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37th PARLIAMENT, 2nd SESSION

Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage

EVIDENCE

CONTENTS

Thursday, December 5, 2002

0905

The Chair (Mr. Clifford Lincoln (Lac-Saint-Louis, Lib.))

Mr. Tom Kent (Individual Presentation)

The Chair

Mr. Tom Kent

0910

0915

The Chair

Mr. Wilson Southam (Past Director, Southam Inc., As Individual)

The Chair

Mr. Wilson Southam

0920

0925

The Chair

Mr. Wilson Southam

The Chair

Mr. John Miller (Professor, Director of Newspaper Journalism, As Individual)

0930

0935

The Chair

Mr. Jim Abbott (Kootenay—Columbia, Canadian Alliance)

0940

Mr. Wilson Southam

0945

Mr. Jim Abbott

Mr. Wilson Southam

The Chair

Mr. Tom Kent

The Chair

Mr. Dennis Mills (Toronto—Danforth, Lib.)

0950

The Chair

Ms. Christiane Gagnon (Québec, BQ)

Mr. John Miller

Ms. Christiane Gagnon

The Chair

Mr. Paul Bonwick (Simcoe—Grey, Lib.)

0955

Mr. Wilson Southam

Mr. Paul Bonwick

Mr. Tom Kent

1000

Mr. John Miller

The Chair

Ms. Sarmite Bulte (Parkdale—High Park, Lib.)

Mr. John Miller

Mr. Tom Kent

1005

The Chair

Mr. Wilson Southam

Ms. Sarmite Bulte

Mr. John Miller

Mr. Wilson Southam

1010

The Chair

Ms. Wendy Lill (Dartmouth, NDP)

Mr. John Miller

1015

Ms. Wendy Lill

Mr. Wilson Southam

The Chair

Ms. Liza Frulla (Verdun—Saint-Henri—Saint-Paul—Pointe Saint-Charles, Lib.)

1020

Mr. Wilson Southam

Ms. Liza Frulla

Mr. Wilson Southam

Ms. Liza Frulla

Mr. John Miller

1025

Ms. Liza Frulla

The Chair

Mr. John Miller

The Chair

Mr. Jim Abbott

Mr. Wilson Southam

1030

The Chair

Mr. Tom Kent

1035

The Chair

Mr. John Harvard (Charleswood —St. James—Assiniboia, Lib.)

Mr. John Miller

Mr. John Harvard

1040

Mr. John Miller

Mr. Wilson Southam

The Chair

Ms. Wendy Lill

Mr. Tom Kent

Ms. Wendy Lill

Mr. Tom Kent

Mr. Wilson Southam

The Chair

Ms. Liza Frulla

1045

Mr. Wilson Southam

The Chair

Mr. Paul Bonwick

1050

The Chair

Mr. Tom Kent

The Chair

Mr. John Miller

Mr. Wilson Southam

The Chair

Mr. Wilson Southam

1055

The Chair

Mr. Wilson Southam

The Chair

Mr. Tom Kent

The Chair

CANADA

Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage

NUMBER 010

2nd SESSION

37th PARLIAMENT

EVIDENCE

Thursday, December 5, 2002

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

¿ (0905)

[English]

The Chair (Mr. Clifford Lincoln (Lac-Saint-Louis, Lib.)): Good morning. I'd like to call to order the meeting of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, which is meeting today to continue a study on the state of the Canadian broadcasting system.

[Translation]

The Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage is meeting to continue its study on the State of the Canadian broadcasting system.

[English]

We're extremely privileged today to have very distinguished panellists to address us on the question of concentration of media, and at the same time they want to, I'm sure, speak of foreign ownership as well. We're privileged to have Mr. Tom Kent, Fellow, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University, whose name is well known to all of us for the study he carried out a few years ago that has left its mark; Mr. Wilson Southam, Past Director, Southam Inc., Coordinator, Diversity of Voices Everywhere, DOVE; and Professor John Miller, Director of Newspaper Journalism, Ryerson University.

I should point out to the members that Mr. Miller has brought a text, which is being distributed to you, “Unless Something Is Done”,

a petition by very distinguished Canadians whose names appear on the back of the sheet and includes our three witnesses. You might like to read it in your own time soon.

I'd like to open the meeting by asking Mr. Kent to address us.

Mr. Tom Kent (Individual Presentation): Thank you, Mr. Chairman and honourable members. It's a great pleasure to be here.

Since time is short, I'll be very brief indeed and just tell you how we feel about one of your two topics, that is to say, foreign ownership. In my view, relaxing the restrictions on foreign ownership would certainly serve a private interest, would increase the price at which—

The Chair: Mr. Kent, may I interrupt you for just a second?

Mr. Southam left a text with us called A Diversity Of Voices At Risk?, which cannot be distributed right now because it needs to be translated into French. We will proceed with this and make sure the members are given the text as soon as possible, Mr. Southam. We can't distribute it today. These are the rules of the committee.

Sorry, Mr. Kent.

Mr. Tom Kent: Not at all.

As I was saying, relaxing the restrictions on foreign ownership would serve a private interest. It would increase the price the present owners could get when they sold out, which seems to happen rather often, but the public interest would be severely hurt. Even less of what I would call the date-keeping of information and opinion, which is the special responsibility of the media, would be done from Canadian viewpoints for the distinctive interests of Canadians.

However, I'd like to concentrate my opening remarks on the cross-ownership of newspaper and broadcasting media. It is an issue on which past governments have taken action. In 1982 the Trudeau government made an order in council directing the CRTC to not issue or renew broadcasting licences to proprietors of daily newspapers serving substantially the same area. However, before a case was dealt with there was a political change, and the Mulroney government revoked that order.

The road since then has been all downhill, and lately at breakneck speed. In 1982, of course, cross-ownership was mainly limited to New Brunswick; now it's Canada-wide. The big TV networks are joined with the major papers in what they claim is virtue, but is more accurately seen as a combination against the public interest. The 1982 directive was quite clear about that. The Trudeau government then said--with the present Prime Minister as the Minister of Justice, I might say--that cross-ownership was being prohibited for the sake of “independent competitive and diverse sources of news and viewpoints”.

In our market economy, anyone with the money can own a newspaper. The need for money produces some ideological weighting of opinion, but at least what is maintained is the independence from government that was the historic battle for freedom of the press--or rather, that was maintained until recently.

Broadcasting, unlike print, has to be licensed. The CRTC has the trappings of a quasi-judicial body, which makes it a magnificent source of legal pleas, but doesn't conceal in any way its politicized nature, and necessarily so. It's not only subject to general direction; specific licensing decisions can be overruled by cabinet, and rightly so. In short, a newspaper owned in common with TV becomes a newspaper greatly beholden to government.

One owner of a TV licence once famously said it was a licence to print money. In a way, that may now be something of an overstatement, but certainly TV is much more important than newspapers in the finances of the cross-media empires. Their TV licences, not the newspapers they've gone on to own, are the source of Asper wealth, and for BCE, The Globe and Mail is financially insignificant beside its CTV stablemate.

These media corporations must plead with government for any renewal or enlargement of their TV licences. I don't suggest that will immediately turn them into toadies of government. The traditional role of the press as a critic is a bit too strong to fade overnight, but in the crunch, money is even stronger.

The creeping effect of cross-ownership will be to temper investigative reports and mute critical comment. The erosion will be gradual, no doubt, but freedom impaired, little by little and nod by nod, is still freedom lost. In other words, a press linked with TV is a press that has sold its freedom.

Of course, the builders of corporate empires claim economic marvels from convergence. The record, equally of course, is in fact littered with disasters. At best, the possible economies from print and broadcast convergence are very minor. They count for nothing beside the loss of freedom.

¿ (0910)

There's a simple remedy, and it was taken before. The CRTC can again be directed to not issue licences to owners of newspapers. However, it is necessary to go rather beyond the 1982 precedent in two ways.

The overlaps of TV and newspaper ownership are no longer localized, as they were in 1982. Concentration and convergence have become Canada-wide. Asper TV and Asper press are all over the place; so are CTV and the national Globe and Mail. Independence of the press now requires the complete separation of all newspaper ownership from all broadcasting.

The method could again be a directive to the CRTC, but it was shown before that an order in council easily made can be easily revoked by another government. There's need for the greater authority and stability that's given by legislation, by parliamentary action. So I would venture to say that the rescue of freedom could appropriately begin in the recommendations of this committee.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

¿ (0915)

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Kent.

Mr. Southam, the floor is yours.

Mr. Wilson Southam (Past Director, Southam Inc., As Individual): Mr. Chairman, I've had conflicting reports this morning as to how long we have. What would you like?

The Chair: You have ten minutes or so, if that's all right.

Mr. Wilson Southam: Thank you very much.

I've brought down some booklets for everybody, but I've just learned you can't have them because they don't exist in French. It was not possible to translate them on four days' notice. So I'm going to have to change my plan of attack here, which I'm pleased to do.

Thank you for asking me to be here with you today. My active involvement in this really goes back to Christmas day, when a man I admired greatly, now a senior citizen of this country, called because he was appalled by the practice of sending editorials from Winnipeg—three a week was the plan—to 14 large metro papers, with instructions that they run them and henceforth not contradict what was said in them.

