It's an observation that community media is ten times as cost effective as private or public sector media, and it's really the only cost-effective model for smaller communities.
It's disappointing that Rogers and Shaw, the two companies at the focus of this, have been the reason that we've lost most of those smaller stations. They're certainly not serving them with their private stations. In fact, we're in a crazy situation now where, for example, Rogers extracts money from its cable subscribers in New Brunswick to support Citytv in Toronto. None of that money is flowing back into the communities from which it's extracted.
When an independent local news fund was created in 2017 from what was formerly recognized as community TV money, it was called “local expression spending”. They gave cable companies carte blanche the ability to move the money to their private properties, to move it around among their community stations and to shut stations in big cities.
Unfortunately, we're seeing the results of that, and our experience is that the CRTC.... These companies are just too big. The bigger they get, the more difficult it is to get them to observe policies, even when they're put on paper. We complain and point out that they're not being followed, and nothing happens year after year.
We just don't see how further consolidation is going to address local news or the problems the regulator has getting them to follow the policies that are already in place.
Thanks for the question.