Evidence of meeting #10 for Canadian Heritage in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was media.
A video is available from Parliament.
Chief Executive Officer, Transcontinental Inc.
Obviously we're not the New York Times.
Chief Executive Officer, Transcontinental Inc.
Most of our papers have one, two, three journalists, or four.
Basically, if you go back to my presentation, on page 7 I express our problem in a very simple way. There is nothing more that our journalists would like to do than investigation, and we give them time and space, and the paper, and the websites to do investigation. I think they play a vital role in all the community to make sure that all the stories about city hall, and about what you all are doing, are made public.
For example, if a friend of the mayor wants to illegally rezone land and our people put that on the front page, I guess the land is not going to be rezoned. They play a role in the community.
Liberal
Seamus O'Regan Liberal St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL
The New York Times and The Boston Globe can afford a whole roomful of people.
Liberal
Seamus O'Regan Liberal St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL
But on the flip side, you guys can afford one.
President, Director General, DBC Communications inc
It costs a lot of money.
President, Director General, DBC Communications inc
It costs a lot of money to do. It's a lot of journalists and a lot of time, and we have three journalists in our newsrooms. We do what we can do with it.
Chief Executive Officer, Transcontinental Inc.
If you look at page 7 of my document, I will explain all our business work. My business works that when you produce a paper you need to have half of the pages that are ad dollars and half of the pages content. That's how it works because you solely live on ad dollars.
If you send your people selling into the community and the community says we will support you with 16 pages of ads, then you produce 16 pages of content and you produce a 32-page paper. Then you can do a lot of investigation because you have 16 pages of space.
If your people go into the community and the community supports you with eight pages of advertising, I guess you're producing eight pages of content, and then people start to phone us and make comments like Monsieur Olivier, I'm paying my tax, why are you not covering this, why are you not covering my press conference? I can't. I only have eight pages and I have to feed the websites on top of it and I only have three journalists. So we do less.
Liberal
Seamus O'Regan Liberal St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL
The pressure to have those ads in no way affects the editorial content?
Chief Executive Officer, Transcontinental Inc.
It doesn't affect the quality but it does affect the quantity.
Liberal
Conservative
Peter Van Loan Conservative York—Simcoe, ON
Thank you.
My question is for the Public Interest Advocacy Centre. This study has been unfortunately largely a dialogue between those who work for media outlets or those who are the media outlets and us. There has been a dearth of people speaking for the consumers, which is why I searched high and low for folks like you to have as witnesses. I think it's important that the consumer voice be heard as part of this conversation rather than just those on the other end of the spectrum.
One of the things that you have been very active in advocating for as a consumer group was this notion of these basic skinny packages, which the CRTC then went on to approve. I've been reading conflicting reports about nobody is grabbing onto it, or a lot of people are grabbing onto it, and it's going to really hurt the ability to get revenues or it's going to have no impact on them for the long run. What do you think about the desirability of it? Is it successful and if the use of them becomes more widespread, what kind of impact will it have on our interest in local news?
Legal Counsel, Public Interest Advocacy Centre
I'll try to address several parts of that question.
There are several reasons for proposing what is actually skinny basic and pick-and-pay together. Rogers mentioned before in the previous meeting that the way consumers are accessing content is changing and that's partly why PIAC and other consumer groups had advocated for these different options.
In a world where consumers want access to content, they want choice and they want flexibility to choose their content, and many were getting much more frustrated with their large bundles, which they felt they were paying too much for. This really was a way—not to force people to change, if you like your bundles you can stay with your bundles—if you wanted to downsize, you could go for a skinny basic and then be able to pick-and-pay on top of that if that suited your family's needs.
The pick-and-pay won't be fully integrated until December, so really we'll have to wait for a few more months to see what the impact of these new options will be.
In relation to your question on local stations, actually the skinny basic packages should include all the local stations and some regional stations as well, so that option itself shouldn't affect whether Canadians are receiving their local over-the-air stations.
Conservative
Peter Van Loan Conservative York—Simcoe, ON
I take it from you then that if we're hearing from witnesses that that's one of the things causing a problem for them, your view is that it is not causing a problem for delivering local news.
Legal Counsel, Public Interest Advocacy Centre
Not in relation to your local over-the-air stations or your community stations.
Conservative
Conservative
Peter Van Loan Conservative York—Simcoe, ON
Well, you heard me ask a question about local news in my neck of the woods. I'm in the north end of the GTA, although it feels much more remote, when you're there, in a media context. I talked about how I would see a CTV Two camera about once every six months, when it would hit the constituency. As to CBC, I would have to count in years since the last time I saw a CBC camera. The closest CBC station is in downtown Toronto, and they think they need to get a passport, I think, to go north of St. Clair Avenue. The chance of their coming up to Georgina, at the north end of York region.... It has been literally years since I've seen them cover a news story up there with an actual person with a camera on the ground.
I talked about how Rogers seemed to be making the move to fill some of that gap with local news. They say in their evidence that they were doing it, but then there was this tweak limiting the amount of their 2% local take for community broadcasting. They limited the amount that could be used for their news production.
I wonder if you could comment on that: the desirability of their moving into that space and the desirability of that regulation being changed back in a way that would facilitate it, or the desirability of their reaching into some of their own plans to do it.
Legal Counsel, Public Interest Advocacy Centre
First of all, in relation to local news, generally our position is that the local stations are in a better position to provide local news because of the history of having professionalism. It is usually labour-intensive reporting.
In regard to community stations, if they want to move into local information and local news, in our view the access programming threshold—the requirements set out by the CRTC—doesn't actually prevent Rogers from moving into local news, because the access programming just means that the idea needs to come from a community member and that the member need to be involved in producing that programming. That to us really is what a community channel is about: engaging the community members and making sure that they have a say in what's being aired on their community channel. In our view, then, there is a way to work access programming into local news.
Does that answer your question? I could also move into Roger's proposal about redistributing their 2%.
Conservative
Legal Counsel, Public Interest Advocacy Centre
I think you would have to tread very carefully in considering Roger's proposal, if it's the same as what they submitted to the CRTC. The urban markets they proposed to move the money from were just Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. In their proposal they could move the money or have the flexibility to reallocate either to community stations or to over-the-air stations in smaller communities. That could mean anywhere outside of Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, so it could also be Calgary and Edmonton and their Omni and City stations there. I know they mentioned Bathurst, New Brunswick, but there could be a concern that the money wouldn't actually go to Bathurst, that it could go to Edmonton.
We would have a concern to make sure that they are transparent about how they want to reallocate their funding.
Conservative
Peter Van Loan Conservative York—Simcoe, ON
Okay.
Your first recommendation was that private broadcasters must fulfill their commitments locally. You spoke about Omni as your example of this. Are there other examples in which you think that commitments are made to local news content that are not being fulfilled?