Since he wanted to write a letter to The Globe and Mail, I first directed him to a man called Hamilton Southam and then to Paddy Sherman. They worked for a couple of months on different drafts, and they were joined by Keith Spicer. They worked on drafts of a statement, which they decided should become an ad.

At that point, they asked me what I thought. I said I thought there was too much about the Southams. The Southams had a policy saying local publishers and editors should represent their communities. It wasn't perfect. After all, we were coming to the marketplace with a bias towards the establishment and the established way of doing things. But at least it was a genuine attempt at decentralization and the concept of the press as a public trust. There was also too much about the Aspers, who shouldn't have been mentioned. It was CanWest, which was a corporation, they were talking about. Lastly, they were simply asking CanWest to behave, which didn't seem to be very useful.

For my pains, I was asked to take the project over. I left off some work I was doing and I entered into one of the most interesting 11 weeks of my life. I was later told it was for 20 hours a day. A miracle happened: 40 publishers, editors, and directors, who had never ever, ever, ever agreed on anything together in their lives, ended up signing an advertisement. It was to run across this country, and it asked Canadians to think about the question, is freedom of the press being lost one newsroom at a time?

Well, it didn't happen because CanWest wanted 13% of their wording added to it. So in the end, it didn't run in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Toronto, and Ottawa. In the course of this, we learned that not only were they controlling editorial space across the country, but they were also controlling advertising space, which was an interesting experience to go through. We made two changes, extended the deadline twice, and moved on to The Globe and Mail, The Winnipeg Free Press and the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, where the advertisement turned down by CanWest ran unchanged.

After the last deadline, CanWest changed their requirements and published the advertisement. They claimed it was all they were asking, which was not true. I'd be happy to provide documents supporting this allegation. My reply in an op-ed column in The Globe and Mail was in this booklet, “Newsrooms Are No Place for Head Office”.

Then a strange thing happened. As a small boy, I was told by a grandfather I admired a great deal that as a Southam I shouldn't take any public positions in case I biased a journalist one day. So most of my speaking over my lifetime has been across the United States and Europe and Australia. But I suddenly realized the damn papers were gone and I could say anything I wanted.

So I started. I found over the last month and a half that without solicitation I was being asked to talk to the Journalists for Free Expression at Massey College, to journalism students at Western, to students and faculty at York University, and to the senior management of the Ontario Science Centre. I enjoyed this. As with the 40 publishers, editors, and directors I spoke with, who were deeply appalled by the directions being taken around centralization of ownership and the prospect of possible foreign ownership, I'm finding I'm getting letters from these places saying the students are going to their meetings with their teaching assistants and are actually in tears at times, fighting over the issues of whether this damn country has the will to protect its culture and stay independent. I was told there's a lot of feeling out there. I believe the people who are writing these letters.

So I'm honoured to be here today. The booklet actually is part of trying to set a wider context. As I'm old and senile and need help, as we all do when we get old and senile, part of the wider context is provided by mnemonics to help us remember things. The thing is structured around the letters MADCAP. M is for “marketing myopia”.

¿ (0920)

We've spent 70 years since FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, got elected in the States and scared the hell out of the rich with his populist policies, being subjected to a barrage of crap about the marketplace doing everything best. It's clearly, if one has read The Efficient Society and a series of books by a young Canadian academic called Heath, not true. There are some things that are done much better by all of us together, yet under the myth of marketing myopia, American ascendancy is propelling that myth around the world, destroying economies and starving countries to death, if you've been following recent studies in Malawi and other places, and it's gaining a lot of ascendency. In the course of that there is a dwindling diversity of voices going on, which is well documented in the list of books that are in there, if it interests you, when it does get translated and passed out to you, and it's real.

I can remember as a young journalist going to work one day in a newsroom in Hamilton, and a publisher I came to admire enormously over the years came to work in a bad mood and he said,“Not another damned pet story!” Well, there wasn't a pet story published in that paper for nine months, until he said one day, “Where are the pet stories?” Then they started again.

So when you do this very difficult work you're attempting, I would urge you to remember, despite the plain promises that are made to people, that a lot of this stuff is about the nuances of climate, and climate operates in very funny ways. We'll probably never have a perfect press, but what you can do by keeping it separated in terms of local editorial independence is to at least have different biases in different places being freely expressed, which gives us some of the diversity that gave us national health and the Canadian Pension Plan.

I call to your attention, when you finally get this booklet, where we had a young researcher come to work with us, and he said, “What the hell's the problem?” He was from another country and he didn't know what was going on. He produced a Southam editorial policy that ran for years, committing that company to run all its newspapers with local editorial independence. Then he promised the heritage committee of the House of Commons of Canada--I don't know if you've heard of this group. CanWest solemnly promised that under CanWest ownership that would not change. On the contrary, CanWest understands that the success of our newspapers is due largely to their editorial policies and their ability to mirror the interests and values of their local readers. He said, “How can there be a problem?”

Well, then he came across an editorial written by Doug Millroy after a detailed interview with Murdoch Davis, the editor-in-chief of Southam News, in which Murdoch Davis, long before there was a fuss and believing he was fine to say what he wanted, detailed how these local papers were not going to contradict any one of the 153 editorials a year coming from head office. How can you possibly operate and represent your community when you have 153 editorials a year coming down the pike with a single point of view on major issues you subsequently cannot contradict?

Anyway, I am not speaking for the 40 editors, publishers, and directors because I don't have another 11 weeks to go 40 hours a day before coming to see you, but a summary of some of the things some of them are suggesting appears at the back of this booklet.

Recommendation one: that there be a public or government inquiry. Earlier there is a summary of various appeals and a dozen or so websites around the world suggesting that Canada should take a serious look at doing that, given the level of effects and impacts on local editorial independence now going on in this country.

Two, that we separate newspaper and TV ownership, and there I quote Tom Kent and his new article in Policy Options, Ottawa, October 22.

Three, that as to local editorial independence, where a group owns more than one newspaper, only one can represent the owner's views on the editorial page, and the others will take a solemn pledge of editorial independence--to be tested in various ways you can't cover in 10 minutes--will represent their communities, and will not be run by business interests in Winnipeg or anywhere else.

Four, that they return to full support for the CBC. It's fun and it's popular to knock neo-conservatives and the Conservatives, but in fact it's mostly been the Liberal government that's cut the heart out of the CBC with budget cuts in the last while. There is a quote here from an interview with Izzy Asper that reduces the CBC to a proposition of entertainment, which means he probably hasn't listened to the CBC, because it certainly isn't just about entertainment.

¿ (0925)

Five, that there be safeguards for Canadian culture, and I admire the minister's current attempt to get countries around the world to line up and speak to the question of how the hell different countries will protect their culture from the growing imperialism and super governmental power of the IMF and the WTO.

Six, that we fund national journalism fellowships properly and seriously. There was a series of them, and they're no longer funded by these new large conglomerates that own the newspapers.

Seven, that we set up investigative journalism awards. Tom mentioned a moment ago that investigative journalism goes down when businesses are run by large business interests, and that's absolutely documented and absolutely clear. Investigative journalism takes a lot of time and a lot of money, and it means taking risks with your advertisers. There's great investigative journalism being done abroad, but very little of it gets here, even as reprints, until the issues are over.

Greg Palast broke the whole story of the theft of the election by the Bush family in Florida in fine detail before they finished counting, yet it didn't publish anywhere until the Washington Post ran it four months later, long after the counting was over. That was in The Guardian and The Nation.

Eight, that we have independent newsroom incentives. It couldn't be government interference; it would have to be based on ratios of spending and ratios of manpower against size of audience. That costs the business money, so we would give them tax breaks in other parts of their business if they met the criteria. In that way communities could have independent newsrooms, and the large businesses could say that they weren't being interfered with as businesses.

Nine, that we would take a serious look at setting up a not-for-profit national newspaper like The Guardian or The Nation abroad, which do such great work, are not-for-profit, and are a model. They would embarrass the rest of our press, perhaps, into going back to doing a proper job.

There are a couple of others, including a national research centre, on issues having to do with the law. There are more and more decisions being made, even by the Supreme Court, affecting journalism where the research is scanty, and a number of people have very good ideas for setting up proper research that would be available to the courts and the legislators with respect to these issues.

There's a summary of these matters and here's a copy of the ad.

Mr. Chairman, I apologize for taking an extra minute. Thank you for your time.

The Chair: It's only approximate, and what you're saying is so important that I think you should feel very free to take your time.

Mr. Wilson Southam: Thank you very much.

The Chair: Professor Miller.

Mr. John Miller (Professor, Director of Newspaper Journalism, As Individual): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you all for considering the petition that was signed by 53 very prominent Canadians. I presented it, with Wilson Southam and Peter Murdoch, to the Department of Canadian Heritage a month ago. I'm happy to give it to you for your consideration.

I would like to speak to you about the connection between citizenship and journalism, between the preservation of civic discourse and the free, diverse, and responsible media. I don't want to speak to you about globally competitive--that wonderful phrase--media conglomerates, but of the newspapers, the radio or television stations on the main streets of all your home towns.

