To those asking what "diverse" means in this context, here's a quote in the article from the authorities:
> “The funding will be directed to areas of immediate need in the Canadian broadcasting system, such as local news on radio and television, French-language content, Indigenous content, and content created by and for equity-deserving communities, official language minority communities, and Canadians of diverse backgrounds.”
Canada did this in the 70's, demanding that some certain percentage of TV content be "identifiably Canadian". Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas took that as a challenge to be the most ridiculous Canadian stereotypes they could come up with and nailed it as Bob and Doug McKenzie.
This makes me wonder, would something like Slings and Arrows have been considered "identifiably Canadian"? It happens to take place in Canada, but it could take place anywhere, like, say, Brazil.
What they actually mean by diverse is Canadian-produced. All Canadian streaming platforms are subsidized so a tax on them is meaningless. It's a protectionist measure.
Often actually they don't mean Canadian-produced, but culturally Canadian, which leads to absurd situations where you have Canadian-produced production with mostly Canadian casts that get refused for one reason or another
The headline says "Local News, Diverse Content" so when that condensed list is expanded to the full list, in which the first item of each list clearly aligns and the remaining item(s) of each list clearly align, then no, local news is not the first diversity item in the list. French language is.
>Indigenous content, and content created by and for equity-deserving communities
You are right but what about the second and third items: what does “equity-deserving” mean to you? In many cases in business and academia it means “not white”.
All taxes like this are hidden flat taxes. Also money is fungible, so if you are a Canadian you should ask would i accept a general increase in taxes to fund “local news or diverse content”
>would i accept a general increase in taxes to fund “local news or diverse content”. Answer is probably no
I'm not canadian but I'm actively trying to avoid american entertainment content more and more. Americans are probably not aware of the extent of american cultural imperialism but it's _insane_
Genuinely curious about what you mean by american cultural imperialism, could you elaborate? I’m interpreting it as a complaint against the pervasiveness of American culture abroad.
I think it's an interesting opportunity to see things I don't normally get to see. And I'm privileged enough that this isn't the end of my lifestyle with the increased cost that will occur.
1. For most people money is a thing that they gain by literally converting their lifespan into it via work. So if we take it from people it should be for things of importance
2. There is a finite amount of money and there are things more important than tv. Maybe curing cancer? Subsidizing childcare? Dunno two easy ones off the top of my head
>things more important than tv. Maybe curing cancer?
This is a fallacy. The people making local news shows aren't the same people that are curing cancer, and the people curing cancer aren't going to stop to go make local news shows because of this.
Many people will know quite personally the struggle you describe, but I think there's an implicit assumption in it that reliable news sources will always remain available with or without direct monetary support from the population. I'll admit that "reliable" is a loaded word here, but what happens if the only news available becomes a hyper sensationalized engagement at all costs over facts dumpster fire? Freedom of the press was an important enough idea to make it into the US first amendment, but just like freedom the press isn't free.
There's a crisis in local news. It's an essential service that the free market has largely stopped providing -- the number of journalists following local politics has been decimated, and sometimes in a literal sense. Without someone with the time to follow that stuff corruption flourishes, and getting rid of local government is not an option. We need some sort of fix so it's nice to see someone trying.
> It's an essential service that the free market has largely stopped providing ...
I think you're misinterpreting the situation.
What we're actually seeing in this industry (and most others) is that the various levels of government in Canada have collectively imposed so much artificial overhead and interference on businesses that it has become nearly impossible for the free market to function.
Some of this is directly imposed, in the form of high taxation, unnecessary regulation, pointless bureaucracy, and so forth.
A lot of it, though, is indirect. For example, the high price of real estate (solely caused by the governments' flawed immigration and property development policies) imposes significant, but less-obvious, overhead on businesses. Buying or leasing office/retail/workshop/warehouse/etc. space has become prohibitive in many cases. Entrepreneurs and business owners are forced to direct more resources toward their own personal housing, instead of their businesses. Prospective employees can't move as easily. Entrepreneurs can't take as much risk as they otherwise could.
Even well-established businesses have been finding it more and more difficult to feasibly operate in Canada.
