Scratching the surface: Rethinking the roots of Canadian communication policy

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• Mary Elizabeth Luka, PhD
• Banting Post-doctoral Fellow
• School of Arts, Media, Performance & Design | Schulich School of Business
• York University

For: CCA – CRTC Prize for Excellence in Policy Research

February 11, 2016

Introduction

Atlantic Canada is the centre of the Canadian culture and telecommunications universe. I know this because Cory Bowles lives here. Sometimes he is in the trailer park with the other internationally renowned Trailer Park Boys, or on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram dealing with thousands of adoring fans or hateful comments from around the world. Sometimes he leaves town to teach at a Quebec university, produce films at the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto or to research in South Africa or Ghana. Mostly, though, he stays in Halifax to write short stories, direct television, choreograph dance, help mobilize protests about drastic changes to the film and television industry, or take a volunteer leadership position on the board of the provincial arts council. He’s not the only one with this kind of complex creative and telecommunications-dependent network of connections rooted in the region. Tanya Tagaq went to art school here before she accompanied global superstar Björk on travels around the world, challenging us to consider the very foundations of Northern music, culture and sound. This Hour Has 22 Minutes came from here, and spawned not just the spectacular career of Rick Mercer but also of Michael Donovan, the leader of the globally dominant childrens’ animation production company, DHX Media, that emerged from 22 Minutes. Zita Cobb brought her digital economy profits home to draw international artists and attention to stories about Newfoundland and Labrador, the province that joined Canada only in 1949, and finds parallels in quiet but spectacularly successful community arts initiatives such as Wonder’neath Studios in Halifax (McGregor 2015), as well as activating new social justice connections for the National Film Board (NFB) on Fogo Island through the Shorefast Foundation’s community engagement initiatives.

In this paper, I theorize a set of socio-economic and socio-cultural impacts based on constellated commercial and creative connections not just for these specific creative workers and their stories, but also as examples of what Canadian communication theory and legislative visions point us towards imagining: particular opportunities arising from policy, the creative economy and citizen engagement nationally. What is most powerful about these cases, however, is the flexibility of their connections to a broad and relatively visible spectrum of already-existing, potent exemplars of Canadian communication and creative activity. There are thousands more cases like these that could be included as relevant examples to help think through how to recognize and integrate Canadian communication, telecommunications and creative policy today. In other words: What are we waiting for? The evidence is all around us.

To better understand how a ‘living’ form of policy-making and accountability can help support a sustainable communications industry in Canada, I use long-term observation of creative and media spheres, including my own experience and networks of knowledge, drawing on professional and analytical registers of engagement. Equally important, formal policy initiatives weave in and out of my examples of individual connections to supportive culture and media infrastructures. The Canadian telecommunications, culture sector, and media production industry documents that I consider in relation to those examples include the November 2015 Mandate Letter to the Minister of Canadian Heritage, legislation such as the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications (CRTC) Act (1985), Broadcasting Act (1991), Telecommunications Act (1993), National Film Act (1985), Canada Council Act (1995), Copyright Act (1985), Security of Canada Information Sharing Act (2015), and several strategic plans, including that of the NFB (2013), Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC 2015), Canada Council for the Arts (2011) and the CRTC.

In this paper, I work towards identifying and integrating existing strengths arising from creative Canadians’ networks and connected practices of cultural production, including communications, broadcasting, and telecommunications. By analysing a broad spectrum of policy documents, I connect those strengths to comprehensive visions for the cultural and creative policy environment. Canada faces considerable uncertainty and challenges as a geographically sprawling, culturally diverse, developed nation with a relatively small population and markets. In a global context, Canada struggles to assert values and develop strategies that enable it to chart its own course in telecommunications and digital media production and distribution, drawing on its unique cultural identities and strengths. Scholars from business studies, to the humanities, social sciences and the arts, aim for deep understandings of particular aspects of society’s relationship to media and culture, often by isolating each from other considerations. Creative workers, media producers and innovation scholars alike develop strategies to grow local and international markets, create jobs, and enable other financial markers of success. In the absence of a strong social and cultural vision, however, it is difficult to achieve depth and realize strategic success or development. To assess the current status of a strong social and cultural vision in broadcasting and telecommunications, it is productive to take a high-level view. Here, complex and integrated sets of values, and sometimes contradictory perspectives, can be consolidated, while allowing for flexibility in individual initiatives, approaches and industries. This is the domain to which the strongest policy work aspires. So does the inter-disciplinary nature of Canadian communications theory.