Is the Kimberly Daily Bulletin a better newspaper today than it was ten years ago? IsThe Sun Times of Owen Sound, the Prince George Citizen, the Cape Breton Post, the Winnipeg Sun, the Toronto Sun, the Montreal Gazette, the Halifax Daily News, Le Soleil of Quebec City, the St. John's Telegram, or the Niagara FallsReview? If you don't know the answer to that question, maybe consider this. Are there more reporters covering the news now than there were ten years ago? I guarantee you there are not.

Are their owners able to vote for you? Do they live in town or thousands of miles away? Can you talk to them on Main Street? No, you cannot. These papers are owned by six giant media companies, some with interests in television, radio, filmmaking, and the Internet. I can assure you that the ones that aren't would sure like to be. They would also like to some day sell to a wider array of owners, perhaps those based abroad.

These are papers whose owners' first loyalty is not to readers but to shareholders, who view the delivery of news and information as contributing nothing to the revenue side of their ledgers, just to their overhead. They operate on a business model of a mature industry unable to grow or generate windfall profits, heavily in debt from acquisitions and prone to cut or synergize unproductive resources like covering the news.

That is why those media companies and their representatives have been before you seeking the widest possible rules on cross-ownership and opening up the borders to other bidders. It's interesting that these same people were on the other side of the argument 20 years ago, because there was more of the Canadian market to consolidate and exploit. This is bad for citizenship and it's bad for democracy. If we allow it to continue or grow bigger, it will be fatal for healthy civic discourse.

I'd ask you to consider the following question. If you as a committee were to propose changes in either cross-ownership regulation or foreign ownership, these would be huge public policy challenges. Are you confident that Canadians would get a full range of opinion published in their newspapers or carried on their television stations? Would they be properly informed, so they could carry out their duties as citizens? Can you guarantee that media owners, who are the strongest and perhaps the only advocates of these policies, would put aside their vested interests and fulfill their responsibilities to inform the public?

If we judge by the words of one such owner, Izzy Asper, the answer is clearly no. On October 30, he gave a widely publicized speech to the Israel Bonds gala dinner in Montreal. He said that most media are part of what he called “the most virulent, vitriolic and vicious explosion of anti-Semitism”, which he said was unparalleled since the rise of Nazism. He vowed to “stamp it out” in his newspapers and television stations.

¿ (0930)

He went further, calling on university administrators to “re-take control of the teaching process, to ensure that...the revered term 'academic freedom' is never used as a licence to libel, a podium for propaganda, and an advocacy of hate.... And we should withhold our financial support from those institutions that fail this obligation of educational integrity.”

We have seen how his company is trying to control editorial opinion in all his papers across the country, which include the National Post and the major newspapers in Ottawa and six of the ten provincial capitals. CanWest Global is now in the process of consolidating key editing resources in Winnipeg, which is a direct threat to diversity of news coverage and a possible future threat to the existence of the venerable Canadian Press, which is the national news-gathering cooperative.

CanWest's website boasts that aside from its newspapers, or together with its newspapers, its Global Television Network reaches 90% of the Canadian public. Its goal of convergence and cross-ownership was bluntly expressed by Leonard Asper to the Canadian Club of Winnipeg:

In the future, journalists will wake up, write a story for the web, write a column, take their cameras, cover an event and do a report for TV and file a video clip for the Web. What we have really acquired is a quantum leap in the product we offer advertisers and a massive, creative, content-generation machine.

There is no mention there of benefit to citizens, readers, viewers, or democracy. So we ask, will Canadians be better served by this techno Frankenstein monster of corporate greed? I cannot imagine how.

What do we do about it? We don't actually have to go very far afield. The Quebec government has a new move to measure the performance of its media in this new era of concentration of ownership and cross-ownership. It's very controversial, but very innovative public policy-making. It acknowledges that no studies exist to show whether the wave of media mergers in the last two years has damaged the quality and diversity of journalists, and by extension, public discourse.

It is determined to do that research and is ready to consider strong measures: a codification of ethical and professional principles that journalists and media owners would have to follow by self-regulation at first, and be accountable ultimately to the public, and financial assistance to strengthen independent media.

In the United States, where cross-ownership of television and newspaper properties is banned, the FCC is under pressure to do what Canada did under Brian Mulroney and open it up. This move is being fought by many, one of them being Frank Blethen, who is publisher and CEO of the Seattle Times. Noting that it's rare for institutionally owned newspapers and television to engage in robust investigative journalism, Blethen asks:

Does anyone believe that the class of professional asset manager controlling today's news organizations...would even recognize the significance of a Watergate, or publish the Pentagon papers?

Today, our greatest threat lies in ownership of the press itself. It is fostered by public apathy and government passivity, an egregious failure to recognize the threat and aggressively deal with it. Of course, recognition is difficult when those controlling the press are not telling the story--whether wilfully or simply through disinterest and disinvestment.

More than 50 years ago, the journalist Walter Lippman observed that the secret of a truly free press is that it should consist of many newspapers decentralized in their ownership and management and dependent for their support upon the communities where they are written, where they are edited, and where they are read.

I implore you to be prudent before stepping into the brave new world of convergence and unrestricted ownership. Let's benchmark the civic benefits of our media industries. The signatories of our petition call for an independent public inquiry, like the Kent and Davey reports, with the resources to study the effects of what has been done so far, what Canadians think about it, what they expect and deserve from our media, and what conditions and obligations should be attached to any broad policy options--certainly including cross-ownership and foreign ownership.

¿ (0935)

A good model for this is the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press, something I've found very few editors, publishers, producers, and media executives in this country have ever heard of. It was a panel of distinguished public figures and the academics who reported on the social obligations of the press in 1947. Its ringing definition of public expectations stands the test of time today: “Freedom of the press is essential to political liberty. Where men cannot freely convey their thoughts to one another, no freedom is secure.”

You must decide, do you listen to the Canadian people and do you listen to the 53 distinguished Canadians who signed this petition and say their nagging fear is that unless something is done, journalism may be torn from its moorings and imperil democracy? Do you listen to them, or do you give a few rich media owners everything they want?

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Miller.

I'm very glad to have been here today to listen to the three of you. It's very heart-warming.

Mr. Abbott.

Mr. Jim Abbott (Kootenay—Columbia, Canadian Alliance): Thank you.

I, too, really deeply appreciate the input you have given us today. You do it from a very knowledgeable background. You do it, if I may suggest, not pejoratively, from one perspective.

The committee is charged with a very interesting responsibility here. In your presentations, you've talked at great length today about freedom of the press, disseminating information, and so on and so forth. Rather than entering into a respectful debate with you on some of your points, I suppose I'd like to take a look at what you might be proposing as a solution to the problem you've outlined.

I think it was Mr. Southam who suggested, “give them tax breaks”. I just wrote this down as a note from something you said. I guess my concern is, if we were to go down the path very eloquently put out to us today, the question would be how would we enforce? In other words, when we talk about giving them tax breaks, I would suggest what we're talking about is to establish some kind of a committee. I'm just assuming something here. Would we be establishing some kind of a committee? It has been suggested in earlier presentations by other people, who have expressed much the same point of view, that you would have some kind of a media committee, with the owners, some journalists, some editorial board members, and whoever, on it. But then it has been further suggested that we give them tax breaks, which is why I'm interested in Mr. Southam's comment. In other words, setting some kind of a punitive policy has been suggested.

Is this really what we want? In other words, if we are to get to the point you're talking about, we would first have to unravel what has been created so far, if we were to be de-licensing. But even to get to the point we're talking about by doing this, to creating freedom of the press, particularly with a supposedly independent committee and then by applying the heavy hand of tax law against them, isn't somebody still dictating? In other words, are we not creating a cure that is worse than the ailment in the first place?

The Chair: Each of you may want to pick this up.

Mr. Southam.

¿ (0940)

Mr. Wilson Southam: Thank you.

You can make a pretty clear case that it's cheaper to have one newsroom that sends copy to 14 large metro papers than it is to have 14 newsrooms. Newsrooms are not inexpensive.

The Canadian people at this time use tax dollars to give us the CBC. If the Canadian people, looking down the road at the consequences of exploding population, climate change, the 30 countries around the world that no longer have enough water to grow their own food, the consequences of cloning... There are at least 12 things that could wipe out our species in the next hundred years, for sure, according to the scientists.

If we decided we really wanted a strong diversity of voices and we wanted to keep it, and if you were to go to businesses in a free society that make money out of newspapers, you might say to them, “If you choose, you can apply to have your newsroom certified as an independent newsroom, year by year”. It would not be done on a government's judgment, because that would put the government right in the newsroom.

What we would do, as part of our public inquiry process, is have some journalists and some academics—certainly yourself and other members of Parliament—develop a criteria based on objective and measurable things like the number of staff, variety of roles in relation to circulation, the expenditure in relation to circulation, an independent body running a survey of everybody, including all of the journalists, as to whether they feel they're not being meddled with and controlled externally in any way. It would be some set of criteria that would probably do for ten years at a time if it was well done.

Those wishing to come forward to say they wanted to take the Calgary Herald, and if they produced figures... if they qualified, we'd clearly be spending a hell of a lot more money than the way we're going right now. Even the The Toronto Star, which does a great job--their reporter just left, so I feel safe--is down 200 people in their newsroom in these times. And John is absolutely right when he talks about a lot fewer journalists ten years down the road.

