Thank you, Dr. Fry, and good morning, committee members.
My name is Troy Reeb, and I am with Corus Entertainment. On behalf of our more than 3,000 employees across Canada, I want to thank you for inviting us to discuss Bill C-11, which we urge Parliament to pass without delay.
Corus is proud to be Canada's leading independent media and content company. We have subsidiaries such as the renowned animation studio Nelvana, our children's book publisher Kids Can Press, and Corus Studios, which is a leading producer of lifestyle and documentary programs.
Toon Boom, our Montreal division, creates software for international studios.
All told, our Canadian content is exported to 160 countries worldwide, but our bread and butter remains broadcasting in Canada. We operate 15 local Global Television stations, 39 radio stations and 33 speciality channels, such as Treehouse, Séries Plus and Food Network Canada. We're the proud home of Global News, one of Canada's largest journalism organizations, which supports communities across Canada. To emphasize, Corus is a pure-play media business. We have no cable and no telecom assets to subsidize us.
Canadian broadcasting policy is primarily cultural policy. It uses regulations and licences to promote cultural objectives such as representation, creative expression, national identity and connectedness. Canadians care a lot about these issues and hold a wide range of views on them, but I hope there's one thing we can all agree on: Successful Canadian broadcasting policy depends on successful Canadian broadcasters. One simply cannot exist without the other.
Corus and other Canadian broadcasters continue to embrace our responsibilities in the system, but we can no longer support the onerous regulatory framework of the past entirely on our own, with no similar obligations on foreign players that don't just operate in our marketplace but now threaten to dominate it. The status quo is unsustainable.
For example, Corus is extremely proud to be a local news provider. We're uniquely able to provide this vital cultural contribution through local stations that foreign streamers cannot and will never replicate. However, local news is a challenging business. Traditionally, we've offset our losses in local news through more profitable entertainment programming, but our ability to do this is fading fast. To be clear, news is Canadian content and journalists are Canadian creators who actually live in Canadian communities; they don't just visit for the duration of a production cycle.
Corus has received international awards for innovation for developing new models to sustain local journalism long into the future, but even the best people and ideas cannot overcome badly outdated regulation. Today, broadcasting regulations dictate how much we must spend on certain kinds of shows, when our shows can air, the types of songs we have to play on our radio stations and the number of commercials we can broadcast per hour. Our mandatory spending levels on Canadian content have hardly changed, despite decades passing since the World Wide Web first became a thing.
Most of the rules we operate under were designed for an industry that simply no longer exists, one where radio and TV stations enjoyed privileged access to Canadian audiences. Today, among the largest TV networks in Canada are foreign digital companies with no cultural policy obligations, and the largest sellers of local advertising in Canada are, again, foreign digital players that have no requirements for local programming.
I repeat: the status quo is unsustainable.
We support Bill C-11 because it gets the biggest thing right: It would finally bring the foreign digital broadcasters that operate in Canada into the regulatory framework. We can achieve no other meaningful broadcasting policy reforms until this gets done. After more than a decade of unregulated foreign competition and six years of rolling consultations, it is long past time to update this 30-year-old law.
To be sure, Bill C-11 is not perfect, and we will recommend a few amendments in our written brief. For example, there's no reason Canadian media companies should have to pay millions in part II licence fees when foreign competitors will not, and there's no reason that Canadian media companies should be left with higher obligations than our foreign competitors. All we ask for is a level playing field with modern regulations for all.
Some will argue here today that this bill is unnecessary. They claim that all is well with Canadian broadcasting, that foreign digital media companies operate in a different market because they live online. Believe me, I wish that were true, but it simply is not. Here is our reality: Facebook and Google compete with us for advertising; Netflix and Amazon compete with us for audiences; and the same U.S. studios that used to license us content for Canadian televisions now take it directly to Canadians themselves, causing programming costs to skyrocket.