Good afternoon.
The APFTQ has been in existence for more than 40 years now and represents more than 130 professional production companies working in both official languages in all audiovisual production sectors in Quebec. We want to thank the committee for the opportunity to express our digital vision today.
We are currently in a period of transition to the transmedia or multi-platform production and use of cultural content. This is a new transition period, we should say, since our industry has undergone a number of technical and technological changes since the CRTC's ancestor, the Canadian Broadcasting Commission, was founded in 1932. Perhaps we're tempted to think that these changes were minor in comparison with those we are currently facing, but that would be a mistake.
These changes have resulted in quite significant upheavals to justify numerous adjustments to the mandate of the CRTC, or that of its forerunners, and various legislative amendments. The governments of every period have managed to adjust to the new realities and to take steps to adjust the oversight of the broadcasting and telecommunications industries to those realities.
The government must revise certain policies and acts already in place without delay to adjust them to today's reality, while enabling those of tomorrow to find their place as well. We do not support the position that everything is new, that nothing is like the past and that no oversight is required, or the opposite view that all new platforms should be covered by the oversight currently in existence.
We submit to you that the solution lies more in a grey area between those two extremes. An initial observation in broadcasting and telecommunications is that there has been an explosion in the number of content dissemination channels and distribution channels. The entire existing production, dissemination, communication and distribution system is now being reproduced with certain adjustments in the virtual world of digital media. However, a number of acts and government policies no longer apply there.
In our view, we should start by adapting broadcasting and telecommunications legislation to this new reality. The starting point lies in their respective policies. I will spare you the examples, but you can refer to our document. The policies under the two acts can very well be updated and adapted to digital media. We think that most of the major principles they contain are directly applicable to digital. Of course, the scope of those two acts will have to be expanded to clearly cover all the ways of communicating content, both known and to be invented. As for the resulting regulatory oversight, it will also have to be as technologically neutral as possible, while complying with new established policies.
The second observation concerns convergence. Digitization and convergence accentuate the trend toward the concentration of media ownership rights. There are increasing interrelations and complementarity between the telecommunications, publication, broadcasting and Internet sectors, where a small number of economic players own vast families of businesses.