So if you're going to go to private businesses and say it's in the national interest that we have a rich diversity of voices, including the manning of our newsrooms and the.... Right now what we're headed for is a situation where if you work very hard for two years to produce a film and there's one film reviewer whose stuff is going to the whole country and he or she doesn't like your film, you're dead. That's starting to happen, literally, and it can kill a Canadian film on the basis of essentially one person.

So you say “It's going to cost you money, and we recognize that you are a business, but we also have to balance the private owners' issues and the public interest. Here's this criteria we all arrived at together. If you choose to try, and you can meet it, we'll give you and other parts of your business the following tax breaks as our contribution to your recognition that journalism is a public trust.”

¿ (0945)

Mr. Jim Abbott: My concern, quite bluntly, is that of the subjectivity of what you're proposing, the subjectivity of attempting to come up with that decision.

You mentioned The Toronto Star. I mentioned it in committee yesterday. I was astounded at a major, major story that, because it wasn't of the tone or it wasn't of the topic they wanted to cover, was on the front page of all the other papers but wasn't in their paper. Would that be a demerit point for The Toronto Star in this committee?

I'm really concerned about the entry of subjectivity into this decision-making that rewards or doesn't reward people on the basis of taxes. Again, I gently suggest to you that we have to be careful we don't create a cure that kills the patient; it cures the disease but it kills the patient.

Mr. Wilson Southam: The answer is you're absolutely right. No, you would not have that sort of subjectivity. You would have things that can be measured, counted. This number of employees is, again, your circulation base--factors like that that you could count. If they were all Nazis when the dust settled but they said they weren't being interfered with and they qualified, they'd be independent. It would be the same crapshoot we've always had.

When Toronto had 1,900 people, it had six newspapers. They might all have been terrible, but at least it had six voices. You're never going to be able, if you're going to keep government and other people out of the newsroom, to assure yourself of a quality press. But you can assure yourself you won't have one if you continue toward having very few owners. That's becoming very clear.

The Chair: Mr. Kent, I think you wanted to intervene.

Mr. Tom Kent: Thank you.

I appreciate the concern that's been expressed. The Royal Commission on Newspapers did make a very simple proposal that I think would deal with it and avoid any subjectivity. It was simply that each year the proportion of a newspaper's expenditure, all its editorial content in relation to its total revenue, should be averaged for all the newspapers in the country. It's a purely objective thing. You do the arithmetic; you take the average for the country. It's how much you spend on the content that primarily determines the quality of a newspaper. There can be exceptions to that, but essentially it's what you're prepared to spend on your newspaper that makes a good or a bad newspaper. Newspapers that spend more on their content than the industrial or nationwide average should get a reduction in taxation, balanced by an increase in taxation on those that spend less than the nationwide average, which is established generally by the press itself.

I'm not sure that nowadays that would be a particularly effective mechanism. I'm not now advocating it, but what I'm saying is if you want to be objective, there are ways of making objective criteria that would have a financial influence on the behaviour of the press.

I repeat that I don't think this is the most important thing. The most important thing is to ensure that if more than one paper or more than one media outlet is owned by one company, then all except one should be under some sort of trust arrangement of the kind that operates in many of the great newspapers of the world. There's nothing unique or unusual about that. It's how freedom of the press, quality of the press, has been most established.

The Chair: Mr. Mills.

Mr. Dennis Mills (Toronto—Danforth, Lib.): Mr. Chair, I have a point of order.

I regret that I've just been told I have to go to the House to speak. Before I leave I want to say how upset I am that I have to go to the House to speak. I think this is a rare moment in one's political life where we have a chance to make a difference.

By giving us this insight this morning, Messrs Southam, Miller, and Kent are giving us a chance to make our report something special.

Thank you.

¿ (0950)

The Chair: If you can come back, it would be good. Thank you.

Madame Gagnon.

[Translation]

Ms. Christiane Gagnon (Québec, BQ): Good morning.

I think your comments this morning will certainly contribute to our reflection about convergence and cross-media ownership. You referred to Mr. Asper, who I denounced in the House of Commons about two weeks ago. He called journalists fools, accusing them of not knowing history, being ignorant and even being liars. So Mr. Asper is right and everyone else is wrong. This is an example of the power of convergence and concentration in the press. In my opinion, it is time for us to take a look at this issue.

As I see it, we have tolerated this state of affairs in spite of the mistakes that were made, with little thought given to their impact on the freedom of the press and what should be offered to the public. A recent survey conducted by Léger Marketing showed that people have less confidence in those who write the news. There is a tendency to think that they are in the pay of business and are not too concerned about the public.

Some observers and even communication experts tell us that convergence has a less negative impact, that there have been a number of positive developments in this sector and we should be more concerned about establishing parameters for cross-media ownership than for convergence, which has produced a number of interesting results. I gather that you do not seem to be of the opinion that they should be treated on an equal footing.

Do you agree with some of these communications experts who are seeing a growth in this phenomena? Do you agree with the observation they have made?

[English]

Mr. John Miller: I will take that up first. I think the poll you referred to showed that 93% of Canadians value freedom of expression in the press, but the percentage who were confident that the media were delivering on that promise was substantially low. It was very near 50%. The 40% gap is what concerns me. We're suggesting that the answer is an independent inquiry to measure why it is so, as a first step. It would tell us the policy options that would follow from it.

I sometimes have trouble explaining to my students why broadcasting is regulated and print isn't. Broadcasting was regulated because the airwaves were once thought to be finite. That's no longer the case. Trees are finite. There might be a very good reason for setting up a CRTC for newspapers. I don't know.

In answer to Mr. Abbott's question, I would say that some guarantees for editorial independence are possible on a local level without the government being involved. Mr. Kent's reports suggested a contract between an owner and an editor allowing for a panel to be set up to guarantee and oversee the contract. It would be made up of representatives of the publisher, the newsroom, and the public who would meet to report and review how the contract was being carried out. This idea, after twenty years, is now being revived by the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union as a policy option. It might be worth exploring.

[Translation]

Ms. Christiane Gagnon: I see.

[English]

The Chair: We will now go to Mr. Bonwick and Mrs. Bulte.

Mr. Bonwick.

Mr. Paul Bonwick (Simcoe—Grey, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for a wonderful presentation.

My father used to tell me to be wary of compliments. I agree with almost everything you've said. I truly believe that democracy is only effective when its citizens are engaged and informed on the issues of the day. It's very difficult when centralized service is given one opinion and one perspective on one issue that obviously has so many different elements.

I also believe that independence of the media is sacrosanct. It's critical. I therefore have a great deal of difficulty in offering any type of subsidy program, whether it would be a tax incentive or whatever other options, in effect creating a business relationship between government and newspaper.

I have some friends in the newspaper business, both on the administrative side as well as on the journalistic side. As I'm sure you're aware, especially when you're dealing with regional papers or mid-sized city papers, the profit margins are not that great, especially if capital requirements are significant.

I would suggest creating a standard or establishing a standard by way of Parliament. No matter who has input on it, whether it's you, Mr. Miller, any of your colleagues, or people who are named here, at the end of the day it's going to be Parliament that adopts or approves the rule. When Parliament starts to establish standards by which newspapers will operate, I become very nervous.

To take it a step further, I would also suggest that I think we could all agree that any law, any regulation that is adopted or approved by government, can be rescinded by government. Hence, our, or future, government has the proverbial carrot dangling over the newspaper industry. If we don't like the way the industry is going, hypothetical but certainly a very real situation, we can pull back, rescind, or cancel the tax or subsidy.

I have a great deal of difficulty in digesting any type of subsidy. I think, quite frankly, to the panel, it contradicts the message you're sending to us with regard to creating greater independence and a greater variety of voices within our newspaper industry.

I would be interested if you might expand on your idea of some sort of subsidy or tax incentive to encourage independence and foster growth within the newspaper industry.

Thank you.

¿ (0955)

Mr. Wilson Southam: Since it was our advertisement that threw this out and explained that it was doing so in the context of brainstorming, I would like to not do that here. You may well be right. We have 11 other proposals for your consideration. That really would be a hell of a design problem to do it in a way that avoided that which you are stating, and there may be no way around it. You may be right.

It was a suggestion that it be explored. We invited our elected reps to consider, to look at, to evaluate, and to weigh it. We didn't suggest it be done, and it was one of many suggestions. So rather than tie your time up this morning with something that was designed to be contentious and to create discussion, there are other excellent suggestions here, and I'd like to differ.

Mr. Paul Bonwick: Sir, there are excellent suggestions in there. I don't take exception to most of them. That was the one I did and hence I addressed it.

Mr. Wilson Southam: You may well be right.

The Chair: Mr. Kent.

Mr. Tom Kent: I think I substantially agree.

Twenty-odd years ago, when ownership was considerably less concentrated than it is now--and it seemed very concentrated but less than now--and, for example, the old Southam, as it was, was still operating on its principles, spending much more than in a business sense it economically needed to do on the quality of its newspapers, then the idea of the sort of tax disincentive that I suggested, which would have been quite objective, would have done quite a lot of good. However, as concentration has gone now, I think the day for it has passed, and frankly I would now withdraw that suggestion because the circumstances have changed.

