A strange propaganda battle has been playing out in front of the entire Canadian television viewing public of late. On the one side is a group calling itself “Stop the TV Tax,” which is telling us that the broadcasters are about to convince the government to slap a ten-dollar-a-month “TV tax” on all Canadians who purchase cable TV. They’re saying get involved and stop this injustice.

On the other side is a group called “Local TV Matters,” which is telling us that the cable companies are blocking an effort to save local television from bankruptcy, that local TV is threatened by a precipitous drop in ad revenue, and that unless we tell the government to act, we won’t have local news on TV anymore. They’re saying get involved and stop this injustice.

Naturally, these two astroturf campaigns are being run by the companies involved. The “Local TV Matters” folks are a consortium of Canada’s major broadcasters, who want to charge cable companies for carrying local TV station signals that are free over the air. The “Stop the TV Tax” folks are the cable and satellite companies, which are telling us, point blank, that if that happens, they are going to pass the cost on to the consumer — hence the notion of a “tax.”

Both campaigns are disingenuous. The cable companies have grabbed the ten-dollar-a-month figure seemingly out of thin air. The numbers being discussed would be closer to six dollars per month. (Granted, the ad says “up to.”)

But the TV Matters campaign is far worse. Check out the website — you can’t tell that what they’re talking about is a new fee on cable companies. And the idea that this money would save local stations and therefore local TV content is bunk. As others have noted, local stations have been closing for years. They’ve lost their local identities: The CBC doesn’t even brand its local affiliates separately anymore; CTV barely does; Global TV never did. Not to mention that a new fund, amounting to one percent of broadcast distributors’ revenue, was already set up this year to support local news in markets of less than one million people.

So ultimately I side with the TV Tax people. The cable and satellite providers are some of the wealthiest companies in Canada, and I ‘m loathe to defend their monopolistic fiefdoms, especially when they’re making clear that any charge they incur they will dump on me. But when it comes down to it, it’s patently unfair to charge the consumer, via cable company or any other method, for channels we have no choice but to purchase.

The CRTC mandates that cable companies carry the signals of any local (”local”) TV stations in the area where the cable service is provided. You can’t buy cable service without getting these channels. So charging for them is, in effect, a cable TV tax. From the consumer’s perspective, it’s not a “local TV tax” because the people who get local TV from the air don’t pay it. It’s just a new tax, is all, the funds from which will be given to subsidize TV broadcasters, which subsidies they can use any way they want. (They haven’t committed themselves to actually spending the money on local content.)

So I have a proposal that will resolve this problem: If the local TV stations want to be a paid-for service, their purchase should be optional like all other pay-TV channels. I’m perfectly willing to let them charge for their channels — but I should have a choice whether to buy what they’re selling.

And given that they’ve recently convinced the CRTC to allow them an unlimited amount of commercial time per hour, I have a feeling I won’t want to pay for their services. I shudder to think what reruns of all my favorite ’70s sitcoms will be like once the broadcasters chop them down to make way for fifteen minutes of commercials per half-hour. It’s not enough that they want to pollute our brains with a constant stream of consumerist propaganda — they want to charge us for it, too.

Well, no thanks. I can think of more than a few people who would love the opportunity to trade in their ad-ridden “local affiliates” for HBO or the sports-channel packages. Which is precisely why the CRTC won’t allow it to happen. Von Finkelstein and the gang will argue that Canadian society would fall apart if people stopped watching local TV broadcasting. After all, the whole point of creating the CBC and mandating Canadian-content rules and limiting foreign ownership of media was to “build the Canadian nation.”

Well I’ve got news for you, CRTC. The days of nation-building via television are over. Who actually watches local TV anymore? I watch the national and American news channels, and leave the TV tuned to one of the cable movie channels by default. My girlfriend is a cooking-channel addict. Many of my friends stick to the pay-channel shows. Others just download whatever they want to watch via torrent. Yet others are collecting their favorite shows on DVD and don’t even watch “live” TV. The local affiliate? Good for sports scores at 11:25 pm, and that’s about it.

You know who is watching local TV? The people with rabbit-ear antennas, the ones who never made the jump to cable. The only people who WON’T be paying the new TV tax, if it happens.

So time to let ‘er rip and let the local channels compete in the brave new five-hundred-channel universe. If the CRTC is worried about the disappearance of Canadian culture from the airwaves (cablewaves?), they’re going to have to address the matter in a completely different way anyway. Forcing people to pay for something they don’t use won’t convince them to buy locally.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 5:07 am and is filed under Smells Like North. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.