WITH THE MYRIAD ISSUES facing the CRTC and regulators around the world, chair of the CRTC is a hot seat. Always has been. Always will be.

Canadians care deeply about the subjects which the Commission handles on a daily basis, be it wireless phone pricing, email spam and phone scams, Canadian content, or any of the various challenges which fall under the purview of the Regulator. It all impacts our daily lives in the way we communicate, are informed and entertained.

Over the course of part two of our interview with CRTC chair Ian Scott (click here for part 1), which was done at the Commission headquarters on November 13th, Scott (pictured) lays out more of what lies ahead in broadcasting and telecom in Canada and around the world.

Should broadband providers, which deliver so much video, help pay for Cancon? How might AI help? Why is having two different federal government policy directives not actually a problem? What is the role of public broadcasting? How can a Regulator stay meaningful in this world? These are just some of the questions our Bill Roberts posed.

We also get to find out why Scott wanted this job in the first place – and we wonder what his former employers might think of his assertion that this gig is “infinitely more interesting” than what he used to do.

Please click above to listen to part two of our chat with Ian Scott.

IAN SCOTT IS already two years through his five-year mandate as chair of the CRTC. He hasn’t been as active calling hearings as his predecessor, who kept thinking up ways of making sure regulatory departments and the journalists who cover them were always hopping, but the CRTC under Scott has still been very busy.

While the Commission is an arm’s length agency, the federal government has been quite keen on pushing a few big issues which, despite what many critics might have to say, are awfully complex and difficult for the CRTC to regulate when the lists of desires from so many different parties are so long and varied. You can’t keep everyone happy, no matter what politicians might like.

Scott (right) told our Bill Roberts last Wednesday at CRTC headquarters “we’re not the policy makers,” but he does have some wishes when it comes to how the federal government might set new policy in the wake of the Broadcasting and Telecom Legislative Review, whose panel report is due in January.

He said he’s generally pleased with the telecom toolkit already at the Commission’s disposal (and knows February’s wireless policy review hearing will be closely watched), but the Regulator needs much better direction from government on the broadcasting side where “the world has changed drastically… We need new tools to deal with the new environment,” he said.

The now-former Heritage Minister has already said digital giants should be contributing to Canadian culture, since they benefit from our market – and the CRTC has said much the same through its Harnessing Change report. However, Scott knows the any impending policy alterations won’t be as simple as applying the same levies Canadian companies now contribute to Cancon to the likes of Netflix or YouTube.

The Commission needs to know the outcomes the federal government desires so then it can “look at these companies and figure out the best way to make sure they can make a meaningful contribution to the system,” Scott says.

All this and more is just in part I of our podcast with CRTC chair Ian Scott. What’s left to discuss? Lots. Part II of the two-parter will be posted next Tuesday.

“KNOW YOUR STUFF” is the advice Mary Ellen Carlyle gives to young men and women who want to make their own mark in broadcasting technology, because the challenges are difficult and numerous.

If anyone knows her stuff, it’s Carlyle, who has spent 30 years at the cutting edge of live event television broadcasting and thanks to her huge and diverse body of work, she will be inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame on December 17th in New York. She will be the sixth woman and first Canadian honoured by the group whose membership are all sports broadcasters.

Back in 1989, when she started with Dome Productions after a few years at TSN, the company produced just 81 baseball games and 10 CFL games. That has exploded to 2,500 events annually, consisting of all manner of sports (including the growing E-sports genre, in which Dome was an early leader) to political events like last year’s G7 in Charlevoix, Quebec and the Toronto Raptors run to the NBA finals and the championship parade.

Thanks to the decision made by former Bell Media chief Ivan Fecan and Rogers founder Ted Rogers years ago to share the mobile broadcasting load, the company is co-owned by Rogers Media and Bell Media. Despite a few instances where she jokes she felt like the child “of two divorced parents”, Carlyle praises her bosses for giving her team the freedom to experiment (they once produced the Ryder Cup in 3D) and adopt new technologies quickly – a policy which has made Dome the most advanced 4K HDR producer in the Americas.

U.S. broadcasters look to Dome Productions for leadership in broadcast tech.

“We’re unique” she says about their 15 HD (seven are 1080p), four B units, three remote integration, four uplink, and three full 4K mobile units. Dome’s production units can also perform web and social media functions and are prepared for virtual and augmented reality, too. When called upon to be the host of another event like the 2010 Olympics or another G7, Carlyle said she will prefer to be called “host media” over host broadcaster.

In her 38-minute chat with our host Bill Roberts, Carlyle (right) notes her many career highlights, mentors, her favourite sports and events, where she thinks sports television is headed – and just what else she tells other young women who want to pursue a career like hers.

Please click above to listen.

IN PART TWO OF our podcast with outgoing APTN CEO Jean La Rose, he tells our Bill Roberts how challenging it has been to try and serve the more than 50(!) Aboriginal language communities in Canada.

He talks about how covering some very sensitive topics bubbling up from within Indigenous communities is a very difficult line for APTN to walk. Even popular shows like Mohawk Girls and Blackstone address, and display, taboo subject matter which some viewers would rather not see and has “caused some dissention” at first because they might be subjects people don’t want to address – but how deft producers can turn that into a positive.