The important thing now is to reduce convergence and concentration as much as we can by act of Parliament, and above all to require, if I may repeat myself briefly, that where there is continuing concentration, then while obviously any proprietor is entitled to do what he wishes with one paper, if there is more than one paper, there must be some kind of what I call a trust arrangement to ensure, as Mr. Southam said, editorial independence.

The Chair: I think Mr. Miller wanted to add something.

À (1000)

Mr. John Miller: I'd make one point. I think your point is absolutely valid. If we agreed to agree on first principles, first principles would include no undue influence over the editorial voice of our media, and government undue influence would be the worst of all. So any kind of government interference would have to be very carefully thought out. Probably if there was anything like this even considered, it would have to be at extreme arm's length.

The Chair: Ms. Bulte.

Ms. Sarmite Bulte (Parkdale—High Park, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you all for coming before the committee today.

I want to pick up, Mr. Miller, on what you talked about, the creation of a not-for-profit newspaper. Could you expand on that?

Maybe I'm wrong, but one of the things I'm hearing more than anything, the message that seems to be coming out, is it's concentration that we're concerned about. That seems to be the key here. We talk about convergence, but it's really the concentration that seems to be at issue here, and maybe I'm wrong about that.

We talked a little bit about the convergence. I think you said, Mr. Kent, that we should reverse convergence. I think that's what they're trying to do in the U.K. with their new communications bill. But with the newspapers, isn't it concentration? What is the option open to Parliament to deal with concentration?

We had suggestions that perhaps it was looking at the Competition Act, that really what has happened here is that there has been an abuse of dominant position with respect to the concentration of ownership. Can you help us here as to what is the right way to deal with this? I'm hearing concentration more than just convergence. How do we stop this concentration? What tools are available? Obviously, the Competition Act doesn't seem to be available for us.

Mr. John Miller: I'll just start it off, and I know my colleagues will have a lot more to say.

My belief is that convergence is the natural product of concentration. Concentration reached its saturation point, more or less, and now the only way to grow the business is to converge and create these imaginary synergies. Part of this move past concentration into convergence, and then bringing in the foreign ownership question, is linked to the business model that is now the reality of media ownership.

The reason we have Mr. Asper saying strange things that impinge on editorial independence is because he's a TV guy. He doesn't understand the traditions of newspapers. We have a phone company owning The Globe and Mail. These are people who didn't grow up with that culture and they don't know the traditions that built them up as vehicles of information.

Mr. Tom Kent: The emergence of convergence, which has become so much more intense just very recently, is important primarily because it underlines the effects of concentration. I agree with that. It's the combination of the two that is the problem.

The particular problem about convergence, as I tried briefly to argue, is that it undermines the freedom of the press in relation to government. Under our system the holding of a broadcasting licence is at the will of government. Therefore, if there is a common ownership, because the finances of TV are so important to the owner, automatically the newspaper also becomes beholden to government. That independence from government, which we've all been talking about, is destroyed more directly thanks to convergence than the expression of diverse views and information is in itself limited by concentration. But I agree that doesn't alter the fact that concentration limits them, and concentration has to be dealt with.

The problem about dealing with concentration is that while convergence as we now have it is a relatively recent phenomenon, it's not embedded. We've allowed concentration for so long that it is now deeply embedded, and to wipe it out would be a very arbitrary thing to do at this point. Therefore, what I think we've all in our different ways tried to suggest is ways in which, without enhancing the power of government, we could lessen the effects of concentration on the journalists. What I've pleaded for, for so long is the equivalent of what I would call a trust arrangement where more than one media outlet is owned by a common proprietor. That could be done without government interference with the freedom of the press.

The royal commission suggested in effect establishing for all except one media outlet a contract arrangement between the person in charge of the news, information, and opinion, which is the editor, and the employer organization. There can be such a contract. As I say, it exists in many of the great newspapers of the world. They don't arbitrarily fire their editors or publishers. They don't do what was done to the publisher of the Ottawa Citizen. On the contrary, they delegate responsibility to the editor for the content of the paper, and that's guaranteed for the period of the contract. That is the sort of arrangement, which has been made voluntarily in many papers in many countries, that could be extended as a matter of principle as a way of reshaping the framework of concentration and lessening its effects. I'd like to say that we'd like to get rid of concentration, but that isn't realistic. But it's within the power of Parliament to lessen its effects on freedom.

À (1005)

The Chair: Mr. Southam, would you like to add something?

Mr. Wilson Southam: I would. Since the point about government in the newsroom had great merit, I'd like to point out that when we abandoned the separation of television ownership and newspaper ownership, we in fact brought enormous potential government influence to bear on newspapers. It's a cliché out there in newspaper land that because television is so much more profitable than newspapers, if you own a bunch of newspapers and some television and you're used to controlling things, you're sure as hell not going to let your newspapers annoy the people who give you these valuable licences. It's almost the ultimate government interference, whether intended or not.

The old rule was that we wouldn't let people own television and newspapers in the same community. Tom's suggestion is for policy options and ours in this report is that if you want to own a newspaper anywhere, you can't own television, period, finished, end of problem. So the lurking threat of the government cancelling your very profitable television licence won't influence whether you want to scream foul at the Prime Minister or anyone else in your newspaper.

When we let that go, and it's very recent that people became allowed to own both, we really created a tremendous potential lever. I don't suggest you people have done this, but the potential lever is there. If I don't want to lose my TV licence, I'm sure as hell not going to let my naughty newspapers annoy the government. That is the biggest, fastest way out of a huge one.

You're smiling a lot. Shall I shut up while you get going?

Ms. Sarmite Bulte: Perhaps I may. We talk about the licences and the CRTC, but the reality is that a licence has never been revoked by the CRTC. So while there is that possibility, it has never happened.

Mr. John Miller: But they're being granted all the time, that's the thing. If you want to get one, you play the game.

Mr. Wilson Southam: Name a newspaper chain that has really annoyed the hell out of the CRTC over time that has been given one recently. I can name a couple of cases that were widely attributed behind the scenes of quite strong newspaper groups that didn't get one because they annoy the government so much.

Ms. Sarmite Bulte: Really?

Mr. Wilson Southam: So you have to look at it both ways, and it's worth looking at both ways. You have a very, very difficult job. Thank you for doing it.

À (1010)

The Chair: Ms. Lill.

Ms. Wendy Lill (Dartmouth, NDP): Thank you very much.

I'm interested in your comments about broadcasting being regulated because the airways were thought to be finite and that it's in fact trees that are finite.

I want to ask you some questions about the idea of regulation and the public trust, and what regulation is all about. It seems to me that there have been certain functions in this country that have had regulations to allow for equal citizenship, such as air travel, so that people in all parts of the country would be able to travel, and so that everyone would be able to have a telephone and connect with one another, and so that everybody would have access to public broadcasting, and that's why the CBC was set up. I guess we now hear that regulation is bad; it's the big, heavy hand of government upon us. There have been regulations being thrown out all over the place, privatization. It all seems to me to be a move away from the idea that it was initially meant to protect. “Protection” is also a bad word. “Regulation” and “protection” are both bad. But it's that idea of public trust that I believe is essentially a good term and is essentially what this committee should be concerned about.

I anticipate the large conglomerates taking great shots at these hearings and saying they're going to turn us into bean counters like they've turned our radio and TV stations into bean counters. The CRTC is on our backs all the time. We're constantly being asked to record, record, record. I would like to cut that off at the pass, quite frankly. I'd like to see what kind of...

You talk about a structure or trust arrangement that would do what we need done here, which is to haul back the newspapers into the realm of being much more than simply another product. It's not a product. It has a higher goal. We need to hear more about those higher goals and that kind of structure that we can build and can put forward for this government to run with.

Mr. John Miller: What I'm suggesting is not central control. I'm greatly in favour of getting the owners, or the owners' representatives—this generally means the publishers and the editors—reconnected with the citizens on a local basis. I think there's potential to do that, maybe prompted by this committee as a condition of whatever you want to do with cross-ownership or foreign ownership or any other thing—tax policy, tax law, competition law—any of the various ways that government right now controls newspapers.

As a sort of quid pro quo, say we're concerned about ownership being too remote from the communities. We want to talk about first principles again. This connectiveness to the community is so important that we will only do this if you set up something like Mr. Kent proposed, very much on the same model as press councils that Mr. Kent was also indirectly responsible for, sort of at the threat of government control or a national press council that he proposed, the provincial council's self-regulation set-up. That's not been totally successful, but what it does is keep the industry honest by power of publicity. In other words, if these groups who administer the contract between the editors and the owner issued a public report on how this contract is working, or any concerns they have, then the newspaper would be accountable to the people of the community. I favour that approach more than government regulation.

À (1015)

Ms. Wendy Lill: Does anyone else want to speak on that?

Mr. Wilson Southam: Yes, I'd like to say something.

There was something you touched on that I can't fix, and I suppose you can't either. If we're going to deal with the sorts of problems we're headed for with the population and the list I mentioned, which is outlined in here, we're going to have to try to recover from all of the distrust going on.

