Thank you for inviting us.
I'm Catherine Edwards with the Canadian Association of Community Television Users and Stations.
With me is Amélie Hinse, the executive director of the Fédération des télévisions communautaires autonomes du Québec.
Our organizations advocate for access to digital media training, production support and distribution, so that individuals and communities can express themselves. The not-for-profit community element employs 1,000 staff, trains more than 20,000 volunteers annually, broadcasts in 80 languages and produces a million hours of local content over the air, on cable, on satellite and online for one-tenth of the cost of an hour of production in the public and private sectors.
We believe community-owned media is the best way to serve communities with local news and to ensure that a diversity of voices continues to fill our airwaves. We're pleased to provide comments on the Rogers-Shaw merger, because community TV and, consequently, access to local news for more than 300 communities that community TV once served has been decimated over the last 20 years by prior mergers undertaken by these companies.
Of the more than 300 cable community TV stations that once formed the backbone of the community element, over 75% have closed as Canada's cable giants have withdrawn production infrastructure to the cities and focused their energies on specialty channels and selling TV subscriptions and mobile services. For example, Rogers used to have 12 neighbourhood community TV offices around the Vancouver Lower Mainland. They were closed in 1998, when Rogers sold its western systems to Shaw. Vancouverites from White Rock to North Van were expected to make their way to Shaw corporate headquarters for access to our broadcasting system.
Since New Westminster's Shaw community TV studio was shut, Mr. Julian has volunteered to help cover events for the NewWest.tv not-for-profit start-up, a CACTUS member attempting to fill the gap left by Shaw. These stations ensure that you, as parliamentarians, can reach your constituents to talk about the issues that are important. They are not sound bites meted out to you by megacorporations more interested in blockbuster U.S. series, but community-owned entities committed to supporting local democracy.
Mr. Coteau, the same happened in Toronto. Rogers, like Shaw, consolidated all of its community TV production studios into one corporate headquarters, before finally closing in 2017.
Mr. Bittle, up until 2003, there was a Cogeco community channel devoted to St. Catharines that disappeared by 2011. Subscribers in St. Catharines now see a community channel from Niagara, which is also shared with Grimsby.
This process of zoning former distinct community channels into a single regional channel has been permitted by the CRTC following the urging of Rogers in 2006. Mr. Nater, Ms. Lewis and Mr. Louis, Rogers claimed to have distinct community channels on its website in Waterloo, Kitchener, London, Stratford, Guelph and Cambridge, but, in fact, a single zoned channel serves all these mid-sized cities, with only occasional insertions of content specific to each city.
Rogers and Shaw have told the CRTC that they couldn't afford to keep separate stations open, but communities were never asked whether they'd like the opportunity to run the channels in a more cost-effective model. Rogers has been particularly vicious in eliminating competition for its own regional community channels.
In New Brunswick, which used to have over 30 community TV stations, Rogers shut down all but six when its fibre optic connected the province. The community-owned station in Chatham was told by Rogers that fibre optics would no longer enable two-way programming. Chatham residents could continue to receive Rogers TV from across the province, but they would no longer be able to see Chatham's community-produced content. It was a lie.
When Rogers shut down production studios in St. Stephen and St. George, two of the three villages in Charlotte County, and started piping in its provincial Rogers TV, our St. Andrews member was told by a Rogers technician that Rogers had inserted a cable trap at the St. Andrews boundary to purposefully limit distribution of the community-owned signal.
In 2017, under intense lobbying by Rogers, the CRTC gave cable companies the green light to redirect most of Canada's community TV, or local expression, budget to support their failing private news properties by the independent local news fund. Shaw invested its Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary local expression budgets in Global, and—