There are many private entrepreneurs and private businesses in Canada who are more than willing to providing local news coverage. Thanks solely to government, however, it's just not feasible for them to do so, so they don't.
If there is broad agreement that there is a crisis then wouldn’t you see more Canadians paying for access to local journalism? It seems the government is taxing what people want to pay for (streaming services) to give them what they don’t want to pay for (québécois and indigenous content). This is just funding special interests that can’t stand on their own because the market doesn’t want it.
It's a collective action problem. One person's subscription will not make the difference needed to improve journalism enough for them to get a direct benefit. Further, the main benefit would be that it exposes corruption, which doesn't generally impact individuals. Corruption's effects are spread amongst all the tax payers. Each individual is better off not subscribing and reaping the benefits of others' subscriptions, but everyone suffers if local journalism isn't funded.
It's similar to the climate crisis: there's broad agreement that things are bad and getting worse, but individuals acting in their own self-interest can't be counted on to solve it.
Further, commercial interests are generally anti-aligned with exposing corruption. They'd rather their bribes/lobbying be unquestioned, driving down the cost of it at the expense of the tax payer. We can't count on business to provide this service.
Finally, this isn't just about québécois and indigenous content. The last I saw, the $ was available as long as you had full-time journalists on staff, regardless of their focus.
> It's a collective action problem. One person's subscription will not make the difference needed to improve journalism enough for them to get a direct benefit. Further, the main benefit would be that it exposes corruption, which doesn't generally impact individuals. Corruption's effects are spread amongst all the tax payers. Each individual is better off not subscribing and reaping the benefits of others' subscriptions, but everyone suffers if local journalism isn't funded.
The broader the benefit, the broader the appropriate tax base is. If this is for local journalism and is as important as you say (I have major doubts), then it should be funded by a broader tax base than streaming subscribers. I.e. The future of corruption free democracy shouldn’t be on the shoulders of streaming subscribers. If it is so important it should be funded by income taxes.
Everyone loves the commons. People refuse to pay for basically any digital good, even if they really want it, and journalism isnt even what people really want. Its the good governance it creates that people want
They love to paint this as funds for the little guys but take a look at who owns ALL of the regional broadcasters - tv, radio and print - it is not mom & pop shops covering townhall, it's an oligopoly of a few giant conglomerates. Do you like Canadian telecoms? This is essentially propping up their media brethren - or in some cases the same company.
I haven't seen anyone put any other alternatives up for debate.
I know Poilievre has talked about defunding the CBC, but I don't know of anything he has proposed that would result in more local journalists.
Do you have an alternative in mind? We need some way to get $ into journalists' pockets while also having some accountability.
Increased CBC funding? It's probably better to have a diverse set (i.e. not just one being subsidized) of news outlets, so the Liberal plan here makes more sense to me, though there's also an argument for not spreading things too thin across lots of tiny outlets.
Instead of taxing the streamers, require they provide local content directly? I think that this proposal is doing that indirectly. The streamers get taxed, but could pick up some $ from the CRTC if they start producing more local content.
Instead of taxing the streamers, tax people directly? That'd probably be less popular than taxing the streamers, so good luck with that.
There's a danger in "We need to do something, this is something, therefore we should do it".
Government subsidies flow to those who know the system. If what you want is journalists being paid by those people who know the system (probably postmedia, rogers, and bell), then this may be the solution you're looking for. However, it'll likely make it even harder for different viewpoints to compete, not only against big companies alone, but ones that get subsidies.
In the UK there's some ground-up work being done with some local newspapers becoming charities ( https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/mar/15/glimmer-of-hop... ). This, plus some very specific tax advantages, could provide news viewpoints of all stripes and not be beholden to funding conditions that may or may not make sense for the news source. It's just one example, but it's not tied to funding that can be easily manipulated by governments of the day. Subsidized organizations also often tend to get lazy.
Money is fungible but a tax on a specific thing is not fungible to a 'general increase in taxes', raising tax on gasoline its not the same as raising income tax, because the proportion of tax paid is based on gasoline consumption not income.
This tax effectively amounts to an import tax, since the big streaming content is all American companies (Netflix, Disney, Amazon, HBO). It's a protectionist tax to keep up local production just like a tax on imported cars or on foreign owned property is.
