The Senate comes to town, in case you didn't notice

A special committee of Senators came to Vancouver to hear the industry and the public complain about media monopoly. A report and recommendations are promised - just like 30 years ago.

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

The government of Canada sets the regulations by which media companies, like all others, conduct their business. Among the larger contributors to political parties, media companies work hard to ensure the government regulators do nothing to harm their interests. This cozy relationship has produced a level of monopolization of media properties in Canada greater than in any other Western democracy.

The government of Canada, for instance, has refused to consider whether there even is a monopoly over editorial content. The competition tribunal considers it the limit of the people's concerns that they worry instead only about whether there is an advertising monopoly in the marketplace (which they have decided there isn't, because there are advertising markets available on the internet).

Editorial monopolization in Canada is most pronounced in the Vancouver media market, now legendary for being the most monopolized not only in Canada but in the whole Western world.

This long-running and extremely sorry condition of life for consumers of media products in Vancouver has produced a whole genre of books and journals plumbing the depths of depravity and lengths of hopelessness that mire this market. It is an understatement to say there are serious complaints with Canadian media, and with Vancouver media in particular. And because the government in Ottawa has willfully and blindly allowed this condition to evolve (in exchange for generous contributions by the monopolizing media companies to party coffers of both main parties), the government can safely be regarded as part of the problem.

Which is why I took special interest when the government's Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications road-show hit town January 31st with its “Committee Studying Media” carnival. This event featured eleven breathing senators gathered around the broadly curving maple desks of the Morris J Wosk Centre for dialogue to hear 14 industry witnesses and, as time allowed, some members of the public at the end of the day.

This is hardly the first time the government dispatched this or that traveling inquiry out to the regions to hear the laments of the people and show them a sympathetic face. Collusion among gasoline sellers, destruction of the country's air travel capacity, the collapse of independent media and the end of democracy—it all sort of runs together for the sober chamber of second thought, kept on for the sole purpose of wringing their hands and shrugging their shoulders, which they did so well on this day.

There is hardly a need to recite here, to a reader in Vancouver of Vancouver media, the dire situation of the Vancouver media market. Nor should there have been a need to recite it before a committee of media-interested senators, three of whom are themselves former media reporters, and all of whom, one may fairly presume, are conscientious enough in their work to have broadly familiarized themselves earlier in the week with at least the rough outline of the disaster that has been unfolding here for decades. There have been previous government inquiries, after all, complete with their well-bound, if not so well-read final reports.

But the purpose of the Senate Committee Studying Media is not for state regulators to learn what changes to law are required to protect the people by ensuring their democracy thrives on a proper feast of independent editorial content. The purpose of the Senate Committee is quite the opposite.

First of all, these were not the state regulators, they were just senators who, as Deputy Chair of the Committee David Tkachuk, admitted, can do nothing but make recommendations. But even if they were empowered, they wouldn't be interested in making changes to protect the people, because the people make no significant donations to party coffers. It is impossible to imagine the Senate advising the legislature to enact laws that bust up the CanWest media cartel, let alone to imagine the legislature doing just that. Yet this is but the first and most obvious step if state intervention is to be used to save independent media.

Nor is democracy always so close to every one of their hearts. At least one of the Senators on this committee, Pat Carney, has dubious allegiances to democracy, having accepted her post as Senator in 1990 by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who squeezed her in under a rarely used provision allowing him to appoint extra senators, which he needed to ensure the Senate would pass the Free Trade Agreement—the crowning achievement of his traitorous career.

And whether these senators were in any way interested in independent editorial content in media in Canada was hard to tell. It all seemed so new to them, and yet, for anyone who is the least interested in media in Canada, nothing that was said all day in the Wosk room could possibly have been news.

No, the purpose of this traveling road show was not to learn what changes the people required, but rather to sugar coat for the people the disappointing but familiar news that the government is there for industry as it always was. These types of hearings are only to make the people think the government cares. Hearings will be held across the country, the public will be applauded for speaking out, the complaints will be recited, the dire warnings will be sounded, and then reports will be written, and recommendations will be made—and filed.

And nothing will happen, nothing, that is, unless the media companies require it. No one will read the report. Yet many people will think, as I'm sure many do already today, that the government is concerned, the government wants to take action, and the government will fix the problem. They listened to the descriptions of those problems, did they not?

In a generation or so, another committee will visit, and different people will describe the same problem. It reminds me of how people in Hong Kong always helpfully give you directions when you ask, even if they don't have a clue themselves. Why come here to make the people think their problems are being considered, when everyone knows they simply aren't? Because it stops them complaining for a few years, that's why.

I spent a whole day learning this. But I am behind the lead of the public. They knew already, and failed to show up to the public hearings completely. Eliminating those connected in some way to the media industry and who had come to present, the senators and their various handlers, and the workers coordinating the coffee and pointing to the washrooms, I counted five members of the public in the nine hours I was there.

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