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27 July, 2007
Regulating Canadian TV Content

A long time ago, a reader wrote a letter to the Gazette complaining about government regulations on television broadcasting in Canada. He claimed that Canadians should be free to watch whatever they want. More recently, an acquaintance told me his wife hates Canadian content because it always looks so low-budget. These complaints are enraging to anyone who thinks being Canadian is more than being brainwashed by corporate beer marketing.

Recently I've researched why this situation exists. I've learned about the market principles at work in cultural production. These principles necessitate the cultural policies that most non-American countries successfully use to protect and encourage space for their own national voices own their own national airwaves.

Most cultural business endeavours fail financially. There's too much competition and unpredictability. Nobody really knows what movies and TV shows will be popular; only a small percentage of products end up being profitable. Cultural producers can only survive by producing many products simultaneously and letting the rare hits pay for the flops.

Thus it's nearly impossible for small producers to live. They can only afford to put all their resources into one or two products at a time. If those don't hit it big, the producer is bankrupt.

Another important factor is the "cluster" effect. Quality in cultural product is only assured when workers have steady work. If they must supplement their income with other unrelated jobs, their performance (acting, shooting, writing, set construction, etc.) suffers. Thus the only areas that succeed are areas with a constant "critical mass" of related activity, not just occasional production. Top talent and financiers go where there is ample steady work.

Increasingly, American producers focus only on the single most profitable audience. Thus, demographics such as African-American, non-Christian, or elderly people are seeing fewer products relevant to them. (Where are the Golden Girls of today? In "Will & Grace"? Gag me with a materialistic clean-cut white New York professional male who happens to date men.)

This relentless pursuit of profit ignores diversity. It broadcasts—to all North America's multicultural, multi-religious population—content reflecting only one world view. That's fine for a melting pot, but not for a mosaic or tapestry.

One quirk about popular culture economics is that there is little connection between popularity and profitability outside the USA. When producer pays its bills at home via its domestic audience, there is zero cost involved in exporting its products. It can set its foreign rights prices at whatever it wants, and differently for different countries. Thus, American producers find out the lowest price a foreign broadcaster would have to pay to broadcast local content, then sells its content for cheaper than that. So, even when Canadian content is more popular than foreign (that is, American) content, broadcasters make more profit screening American product.

Since American producers target mostly middle-class, white, Christian, clean-cut, pretty, usually heterosexual people, and since they "dump" product in Canada at whatever price ensures them screen time, Canadians would not hear their own voices (such as "This Hour has 22 Minutes") on Canadian screens without certain policies in place.

The lack of clusters in Canada has prevented any Canadian producers from achieving large size. This restricted scale of Canadian producers prevents them from making the slick high-end products Hollywood and New York make.

Fortunately, Canada's cultural production policies have successfully created small "clusters" in Toronto and Vancouver. The quality of Canadian content is improving. Also, our broadcasting policies effectively thwart the profitability of foreign content over local content.

But, in the end, if you think CanCon is terrible and American content is virtuous, move to the USA.

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