A former Canada Media Fund board member defends funding local, cultural TV
So I love television. I’m a huge believer in shared pop culture experiences, and television is still the thing that the largest number of us can experience together at the same time. In a country the size of ours, and with a huge amount of U.S.-created content wafting northward, protecting and nurturing Canadian television is especially important.
Which makes the CRTC’s decision to axe the Local Programming Improvement Fund especially perplexing to me.
The LPIF was created in 2008 to help subsidize local stations that can’t produce their content for the amount of revenue they can generate from advertising. This isn’t unique to local programming, however the truth of the Canadian television industry is that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, programming is subsidized.
I spent three years on the board of the Canada Media Fund. In that time we allotted about a billion dollars to the creation of TV (mostly) and digital media. There are other funds and tax incentives for TV-makers as well. The truth is pretty simple: television is expensive to produce and, in Canada, advertising alone can’t pay for it.
Which brings us to a debate we hear more and more: what’s the case for regulation and protectionism versus a totally free market?
Our culture industries aren’t immune to this. In fact, I’d argue that they’re more at risk than a lot of our other sectors. In English Canada, we fight massive U.S. production and advertising budgets. Québec can make it work for the bigger shows that have the advantage of a sort of cultural void that foreign programming simply won’t fill.
But for local programming—local news, for instance—both markets need an influx of additional funds. The average local station that subscribed to the LFIP took more than $1 million from it last year. At that level of reliance, some local stations will have to go off the air or radically restructure, especially in smaller markets where, I’d argue, they’re even more important. Our bigger cities have large local stations that won’t be as affected; many of these actually share resources across multiple channels. But for smaller markets, killing the LPIF will be devastating. Bell is already suggesting that six stations in their network could be on the chopping block. Without these stations, there might simply be no local TV news in some parts of the country.
Somehow, even in this era of live-tweeting everything, I just don’t think we’re ready for that. And I’m quite certain that in these smaller communities, where the penetration of digital and social is significantly lower than our larger cities, this might be a real problem.
There will be some posturing from our media giants about how they don’t want the LPIF to vanish, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to save these stations. Cable providers were actually passing the cost of paying into this fund onto consumers and will have to prove to the CRTC that our bills will drop a commensurate amount. So it seems unlikely that in the absence of that revenue (and with a message to their customers that a smaller bill is on the way) that anything will replace the Fund.
Lastly, the CBC received $40 million in yearly revenue from the LPIF, and it’s there that the cuts may be felt even more deeply. On the heels of the Conservative Government cutting $115 million from the CBC’s budget in March, this is a second, powerful blow against our national broadcaster. I believe in the CBC. It’s a part of our history, of course, but it’s also critical to our identity.
The overwhelming majority of us live within a two-hour drive of the the U.S.—the largest producer of television in the world—and for most of us there’s no language barrier. If we don’t fund our own television, we’ll continue to default to American programming, and I can’t shake this queasy feeling that there’s a subtle-but-relentless erosion of our national identity that follows. Other countries that aren’t that much bigger than ours—the U.K. and Australia are two good examples—do a much better job of supporting a subsidized, national television industry. Without tax dollars, that simply won’t happen here.
So while the CRTC’s official line is that the economy has recovered and local television programming can be supported by advertising dollars, don’t believe it. There won’t be local programming—and some local stations may even close—without the LPIF. And if this is a harbinger of things to come, it won’t just be local programming that vanishes. It could be the Canadian television itself.
Related
• CRTC axes Local Programming Improvement Fund
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Max Valiquette is managing director of strategy at Bensimon Byrne, his very favourite ad agency.
