Canadian Heritage committee  Yes, for sure, and I think it's the responsibility for helping to prop up and support Canadian content generation, whether it's music or television, or film as well.

Canadian Heritage committee  I think of what happened with radio within the context of a global pandemic. Radio advertising got hit really hard, because a lot of its advertisers are local. At the same time, it really stepped up to provide the information that people needed. That's not necessarily the newsca

Canadian Heritage committee  The biggest impact has been felt in advertising. As I said, about 50% of the advertising market in Canada is held by foreign platforms, Google, Facebook and the like. That has had serious effects, including devaluing the advertising on the market. It has also driven up the price

Canadian Heritage committee  Throughout the decade when foreign platforms were able to enter the Canadian market completely unfettered, we did not see spending on news go up, but we didn't see it go down down a whole lot either. However, the costs of news and information programming definitely increased. Du

Canadian Heritage committee  The main thing you would see is that you would have an amount of money that could be reinvested within those organizations themselves. In some ways, a taxation dollar—I'm not sure if it's the first or last dollar out—could be retained within the broadcasting companies and could a

Canadian Heritage committee  I would make the distinction and say not “production funds” but rather “production” itself. There is that distinction. In terms of how much is being put into production, it's just under $2 billion per year. That doesn't include news, which, between TV, radio and specialty, is so

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes. I think that on the one side you have big challenges for the advertising dollar for broadcasters, as the advertising market now is about 50% made up of digital platforms. On the other side, many of the regulatory obligations that have been there for years remain in place. If

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes, that's certainly something that I hear at times. Especially, too, people will make comments along the lines of, “Nobody listens to the radio anymore.” Well, we have numbers saying that about 70% of Canadians in the run of a week are listening to the radio in some way, shape

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today about this important bill. The Canadian Association of Broadcasters, or CAB, is the national voice of Canada's private broadcasters, representing more than 800 members around t

Canadian Heritage committee  I think I would want to reframe that and say that it's not about reducing CanCon. That's not what we've been talking about. I think it's about being more flexible about the sorts of CanCon that Canadian broadcasters can invest in. Right now there are fairly strict rules on what s

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes. Effectively, within the last decade it's been a really dramatic change in terms of what the advertising landscape looks like in Canada. Now 50% of it is going to online services. That's a whole new competitor. I would say that 80% of the online advertising that's done in C

Canadian Heritage committee  There are really the two giants of the online—

Canadian Heritage committee  They have the scale and the ability to be able to take advertising and distribute it. They're certainly much larger, and they're able to undercut the prices of, for example, a Canadian company trying to get into this area. They would be able to undercut that company by virtue of

Canadian Heritage committee  —to capital markets around the world, and if we want to say that, well, they can do that, and Canadian operators can only bring in—

Canadian Heritage committee  I don't think that it's attempting to change the behaviour; I think it's attempting to recognize the behaviour. I think that part of the problem that we have is that the Broadcasting Act is still looking at broadcasting as if it were 1992 and not as it is in 2021. It's very much