You don't have to subscribe to Netflix or Spotify. If you don't, you're either probably consuming more local media & getting local ad rates up or you weren't watching TV/listening to the radio anyway...
Personally, I think this is a great policy! Local news is incredibly important to the health of a democracy (somebody needs to show up at those city council meetings and report on them, and national media wont do it), but it's doing quite poorly in the modern media landscape. I do not think it is at all a problem to support it like this, and a tax on streaming seems like a great way to do it.
If you are hesitant about the concept of subsidizing local press or media companies in general, it's absolutely nothing new: Sweden has been doing this for more than 50 years, and (in my opinion) it's largely been extremely beneficial to the media environment.
We're learning a very hard lesson never to trust the Liberal party of Canada ever again. If you're Canadian, you'll know this lesson as the same one learned in Ontario in regards to Wynne and the Ontario Liberal Party there, whose brain trust all moved federally into the Trudeau government leading to the exact same predictable outcome.
My response is that this list of things is covered across the political spectrum of media sources - these items are not controversial, fringe issues covered only outside of Canada to portray Canada poorly for some purpose. Our most prominent news organizations cover these debacles constantly: National Post (right leaning) or Globe and Mail (left leaning), CBC, and out to the fringes as well.
It's typically Canadian small-potatoes in manifestation, but not that much different from any other government desperate to hang on. Populist appeals to "fairness" and out of control spending that will force the hand of the group that has the resources to fight, find loopholes or leave. This is not going to end well when it's time to pay the bills.
That's how US media would like to portray Canada (socialism bad!), but we're doing just great over here and making pretty decent decisions for ourselves. We don't get everything right at first, and we're way behind on our green transition, but we'll get there in the end.
This new tax complements our CanCon rules [1] which help protect Canadian artists.
As a Canadian, I'm super curious about the recent frequent comments about Canadian policy on HN.
I'm as Trudeau-fatigued and concerned about productivity as the next person... but I think high immigration is something most folks in Canada see as good, and couldn't guess what the connection between housing and CanCon / streaming regulation is.
I'm really curious to understand if the folks commenting so stridently are Canadian and hold some passionate views, or are maybe getting a particular info stream about Canada.
> I think high immigration is something most folks in Canada see as good ...
That's what many Canadians will express in public, just to keep their lives easier by avoiding false accusations of "racism"/"bigotry"/"xenophobia", by avoiding potential job loss or employment-related sanctions, by avoiding other forms of harassment, and so forth.
In private, and especially with people they trust not to attack them, the sentiment is often very different. They're well aware of the various negative impacts that immigration is causing, and has long been causing, to Canada and Canadians.
Well; that's certainly not my experience living in a Canadian city... with high housing prices and lots of immigration.
Not seeking to put you on the spot. I imagine there's a lot of variation in how people see things everywhere. But I'd certainly disagree with you. I appreciate the economic and cultural benefits of living in a growing, multicultural country. And I suspect given the number of people flocking to this city I'm not alone.
Has it really been causing? Or is it their perception, fuelled by those who profit from sowing discord?
In my country there is high (and rising) anti-immigration sentiment, despite the fact that immigrants don't commit more crime than natives, and are net contributors to social security.
> but I think high immigration is something most folks in Canada see as good
I think this was absolutely the case right up until every last city/town in Canada started experiencing skyrocketing housing costs in the last few years, and now many cities have absurdly low vacancy rates. Broad consensus (to me) seems to be that we need to at least pause or dramatically lower our targets while we catch up in building.
When there's headlines like "Investors own 77 per cent of new condos in Waterloo region" going around, there's something deeply wrong and people are going to be pissed about it.
maybe the wrong composition of immigration, but too much? Not if you want to retire some day and need some help from the next generations. Our natural birth rate is not going to do it...
It's time we all pull our heads out of the sand and admit that the lavish elder-welfare programs of 20th century are simply untenable. They were only workable because of a quirk of demographics (the baby boom), but that's over now. It's gone. And it's not coming back.
