not. Have you done any studies? How would you comment on the factor of cynicism in terms of voter turnout?
Mr. Waddell: This is not meant to be a detailed analysis of why people vote or do not vote. It was an exercise I did to see if it might interest the community because it interested me. There are many reasons why people do not vote. One reason people do not vote is because they do not want to vote. I would argue that is their right, too, if they do not want to vote. I do not think we should be forcing people to vote if they do not want to vote. Some people may not vote because they do not like any of the candidates. Some people may not vote because they are cynical. Some people may not vote because they think all politicians are terrible.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: That is a different issue.
Mr. Waddell: There are many different reasons. In this case it seemed to me that it was interesting that these were communities that used to receive information in one way and they no longer did.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: May I ask also, did you say it would be better to regulate content than ownership?
Mr. Waddell: Yes. I do not think ownership by its nature is necessarily a guarantee. Just because a Canadian owns a publication does not mean it will be a better publication than if it is owned by a non-Canadian.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Could you give us one more example of what you mean by regulating content?
Mr. Waddell: Yes. I am not talking about newspapers. I do not believe the content of newspapers should be regulated. I am talking about broadcast media only, and television mainly, where we talk about issues like Canadian content in prime time.
What is prime time? Is prime time 6 p.m. to midnight? Broadcasters would like prime time to be 6 p.m. to midnight because then they can put the Canadian programs on the shoulders of both of those times. The real prime time, you and I know, is probably 7:30 to ten o'clock. If the government believes it is important for public policy reasons to have Canadian content on prime time television, then write regulations, enforce regulations, and impose real sanctions on people who do not live up to those regulations in a way that will guarantee to do that.
If you believe there should be 80 per cent Canadian content on prime time television, then regulate the content of prime time between 7:30 and ten o'clock, for instance, and say that all broadcasters in Canada must have 80 per cent Canadian content between 7:30 and ten o'clock.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: If the Canadian public at that point is gripped by the war in Iraq, how realistic is that?
Mr. Waddell: I am not advocating that you impose that content regulation. I am saying that if you are concerned about the media, I think the issue is the broadcast media exclusively. If you are concerned about Canadian content and broadcast media, I do not think Canadian content comes about by ownership. I think it comes about by regulation of the content by the regulator.
I do not think the regulator is particularly rigorous at doing that. I certainly know that there are no real sanctions imposed upon people who do not live up to whatever they say they will do, to the regulator. However, I would not, for a minute, advocate that we should be regulating what is in newspapers. The way you deal with that is that if people are interested they buy the paper; if they are not interested, they will not buy the paper.
The Chairman: I want to come back to the regulatory system. Just before I do, I would just like to say that your almost off-the-top-of-your-head study, as you describe it, about turnout and national bureaus, intuitively makes sense to me as at least one contributing factor. As you note, there are many others.
Mr. Waddell: I would not argue it would be anything more than one.
The Chairman: It also raises the other interesting question about all the other stories that do not get covered, and we do not miss them because we do not know they are not covered. There will always be a limit to the amount of news that the public will sit still for. There is a limit to the number of reporters available.
Are you aware of anything being done in Canada to track that kind of thing? What gets covered?
Mr. Waddell: There are several people who have done that. The University of Windsor has done some work, and there has been some done at Simon Fraser University or UBC. I would have to get back to you with the precise names. I could find it fairly easily. Various groups at various times have done their own assessments of what are the top 10 undercovered stories of the year. There have been those groups around on that subject. I do not know if that is a scientific analysis based on actually looking at how much coverage there was, or whether it is just a sense from some of those groups that these are important issues that are not getting the degree of play or public debate that should exist. There has been some of that done, but I do not have the specifics.
The Chairman: I understand. I am not suggesting that it is a Senate committee's role to draw up assignment lists for newspapers, but it has just been an interesting part of the mix.
Back to the regulatory system, and I am thinking now of the present regulatory system that you discussed earlier, I have two related questions. First, should the competition authorities look beyond the impact on advertising markets when they assess media mergers? Second, should the CRTC, when it is assessing cross-media ownership applications, pay more explicit attention to the effect on newspapers? Its focus — because that is its mandate — is the broadcasting system, not the newspapers. I think those two are in a way related.
