Canadian Heritage Committee on Feb. 25th, 2016

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Larry Maguire]

Thank you.

You have a few seconds left.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

I want to throw this out there, Mr. Winseck, to see if you have something to add really quickly. You talked about the importance of access to high-speed Internet. We put in a program last year called the Connecting Canadians program, and and I'm very happy to hear that the Liberal government has continued it.

Coming from a rural community, I would say that much less than half of my residents have access to high-speed Internet. When you talk about access to Internet, it's not just about access to physical cellphones and tablets, it's the fact that you don't have high-speed Internet. I think that's something we need to focus on as part of this as well.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Larry Maguire]

There are just a few seconds for the answer.

[Dwayne Winseck]

I agree that we need to extend universal service with respect to high-speed Internet. I filed a significant submission with CRTC on its review of this issue.

I'm going to say something right now that may sound a little bit out there. Going back to the post and the delivery of news and so forth, there's a lot of history there. It might sound a bit radical at the moment, but I've had a bit of a crazy idea in my mind for the last six months. It's a crazy idea of merging the CBC with Canada Post and creating the Canadian Communication Corporation.

What it might do is help to provide the delivery infrastructure for the news, as you mentioned, and it could serve as a provider of wireless Internet in remote and rural areas of this country. In the past, the post office has played a central role, especially in American history, as a major infrastructure for news exchange.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Larry Maguire]

Thank you, Mr. Winseck.

Thank you, Mr. Barlow.

I'll now turn it over to Mr. Breton.

[Pierre Breton, Liberal, Shefford, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good morning, everyone.

First of all, I want to thank you for the valuable and very interesting information you have shared with us today. This is going to facilitate our decision making, especially the analysis we are going to do before making our recommendations.

I am from a rural area that is about an hour away from Montreal by car. My concern is the local media. Our local daily newspaper, our local radio and our community television are highly mobilizing forces for our fellow citizens, in my opinion. People want to know what is going on, whether at the municipal council, on the cultural front, on the sidewalks, or in the neighbouring village.

Media concentration is an important concern. In our region, there is a real consensus among people regarding the information they receive on a daily basis. If we start to receive information exclusively from Montreal, Trois-Rivières or Sherbrooke, obviously the community will not be as stimulating.

Mr. Demers, I saw that you had done research on regional media. I would like to hear your point of view on the future of local media, whether radio or newspapers. It is extremely important in my opinion that we consider this matter.

[Prof. François Demers]

You point to the crucial need for local information within local and regional populations, which, even if they reside in big suburbs, make up a sort of community. For other reasons, the withdrawal of traditional suppliers due to concentration, as well as their decision to only broadcast, as did television, Montreal-based products in all of the regions, is going to create a need to reconstruct the supply of local information.

Currently, the main obstacle is that these gigantic groups act as a damper in the regions. They control the advertising market, especially, and thus prevent the entry of new players. Even if they do not meet the needs of the population as well, they prevent the arrival of new players into this type of market. In the Quebec region, for instance, if the newspaper Le Soleil closes its doors, a new medium will appear that will be more focused on the region.

[Pierre Breton, Liberal, Shefford, QC]

Thank you very much for these clarifications.

Once again, my question is about local information and local media, and other witnesses may of course reply as well.

You cannot stop change. As someone said earlier, the new generations look to other platforms to obtain news. I have only to look at my three children as an example. Unfortunately, they do not read the local newspaper, but when they get up in the morning, they consult social media on their devices. The content in those media is what interests them and what they find convenient.

The local media are also undergoing a transformation; they are transferring their paper newspapers to digital form. However, it is not always easy for them to attract this new clientele. I would like to hear your opinion on that.

Why do these newspapers that are now in digital form still have difficulty bringing in this new generation of young people who should be interested in them?

[Monica Auer]

If I might just quickly begin, one thing to bear in mind about the consumption of news is that it changes with age. When you're young, you like snack food. Who doesn't like a good McNugget? Then, as you get older and you have kids, you say that you need to have a proper meal. You need to have salad and you need to have vegetables and the whole thing, so you move from snack food to actual meals. Then, when your kids are in their teens, your mother comes over, and you have to make a really nice meal.

My point is that as the population ages, each generation has a slightly different need and will access the information it wants in a different way. Should we be saying that the sky is falling because millennials, for instance, aren't watching in the way that older generations watch? No. The issue is whether or not the professional content that is needed will be there when they need it.