This fact is clearly inconvenient for progressives, who want nothing more than to go on playing Santa Claus. But the only solution you all have to offer (mass immigration) has the teensy-weensy downside of inevitably leading to the cultural obliteration of the West. It's a ghoulish and unserious option, which is why increasingly vocal majorities oppose it throughout the western world. The more you all push for this insanity against the will of the people, the greater will be the damage and the harsher the inevitable backlash.
State pensions are anything but "lavish". The social security welfare state predates the baby boom you speak of and also exists in countries which never had it. Below replacement rates are a problem, yes, but that can be solved if you work towards not making "having children" be a luxury not affordable for the proles.
On your other topic, let me point you to a certain western country which has always had a torrent of immigration from all around the globe and has not had the cultural downfall and obliteration in fire and flames that you vaticinate: a certain United States.
Nit-picking words is the lowest form of rhetoric. They're unaffordable, as you well know.
> The social security welfare state predates the baby boom you speak of and also exists in countries which never had it.
True and entirely irrelevant.
> Below replacement rates are a problem, yes, but that can be solved if you work towards not making "having children" be a luxury not affordable for the proles.
You people "working towards" your goals is what got us here in the first place. If you all had any way to raise birth rates, it would have happened somewhere by now. But you don't. Getting rid of your "work" is likely the best thing we could possibly do to raise birth rates. Vastly reducing the benefits of Social Security, for example, would make having children much more attractive. If you rely on your kids to take care of you in old age, suddenly you can't afford not to have kids. This is how it worked for all of human history, by the way, until you all started farting with the incentives.
> On your other topic, let me point you to a certain western country which has always had a torrent of immigration from all around the globe and has not had the cultural downfall and obliteration in fire and flames that you vaticinate: a certain United States.
This is an old argument which made sense historically, but has taken a serious beating over the last 20 years. For more than two hundred years, America boasted a unique political culture, born of the frontier, which was proudly individualistic, decentralized, and enterprising. But that culture is being obliterated as a direct result of mass immigration. Polling data show that heritage Americans continue to support the old ways (free markets, limited federal power, low taxes, free speech, gun rights, etc), while recent immigrants and their children are far more likely to eschew the frontier spirit and embrace the nanny state (in other words, they support their old ways, not ours).
They're not just competing against other companies though, they're also competing against piracy which places a much needed downward pressure on prices.
This idea is not new nor uniquely Canadian. The purpose of all public media is to make programming and reporting possible that is seen as socially valuable but an advertising/click/like-driven business model cannot sustain.
The money for it needs to be diverted from somewhere. The UK has had TV licensing to fund the BBC:
That's great, almost no one is going to watch it still if they weren't already before. There's tons of existing subsidies that already at every level of gov.
This isn't the 90s when they could force feed us bad Canadian produced TV shows on Canadian TV channels. Netflix gives people the choice of global content now and there's more opportunity and money floating around for young up and coming filmmakers than ever before.
Public funded news is a terrible idea because it's too easy to become corrupted by politics. This makes it easier for Netflix to raise prices, but it is what the people seem to want. Otherwise I guess we'll find out at the elections next year.
The sad reality of Canada is such things are just ways to fund new classes of kickbacks to Trudeau and his buddies. Episodes such as ArriveCAN have made even my lefty friends suspicious of all gov spending.
If you read more than the title you'll notice this is already mentioned
> similar efforts are often derailed by corruption, and there’s no guarantee the money guaranteed for useful things actually finds the way it its original destination
Laws like these existed in the music and film industries for years and it helped foster local talent. Even public radios had to have a percentage of Canadian music on the air.
Streaming services have circumvented this and this law changes that for the better.
The kind of cynicism on display about anything that Trudeau does is frankly disconcerting. Even a broken clock can be right twice a day.
Just because wealth transfers for culture existed before doesn’t make them right nor does it make the implementation of this policy good.
Good policy is good if you reverse the winners and see if the people implementing it complain. So if we take this tax and fund media for men and white people instead of women, First Nation and immigrants would it still be good policy?