Mr. Waddell: There is a real difficulty. In a great world it would be nice to say yes, the Competition Bureau should look at editorial content as well when looking at content. Once you start to do that, it quickly becomes difficult to do. For instance, that gets back to the discussion of the marketplace of ideas. There are many different marketplaces of ideas. Are we talking about local, provincial or national coverage; local issues, provincial issues or national issues? A merger may have no impact on the amount of coverage there is of national issues, particularly in an era when interested citizens can get information from the Internet and can find other newspapers or other sources of information from countries around the world. It may have a very big impact on the coverage of local issues, of how many people are covering City Hall or how many people are covering school boards, if anyone does that any more.
It is difficult to determine. I do not know how you would determine what the issues are, in terms of editorial content, where a merger would significantly reduce competition in terms of the marketplace of ideas. If you reduce the competition in the marketplace of ideas for municipal news, how does that compare to the fact that you are not doing it for national news or provincial news?
It is a great theory, but when you sit down and try to figure out how you actually do it, it is very difficult to determine a formula or a way of being able to do it.
In regard to your second question, about newspapers and broadcasters, there are several issues that are related on the cross-ownership question, most of which the committee has heard about in some form or another prior to this evening. One is just a simple question of the diversity of voices and the number of different people who are out there reporting. It makes sense, and it is practically true, that if you have five different people for five different organizations chasing the same story, the likelihood is that some of them will come up with more information than others. Some of them will be more entrepreneurial than others, and you will get four or five versions of the story, some better and some worse. One of them may turn up something no one else does. If you have one person doing that, you have less opportunity for that to happen, multiplied by the degree to which the one person who is doing it is aggressive, lazy, interested or not interested. That is one issue.
The second issue on that is important, I think, but I am not quite sure how the regulator deals with it. When Florian Sauvageau was here he spoke about the cross-promotional issue as it relates to newspapers and television. Those are good questions to ask about how much the content of newspapers, when the newspapers are owned by the same people who own broadcasters, is shaped to drive people who read the newspaper to watch television on the broadcast network. I can give examples. I am not sure how much Canadian Idol was a real phenomenon independent of being driven by television stations and newspapers that have the same owner. Another example is Survivor, which the CanWest papers seem to play up fairly regularly as a news story. Could that be related to the fact that CanWest also broadcasts Survivor? The question that comes out of that is whether that coverage replaces news that might be considered of more value to people.
The third issue that comes out of the cross-ownership question is what happens when the same owner owns properties that are regulated by government and properties that are not regulated by government, for example, television stations and newspapers? Is there a concern that the newspaper's content, playing of stories, et cetera, will favour a government of the day in order to avoid ruffling feathers that might lead to the same owner's broadcasting licence not being renewed?
In a related issue on a more practical basis, in the last election campaign, one of the political parties running in the last election campaign, the Conservatives, advocated or appeared to advocate, an end to the CRTC. That became an issue during part of the campaign. One of the people who played that fairly prominently as an issue was The Globe and Mail. It is fair to say that the elimination of the CRTC would have a fairly serious impact on the financial health of The Globe and Mail's parent company, BCE. If we were to open the world to what are now called grey-market or pirate satellite dishes, if we were to end regulation of telephones — though I am not quite sure what the Conservatives' proposal really was — we are now living in a very different environment than we used to live, in terms of ownership of media. That is fine as far as I am concerned, but, to give you an analysis from the business world, in the interests of fully enlightening readers, the various scandals on Wall Street, Bay Street and everywhere else have forced brokers to start to disclose when their financial analysts hold shares in the companies they are promoting as buys, or when the brokerage house owned shares in the company they are telling their client to buy shares of. Maybe we are at a period where newspapers, when they have conglomerate ownership and when they take political positions, have to be more open about declaring the financial interest of their parent company in the positions they are actually taking.
The Chairman: Again, that one would be immensely complex to implement in practice.
Senator Munson: Professor, you answered part of the question on the CRTC. We really are living in a converging world when you are agreeing with Ezra Levant, publisher of the Western Standard, about opening the doors to foreign ownership and regulation. I never thought I would see somebody formerly of the CBC share that kind of philosophy.
Senator Tkachuk: It is not abnormal, Senator Munson.
Mr. Waddell: The media in this country are now owned by one company that has revenues of $19 billion or $20 billion a year, which would be BCE, that is, if I have not understated their revenues. The other one has significant revenues as well. It does not seem to me they need to be protected. What is it we are actually protecting?
I would argue that protection such as that tends to eliminate new competitors from coming into the market and give the people who are there a substantial position themselves. Maybe it is just journalists, but all of you, as people sitting here this evening, obviously think there is something not great in the media in the country at the moment or there may be things that need to be improved. We have the media that we have, as a result of the system we have.