To demonstrate how entwined these systems are today in connection with my examples, I first position my enquiry in the context of current theories of communications and media studies. I employ the concepts of creative citizenship and co-distribution as they have been developed in the scholarly environment to help scrutinize succinct elements of the policy documents I bring into dialogue with one another. I do this so that I may use their junctures as waypoints to indicate a fluid and evolving 21st century vision of Canadian creativity and communication. Methodologically, this paper combines textual analysis of formal statements expressing vision, mission and purpose with observational evidence drawn from the cases noted above this paper to activate the concepts of creative citizenship (Luka 2014) and co-distribution (Luka & Middleton, in review). I consider how the funding, production and distribution of Canadian creative work are networked together through current policy directions. These include commitments to commercial market support, a robust core of creative innovation and growing references to security and protection. My initial comparison of high-level mission or vision statements appearing in significant policy documents also frames existing ways of thinking through broader relationships among the arts, creative work and policy development in communication and media studies. By offering Tagaq’s, Cobb’s, Donovan’s and Bowles’ position in the Canadian creative firmament as starting points, I suggest that the narrative of seemingly monolithic organizational structures prescribed by legislative mandate and strategic planning visions is challenged, illuminated, and also changed by individuals. How does the 1991 Broadcasting Act apply to an internationally-famous creative, public figure, based on the east coast and making most of his living by working in central Canada? In what ways do the Telecommunications Act (1993), the NFB Act (1985) and the Security of Canada Information Sharing Act (2015) affect one another and innovation in this country? Although this paper cannot fully answer these questions, it aims to demonstrate why they ought to be asked together.

A uniquely Canadian path

In 2014, Robert Sirman, then Director and CEO of The Canada Council for the Arts, asked what the authors of the Massey Report (1951), a watershed visioning document in Canadian communication, media and creative policy, would have thought about the state of Canada’s infrastructure and vision today. Sirman’s assessment ranged from bewilderment to anger to mildly optimistic, particularly concerning how persistently democratic engagement is tied to culture and media today. In his view, the demise of the venerable cultural advocacy organization, Canadian Conference of the Arts (1958-2012), and the decline of resources and centrality held by the CBC as a cultural as well as media innovator, are mitigated by recent highlights about the status of The Canada Council for the Arts, the NFB, the potential for the CRTC to expand beyond its commercial mandate, and, most of all, by several individual artists who have had international impact. This points to an interesting theoretical and policy challenge.

If our benchmarks of success include the degree to which organizations established in the middle of the 20th century still express current Canadian values, but are mostly illustrated by exemplars of individual success, then why do we so often enumerate but not analyse the successes that those individual stories tell? To bring the question of individual impact on social questions more firmly into the telecommunications environment, an analysis of the media and telecommunications ecosystem in Canada by Luka & Middleton (in review) that emerges out of the 2013-2015 Let’s Talk TV (LTTV) consultation conducted by the CRTC, identified six core groups of stakeholders involved in more than 45 LTTV activities^{Footnote 1}. Each of these stakeholder groups is comprised of leading organizations or influencers numbering between 15 and 500 players (from provincial governments to production companies, unions to third-parties). On an almost person-by-person basis, this is an eminently understandable number of interests, albeit contained within a complex legislative, creative and commercial context, including the documents reviewed in this paper.

To place this into a global communications context, Benedict Anderson (2006) and Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994), among others, marry the creation of national identity to communication through culture and storytelling, notably the appropriation and modification of shared language, cultural meaning and (for Shohat & Stam) filmmaking. Each argues that without the existence of other nations and their cultural practices, emerging nation-states will find it difficult to define themselves. There is, of course, a long tradition in Canada, as elsewhere, to describe itself in relation to how it is not American, or British, or anything but Canadian, and to also find ways to acknowledge the influences of many (but not all) cultures that collide here in Canada (Berland 2009, Mackey 2002). The recent surge of interest in Syrian refugees in Canada points to a related phenomenon underway for centuries. Massive migrations of people live in unrecognized ‘cities’ such as refugee camps. They are described as stateless, yet are integrated enough to be managed as a political entity through international aid or military might (Rawlence, 2015). Categories of need become paired with values of nationhood made more comprehensible through personal stories. For example, Canada’s commitment to immigrants was recently ‘demonstrated’ in a widely-shared photograph of the Canadian prime minister greeting Syrian refugees at the Toronto airport (Poplak, 2015).