La Rose also demonstrates how APTN isn’t just about addressing the challenges facing Indigenous communities in Canada, but celebrating their successes, too.

Speaking of successes, did you know when APTN launched, there were a total of six Indigenous TV producers in Canada – and now there are well over 100 who have benefitted from the work and exposure APTN provided – and who have gone on to work for the likes of the CBC and Netflix.

All this and more is found in part II of our podcast with La Rose. Please click above to listen to an excellent interview.

Click here for part I, published last week.

Cartt.ca’s Bill Roberts met with La Rose (right), who will retire as APTN CEO at the end of the year, in Ottawa the day after APTN and the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation hosted a special ceremony honouring the many children who died in residential schools Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que.

JEAN LA ROSE HAS BEEN CEO of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network for 17 of the channel’s 20 years. To say he’s seen a lot is an immeasurable understatement.

He tells our Bill Roberts how he felt the sting of racism as an Indigenous Canadian and how hard it has been not only to help to protect Indigenous people from harm, but their culture from the onslaught of global media which doesn’t reflect the lives of the majority of his viewers.

APTN grew from a channel which, La Rose (pictured) admits, didn’t really know what it was doing at first, to what is now an internationally recognized force to be reckoned with. Its news “uncovers the stories others won’t,” which mainstream media will then cover only after APTN has pulled back the curtain.

It’s not easy as an Indigenous broadcaster, but APTN has plans to grow despite cord-cutting (it’s a BDU must-carry, so cord cutting hits its bottom line directly) and to build on its burgeoning reputation as a player in television, which really took off after its stellar work during the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.

It has launched a new app and is exploring international growth while continuing to represent and reflect its community in, and to, Canada and the world.

Cartt.ca’s Bill Roberts met with La Rose, who will retire as APTN CEO at the end of the year, in Ottawa the day after APTN and the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation hosted a special ceremony honouring the many children who died in residential schools Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que.

Click above to listen to part one of our fascinating two-part podcast.

Click here to listen to part II.

THERE’S NOT MUCH TIME left to save our cultural institutions and corporations in Canada, says Richard Stursberg.

If our federal government doesn’t act soon, what it means to be Canadian will be subsumed by the sheer volume of American culture washing over us online while our “feckless” Canadian government stands idly by. “We’re going to be completely dominated by American content,” he says.

The former assistant deputy minister of culture and broadcasting and former CBC, Shaw, and Telefilm executive, recently released a brand new book, called The Tangled Garden. A Canadian Cultural Manifesto for the Digital Age, which is a soup to nuts re-envisioning of Canadian content and the Canadian media industry which is cracking under the enormous pressure being applied by the FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google) companies.

Those foreign interlopers need to start playing by the same rules (at least start with having them pay the same level of tax, he implores) as Canadian broadcasters (because those FAANGs are broadcasters, he says), which will boost government revenues. Then, if they are made to spend 30% of their revenue earned in Canada on Canadian content, as the likes of CTV, Global and Citytv must, we will continue to see Canadian stories produced by Canadians. In fact, we will see more made and more jobs because of it.

The book is part history lesson, pointing to how cultural policy was carefully developed to advantage our own creators and broadcasters and the like, but mostly instructional, asking why, just because signals now arrive over the internet, we can’t act to defend our culture? Other countries are doing it, but where are our strong political leaders?

Tangled Garden lays out all of the dollars and cents and Stursberg says the changes he proposes will see more Cancon and more government revenue while drawing no more dollars from the pockets of Canadians than they are already paying.

The status quo, says Stursberg, can’t last much longer. “It seems mad to advantage outsiders over Canadian companies in Canada,” he said in our podcast with Bill Roberts. “If you’re going to be like Netflix, a broadcaster in Canada, you have to play by the same rules as Canadian broadcasters.”

So why hasn’t our Liberal federal government acted on what is clearly a crisis? “They’re feckless,” he says. “They really have no grip whatsoever on what’s going on let alone any clear sense of how to deal with it.”

NO CANADIAN MEDIA company has grown over the past 12 years the way Montreal’s Stingray Group has.

Getting its start in 2007 when its founder purchased a South Carolina-based karaoke business, Stingray has grown in ways that co-founder and current CEO Eric Boyko couldn’t have fathomed in the beginning. With its $506 million purchase of Newcap Radio last year, Stingray is now one of the largest radio station owners in Canada – while also owning 80% of the world’s karaoke market (who knew!?).

Known primarily in Canadian media circles as the TV music company (but with a thriving line of business providing companies like retailers and ski resorts with background music), Stingray now has over 400 million subscribers in 143 countries, primarily in the business to business space, but with a growing B2C presence. It provides music and video such 4KTV and concerts to cable, IPTV, or wireless carriers and some, like Stingray Qello, direct to consumers. Imagine the myriad copyrights regimes it has to manage!

Boyko (right) tells our Bill Roberts in this podcast that Stingray is one of the top five music companies in the world right now but has much, much larger aspirations.