I thank you for being an elected rep, and for all the hard work you do. I'm awfully tired of people knocking government. The fact is, though, we may get a George Bush here one day. So you don't want to have too many tools he could misuse. The problem isn't that you might abuse levers today that were opened up for government to use. It's a theoretical or abstract one in terms of political theory that you don't want to have these lying around if things go bad in the political process. I promise you, I'm not quoting Jeffrey Simpson when I say this—if you have read his book.

But I think it would be wonderful to have something like what Tom and John have suggested, which is a public trust document at the community level that citizens participate in, which moves the responsibility of the newspaper back down to where the editor, the publisher, and the team are reporting to the community and representing that community. These local voices gave us public health. It didn't come from Canada; it came from Saskatchewan. They gave us the Canada Pension Plan. It didn't come from Canada; it came from Quebec. We have all sorts of things that make this country terribly valuable, which came from here and there. Yet we're creating a country in which this is not going to be able to happen, I think. One of the factors is this diminution of the capacity of our press to represent locally, instead of representing large corporate interests.

The Chair: I'll turn to Madame Frulla.

Ms. Liza Frulla (Verdun—Saint-Henri—Saint-Paul—Pointe Saint-Charles, Lib.): Thank you very much.

Thank you very much for being here. I wholeheartedly agree, because I not only observed it, but I also lived it and went through it.

I'll ask my question in French. It's more comfortable for me.

[Translation]

It is a fact that two years ago in Quebec a parliamentary committee decided that press concentration as well as cross-media ownership no longer made any sense in a market such as Quebec. So mechanisms were set up not only to keep track of this trend but also to follow up what was taking place in the market.

The problem really is due to the fact that both the monitoring organization and the press councils do not have any power. For example, how can we tell a big group like Quebecor, that owns Le Journal de Montréal and TVA, who will also become the owner of a large radio group, namely CKAC, the sale of which by Astral to Quebecor was approved, in addition to owning small magazines like Le Lundi, etc., that it may have too much influence at the management level when it comes to the press? There is not any power. That is the problem. There is no mechanism that enables us to say that this is enough and we will not tolerate it any more.

I come back to what Ms. Bulte was saying: the CRTC has never revoked a licence. When Quebecor bought TQS, and it is doing the same as it purchases CKAC, it promised that there would not be any concentration in the newsrooms. But there has been, and the licence wasn't revoked. It is as if the CRTC granted a licence but did know how to go about revoking the licence when faced with this situation.

My question is a simple one. In the case of press concentration, you say that it would be important to have a contract between the owner and the editor, a contract that could be reviewed yearly. That might be a solution but in the case of cross-media ownership and press concentration, it is quite a bit more complicated. Do you see any solutions to this?

À (1020)

[English]

Mr. Wilson Southam: I'll speak first.

[Translation]

My mother was a francophone but she refused to speak French to me when I was a child in the west.

[English]

And I'm embarrassed that I can't speak to you in French.

Ms. Liza Frulla: Well, I'm Italian and my grandparents did the same thing with me, so I understand very well.

Mr. Wilson Southam: I'd like to comment on the first part of your remarks.

Someone once said the dictator to be feared is the really benign and kindly dictator because he or she accustoms us to un-freedom.

When I was asked to the Southam board in 1972 I went on and said I was appalled that we'd been allowed to acquire so many newspapers. And it was my privilege, behind the scenes, to act twice to keep us from getting bigger in significant ways. When asked why I was doing so I said it wasn't in the public interest.

Southam did behave quite well, as did the Financial Post, and we all became used to those big companies. Now we're in a world of big companies and we have a growing literature, which is excellent, on the end of the nation-state. It talks about the fact that the nation-state, as the guarantor of our freedoms and liberties, doesn't have much longer. It's an intelligent literature and it's highly believable.

The enemy, in one sense, in terms of the media, is a very large firm, not because they're evil people at the top, but because the world view is one that doesn't sit well with differences and it doesn't sit well with independence of voice and so on.

To move to the second part and then tie these two things together, what you do with the cross-ownership is this. When these licences come up at the end of seven years--I'm not sure why you didn't make it two centuries--you say, “We're sorry, by then you are going to have to make a choice. We're going back to the old days. You want to have a newspaper? You can't have a licence. It's going to be the same for everybody.”

And that's huge. A deputy minister we met with said this was huge. Well, yes, it is huge, but we've made some mistakes and we have a really tough situation that's making it awfully difficult for us to deal with what's coming. I think we're taking ourselves out of the action. We might as well deliver ourselves straight to the United States, the way we're going.

So that's what you'd do about that one. Do you think you'd really go back to full separation if you can find a way and the political will? With so much money flowing from corporations and so much pressure it's very difficult to see how that would happen, but the logical answer is that's what you'd do.

When it comes to concentration your report suggests, Tom, that nobody should own more than five newspapers, which still sounds to me like a good number. I don't know how you'd get there, but in terms of health, it would be a hell of a place to get to.

You talk about the synergies that would be lost, which leads us to try to explore ways... you say, okay, you're paying a price so we can have a public trust concept and a diversity. We will give you some sort of a tax break. And you'd have to set it up so that, in terms of your point, it didn't add up to government interference, if you could find a way. It's a creative challenge. Perhaps we can't, but we need it, and we really do and will need, in my view, a tremendous, honest diversity of voices, just as we'll need tremendous elected reps and a lot of other things if we're going to deal with what's coming.

Ms. Liza Frulla: I would like to add something because you're talking about the public and the fact that the public know. Do you feel the public is really fully aware of what's going on?

[Translation]

I come back to my own experience. I had a television program and when we chose this as a subject, we realized that there was no passion for a subject like the concentration of the press, which I considered to be fundamental, just like health. I don't know how aware the public is of the threat of the concentration of the press and cross-ownership. As I see it, they amount to the same thing. There are two different mechanisms but the end result is the same.

We say that we will get the public involved. Is it that easy to get the public involved? Do you think it is still able to work up an interest for the big issues like health, education and so forth?

[English]

Mr. John Miller: I guess one reason we're proposing a high-level public inquiry is so that it's covered. And what you're suggesting is precisely why the government might want to do something, because how can you expect the owners who control what goes into the newspapers and on the airwaves to transmit a message that, in effect, makes the public aware that they're too big? I'm sure you didn't mean to imply that this is so big that the government can't do anything about it.

À (1025)

[Translation]

Ms. Liza Frulla: The government is what I am coming back to.

The Chair: Mr. Frulla, give some other people a chance.

[English]

Have you finished, Mr. Miller?

Mr. John Miller: Yes, though I would make one suggestion, which is that you already do this. Among the more creative laws are the tax laws that govern foreign ownership of media, where in effect you're saying that if this newspaper doesn't meet these percentage ownership requirements, then the advertisers can't deduct the cost of their advertising as a business expense. If you're doing that with foreign ownership, you could do it with local editorial boards as a requirement. You have to have one of these if you're going to qualify as a vehicle where advertisers can deduct the cost of their advertising. Why not? You've already made the linkage between two dissimilar issues.

The Chair: On our second round we'll start with Mr. Abbott.

Mr. Jim Abbott: It was very interesting, Professor Miller, when you mentioned that connection, because I would suggest gently that you have suggested something that is objective. There is something there that is objective, that can be measured. How many column inches of Canadian content or how many advertisements are there? It can be measured, whereas I think--and it's unusual for myself and Mr. Bonwick to find ourselves on the same side of an issue--the concern we all share, and I'm sure you do, is that we don't want to create a situation where there is subjectivity that is then enforced with some kind of penalty. I'm sure we're all in agreement on that.

I have another question for you. In the case of Cineplex Odeon, when we saw our theatres in Canada basically turned into an outlet point for all the Hollywood-produced movies you could possibly imagine, Cineplex Odeon at that point was Canadian-owned. I suggest to you that when Seagram's--again, a Canadian company--bought Universal, we didn't see any change. Now, that is a demonstrated case, the situation of our theatres in Canada with the almost exclusion of Canadian content, something the heritage minister and some other Canadians are upset about, Yet the fact is that Cineplex Odeon was owned by Canadians and Universal Studios was owned by Canadians. The question I'm going to pose to you is, particularly with respect to foreign ownership, does that not prove the case that it's a matter of will? It doesn't make any difference about the ownership, foreign ownership or not; it's a case of will.

Mr. Southam, I think you made the point that while you were on the board of Southam you were working behind the scenes to reduce media concentration. That was the good work of one man. The point is that at the end of the day ownership doesn't make any difference, or does it? I'm suggesting that in the case of Cineplex Odeon and Seagram's we have an example where ownership really doesn't make any difference.

Mr. Wilson Southam: I was at a meeting of an Ontario Council of Health subcommittee one day, and somebody was lecturing us all on the fact that no matter how many times the sun comes up, we can't be sure it will come up tomorrow, which I think everybody knew. Finally, a very bright academic from the University of Toronto went forward, and Abigail said to this man, you're right, we can't be sure the sun's going to come up tomorrow; we can't be sure it won't, but we can be damn sure it will be one or the other, and now can we get on with the meeting? She also said, by the way, that's what we call a conditional future certainty.