In Canadian cultural and communication studies, the challenges of ongoing negotiations of statehood are expressed through analysing the production of multiple and fluid identities, including diverse cultural content and economic approaches shaped by geographic and demographic analyses, especially when paired with discussions of creativity and innovation (e.g. Gagnon 2000; Murray 2009; Roth 2005). In part, this flexibility and adaptability is a consequence of the directions laid out in the Massey Report and similar discussions at that time. Not least of these were led by political economy scholar Harold Innis (1951) and English and communication scholar Marshall McLuhan (1951). Both connected communication inexorably to technology, identity, creativity and commerce. In recent years, however, the crucial nature of a cohesive communication system led by government, or at least a national strategic vision for culture and communication such as that championed in the Massey Report, has tipped in favour of responsive, shorter-term commercial or ideological political interests (Winseck 2014). Even today, policy concerns about “rightsizing” Canada industrially in a post-industrial context tend to rely on isolated understandings of the relationships between geography, and urban/rural development through resource and transportation systems management (Lindsay 2015). More helpful would be a recognition of how those systems echo through and diverge from communications and cultural development systems, such as broadcasting (Raboy & Shtern 2010), telecommunications (Lentz 2014), copyright (Geist 2012), broadband (Middleton 2011) and data centres (Hogan 2015). Today, Innis might suggest that all of these systems must be understood to articulate together.

In post-1982 Canada (after the repatriation of the constitution), debates on nationhood and communication have circled around the expression of rights not just in a legal sense but also in terms of civic engagement. Among other rights expressed in the policy domain, Canadian communication scholars such as Catherine Middleton (2011, 2015), Marita Moll and Leslie Regan Shade (2011), Marc Raboy and Jeremy Shtern (2010) and others assert the “right to communicate” and the need for national high-level communication strategies (production, access, distribution) whether over television and radio airwaves or through broadband internet and mobile devices. Scholars, among others, also note the challenges of making interventions in this field as interested and informed citizens (e.g. Shepherd et al 2014; Taylor 2013).

While acknowledging crucial foundations of Canadian communications theory as sketched out above, it is through the particular lens of creative citizenship in cultural and media production (Luka, 2013), and of co-distribution in telecommunications and broadcasting (Luka & Middleton, in review), that I wish to consider vital opportunities for current citizen engagement and to rethink the current state of Canada’s vision(s) for nationhood, culture, innovation and telecommunications. Creative citizenship allows for the observation of ways in which grounded local engagement in media production and programming decision-making can help to reshape Canada’s national and diverse cultures in an international context, including its telecommunications and creative policy and practices. Additionally, considering co-distribution as an approach for strategic business management in these domains brings the theoretical and citizen-centred attributes of a global “convergence culture” (Jenkins et al 2013; Rushkoff 2003; Tapscott & Williams 2008) into the realm of accessible business and consumer arrangements concerning dissemination of broadcasting and telecommunications goods and services across Canada.

Mission (Im?)possible

Rethinking how meaning and media are produced by audiences and creative workers in the 21st century, creative citizenship (Luka 2013, 2015) builds on considerations of identity and pluralism of genres that cultural citizenship recognized a decade earlier (Andrew et al 2005) and still at play in media audience engagement analyses (Müller & Hermes 2010). Creative citizenship activates the public sphere through artist and audience involvement in policy and programming. Based partly on the technological opportunity offered by convergence, and the strength of an overarching program vision provided by policy imperatives (“mandate” work), using creative citizenship approaches consistently connect content producers (production systems) to narrowcast audiences (distribution systems). This was evident in the late 1990s, during the transformation from analog broadcasting to digital participatory broadcasting, and from identity politics to equity practices in the arts. Practitioners in each of these arenas set out to achieve socio-cultural goals based on the operationalization of shared values (Luka, 2014). ArtSpots brought expert curators, community organizations, and co-creative production and citizen engagement practices inside production processes to share skills, leverage partnerships and produce media, exhibitions and networks (Luka 2013). Furthermore, creative citizenship draws on the potency of shared visions to insist that the interlocked nature of personal and professional relationships generated by the uptake of technology in public broadcasting (and other public service institutions) are crucial at a time of transition (Luka 2014). One end of the participatory spectrum includes audience voting for reality TV participants (American Idol & So You Think You Can Dance, n.d.), while creative citizenship occupies another, as in CBC ArtSpots, the case of the internet, television and exhibition initiative I founded and ran at CBC for a decade. While I analyse cultural media programming this way, others similarly discuss news convergence (Bivens 2014), fan fiction (Jenkins 2006) or community radio (Fauteux 2015).

