Cancon Regulation Essay

Back when televisions were in black and white, Canada’s confidence in its own culture was low. Before technology gave the gift of internet and social media, there weren't many ways to promote Canada’s culture and to help its artistic creativity. Canada needed to find a way to truly reflect the Canadian attitudes, opinions, and ideas. And as years went by and technology progressed, television and radios made it easier for Canada to do just that. But what exactly did they do?

Essentially the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunication Commission (CRTC), “an independently constituted regulatory agency(armstrong)”, enforced a regulation for broadcasters to devote a big portion of their airtime to canadian programming. There are two main reasons

This is a big concern considering 2017 is a modern and digitalized era. This also raises the question that if the regulations can keep up with the non-stop advancing technology, seeing that previously it took the CRTC 23 years to update its regulation. An aspect to view this issue from is the business point of view. As stated before, broadcasters are required to devote most of the air time to canadian content.That means “for broadcast stations, requires that 60% yearly, and at least 50% of prime-time programming, 6:00 pm to midnight, be of Canadian origin.(crtc)”. The problem is since not that many people are interested in canadian content, these companies don't make enough revenue. In technicality, “Canadian recordings take up 35% of programming, but their share of market in Canada is well below this number at about 14,5%”(canada at 32) In fact many radio broadcasters have struggled to meeting the Cancon quotas because of the difficulty to find quality content.This sequence results in them filling the requirements with cheap and poor quality material. These adjustments in the industry also limits the consumer's choices, ultimately making them watch those poor quality content that broadcasters put out, rather than their favourite non- canadian

This shows the impact online media has not only on canada but the world. It is no secret the internet has provided the canadian consumers with an easier option to view content. “27.9 million Canadians use a desktop computer to access the internet monthly”(Canadian media stats) and that's about 77% of the canada's population. Undoubtedly the online world plays a major role in our lives. Since CanCon was regulated before the internet and digital era, streaming services and online content technically don't count as a commercial broadcasters and don't fall under CanCun's jurisdictions.(somehere). Therefore the CRTC can’t enforce any regulations on them. For instance one of the most controversial topics surrounding the CRTC was the global streaming giant, Netflix. Since netflix launched in 1997 it has rapidly grew and attracted audiences from all over the world. Currently netflix went from 22 million subscribers in 2011 to 109 million subscribers in 2017(statista). A large part of the criticism has focused on the fact that Netflix is not required to pay sales taxes on the hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue it draws from Canadian customers each year; and that it is not required to dedicate a portion of its revenues toward the creation of Canadian content the way that domestic broadcasters are. CRTC’s initial reaction was to tax netflix as a