Canada-wide
Open Letter sent to Prime Minister Calling for DTV Education Campaign
On September 10, 2010, CACTUS, along with 18 other broadcasting, cultural, and civil society organizations sent an open letter to the Prime Minister calling for a comprehensive national education campaign on the digital transition.
Click here to read the English version.
Click here to read the French version.
The Digital Transition in Your Community
The way TV signals were delivered over the air changed in Canada beginning in August 2011. If you have a cable or satellite subscription, your service was unaffected. If you watch TV using an antenna ("bunny ears") mounted on the TV or on your roof, one of the following situations applies:
- In most major towns and cities, broadcasters upgraded their signals to digital. You needed either a digital TV or a digital-to-analog converter box to continue watching over-the-air TV with an antenna.
- In smaller communities, some of your local broadcasters may have upgraded or may yet upgrade their signals to digital (and you'll need a digital TV or converter box). Others may continue broadcasting in analog. In both cases, you can continue watching free TV, for now.
When the analog transmitters reach the end of their useful life, however, local broadcasters may elect not to replace them. At that time, you and your neighbours would have to subscribe to cable or satellite to continue to watch TV. For example, on July 31st, 2012, TVO and the CBC will cease all analog broadcasts (everywhere outside the major cities where signals were upgraded to digital last year).
To find out whether your community will continue to receive free over-the-air TV signals after August 31st 2011, check the web site on the Digital Transition maintained by Canadian Heritage.
Your community has options to maintain these services and to add new ones. For more information about Community Distribution of TV and other services, click here:
NEW OPPORTUNITIES: COMMUNITY DISTRIBUTION
This information can also be viewed as a .pdf file by clicking the link below.
The Transition to Digital Over-the-Air Television: New Opportunities (.pdf)
This information has been developed and is maintained by volunteers. If you have found it useful, please make a donation to CACTUS.
New CRTC Community TV Policy Little Better than Previous One
After eight long years of complaints from the Canadian public that they have been excluded from “community TV channels” on cable, the CRTC recently released a new community TV policy for Canada that is little better than the existing policy.
As dissenting Commissioner Michel Morin dubs it, “The Commission’s paternalistic community model” leaves community cable channels and the money that is collected from Canadians for “local expression” firmly under the control of cable companies. Catherine Edwards, Spokesperson for the Canadian Association of Community Television Users and Stations (CACTUS) noted, “The Commission ignored the request of the Canadian public—which was made abundantly clear at these hearings—that the time has come for community broadcasting to be in the hands of communities, as it is in all other countries that have a community sector. This is how it operates here in Canada in the community radio sector. Why not TV?”
Licences for communities to run their own channels were introduced in 2002, but there was no funding formula. The CRTC’s analysis acknowledges that a lack of funding explains why so few community licenses have been requested, yet the new policy denies communities access to the Local Programming Initiative Fund, to commercial advertising, and to the more than $120 million collected annually from Canadians for “local expression”, but which instead goes to cable companies for their professional regional channels.
Edwards reflected, “What’s particularly sad is how outdated the Commission’s model of community TV is. Approximately 40% of Canadians don’t subscribe to cable, so a cable channel as a digital townhall for Canadians just doesn’t work anymore. We also presented data to show that the majority of the more than 300 unique community channels and studios that once existed on cable have already been closed. This evidence appears to have been ignored. The relatively minor tweaks to the existing policy do nothing to address the closures.”
CACTUS proposed a new model of community broadcasting that would offer access to digital technologies, tools and training in every community across the country, available on all platforms, not just cable. “It’s a real missed opportunity,” said Edwards.
The two apparent improvements to the existing policy are the following:
1) Access Content Minimum Raised
The 2002 policy stipulated that a minimum of 30% of a cable community channel's content must be "access programming". In the new policy, this minimum is 50%, which sounds like a lot more equitable relationship with the cable company, except for these facts:
- The new minimum doesn't take effect for four more years! This is almost unheard of in CRTC policy-making. Policies themselves are supposed to be re-examined every three years, so this renders the change almost meaningless, and also implies that a review can't occur for at least another seven years! Complainants during this year's hearing have effectively been silenced for a long time into the future... a meaningless amount of time in today's fast-changing communications environment.
