Canadian Television: The Exhaustion of a Domestic Paradigm?

Abstract

The 2003 deregulatory efforts by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have focused American media critics' and scholars' attention on the issue of media consolidation. Yet, at the same time, consolidation and audience fragmentation have also come to characterize the television industry in Canada. These two forces, in combination with sporadic efforts to preserve Canada's bifurcated French and British heritage, have forged the agenda for many Canadian television researchers during the last decade. By 2001, the three main Canadian private television networks had become completely integrated into large Canadian trusts. CTV, the largest television network in English-speaking Canada, is now owned by Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE), which grew out of the telephone business but is now involved in almost all the telecommunications sectors, as well as in dailies through a joint venture with The Globe and Mail, a Toronto-based national newspaper. In 2001, CanWest/Global, the number two network in the English speaking markets, acquired more than 200 titles from Conrad Black's newspaper empire--Hollinger Company. Finally, TVA, the number one broadcaster in the French-speaking television market, has become part of the Quebecor print empire with subsidiaries all around the world (Demers, 2000; Centre d'etudes sur les medias [CEM], 2003). In April 2003, the Canadian Senate Communications Committee initiated a formal inquiry into a series of broadcast issues which included concentration of ownership and convergence. But at the time, lan Morrison, a spokesman for Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, noted that Canada had already developed the type of broadcast consolidation that was being met with so much resistance in the United States (Shinhat, 2003). In what may have been a belated reaction to the wave of transactions at the beginning of the new millennium, in July 2003, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunication Commission (CRTC) blocked the transfer of control of a radio chain to Quebec's TVA Group because of concerns over concentration (CRTC, July 2, 2003). For its part, the public network, which includes the English language CBC and the French language Radio-Canada, has been losing ground to the private channels, both general and specialized, with regard to audiences since the early 1980s--a trend which has become more rapid in the last ten years. Now, during the most popular viewing hours, CBC attracts less than 10% and Radio-Canada less than 15% of their respective media audiences (Cauchon, 2003; Petrowsky, 2002). The major television networks attempt to appeal to general audiences but they now find themselves in an environment where the specialized networks and digital television--a service in which the CRTC approved the launch of 300 new channels in 2002--are collectively gaining audience every day. In addition, access through cable or satellites to the American channels has further fragmented the Canadian television market. For example, in the vicinity of Quebec City, where basic cable service penetrates more than 80% of the households, that basic service offers four French speaking general channels (SRC, TVA, TQS, and Tele-Quebec), along with five specialized ones (one all-news, one for infomercials, two community channels, and one on provincial parliamentary activities), three English-speaking Canadian channels (CTV, CBC, Global), four American channels, and a few service channels that provide such things as weather and classified advertisements. In such a fragmented environment, audience members have been using their remote controls to zap programming, which adds even more flux to the viewing dynamics. The fragmented and chaotic nature of this marketplace may explain why many researchers have apparently shied away from studying Canadian television, whose ability to exert control over its potential audience seems to have evaporated with the loss of its monopolistic structure. …