You don't need a fire station or a hospital every single day—most of us don't—but when your house is burning, you'd really like to have that fire station nearby. It's the same with your local radio station and local TV station. When the floods are coming down the plain, you would like to know that they're coming. It's a little bit disconcerting when you realize that most radio stations have become automated and there may not actually be a person in the building. It's disconcerting when the Toronto anchors don't know the names of your local communities.

For print, we've always said that anybody can start a newspaper, and we don't need to regulate that, except for the Criminal Code. For broadcasting, we've said that we'll have limited frequencies and that we want the best use of the service, so we have standards. Also, Parliament has said that it wants to ensure that Canadians have access to news.

I know that some people believe that.... It's often expressed as “Who cares who owns the press?” Well, there's a difference between having a hundred press owners and having two. That's why. It's because you worry about journalistic chill. You worry about the decreasing diversity of voices. When we say that ownership may not matter in local media, it matters when—

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Larry Maguire]

I'm going to have to ask you to wrap up.

[Monica Auer]

I'm going to wrap up: it matters.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Larry Maguire]

Okay. I'm being pretty lenient here, but we'll allow that to go, and we'll turn it over to Mr. Van Loan.

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, York—Simcoe, ON]

Thank you very much.

To the Forum people, you have a couple of tables documenting declines in local revenue, jobs, and local coverage. You don't have any table about the actual hours of local newscasts.

We could have an argument about content, but I don't want to talk about content and quality. Let's talk about quantity. My impression is that it hasn't actually declined significantly and that the networks have maintained it. Would that be an accurate impression?

[Monica Auer]

I'd hesitate to say no, that's an inaccurate impression, but what I can tell you is that the data from the 1990s, which were reported by the stations themselves, show significantly higher levels of original local news than they now provide. That's a slightly different take.

As I was saying before, it's very difficult to use the CRTC's TV logs to figure out how much is original news because, for instance, a program that's being produced in Toronto is being coded as a local TV station—

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, York—Simcoe, ON]

My sense is that you could make the same complaint about their national news too. In terms of grabbing stuff from other broadcasters around the world, I think there's a lot less original news produced there too.

On the second question, you showed those revenue declines. The CRTC says there are more than enough dollars in the system to support it. How do you reconcile those two apparently contradictory positions?

[Monica Auer]

That's because the CRTC is looking at total revenues for all cable, satellite, television, radio, and pay discretionary services. When you say there are enough revenues, the current plan is to take part of the money that's being allocated to fund volunteer-run community programming and put it back to local TV stations. That's the idea. It's not that there is so much money they can get some out of thin air. They're going to take some from one group and give it to another group. It would be like taking money from the CBC and giving it to the private stations. They want to take money from the community sector and give it to the private sector. That's the plan.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Larry Maguire]

We'll move to Mr. Vandal.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

There's a lot of information here, and I'm trying to put some focus to it. I'm trying not to look at things as problems, but I need to ask each of the presenters for their estimation of the number one challenge facing Canadian media going forward.

Let's begin with Al and Monica.

[Al MacKay]

I think it's figuring out how to do business in this particular world. As an old television journalist, one of the things I see is that they're still doing newscasts today the way they did when I first got into the business back in the seventies. There are a lot more bells and whistles and graphics today. You can go live anywhere, and there can be a reporter there with a smart phone. They don't need to have cumbersome trucks and all that, but they're still presenting the information in the same way. I don't think they've cottoned on to the fact that a lot of what they're putting forward in their newscasts at six o'clock and at 11 o'clock is content that people have already seen. They're already aware of it through Twitter, through access via their smart phones, and through the various news aggregators.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

Why would that be a problem to Canadians?

[Al MacKay]

I want to draw the committee's attention to the Statistics Canada report that was released on January 15. It tracks the use of media for following news stories, and some of the statistics are quite dramatic.

The proportion of Canadians who said they follow news and current affairs every day is down from 68% to 60%. The number of people who follow the news on television declined from 90% in 2003 to 78% in 2013. I won't go through all the data. I'll leave this for the committee.

Of course, there's a lengthy background behind this. I'm just doing top-of-mind stuff, but people are not watching. They've decided that they're not going to watch. My view on it is that whoever's putting the news product out is not doing the job the way the people are expecting.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

Thank you, Mr. MacKay.

I'll put the same question to Dwayne Winseck.

[Prof. Dwayne Winseck]

To me the biggest problem now is trying to figure out how we extricate ourselves from the problems that have been created through excessive media consolidation and vertical integration. In the years ahead we need to adopt solutions that will allow us to minimize the structural problems that have been created and gird a strong regulator on this question of concentration.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

What evidence do you have that's a problem?