- The existing 30% minimum was unenforceable. The Commission had audited cable operators from 2002 through 2006, knew the minimum was not being met, yet did nothing. Cable operators routinely classified their own staff-produced magazine programming as "access programming" on the grounds that the ideas for the segments came from the community, and that the community was given air-time in front of the camera talking about their organizations and events.
2) New Definition of "Access Programming"
The new policy attempts to address this problem by defining "access programming" as programming initiated by the community and in which the community plays a creative role on the production team, but that role can still just be an on-camera role. This means that the new-magazine format that most cable companies now favour (over full-length programs produced by volunteers) could still be claimed as "access programming".
- Even if 50% of the programming week is given over to the exhibition of "access programming", the onus is still on the public to monitor and enforce the limit, and the community will always be fighting for control of a channel with a for-profit entity whose priorities are elsewhere.
The Commission has not absorbed the message that "access" to the airwaves is not just about single Canadians getting to make programs here and there. The overall direction of a channel, its mandate, its training and staffing policies--all affect the identity of the channel and its impact and ability to interact with a community's culture on every level. These need to be under the community's control to have a chance of achieving the community's full aspirations. Access TV is meant to be a learning process... it's about media literacy. You can't have a corporation mediating that process on behalf of a community in today's hyper-competitive climate. It is "patronizing", as Commissioner Morin wrote. And with the size of today's cable companies the relationship will always be grotesquely unequal.
Quebec's community producing groups had asked to be given licenses that would put them in equal control of spending and programming decisions with the cable operator (still an uneasy and illogical partnership in a 500-channel universe... is there really not room for both?) and even that was denied.
We can interpret this decision on the part of the Commission as either extremely cynical or extremely naive, or perhaps a peculariarly Canadian weird combination of both. We can either believe that the Commission serves its client license-holders first and foremost (cable companies) and the public whom the Broadcasting Act is meant to serve a distant second (the cynical take), or we can suppose they really believe that it is possible for individual citizens at the community level to share control of a television channel with a national corporation (the naive take).
Or perhaps a third interpretation is the disappointing truth: that the Commissioners just have bigger fish to fry and not much time to spend on this. How many times did they meet since the oral hearing to rewrite the policy? Once maybe? Very little has changed. It's still a long rambling policy with many unclear and apparently contradictory requirements for multiple classes of community licenses, when we had asked for a simple policy with a single over-the-air community-access license class, with mandatory carriage in the basic cable tier, like any other local channel.
In any case, these are the principal new elements to the policy (the Commission did hear our message that there are problems with access), it's just that the Commissioners' proposed solution is to prop up the existing, outdated, and unworkable system. They didn't listen to Canadians on what the solutions should be, despite the fact that the policy is meant to serve us, and we are the ones on the ground who have been experiencing the deficits in the current policy.
They also apparently ignored evidence about the vast number of station closures and the damage done by zone-based licensing, presumably because the only logical solution to that problem is independent over the air truly local channels, and they're not prepared to take away funding from cable companies to do it.
There are a few other tweaks to the policy whose potential impacts we are still discussing. More soon.
Feel free to add your thoughts on the new policy. Anyone can create a membership and post comments at any time.
Cathy Edwards
CACTUS Spokesperson
Analysis of Submissions to 2009-661
By Richard Ward
Community Media Education Society
In the comments listed on the CRTC web site under the current review of community television policy (CRTC 2009-661), groups supporting CACTUS include ACTRA; the Directors' Guild; CTV; Canwest; the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union; the Canadian Conference for the Arts; the Independent Media Arts Alliance; the National Community Radio Association; and NUTV in Calgary. MultiMedia Centre support comes from the City of Burnaby, Metro Vancouver, the Canadian Media Guild, the Documentary Organization of Canada, OpenMedia, the Canadian Library Association and Friends of Canadian Broadcasting.
Altogether 3,007 people responded to the CRTC of whom 2,670 are published on the website. Four single comments are actually large collections of letters: 2510 generally supporting the CACTUS model. A quick look at the first 50 letters in comment #3002 (which alone has 2,080 letters) demonstrates diversity of ideas comparable to most of the letters published individually by the CRTC.