The ogre that is always thrown up is, what happens if Rupert Murdoch comes in and buys papers in Canada? What happens if The Guardian comes in and buys papers in Canada or if The New York Times comes in and buys newspapers or wants to start a newspaper in Canada?
Senator Munson: With that in mind, what business is it of the CRTC to say what the Italian community of Canada can or cannot see? Do they have a role in disallowing Rai to come in to compete against local ownership in this country? Nobody should be afraid of Rai or Al-jazeera.
Mr. Waddell: I would agree with that. In another couple of years, everyone will be able to watch it on their terminal on broadband anyway so it will not matter.
Senator Munson: Do we need the CRTC?
Mr. Waddell: That is not a decision for me to make. I do not see the value of a regulator forcing people to come before them to renew licences every seven years and spend tons of money to do that, enriching lawyers and consultants. If we all know at the start of the process that they are going to get the licence at the end of it, what we are actually achieving?
I do not know enough about telephone regulation and those issues to know where, and if, we actually need a telephone regulator. It is up to governments to decide if we need content regulation in this country to protect Canadian content. You can make a pretty persuasive case that the regulations that were introduced on music and radio were very effective, and 25 years later we have a booming international music industry. That suggests to me there may be some virtue in doing that for television as well if we want to develop Canadian content on television, which is a valuable thing to do. That is something you can impose on broadcasters in Canada, whether the broadcaster is owned by a Canadian or an Australian. That is a matter of regulation. Government is government. Government has the ability to regulate any way that it wants to regulate. That is up to government to decide what it deems are the acceptable or the desirable public policy outcomes and to do that to achieve that.
If it is just to rubber stamp licence renewals every seven years when we know that the CRTC will not take CTV's licence away when it comes up for licence renewal, what is the point in that?
The Chairman: I have a supplementary question. At the moment the CRTC is almost a binary system; you get your licence or you do not. It can set up conditions, but it really seems to be that the only enforcement mechanism, as we have see recently in Quebec City, is to say, ``You did not comply so you will not get your licence renewed.''
Mr. Waddell: Right.
The Chairman: Should there be a broader range of available enforcement mechanisms, and what might be appropriate?
Mr. Waddell: I do not know what would be appropriate. I am not an expert enough on knowing what would be appropriate.
In general terms, the answer to that question is a firm yes. There is no point setting up a system of regulation where you have rules, if you do not intend to enforce those rules. What is the point? The only way you can enforce those rules is with punishments that are sufficiently severe that, if it is a fine, for instance, it will be more than a licence to continue to violate the rules, which a small fine might be.
If the CRTC has rules on Canadian television content, we heard all the arguments 30 years ago when the CRTC introduced rules on radio that it would mean terrible radio and that radio stations would have to play terrible songs, and so on. Maybe it did for a while, but some people figured out they could make money by being a bit better than terrible. Before you know it, some people got pretty good. If the CRTC were serious about imposing Canadian content regulations on Canadian broadcasters, then you could achieve some of that as well.
Does that answer the question?
The Chairman: Everything helps along the way.
Mr. Waddell: It is the same as anywhere else. There does not seem to be much point in everybody spending all their time writing all the regulations and then no one pays any price for violating them. I did not read it in as much depth as I should, but in reading your interim report, reference was made to questions the chairman was asked about conditions that Quebecor was supposed to comply with, in connection with Vidéotron. My reading of it — and please correct me if I am wrong — was that the chairman did not know whether anyone had complied with them or not.
The Chairman: It would be fair to say that the chair of the CRTC told us that one of his take-a-ways, I think was the phrase he used, was that they should go back and do some follow-up on those issues. I do not want to put words in his mouth.
Mr. Waddell: I do not mean to criticize the chair, but that may tell you a bit about regulation and success of regulation.
Senator Tkachuk: Is that not what they all do? They all go in and promise all these things and get their licence, come back six months later and say, ``I cannot do that,'' and the CRTC allows them to do it anyway?
Mr. Waddell: The chair's point and the CRTC's point, if I understand their position correctly, is basically the only sanction they have at the moment is to take someone's licence away.
To go back to hockey, will you ban someone from the game because he trips somebody or will you put him in the penalty box for a while and force him to cool off? Maybe the answer is to design a series of penalties that actually enforce compliance because the cost of paying the price of those penalties is too severe for the organization to contemplate on a regular basis.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Professor Waddell. It has been interesting, and we are grateful to you.
The committee adjourned.