Bell’s announcement this week that it is laying off thousands of workers – including nearly 500 Bell Media employees – has sparked political outrage with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau characterizing it as a “garbage decision.” The job losses are obviously brutal for those directly affected and it would be silly to claim that a single policy response was responsible. Yet to suggest that the government’s media policy, particularly Bills C-11 and C-18, played no role is to ignore the reality of a failed approach for which there have been blinking warning signs for years. Indeed, Trudeau’s anger (which felt a bit like a reprise of his Meta comments over the summer) may partly reflect frustration that his policy choices have not only not worked, but have made matters worse.
Bill C-11, the online streaming law that is now before the CRTC, was never really designed to address Bell’s broadcasting concerns. Indeed, the company made clear what it wanted: access to cheap U.S. programming. When the company appeared before committee back in 2022, it said its primary risk was competition from foreign streaming services accessing the Canadian market directly and by-passing Canadian broadcasters. This challenge has been readily apparent for years. In fact, in 2011 I wrote about how this was likely to become a major issue for Canadian broadcasters dependent on licensing U.S. programming to profitably fill their broadcast schedules:
Once U.S. rights holders conclude that it is more profitable to retain the Internet rights so that they can stream their programs online to a global audience and capture the advertising or subscription revenues that come with it, Canadian broadcasters may find that they can only license broadcast rights with the U.S. rights holders competing directly with them via the Internet.
This was back in 2011. More than a decade later, Bell wanted the government to fix the commercial problem by intervening through Bill C-11:
“We can ensure the central role of Canadian broadcasters by securing access to foreign content. We can also incentivize foreign streamers to partner with Canadian broadcasters, much like foreign linear services have done for decades. We believe Bill C-11 should explicitly enable this.
Bill C-11 rightly doesn’t do that, but removing licensing fees said to be worth $40 million was supposed to help. That approach of shovelling money through grants, tax credits, reduced fees, or regulated payments has been the government’s go-to strategy for years and the only thing it seems to bring are demands for more.
The layoffs on the news side of the business implicates both Bills C-11 and C-18. In the case of Bill C-11, broadcasters are still holding out hope that the CRTC will order the large online streaming services such as Netflix, Disney and Amazon to contribute to their local news production costs. The Canadian Association of Broadcasters has asked the Commission to create a new News Fund that it would administer. Funding for the fund would come from the Internet streaming services, with 30% of their contribution allocated toward a sector with which they have virtually no connection whatsoever. Even if the CRTC agrees, the fund would not take effect until later this year and Bell was apparently unwilling to wait to see how it plays out.
While I have seen some suggest that Bill C-18…