Likewise, according to generally accepted business practices in commercial, social enterprise and non-profit domains alike, vision, mission and purpose statements capture the essence of the aspirational and practical qualities of each organization or initiative (e.g. Bain & Company 2015, p. 12-13, 40-41; Daft & Armstrong 2015; Kelley & Kelley 2013; Osterwalder & Pigneur 2010). Such primary statements provide a decision-making barometer for individuals within organizations, infrastructures and networks to ensure that the work being done is the agreed-upon focus for the entity. These are usually tied to articulating values and objectives about maximizing productivity, market growth, social and financial returns on investment, attracting and sustaining an appropriate workforce, and comparable measures. Vision, then, provides a compelling basis of comparison for similar or related organizations and policy documents. Some of the key pieces of legislation that govern broadcasting and communication in Canada reflect such high-level measures and aspirations, while many of the current strategic plans that interpret those intentions on a relatively short timeframe (three to five years), either narrow or broaden that focus, depending on whether the underlying legislation is broad or narrow to begin with. In Appendix 1, I have highlighted relevant language from several documents for comparative purposes to mark out the current vision of broadcasting and communication in Canada. Though not exhaustive, the foundational principles quickly become apparent, as shown below.

The principles established in Section 3 of the Broadcasting Act are similar in tone and scope to the principles articulated in the Canada Council Act, the Telecommunications Act and the 2015 Mandate Letter to the Minister of Canadian Heritage. For example, the Broadcasting Act “shall be construed and applied in a manner that is consistent with freedom of expression and journalistic, creative and programming independence enjoyed by broadcasting undertakings.” Interestingly, Section 3 does not just detail what this means, including Canadian ownership and control of the broadcasting system, but expands the scope of the leading statement to include an extraordinarily detailed list of commitments to “the cultural, political, social and economic fabric of Canada.” Sections 8 and 2 of the 1985 Canada Council Act (C.2) overlap with the Broadcasting Act in terms of cultural commitment and considerably narrow the Council’s focus:

…to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts [which] includes architecture, the arts of the theatre, literature, music painting, sculpture, the graphic arts and other similar creative and interpretive activities (n.p.)

According to its current Strategic Plan (2011), in the last several decades, the Canada Council has interpreted this vision to develop on ongoing emphasis on:

…five directions – individual artists, arts organizations, equity, partnerships and organizational capacity, [to] facilitate greater synergy within the existing arts infrastructure to enhance sustainability and adaptability;…increase its focus on the impact of the transition to a digital society;…[and] respond to the growing priority of public engagement in the arts (n.p.).

In other words, the shift to a digital, global environment has brought the production of cultural objects and experiences even closer to the public and commercial interests of the broadcasting and telecommunications industries and oversights managed by the CRTC.

Section 7 of the 1993 Telecommunications Act connects in key ways to the vision of the 1991 Broadcasting Act, including that “telecommunications performs an essential role in the maintenance of Canada’s identity and sovereignty… that serves to safeguard, enrich and strengthen the social and economic fabric of Canada and its regions.” The theme of protection is picked up in much narrower (though still communication-based) ways in Part 1 of the more recent 2015 Security of Canada Information Sharing Act, which aims:

…to encourage and facilitate information sharing between government of Canada institutions in order to protect Canada against activities that undermine the security of Canada [because] there is no more fundamental role for a government than protecting its country and its people (n.p.).

The implication of this statement is that the management and regulation of communication systems (including telecommunications and the internet) is not only a Federal responsibility, but to the degree that the Canadian communication system overall has a vision, it must address matters of security and protection. This is reinforced in the current 2014 CRTC Three-Year Plan, within which “the CRTC seeks to ensure that Canadians have access to a world-class communication system… supported by three pillars: Create… Connect… Protect” (pp. 2-3).