And we've been trying to tell you this about the Liberal Party for 50+ years. It's a corrupt opportunistic self-interested institution. There's nothing intrinsically "left wing" about them, they just put up whatever ideological sail will keep their party in power. In the 90s they were the party of austerity. This decade, they're all about "debt doesn't matter" neo-Keynesianism. An election or two later and they'll flip again. But you can count on seeing the same faces and them putting the Party first.
Me: self-identified socialist who knew ArriveCAN was a f*in disaster from the moment it was announced?
The average working class Canadian won't see that, and a PP gov't will just gut or turf those programmes immediately.
And people will either credit the Liberals, or just hate Singh for propping up the dreaded Trudeau. Every store or place I go to some baby boomer is ranting at me about Trudeau. Being associated with that gov't in any way is toxic.
Like I said ... tactical move but bad strategically.
I'll agree with you that the Polievre / Conservative Party's anti-Trudeau astroturfing campaign has been extremely successful. You can see evidence of it all over the comments here.
> The average working class Canadian won't see that, and a PP gov't will just gut or turf those programmes immediately.
Precisely. I think what really grates on people is that the policies pursued are so anti-working class interests while being patronized to from cabinet about it all the time.
This is why despite being libertarian I manage to maintain active friendships with lefties - it is the self serving provably corrupt we cannot stand. I think both of us tend to assume the other leads to an even worse scenario.
Ideologically, I'm far far to the left of Mulcair but could plainly see the guy was an extremely competent parliamentarian and debater and organizer. He should have put up a struggle to stay as leader. He would have held Trudeau to account and kept some integrity for the party. The people who ran his "Smilin' Tom" campaign should have been fired.
Huge mis-steps during COVID and after by the NDP. They've completely lost their bearing as a party for working people people.
> The fee systems effectively mirrors the fees already imposed on local broadcasters.
I suppose the question becomes should it have been there on the others?
I kind of feel that due to the reduced population scale and density of Canada, if you want marginal communities to have closer to home produced content you need to do something like this. The base for the niche groups isn’t big enough (and realistically often isn’t wealthy enough) to minimally support niche content sustainably.
Then again, it feels the recent focus in Canada has been to strip down the taxable to fund and placate the untaxable, with total disregard as to making the taxable or the untaxable more productive and improving their outlook on life. The tax feels fine to me if in decent circumstances, but it’s another example of the governments broader attitude which makes it off-putting.
I've spent decades considering journalism shortcomings from lots of angles, inc hard R and L. My conclusion is most of us can have the news we wanted if we focused on ineptitude/competency.
A strong negative example: Reporting a Gov/Corp/LEO press release without analyzing the integrity of the remarks or the issuer is classic ineptitude. Especially when the data that discredits them are trivial to find.
kids alone are at meaningful risk of stranger kidnapping
FBI/DA says encryption makes Americans less safe
Today, Huge Corp announced ambition new plans to...
I truly appreciate a financial lifeline to keep news orgs from dying completely (even if the method is highly questionable). I do not relish a continuation of journalists failing to minimally vet the info they're advancing.
If this is a genuine question: You'd short a Canadian "Total Stock Market" fund like (VCN) Vanguard FTSE Canada All Cap Index ETF. You can also short the currency, but that requires some expertise since you need to consider the relative currency you purchased from too.
Yeah but Forex you have to balance the BOC moves and the Fed.
That said if you think Canada is going south economically faster then the US and inflation is going to temper than the rates will go down faster and the dollar will be lower vs USD.
Not a rumour, it's happening in plain sight. Why would Trudeau call that Toronto byelection end of June? He had plenty of time. He called it in June because the latest he could step down was July in order to have time for a leadership race before the next election. The reason the byelection will precipitate his resignation is it will be a bellweather performance in a traditional liberal stronghold, which will almost certainly show vast liberal underperformance leading to Trudeau's resignation. Among the factors are Trudeau's plummeting approval rates that are stuck very low, Liberal polling currently near 20%, far below the conservatives, also this riding is the 5th most populous riding for Jewish votes in Canada, who from what I understand are none too happy with Trudeau's stance on what's happening in Gaza. So it's less a rumour than a foregone conclusion, in my opinion.
