Canadian Content Laws Foolishly Archaic

Flashpoint, an action/cop drama TV series was picked up by CBS before CTV did. Apparently, it's quite popular in the United States. It's also a Canadian show following a fictional group of elite Toronto police officers, filmed in Toronto, and produced by CTV. Degrassi: The Next Generation, another CTV program, is also hugely popular in the US and has been picked up by many so called "Superstation" networks. This is why it puzzles me when the CRTC keeps saying that there need to be Canadian content regulations on Canadian airwaves in order to protect Canadian media from being overshadowed by the United States. This sort of concept is just so mind bogglingly archaic in the information age. The CRTC now wants to try and project this power to the internet, an impossible task which would likely involved increased censorship online, opening up a huge can of worms if they limit what sites Canadians can visit.

Back in the 1940s & 1950s, Canadian airwaves were dominated by by American broadcasts. It was thought that these were poisoning the minds of Canadians so the CBC, the government subsidized network, was created to provide Canadians with more "highbrow" programming that was exclusively Canadian. However, laws limiting what could and could not be broadcast didn't come in until much later. They appeared in the 1970s under everyone's favourite liberal fascist Pierre Trudeau. Since then, the government mandates that media providers in Canada must be Canadian owned and must dedicate a minimum percentage of broadcast hours to Canadian programming. I do not have the data in front of me but I believe it is about 8% to 20%. Off course, these laws were created at a time before satellite TV became popular, and long before the internet became a third television medium. We claim to be a multicultural society yet we still hold onto these archaic laws. I'm sure many Canadians would love access to TV programming from their own countries without being harassed by the CRTC for it not having enough "Canadian" content. Canadians who wish to use American satellite services are harassed for buying "grey market" dishes just so the CRTC can keep Starchoice and Bell in a duoopoly.

Shows like Flashpoint have proven that Canadian content can succeed internationally in the internet age without the long arm of the government propping them up, as they do with the never ending list of bad CBC programming. Arguably, the Internet has been a powerful medium to broadcast our content through sites like Youtube. It costs very little for Canadian artists to produce their own TV series and upload them to the web. Any sort of web regulation protecting this is totally unnecessary and just another case of a government body attempting to overregulate. Forcing Canadians to watch Canadian content is no longer an appropriate way to go about things. Rather, the government should be encouraging investment in our nation's media industries to encourage them to produce more high quality content that people would actually watch. US networks have shown that Americans do enjoy our stuff as long as it's not about weird sex and snow shoes, as one movie title on the Canadian film industry put it. Lets end broadcast censorship in Canada and openly embrace the digital age as a new way to showcase our tallent to the world.