Comment #2973 is an 18-signature petition on behalf of the Fédération des télévisions communautaires autonomes du Québec. Counting these responses individually gives a total of 3,103 supporting CACTUS and the Fédération, compared to 2,714 supporting Rogers. The only sure conclsion is that many people feel strongly about their community channel.
Ontario is heavily represented with 1,972 comments, about 60% of the national total. Quebec with 441 and New Brunswick with 250 letters are next in number. There are 486 comments from BC. Alberta is fifth with 151.
Among letters listed individually by the CRTC 1,284 support the current Rogers channel of which 155 are from Mississauga alone, with a further 149 from Toronto. Looking at other BDUs, Cogeco was supported by 473 letters and Shaw had 219. Comment #2024 points out many of the Mississauga letters were aggressively backgrounded by Rogers Mississauga, and the office document enclosed is in fact echoed in many of the Rogers support letters.
33 people wrote in to support the over-the-air model of CFTV in Leamington, Ontario. A further eight wrote in to praise Telile over-the-air broadcasting from Isle Madame, Nova Scotia.
In these comments generally BDUs no longer claim to offer a channel where people produce and control their own information. Of the Rogers support letters on the CRTC site, 636 are from guests on shows while only 75 are from producers and, of those, 32 self-identify as Rogers employees. For Cogeco the figures are 335 guests and 35 producers, ten of whom are staff. Shaw contrasts 175 guests versus 12 producers.
Looking a little deeper at the CRTC published comments, the largest category, 617 comments, simply likes having a local channel. Access is the theme for 315; being able to deliver information to the immediate neighbourhood: 213. 231 letters speak enthusiastically about volunteering as reporters or technicians, or interns from school and university media programs. 219 charities benefit from community TV, several by running TV bingo. Arts, sports, youth, multicultural and small business promotion add a further 516 comments. Of course many letters touch on several topics and choosing the main one is subjective, so these figures can all be seen as minimums. One letter from Bay Roberts, Newfoundland, makes the familiar remark that there would have been even more letters if the CRTC website was easier to navigate.
Council meetings are central for 98 writers. Revenue -- how the channel can be funded -- is the main theme for 77 letters. 130 writers say the community channel is important for access to government. In these three categories slightly over half of the letters come from people working in the public sphere: 39 from representatives at the provincial level, 9 from MPs and 107 from city officials.
Operating Principles for Community-Access Media Fund
CACTUS has continued to refine its model for the new Community-Access Media Fund proposed in its submission to the CRTC review on community television. The oral phase begins next Monday, April 26th, with CACTUS' own presentation.
The document "Revitalizing Canada's Community TV Sector: Operating Principles for the Community-Access Media Fund" can be viewed in full here.
It includes sample budgets for multimedia access centres and timetables for the roll-out of 250 such centres Canada-wide.
The document also includes suggested board structure for the Fund itself as well as board structures for the individual multimedia centres that could apply to the fund.
Also included are operating principles for those centres, including broadcasting codes, standards, and annual reporting requirements.
For more information, contact Cathy Edwards at (819) 772-2862.
Operating Principles for the Community-Access Media Fund
A Description of How the Community-Access Media Fund Will Work, including suggested structures for the boards of directors for the fund itself and for applicants, and suggested codes of ethics.
Also a suggested roll-out of new multimedia access centres.
Also the role of CACTUS with respect to CAMF in assisting the revitalization of the sector.
2002 CRTC Audit
Audit obtained under Access to Information requests from the CRTC conducted on community channels operated by Shaw, Rogers, Persona, Cogeco and Eastlink.
2003 CRTC Audit
Audit obtained under Access to Information requests from the CRTC conducted on community channels operated by Shaw, Rogers, Access, Cogeco and Westman.
2004 CRTC Audit
Audit obtained under Access to Information requests from the CRTC conducted on community channels operated by Shaw, Rogers, Persona, Cogeco and Eastlink.
2005 CRTC Audit
Audits obtained under Access to Information requests from the CRTC for audits conducted on community channels operated by Shaw, Rogers, Persona, and Eastlink.