People here don't seem to realize the importance of Canadian content rules in maintaining a cohesive national identity and supporting local content producers. The overwhelming barrage of U.S. media necessitates funding the creation of Canadian content, artists and points of view.
A lot of media in Canada is subsidized, the government needs to justify its expenses somehow. It has nothing to do with Canadian exceptionalism or something like that.
A guess: locally produced content, rather than content created for a US or global audience. A winner-takes-all victory has different implications in the cultural sphere.
The incredibly low quality comments mustered here, compared to typical HN posts, makes it very difficult not to just see this as a sump of bots and foreign agents.
The pattern is so consistent across online discourse about any Canadian news, no matter the platform. I would've though HN would be too small but apparently not.
I agree with the general shittyness of these comments, but they're probably real people. Whenever Canadian politics makes an appearance here, it's a combination of ignorant foreigners projecting their own local politics without any context, or groups like the convoyers or Ontario Proud spewing their usual garbage.
A lot of Canadians are sick and tired of our corrupt, lying government. It's laughable to reduce critics of Trudeau and the Liberal party as mere "convoyers" or "Ontario proud" characters.
I voted for Trudeau in 2015 and am so fucking done with this clown and his party.
That's not the issue here. It's that this is the entirely wrong place to go off-topic and begin airing political grievances. It just screams "bots and agents."
I mean based on what does well in the various markets, sometimes markets are wrong.
Maybe a controversial opinion but a market is basically just a popularity contest where dollars are votes, which is not only inherently biased towards the wealthy, since those with more dollars get more votes, but it's the same flawed people doing the voting at the end of the day. The results of that certainly matter in that those who want to succeed in a given market will pay attention to what does succeed, but it's far from beyond reproach.
Is that sort of like bad healthcare that is not optional and forcefully taken from each salary you make when you could instead use a fraction of that healthcare tax to get a vastly superior private healthcare, and yet you're not allowed to NOT pay healthcare tax, thus if you want better healthcare you pay for it AND the private one?
How much could it possibly cost? As a young, healthy American, I currently pay over $10,000/year (about half of which is forcefully taken not even counting Medicaid/Medicare) for a plan with a $7,000 deductible. In other words, I get zero benefit other than an annual checkup unless I have something catastrophic happen. This was by far both the cheapest plan and best plan available for every situation for me.
Google says the average Canadian pays, including taxes, about half of what I do. Do you just not get any coverage at all?
Maybe the private healthcare is only cheap because it has to compete with free. (free in the sense that any costs are sunk costs, not that there are no costs)
Having spent four days in the hospital recently on something and only having a $45 ambulance bill out of it without even having to think about whether going to the hospital would bankrupt me — I’ll take Canada's taxes over those in the US. We at least get value for our taxes, and (mostly) don’t have greedy US healthcare companies denying necessary coverage because it would drop their profitability by 0.001%.
One is tempted to think that local news, "diverse content" (however that's defined) would be something Canadians would pay for willingly and without need for yet another enforced subsidy from the government, but apparently not, they just want what they think is good.
It's not that simple, people do not buy each TV episode or movie they watch. They subscribe to a small number of streaming services which decide what content to produce and/or acquire.
The only reasonable way for someone to pay for a particular type of content is either: 1. Subscribe to a major provider that has it in their library (e.g., "I want to watch some anime, and Netflix has some anime"), 2. Subscribe to a special-purpose provider for just this content ("I want to watch a lot of anime, enough to justify having crunchyroll beside netflix").
What happens is that people shop amongst the big ones, and just do away with content they do not offer. Unless people want to protest/boycott providers, there is no way to vote with your money on products they are not offered, nor does it work if the products are extremely inconvenient or financially unsound.
To be quite honest, most people don't really care about indigenous stories and languages in Canada because that's not their identity. Overall, indigenous peoples make up 5% of the population. It's a niche market that wouldn't sustain much on its own without subsidies.
> “The funding will be directed to areas of immediate need in the Canadian broadcasting system, such as local news on radio and television, French-language content, Indigenous content, and content created by and for equity-deserving communities, official language minority communities, and Canadians of diverse backgrounds.”
Original Announcement: https://www.canada.ca/en/radio-television-telecommunications...