Barrel Strength

I am reading the most bizarre stuff about the CRTC these days. You know the CRTC I am talking about: the omnicompetent, omniscient regulator of broadcasting, the far-seeing enabler of leftist hegemony, not the dupes who got suckered into setting bit caps too low and allowing the carriers to charge too much for too little. Am I reading about the same group of people? Apparently so.

Lorne Gunter’s entertaining column in the National Post Full Comment blog largely straightens out the story published in the Globe and Mail, which was floridly mad.

Mad I say, mad! Deranged. For this correction of the Globe story, we who know the inside of government are grateful to our learned friend Mr. Gunter.

There was a public outcry – what we would call an Astroturf campaign so as to distinguish it from a grass roots protest- against the CRTC’s attempted obedience to the rulings of the Standing Joint Committee on the Scrutiny of Regulations, formerly the Standing Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments. Never heard of the Standing Joint Committee? I am sure there are many of you who live outside of the NatCap whose lives remain blissfully undisturbed by any notion of what the Committee does. May your lives continue as such.

The Standing Committee had been subjecting the CRTC to water torture for ten years to get it to correct its regulations regarding false and misleading news. The regulation would not survive the scrutiny of any reasonable Court for ten minutes. This is the era of the Charter. It means that the rights of people to speak, whether by way of blogs, newspapers or television may not be subjected to unreasonable measures. The law was probably always this way but the Charter has armed the judiciary against the other branches of government, in order to protect our rights and freedoms. (For the sake of argument, conservatives, please indulge me without flipping out about the absence of  property rights, the malefactions of the Court Party and its myrmidons in human rights commissions.)

As Gunter writes:

Concerned that this rule would never withstand a Charter challenge because it is too vague and broad, the joint committee told the CRTC to change the regulation so that it applied only to a licensee who “knowingly” broadcasts news that is “false or misleading and that endangers or is likely to endanger the lives, health or safety of the public.”

This is standard operating procedure in government. Every piece of legislation and every regulation must be made conformable to the Charter and, as much as reasonably possible, proof against Charter challenge. It is the Joint Committee that chides government lawyers  to accomplish this.

In the uncharitable interpretation, the Committee’s lawyers are notorious in government for being intolerable even unto other lawyers for their persnicketiness, for the general pettifogging rule of the minor mind which has become separated from any strategic or operational objectives. In the less uncharitable interpretation, the lawyers assigned to the Joint Committee have a reputation across the government for hyper vigilance for potential Charter violations, and a persistence over time that is unbounded either by profit or by practical considerations.

So when this micro-event blows up, the Standing Committee said it was no longer interested in the question, whereupon the CRTC’s Chairman immediately grasps the opportunity not to take up further Commission time  with this issue. When I say “further time”, I remind you that the Joint Committee’s nagging had been going on for ten years, and even government agencies know when their time is being wasted.

And this is where our friend Lorne Gunter goes off his particular rails.

 “As for the CRTC’s contention that it didn’t want to change the regulation in the first place, but gave into the committee because after 10 years it had run out of delaying tactics, can anyone imagine that the regulator called for public submissions precisely because it knew a lefty firestorm would follow and it surmised that would be the best way to stop the committee insisting on the change?”

Lorne, get a grip! 

The CRTC is obliged by law to publish for public comment a proposed amendment to a regulation . See Section 10 (3) of the Broadcasting Act  if you doubt me.

As it happened, following the Astroturf campaign, the Joint Committee told the CRTC that it was no longer interested in seeing the change it had insisted on for ten years, thereby overruling its own lawyers,  and the Heritage Committee, to which the CRTC also reports on broadcasting matters. voted recently not hear the Commission explain why it had dropped the issue. Case closed.

But the weirdest thing about the whole matter is that the misnamed “Fox New North” already has its licence. First, it is not associated with Fox News or Rupert Murdoch in any way,  but is a wholly owned enterprise of Pierre-Karl Peladeau, owner of Viedotron. Second , the proposed news channel obtained a class 2 cable television licence this summer. A class 2 licence is issued without a hearing and furthermore does not require a carrier to carry it. They are issued by the dozen to Chinese, Hindi and Gujarati television channels, for example. Whether Peladeau’s news channel is carried or not is a matter of negotiation with the large carriers: Rogers, Bell, Shaw and Videotron, which is owned by Peladeau himself. Since it has won carriage with Rogers and Bell, Canadians are going to get the opportunity to pay for Peladeau’s news channel, if they want it, on terms arranged between the large carriers.

If the Left wanted to argue that too much power has been handed to large carriers, that would be a debate worth having. Instead it deludes itself and its useful idiots into a pointless debate about false and misleading news, which is like missing the assassination of a Pope for an ambulance chase.

But maybe they do not want to rein in the power of large carriers, because they believe that, with that power, they can regulate to limit free speech. See Tim Wu’s The Master Switch for further reading.

There is too much error in the world for Lorne Gunter and me to fix. But thank you, Lorne, for your part in the neverending struggle.