I was a guest on Jesse Brown’s popular podcast Canadaland the other day. Please give it a listen. I discuss some of the ideas addressed in this column.
The lesson of Mikhail Gorbachev is that reform isn’t always possible. Just as women can’t be half pregnant and antebellum America couldn’t be half free, an economy cannot survive being half centrally-planned. Perestroika permitted certain sectors of the Soviet economy to be rebuilt according to free market principles, but this only made the remaining closed sectors appear more odious. Talk of “inherent contradictions” within the Soviet model — an economic system promising to serve the interests of the proletariat was clearly doing anything but — became louder, and culminated in collapse.
Canadian television remains one of the last holdouts of Soviet-style socialism, a description that is accurate despite its sensationalism. Decisions over which shows get made, which shows can be aired at what hour, how stations can raise revenue, and what channels consumers can purchase — and in what combination — are all subordinate to the ideological goals of Ottawa, as opposed to market forces.
It’s for this reason I find myself sympathizing with Bell Canada president Kevin Crull, and his recent temper-tantrum that resulted in Canadian Radio and Telecommunication Commission (CRTC) chairman Jean-Pierre Blais being briefly banned from the airwaves of CTV, a Bell subsidiary (I should note for the record that I collect a regular paycheque from CTV thanks to my weekly appearance on a current events roundtable).
Crull was infuriated at Chairman Blais’ recent decree that cable providers like his can no longer force consumers to subscribe to channels in excessively large minimum bundles, with Blais instead inventing his own $25 “Skinny Bundle” minimum. Since cable companies practice a sort of redistributionist economics in which revenues generated by popular channels subsidize the existence of unpopular ones (excess profits from the hockey channel may prop up the wildlife channel, for instance), a forced breakup of the big bundle system invariably throws the future of smaller channels into question —and thus the cable companies’ bottom line.
Crull’s response was petulant and vindictive, but I imagine it must be maddening to work in an over-regulated industry whose rules are subject to erratic and arbitrary change for erratic and arbitrary reason. Chairman Blais clearly views himself as a democratic folk hero in the Gorbachev mold, a man determined to win popularity and acclaim by proving consumer satisfaction can exist within a closed economic system so long as the central planner-in-chief is creative and compassionate.
The unbundling decision came in the aftermath of similar decrees designed to demonstrate Blais’ self-declared “consumers first” agenda, including the elimination of Canadian content quotas for daytime TV, a requirement that Canada’s two would-be Netflix competitors, Showme and Crave, must be available to all Canadians, not just those who subscribe to their parent cable companies, and — most nakedly populist of all — a demand that Canadian airings of the Superbowl feature the cool American commercials. That last one hit Bell — who owns the Superbowl airing rights in Canada — particularly hard, and the company is now taking the CRTC to court to fight a decision that threatens to rob the network of hundreds of millions of dollars in ad revenue.
Blais is an all-star for now, but like Gorbachev, in the long term his actions will merely emphasize the internal contradictions of the Soviet economic model rather than mitigate them. The chairman remains officially committed to the ideological assumptions that inspired the creation of his department in the first place — that Canadians need protection from the corrosive cultural influences of American media and that government must actively limit what Canadians can watch and micromanage how cable networks spend their money. It’s an assumption that is simply not shared by the majority of Canadian consumers whose habits indicate they want more American media in their lives and are deeply irritated by the inflated prices required to subsidize the creation of unwanted Canadian alternatives.
Blais wears the mantle of the all-knowing arbitrator of what is or isn’t “fair” or in the “public interest,” but his solutions are motivated by appeasement, not resolution, and are therefore deeply unsatisfying.
Canadians do not want a “skinny bundle” — they want no bundles. They do not want Can-con free mornings, they want Can-con free evenings, too. Industry managers and content producers want a regime of light and stable regulation, not rules that change on a whim in order to placate public resentment with short bursts of populist pandering.
Gorbachev eventually fell, but only after a botched coup by hardliners who realized the existential danger he presented to a fast-crumbling regime. If one of the left-wing parties is elected this fall, will Canada’s progressive cultural nationalists demand similar retaliation against the CRTC’s loose cannon?