While his background and a number of assets are Canadian and he worries about our media companies saying “I’m not sure how you’re going to succeed if you’re not a global media company,” Boyko doesn’t have a whole lot of time to think about that because his ambitions are larger and lie well beyond Canada.

“We have to become a $10 billion company in five years or we’re out of business. It’s $10 billion or zero. There’s no in between.”

Click here to listen.

JUST FIVE YEARS OLD, producer New Metric Media’s star is rising.

In this edition of the Cartt.ca podcast, company president and executive producer Mark Montefiore tells Cartt.ca’s Bill Roberts why he’s optimistic about Canadian content in a world of transnational digital giants, why working in Sudbury is great and how franchising rural Canada and its icons like craft beer, hockey and the mob, will work – and is working around the world.

While Letterkenny may be the best known title in his stable as the primary original production anchoring Bell Media’s Crave and which is also now available Stateside on Hulu, New Metric’s Canadian mob series Bad Blood (a tentpole production for Citytv in 2018), made its debut on Netflix just before Christmas – with the hopes it will be picked up for season two by the streaming giant.

In this podcast, Montefiore (right) also explains his shift five years ago from film to TV when he asked himself “why is 100% of my business in feature films when 100% of what I’m watching is television?” He also answers the question of whether or not this the golden age of TV or the glut age of TV, why Bell Media was the right fit for Wayne and his pals from Letterkenny, how merchandising has created a needed line of additional revenue, what might happen to Cancon when over-the-top is the mainstream video choice for most viewers and a host of other queries in this entertaining 53 minutes.

PHIL LIND MAY ALWAYS BE remembered as Ted Rogers’ cajoling consigliere.

Sure, Phil had more appearances before the CRTC – over 100 – than anybody; and he’s put in 40 exciting years co-building the Rogers brand and our country’s second-largest telecommunications and media company – Rogers Communications.

But to caricature Phil Lind as merely Ted’s strategic “Abominable No Man” is to sell this man very short.

His new book Right Hand Man: How Phil Lind Guided the Genius of Ted Rogers, Canada’s Foremost Entrepreneur, written with Bob Brehl, may not be headed for the RBC Taylor Prize, but I couldn’t put it down (Cartt.ca published excerpts here and here).

From sports to politics, to the arts, to environmental awareness, to Canada-U.S. relations, to the stroke that left the right side of his body paralyzed — he’s got quite a story to tell. It’s also at times pretty candid about Ted’s character, which clearly included business genius – but also bullying, encouraging back-biting, and sometimes resenting this right-hand man.

Showing up at the 10th floor of 333 Bloor East, which frankly hasn’t changed much over the decades, brought back many personal memories too. In my executive TVOntario and VisionTV days, Phil Lind was my warrior-nemesis on everything from 9(1)(h) for not-for-profit broadcasters, to the over-regulated protection of Canadian independent producers, to how PBS (Buffalo) should have equal if not better carriage than our provincial educational broadcaster.

Okay, I admit there’s also some Lind ego in this 350 page or so account of his life… but there’s also humour, wit, little known backroom deals, self-reflection (e.g. his sincere admiration for assassinated Senator Robert Kennedy), and some genuine corporate revelations.

And frankly, any person that after such a serious stoke, returns to a dedicated 14-hour workday in less than a year, deserves both our respect and to be cut more than a little slack.

There’s a truly gracious candour with Phil Lind these days – I hope that this podcast (which goes beyond the book, as he has some advice for the Broadcast and Telecom Legislative Review panel, thoughts on the digital media exemption order, RCI’s current challenges and much more), and perhaps his book, can connect listeners and readers to this exceptional life.

THE CBC REACHES 20 million Canadians every month when counting its various platforms, be it TV, radio, online, apps, or podcasts.

It’s an impressive number, but not one Catherine Tait (pictured), who was hired as CEO of the CBC five months ago, wants to dwell upon – as she tells our Bill Roberts in the latest Cartt.ca podcast. Tait is more concerned about engagement, about fostering trust and connecting Canadians in as many ways as possible.

She calls trust, especially now when we are all so swamped with information (not to mention misinformation, disinformation and lies) the CBC’s “most precious asset” and something that needs constant tending with tools like high quality investigative news, local news and top-notch Canadian programming.

Despite growing global media players (some of whom CBC has partnered with on certain shows) dominating the media space, Tait believes there are a great many niches the public broadcaster can serve which are being missed by those media titans. Netflix might be a great partner for Alias Grace, but they’re never going to provide local news in Nunavut, for example.

Plus, the CBC is the only media outlet mentioned by name and given a mandate in the Broadcasting Act, which is under review right now, too. Any changes there may well alter the new CEO’s plans for the broadcaster.

Want a bit of a provocative topic? How about getting Canadian media companies to pull together to help save the industry. “We’re living in a period of market failure,” she says in this podcast. While competition between Canadian media companies has been healthy for a long time, the current global competitive market means co-operation should instead be the new norm.

“We need to collaborate to make sure we have a viable industry going forward,” she added.

Please listen in to learn more about Tait and her plans for the CBC.