We don't know which way it's going to go with population. We know that at 2.6 babies we get... you know the projections, they're unbelievable, and that's where we are right now. At 2.1 we level out at 9.6...and that would be nice... depending on how many people die of AIDS, it may be a little less. We have a whole bunch of things like that where we don't know which way it's going to go.

I'll come back to your question. We don't know what will happen if you have Canadian ownership, if you have smaller groups of newspapers, or if you have separation; we just know that it's still possible that the right things can happen. Based on what we're learning, we can be relatively sure that if we don't do things like this, they're not going to happen. It isn't a choice between an answer that's going to work for sure....

You had a question about Canadians. Canadians will need to wake up. I don't have current data. Our researchers are working on it, but in the States right now, which we admire so much, one child in four is growing up below the poverty line in the urban core, and it's one in five in designated large rural areas. You hardly see anything in the press about these things, but it goes on and on from there, as you know.

The concentration of wealth is such that the six richest Americans own more than 48% of what the people in the world own, and this is going on apace. We don't know if it's possible for this to stop. We don't know if it's possible for the 46% effective functional literacy rate that's prevalent now to improve. I wouldn't want to have your job right now, with kids getting 14 hours of screen time to one hour of page time.

It must be very difficult to go out there and talk about material matters in the world we have all participated in creating. We're not choosing between a solution in the face of these very complex problems that are coming and no solution; we're choosing on the advice of people like Tom Kent and John, who have spent years looking at it. We're trying to figure out which gives us the best options for protecting a Canadian culture, ones that will allow us to be a voice that counts as we start to try to make a difference on these issues that are shaping up.

We know that if we keep playing this corporate game and living up to this market myth that the marketplace handles everything and that anybody who isn't in it, such as a member of Parliament, an academic, or a statesman, is a nerd or an elitist of some sort... This stuff has been sold systematically for 70 years, ever since Roosevelt pissed off the establishment in the United States of America. It's picking up speed and it's crap, yet we sit around and say, oh, it's not the marketplace; our politicians now are evil--you can sell that one easily--and all sorts of people are terrible.

It isn't a choice in terms of conditional future certainties between a solution we can define now and no solution. It's a choice between stopping something we can see the dangers of and moving back to something that opens up options we'll have to keep working on. It's a messy situation you're looking at, and you're trying to improve the odds, I think.

À (1030)

The Chair: Mr. Kent, would you like to comment?

Mr. Tom Kent: Thank you.

It is, of course, obviously true that the difference ownership makes is largely a difference in the personality of the owners. The difference between, not to be overly flattering, the Southam papers, as they were, and some of the other chains was like the difference between night and day. If we open up ownership to non-Canadians, they are going to buy the newspaper, television station, or whatever, that's up for sale because they'll pay a higher price for it than some Canadian will do. They will pay the higher price because they can then make economies in the operation.

What will the economies be? Essentially, they will use the same staff, to provide a lot of the material for the Canadian publication or station they bought, as they use for their American properties. In other words, the inevitable effect of relaxing the foreign ownership rules is going to be that less of the information, the views that are offered to the Canadian people, is going to be obtained by Canadians. There's going to be even less. There are pathetically few now, apart from the CBC. There's going to be even less reporting of other countries by Canadians. We'll rely mostly on reporting by Americans and so on.

It's unavoidable. If you reduce the Canadian ownership of our media, then the media will provide less information and fewer viewpoints that are written or spoken from a Canadian point of view according to the interests of Canadians. At this point, there really isn't any doubt about how the economics and the markets are bound to work.

À (1035)

The Chair: We have 25 minutes left. In fairness, there are a lot of people who want to ask questions. If members agree, I'll let Mr. Harvard ask a question. He wasn't here. Afterwards, there's Mr. Bonwick, Madam Gagnon, Mrs. Lill, and Mrs. Frulla. I would like to have a few minutes to ask a couple of questions as well. If everyone could be disciplined and ask one brief question, it would help everybody.

Mr. Harvard.

Mr. John Harvard (Charleswood —St. James—Assiniboia, Lib.): Thank you. I'm sorry I'm late. I'm one of those MPs, as are most MPs, who is stuck with committees. We finished a study on U.S., Canada, and Mexico relations over in foreign affairs. I'm sorry for coming late.

I'm one who is also very concerned about cross-media ownership, concentration, divergence, foreign ownership, and the whole package. I spent many years in journalism. I spent 18 years with the CBC, and before that I was in the private sector.

I come from the city of Winnipeg. Forty years ago, in Winnipeg, there were three major AM privately owned radio stations. CJOB was started by John Oliver Blick. He had an outstanding editorialist by the name of Allan Bready, who was my first really good news director. CKRC was owned and had an editorialist by the name of Everett Dutton. CKY, started by the Moffat family, had a gentleman by the name of Bill Trebilcoe. The first CTV station in Winnipeg went on the air in 1960. Its call letters were CJAY. It had two editorialists. You might remember the name of Carlyle Allison, who was on the old BBG. He probably did more to get the licence for the station than anybody else. Bud MacPherson, believe it or not, in the British context, was as popular, if not more popular, as Churchill during the war because he was on the BBC.

Where am I getting to? At the time, 40 years ago in Winnipeg, we had all those independent editorial voices. They're all gone now. They're all gone. CJOB doesn't have one. CKRC is no more. CKY doesn't have one. CTV doesn't have one. The only thing they have is one right-wing talk show host. It's all that's left in the city. I'm talking about radio and television now.

Is it only an aberration in the city of Winnipeg, or is it something that has swept the entire country in the last few decades? Am I somehow paranoid? What do you say, gentlemen?

Mr. John Miller: I'd say one thing. You're absolutely right. That's happening right across the country because local ownership has disappeared, by and large. So what's the incentive? As more and more radio stations get bought up, Mr. Kent's model takes over. They want to economize. These people are deemed superfluous. They go to talk shows that are really cheap and very provocative and shed very little light on public affairs. They generate controversy and heat instead of information.

That's happening right across the country and it's a direct product of concentration of ownership and convergence. That's why people are not engaged any more in the problems of the media, because they don't have that connection you had with your radio station.

Mr. John Harvard: I'd add one more thing, if I may, Mr. Chairman. We're concerned about fewer voices, be they in radio, television, and particularly in newspapers. And I know there is a lot of anxiety and there is a lot of what I call sameness in the editorials across the country. Of course there are the CanWest editorials, which are national.

Can you furnish us with any evidence that there is a kind of encroachment right into the front pages? Has there been a corruption of the news, or a distortion of the news, because of these fewer editorial voices and because of the concentration of ownership?

À (1040)

Mr. John Miller: I can certainly give you two examples. One was—when was it—a week and a half ago, independently of course, all of the editors of all of the Southam papers across Canada chose the same editorial to start on their front page, and it was how Canada needs to pull closer to the U.S. That's point one.

Point two is that it is a fact that some of the journalists at the Montreal Gazette are being spied on and monitored by their boss. Their e-mail and their phones are being monitored. And if you don't think that's intimidating...

Mr. Wilson Southam: If you go to the website that's mentioned in the booklet you'll get later, www.diversityofvoices.ca, you'll see a number of instances documented in answer to your question.

One includes Haroon Siddiqui from The Toronto Star, the editorial page emeritus editor. When he went out to talk to journalists in Regina, the Regina Leader Post rewrote his story—it's owned by CanWest—to say in effect that he approved of the central editorial policy. It wasn't what he said at all, and it was rewritten in the newsroom, and that's documented.

Stephen Kimber, who is head of the school of journalism at UBC, resigned very publicly and has gone public about the fact that his columns were being contaminated and rewritten frequently. So that's commentary as opposed to news. There are other instances.

Yes, it's meant to be just “the editorial page is our space so we have the right”, but in fact there is clear evidence that once you start that, it spreads to commentary, it spread to news, it spreads—as we found out—to the advertising space.

The Chair: Ms. Lill, do you have a question?

Ms. Wendy Lill: Thank you.

I wondered if you'd like to comment at all on the Internet. We know that is now a big piece of newspaper ownership and transmission of information. How is it that you would de-link the Internet in terms of ownership, and what kinds of safeguards are needed there, in your estimation?

Mr. Tom Kent: The Internet in itself is a channel. It's not an internal source of content. It carries a lot of content and that's its strength. As long as we can keep the ownership of the instrument divorced from the content, then the content is what other people choose to provide. So there's no question the Internet is potentially, at least in practice could be, a considerable liberating influence.

But what it provides is little bits of information that you go and look for. It does not provide the basic knowledge of what's going on, the information about the diverse views on public affairs, above all, that the media proper--the newspapers and to some extent television and radio--do provide. And it's this that one has to be especially concerned about. I think the Internet, while it doesn't intensify the problem, for all its virtues, doesn't in itself reduce it.

Ms. Wendy Lill: I guess the problem is that the Internet is used as an example of how we have these thousands of diverse sources of information now...more and more and more. In fact, I'd like to see some figures on usage of the Internet. I have heard it's mostly pornography. I don't think it's looking for different opinions on a news story. It really would be good if we could solidify our knowledge of what people are using the Internet for.

Mr. Tom Kent: I think all I'm saying is that the Internet is really not a bad thing, but it is irrelevant to the problem we're discussing now.

