Good morning, Mr. Chairman, committee members.
My name is Alain Pineau, and I am the National Director of the Canadian Conference of the Arts. Beside me are Mr. Garry Neil, President of Neil Craig Associates, our foreign ownership advisor. CCA is the oldest and most broadly-based arts, culture and heritage umbrella organization in Canada. Its mandate is to contribute to an informed debate on all federal policy and regulatory issues that in one way or another concern this large sector.
We thank you for this opportunity to intervene in the study you are conducting on foreign ownership rules and regulations in the telecommunications sector. This is a fundamentally important issue for Canadian culture in general, quite apart from the specific issues in the audiovisual sector. As a result of technological convergence and ownership concentration, the Canadian telecommunications and broadcasting sectors are in fact two aspects of the same reality. Telecommunications, cable and satellite companies, traditional broadcasters are increasingly owned by the same interest groups that compete against each other in the same sectors, including that of access to cultural content, and increasingly elsewhere.
This is why we believe it is virtually impossible to change foreign ownership rules in telecom and isolate broadcasting from the consequences of doing so. Opening the door to foreign control of satellite and telecoms can only lead to a domino effect and to foreign ownership of cable companies and broadcasters.
Some of Canada's largest corporations operate in these fields, and they would apply tremendous pressure on policy-makers to level the playing field, as we know, with their competitors and permit them to obtain foreign investment on the same terms. How will it be possible to deny one protagonist access to foreign investment granted to its main competitor? We've already seen Globalive. Where can we draw a clear line between the tangled interests of BCE, Rogers, CTVglobemedia, Telus, Shaw, or Quebecor--Quebecor in particular?
It has long been recognized in this country that market forces alone are insufficient to ensure we have access to a reasonable supply of high-quality Canadian choices in every medium, and that we need to have public policies and regulations to achieve these objectives. Ensuring Canadian ownership and effective control of our cultural industries is based on the notion that it is far easier to regulate Canadian-owned firms than foreign ones--not that we're making a success of it.
The absence of appropriate regulation in the movie industry is the best illustration of the impacts of foreign ownership and control of a cultural industry. Because film distribution policy does not effectively distinguish the distribution rights for the Canadian market from North American rights for most of the largest distributors, foreign film distributors maintain a lock on the majority of the film distribution activity in Canada. Foreign films--i.e., U.S. movies--occupy over 98% of screen time in English Canada. The situation is somewhat better in Quebec cinemas, for obvious reasons.
This is an eloquent example of foreign-controlled cultural industry shutting Canadian cultural goods and services out of the market with impunity, in a weak or ineffective policy context. Cultural products are not products like any other, as has been mentioned before. That fact was recognized by the Canadian government when it sought and obtained the cultural exemption clause in the free trade agreement in NAFTA. The fact that cultural products play a defining role for Canada as a nation is also a reason why Canada remains a key proponent of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions.
For the past several decades, the operating principle in Canadian cultural policy has been that Canadian ownership and effective control of our cultural industries will ensure more Canadian content is made available to Canadians. Canadians are more likely than non-Canadians to tell our own stories and to present our own view of the world based on our own values. Statistics support this belief. Canadian-owned firms are responsible for the overwhelming preponderance of production by Canadian artisan creators, even when they have only a small share of the domestic market.
It's also worth noting that Canada currently forbids foreign investment in Canadian broadcasting and telecom services. It simply prohibits foreign nationals from controlling those services. There is also no evidence that lack of foreign investment has hurt either industry.
Garry.