Good morning.
The Canadian television market has experienced significant ownership concentration over the last 15 years, and 79% of commercial television revenues are now controlled by four vertically integrated private broadcasters. Many of these also control massive stables of radio stations. Yet the major broadcasters, although continuing to operate profitable television media assets, are letting down local communities outside major urban markets and marginalized communities within urban markets.
They've significantly cut staff, especially at their local stations. Bell Media cut 380 positions last November. Rogers Media cut 200 jobs in January. Shaw has adopted a model that centralizes the production of all newscasts in one location, primarily Toronto. Rogers has completely eliminated multilingual newscasts across all of its Omni stations, ending access to over-the-air multilingual news for ethnocultural communities. This is despite the fact that during the 2014 licence renewals before the CRTC, Omni acknowledged that these programs played an important role in the communities that Omni served.
PIAC recognizes that conventional station advertising revenues have indeed fallen over the last few years. At the same time, other pay and subscription-based channels owned by the same national broadcasters are doing very well. Many of these broadcasters, upon acquiring local stations, promised that they would use their size, scale, expertise, and diversity of broadcasting and distribution assets to continue investing in local television. That generally hasn't been happening. The national, private, conventional broadcaster should continue to have obligations to produce and air local programming and especially local news.
PIAC recognizes the challenges faced by smaller independent local stations, and to the extent that any fund may be created to support local stations, that fund should prioritize these independent stations and focus on helping all stations develop sustainable business models. Such a fund could also draw on the proceeds of the planned repurposing and auctioning of the 600 megahertz radio frequency spectrum band, which will displace many local over-the-air stations.
PIAC supports the creation of a fund to assist those stations that would be reassigned. Given the importance of the issues raised in this committee consultation, this fund could also be earmarked for the production of local programming, particularly local news.
On the subject of CBC/Radio-Canada, the public broadcaster has a very important role to play and PIAC believes that the federal government's budget proposal to invest $675 million in CBC/Radio-Canada over five years is a welcome step towards Canada having a strong national public broadcaster. However, PIAC believes this funding and any strategic plan for CBC/Radio-Canada should not fix all its attention on the transition to digital media. It should also ensure that local communities are adequately served by CBC stations, particularly where broadband access isn't available, reliable, or affordable.