Mr. Wilson Southam: But you often hear that it's a big solution for people who can go on the Internet. If you go to Calgary, Edmonton, or Vancouver, you are going to find that the Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver press have become the same voice. That's what you are going to find if you go to the newsrooms there.

If you go to other things, which are reported to cover these communities locally—which are very thin, by the way—you'll find a tremendous amount of stuff that's simply not edited. You can put anything up there you want. Of course, yes, then you'll find a lot of pornography, I'm told.

The Chair: Mrs. Frulla.

Ms. Liza Frulla: I would just like to go back to the government and the government implication.

Perhaps because I worked at Radio-Canada I don't have the same fear of government intrusion as others can have, knowing that you have to keep this arm's length between the media and the government. I look at Radio-Canada or the CBC, for example.

À (1045)

[Translation]

At the present time, the CBC and Radio-Canada are perhaps the only television networks that display a large degree of editorial independence and that deal with a great variety of subjects. The diversity of subjects is another problem. Everyone does not publish the same editorial to display a policy position. Today they no longer want to deal with public affairs, why is this the case? Very often it is because in the private media, they claim that public affairs no longer interest people and it is a hard sell because the ratings are not good enough and it is not profitable. International affairs also cost too much so there is no longer any investment in international affairs since, in any case, no one is interested.

Well, Radio-Canada and CBC have maintained this vocation. They are examples of places where the journalists' union can be very present without any apprehension. Make no bones about it, there is also a fear among the journalists in newsrooms.

Am I right in saying that although we may be afraid of government interference, there still are mechanisms, as far as government is concerned, that ensure the observance of the arm's length relationship compared with what we observe in private business? So the fear is not as great since the government can provide incentives without running the risk of breaking this arm's length relationship.

[English]

Mr. Wilson Southam: I agree with you. I'm a great fan of the CBC. I watch no television, which is a deficiency. I made, directed, and produced 62 program. So perhaps that is what put me off.

We have three recommendations in this booklet, which include and extend respect for the CBC. Number four is full support for the CBC. It needs to be restored. It has been badly undercut, as you know.

Then there's a not-for-profit national newspaper. If we've been so blessed by the CBC and Radio-Canada—which I think we have—let's take a look at fully funding the equivalent of the Manchester Guardian or The Nation. They serve England, Europe, and the world, in fact, very well with their overseas editions. It would certainly set a standard for the rest of the press to have this happening here, if we decided to do this.

There's also number ten, which I didn't deal with because of time. It is a model of a website providing online information, obviously as you were describing it, but in a much more extended way than the newspaper, and also online support for speakers and for facilitators going out to work on issues, and so on. If I were here speaking, I could have up-to-date online support if I were using a projector.

So there are three things or approaches, fully funded without advertising, similar to the independence achieved by Radio-Canada and CBC. It would be wonderful if we really wanted to have tools available to us as we deal with the issues that seem to be shaping up. It would be terrific.

The Chair: Mr. Bonwick.

We will close there, and then I would like to ask a few questions.

Mr. Paul Bonwick: I have to take exception to one comment Mr. Abbott made, and therefore I will have to ask him to lose his level of comfort. He said he took comfort in our agreeing, but in his submission to the panel he clearly was bringing forward the carriage and content issue that could be reasonably argued, I would suggest, in the movie industry.

Cineplex Odeon does not have any input towards the content or the production of a movie; they're simply the vehicle that delivers the movie. In the newspaper industry, clearly, they have input and they give direction on what the content is going to be. Secondly, certainly it would be the case that one is based on information and education and one is based on entertainment, so they are two very different issues.

My concern really goes back to concentration and convergence, and it's not so much the concern right now with regard to CanWest. I would ask for your opinions on a natural progression, based on where we're going right now. At some point a consortium or a multinational could be dictating editorials, possibly from the likes of Berlin, Amsterdam, New York City.

When we heard you mention, Mr. Southam, a quote about George W., I was reminded of a quote that was used not too long ago about Bushisms. The quote was that almost all our exports are being exported. It was a very interesting statement, but his point, however poorly worded, was such that it was his desire to provide greater opportunity for American businesses on foreign soil.

So if we do not draw a line today or at the end of this report, then the natural progression is some company in New York City sending out 143 editorials across Canada.

À (1050)

The Chair: Tom Kent.

Mr. Tom Kent: I agree, and that's why it's so important that now recommendations be made that head this off in terms of convergence and in terms of doing something about at least limiting the effects of concentration. Otherwise it can happen, yes.

The Chair: Mr. Miller.

Mr. John Miller: Canada has been a model to the world of creative ways of countering the cross-border influence of American culture, and we've been quite ingenious about doing that. We've created thinkers about the media like Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan who have exported their ideas around the world. I think we're at a point now where we have to be equally ingenious about this threat and how we deal with it.

Mr. Wilson Southam: I would like to answer that, Mr. Chair, if I may. If anybody should have learned, in terms of Odeon having been Canadian and it didn't do anything, so does it matter if it's owned abroad, if we're having any difficulty taking anything we've changed apart that happens to be Canadian, imagine trying to take something apart that's owned by Americans.

Perhaps you'll recall that when Sports Illustrated wanted to come here there was an appeal to the WTO, and the WTO struck down Tariff 9958, which had helped protect our magazines forever. In the same single go, it knocked out the excise tax and postal subsidies. So this government turned around and said, “Let's get tough on this one; let's use the criminal act. We have to protect our magazines.” As you'll recall, in 1998 Bill C-55 was abandoned when the U.S. ignored the NAFTA conventions that say retaliation should be in kind. They threatened to pull the whole rug out under this damned country, and we dropped it.

If you think we're going to be able to sell Odeon to the States and then change our mind, as opposed to saying something tough to Odeon... We have a lot of erosion going on, as you know. We had 15 indigenous dramas on television that were made by Canadians for Canadians just three years ago; we have five now, effectively. Try making feature films in Canada. There is a very talented filmmaker staying here on principle. Support is collapsing relatively, but that's a whole other story.

You talk about our culture. We're losing ground at a hell of a rate. I wouldn't give any ground away gratuitously if you care about Canadian culture.

Thank you.

The Chair: In closing, Mr. Southam especially brought up the question a few times about the separation of TV and print media. We've talked around the issue, and there was a suggestion that no newspaper chain should be allowed to own more than five papers, according to the recommendation of your report. To cut it down further, are you suggesting divestiture? Right now, say, these ownerships own newspapers as well, CanWest, B.C., etc. Are we suggesting divestiture over a certain period of time, and in the future no TV and broadcast ownership could own media? Is that what we're saying?

Mr. Wilson Southam: Yes, sir. That's quite a bit of time. A licence is for seven years right now. If they own both, and if this country decides to protect its culture, then it made a mistake recently when it accepted the promises made to the heritage committee, which were not kept immediately--they're both in this booklet, the promise to you and the not keeping of it. On those grounds you're going to say, “No, we need them separate.” They have seven years to decide whether they're going to get rid of their newspapers that don't make that much money, or whether they're going to get rid of their television. That's--

À (1055)

The Chair: If this were the case, would the whole tax credit idea not be necessary, or would it still be necessary, in your view?

Mr. Wilson Southam: None of this is necessary. There are 11 different things that could all be done, or any one or none could be done. We're simply here because you very generously invited us--thank you--to offer some inputs to a very difficult task. I would say that none of these are mutually...if you do this, you don't do that. You could do all 11, from my point of view, which is clearly very biased. I grew up guiding in the Canadian Rockies and loved them. I hitchhiked across this country as an early teenager and I taught skiing in different corners of it. I think we're pissing it away, frankly, so I came down here to talk to you.

The Chair: Mr. Kent.

Mr. Tom Kent: Mr. Chairman, I would see the timetable a little differently. If Parliament, in a few months, were to pass a new piece of legislation that instructed the CRTC not to issue in future or to renew existing broadcasting licences for newspapers, while that would not take legal effect until the existing licences expired x years from now, it would have an immediate effect in the sense that the present owners are overlapping owners of print and broadcasting and would be in a position where they would decide, in some cases, certainly, here and now that the sensible thing is to withdraw from the newspaper business. In fact, I think the financial circumstances, given how indebted one of those proprietors is, would be such that that decision would be necessary.

This would stir up the ownership situation. It would make it possible, without requiring divestment, because so many newspapers would be on the market, so to speak, to issue some new provisions that would limit the extent to which those newspapers could be bought by either foreign owners or by more than five, or whatever, new Canadian owners.

The sort of tax incentive I would like to see would be encouragement to local ownership, because I think the example of Winnipeg in relation particularly to broadcasting makes this.... The diversity of views is largely a matter of whether or not the proprietors are local residents. If they're local residents, they're concerned to have an impact on their community, to have good editorialists, and so on. If they're not locally owned, or unless in the rare exception the company was prepared to maintain the equivalent of local ownership, as to some extent Southam did, then we are not going to have the diversity of views, which is what all this is about.

The Chair: Thank you very much. We have run out of time, unfortunately. It's been a really rewarding session for all of us. Thank you very much for appearing. We appreciate your time and presence.

The meeting is adjourned.