Thank you.
Mr. Chair and committee members, good morning. My name is Ferne Downey, and I am an actor and the national president of ACTRA. Today with me is Stephen Waddell, our national executive director.
Thank you for having us here today and for giving us this opportunity to speak on behalf of 21,000 performers in film, television, sound recordings, and radio and digital media who live and work in every corner of our country.
Canada's professional performers believe that ownership of our cultural industries by Canadians is crucial not only for our cultural sovereignty but also for our economic sovereignty.
We also believe it is a mistake to think you can relax foreign ownership rules for telecommunications without negatively impacting Canadian culture.
With increasing corporate consolidation and the rapid evolution of technology, telecommunications and broadcasting are quickly converging. Vertical integration means that telephone companies own cable, broadcast and satellite assets, and cable companies own telecommunications, satellites and broadcasters. Moreover, content is being delivered to Canadians through all of these channels. Telecoms and ISPs are effectively becoming broadcasters. You can no longer separate them.
If Rogers, Telus, and Bell's telecom interests are sold off to foreign interests, we will lose control not only of our telecom and satellite industries; we'll be one small step away from ceding complete control of our broadcasting and media industry. To me, that would be catastrophic.
Canadian broadcasting is a public good. It is critical to the health of our democracy and our unique cultural identity. Broadcasting shapes our opinions, our outlook on our community, our nation, our world, and ourselves. It is too influential, too precious, and too tied to who we are to let it fall into foreign hands.
We are already largely dominated by American culture. Our films barely make it into the multiplexes, and we struggle and struggle and struggle to get Canada's private broadcasters to schedule our own programs in prime time. Our culture certainly cannot survive, let alone thrive, if our prime-time schedules are dictated by executives at NBC Universal in Los Angeles.
A healthy democracy needs diversity in programming choices and editorial opinions. We cannot have a healthy democracy when all of our newsrooms are in New York, Washington, and Chicago. How will we know what is happening in our communities? How will you, our elected leaders, communicate and learn about your constituents?
We believe Canadian voices are worth hearing, sharing, and celebrating. We must not open the door to foreign ownership and allow those voices to be drowned out.
I will ask Stephen Waddell to talk some more about the negative impact of opening up foreign ownership of telecommunications.