Proposals for ownership liberalization over carriage, i.e., telecom and BDUs, must absolutely take into account the key role that BDUs have traditionally played in meeting the social and cultural objectives under the Broadcasting Act.
Unlike a pure common carrier, a BDU does play an active and key role in influencing the content it offers consumers. BDUs are not just pipes; BDUs make programming decisions every day. They control and decide which programming services consumers will have access to. They make critical decisions about which services to market, promote, and offer, and how much they pay to these programming services and how much they charge consumers. This BDU influence over programming services may increase, given the recent CRTC decision regarding the value for signal of conventional television stations. Therefore, any liberalization of BDU ownership restrictions could easily result in an unacceptable level of influence by non-Canadians over the television broadcasting system. This could occur even if the ownership rules for programming services remain unchanged.
So the contemplated liberalization is such a fundamental policy change that it will necessitate the adoption of minimum safeguards to offset the impact of foreign BDU control, such as the introduction of rules to prevent a foreign company acquiring control of a Canadian BDU from keeping an ownership interest in the BDU's affiliated programming services, in other words, to divest, as suggested by Rogers when they appeared before you. In addition, it may require the introduction of strengthened conduct rules for BDUs to prevent discriminatory practices or access concerns of content providers.
These measures, as you can see, are complex and could have an important economic impact. For these reasons, we submit to you that a full assessment of the implications for the broadcasting sector should be made prior to implementing any changes to the ownership rules of the telecom/BDU sector. We submit that the prior assessment we propose could be done by an independent panel of experts with public consultations. This type of panel was recently used to review the Canadian telecom policy as well as the competition policy.
In addition to the specific issue of foreign ownership restrictions, the panel could also be mandated to conduct a larger review of the Canadian broadcasting policy and regulatory framework, given the accelerated convergence of broadcasting, telecom, and new media.