QUESTION PERIOD — Ministry of Canadian Heritage
Media Support
December 6, 2023
Good day, minister.
You are the fourth Minister of Canadian Heritage since the Trudeau government came into power. Since 2015, your government has tried what we call the “same old Liberal ways” of helping the media by handing out more money and adding more regulations.
After eight years, we can measure the extent of the damage: 1,300 job cuts at Bell Media, 800 job cuts at Quebecor and 800 more job cuts at CBC/Radio-Canada. Radio and television broadcasters, the written press, the national press and local press are in a crisis.
Are you going to keep the same policies that aren’t working?
Do you think that taxpayers should simply invest more money? Should the government make more rules or are you going to be creative and allow the creators and broadcasters to develop business models that are adapted to the reality of the 21st century?
First of all, there’s absolutely nothing preventing Canadian creators and media from being creative and adapting their business models to today’s reality.
However, we are seeing the effects of the free market, because new digital platforms weren’t regulated or codified at all in Canada before the Broadcasting Act was modernized and before the Online News Act was passed last spring. The free market doesn’t work with digital platforms, and that’s what has caused the media crisis over the past decade.
These platforms caused a lot of upheaval in the whole revenue structure of media outlets and broadcasters in Quebec and Canada. Deregulation is not what is going to fix this situation; rather, we need to adapt to today’s reality and ensure that digital platforms contribute to Canada, because they make enormous profits here. We need a fair industry and we need to ensure that trade relations between platforms, Canadian businesses and Canadian creators are much more balanced. That is the future. We cannot expect the American platforms, which are extremely powerful and have considerable means at their disposal, to make room for Canadian businesses, because we’re not forcing them to do so.
And yet, minister, Pierre Karl Péladeau stated before the CRTC that federal regulations are killing Quebecor’s activities. The CRTC must urgently relax the rules governing Canadian media to let them adapt. Top Bell Media executives have reached the very same conclusion.
Minister, our creative talent and broadcasters are perfectly capable of going head-to-head with the American giants, if you give them the freedom to do it.
Why not try it? Don’t you trust them?
Thank you.
That’s why we modernized the Broadcasting Act, to give the CRTC the means to introduce much more flexible approaches with Quebecor, Bell and all Canadian broadcasters, to account for market realities, and to adapt the regulatory framework and their obligations accordingly.
However, we mustn’t kid ourselves. Defending French, the existence of French, the existence of our two official languages and Indigenous languages, and the presence and capacity of our creative talent to survive online despite the sway of U.S. platforms, requires support measures. That’s why it’s important.
