Thank you very much.
Good morning. My name is Katha Fortier, assistant to the Unifor national president. I bring regrets from Jerry Dias. He had an urgent personal matter today. With me is our media director, Howard Law. We have 11,000 members in the media sector, including broadcasting and TV production. We thank you so much for the invitation today.
The Broadcasting Act is at the heart of our national mandate for cultural sovereignty. That's something we never stop having to protect and advance, whether it's in trade negotiations or in reform of the Broadcasting Act. For decades the Broadcasting Act has been a pillar of our cultural sovereignty. The goal is to strike the right balance between Canadian content and our openness to the world.
We've weathered this incredible challenge to our cultural sovereignty over the decades. Sometimes these changes have been driven by continental free traders doing the bidding of Hollywood, or by the disruption of new technology. When television arrived in our homes after the war, it didn't destroy radio, because we adapted the Broadcasting Act. Cable came along, and we adapted again. Satellite TV was supposed to be a Death Star that was going to zap the Canadian media industry, but we didn't let it. Each time, legislators and regulators kept their eye on the ball. We maintained that balance between our sovereignty and our openness to global culture, and we did it in a bipartisan way. Some of the greatest champions of the Broadcasting Act reform were Marcel Masse and Flora MacDonald.
Yes, the Internet is the most powerful communications technology yet. AI may be the next one. Then there may be another. We must keep adapting [Technical difficulty—Editor] our cultural sovereignty. Surrender is not an option.
Unfortunately, for the last 10 years the federal government and the CRTC have kept their hands in their pockets watching our cultural protections unravel. Now we are doing something about it. We support the amendments put forward by Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, and we especially want to make sure that Canadian ownership rules are reinstated in section 3. Those rules were ignored by the CRTC for 10 years. It tolerated Netflix setting up shop in Canada under the digital exemption and operating, growing and dominating as a cultural juggernaut. We propose replacing paragraph 3(1)(a) with the following: “the Canadian broadcasting system should maximize ownership and control by Canadians”.
We've been following the criticism of the bill. Some of it is hostility to regulation or hostility to cultural sovereignty, but some of the criticism of the bill is fair. There are loopholes to be closed and policy questions to be answered. We are pleased that this committee has asked the minister to answer some of those questions by tabling a draft cabinet directive to the CRTC.
As I said, the bill itself must say that foreign media companies will not be able to buy up domestic media companies, whether conventional or online. Cabinet or the bill should also direct that news broadcasting remain 100% Canadian-owned. Above all, cabinet or the bill must empower the CRTC to dedicate a stream of industry funding for local TV news with strict conditions to tie in to a head count of journalists and media workers. That's missing from the draft directive that has been tabled. Experts and industry leaders appearing before you have already driven this point home.
News is a priority cultural good in our broadcasting world. Journalism is essential to democracy. We saw how true that statement was on January 6 south of the border. We can't afford to be smug about Canadian democracy. Bill C-10 is a generational opportunity to address the underfunding of television news journalism. We can't miss it.
The last thing to say is what Bill C-10 doesn't do. To be fair, [Technical difficulty—Editor] said it would. It does nothing to stem the drain of advertising revenue from all of our media industries, including radio and television, by Google and Facebook. This Parliament has to act on that, and soon. Netflix is just the “N” in FAANG. Bill C-10 must be just the beginning in our defence of our sovereignty.
Thank you very much. Howard and I would be very happy to answer any questions.