Interestingly, the CRTC Act (1985) relies on the 1991 Broadcasting Act and the 1993 Telecommunications Act to express its own scope. The CRTC is also affected by Acts such as the Security Act that do not explicitly mention it (but do reference telecommunication), and by more recent, narrowly-focused Acts such as the 2010 Act to promote the efficiency and adaptability of the Canadian economy by regulating certain activities that discourage reliance on electronic means of carrying out commercial activities, and to amend the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission Act, the Competition Act, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act and the Telecommunications Act. This Efficiency Act sets out quite a narrow vision: to facilitate the development of commercial electronic business, except for broadcasting undertakings (which are subject to their own limits under the 1991 Broadcasting Act). Moreover, the lack of explicit vision statements in the CRTC Act makes a great deal of room for the CRTC to set out an evolving vision in its iterative strategic plans. In other words, the CRTC’s scope of action could be as broad as the Telecommunications, Broadcasting, and Canada Council Acts combined. Given the relationship in scope and vision between those three acts (and the reinforcement of that relationship through reporting functions to the Department of Canadian Heritage), it appears that the CRTC is well enabled legislatively to navigate (although not always empowered to regulate) within a very broad cultural and social fabric, from the creative economy to Canada’s security infrastructure, transportation systems, and to the very development of Canadian identity. The scope of action possible for the CRTC with this kind of vision and policy engagement complements the needs emerging from stories such as those of DHX Media, Bowles, Tagaq, and Cobb. This broad scope is currently expressed through its efforts to convene a national conversation of experts, producers and other business people, and interested citizens about the “discoverability” not just of Canadian media content and distribution systems, but also Canada’s cultural identity. The discoverability conversation is co-led by the NFB and due to unfold in May 2016 in Ottawa^{Footnote 2}.

In this context, it might seem that the 1985 NFB Act, like the Canada Council Act, has a much narrower scope, as articulated in Section 9:

To initiate and promote the production and distribution of films in the national interest [to] interpret Canada to Canadians and to other nations; …represent the Government of Canada in …commercial …motion picture films for the Government..; [and] engage in research in film activity (n.p.)

However, their most recent interpretation of this mandate, in the 2013-2018 Strategic Plan, says:

The NFB will become a major player in the global media landscape…, provide new perspectives on Canada and the world from Canadian points of view, …by creating, distributing and engaging audiences with innovative and distinctive audiovisual works and immersive experiences …on all the platforms where audiences watch, exchange and network around creative content (p. 9).

This sounds remarkably like a comprehensive public media production and broadcasting role, which positions the NFB as a viable partner in national audience development and media distribution initiatives. Likewise, the CBC’s vision as expressed in its 2015-2020 Strategic Plan seems primarily engaged with opportunities for democratic debate, rather than on the production and dissemination of Canadian-centric media content:

to deepen…our relationship with, and to engage with, Canadians in new ways and to provide a publicly owned, publicly minded space where Canadians can meet and exchange with each other and with the country…. Culture and democratic life have, since 1936, been at the heart of our mission. Culture, we express. Democratic life, we enrich (n.p.)

Finally, on the other side of the continuum, the Copyright Act (most recently amended in June 2015) is not only highly technical and legalistic, it relies on the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Acts for its applicability in the field of telecommunications (and other acts for other areas of interest). It has no distinctive mission statement, (e.g. ‘every creator/copyright owner has the right to benefit from their work’), although some might argue that this idea is either implicit or explicitly absent in the definitions (e.g. Geist 2012). Concerning itself with liability rather than capacity-building, creativity or vision, it is an interpretive tool that seeks to establish restrictions on who can or needs to be sued or stopped, rather than a set of guiding principles for productive decision-making. Given its very recent substantial overhaul, it remains to be seen how the technical requirements contained in the Act will be combined with other rights, values and principles embedded in other Acts, including those considered above, especially in view of recent developments such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Moving back to a vision

Perhaps one of the greatest advantages of sharing a relatively cohesive system of values, as expressed in the core documents above, and partly as a result of the size of Canada’s population, is the relative ease with which individual artists, media producers and distributors, and related organizations can potentially move among distinctive creative practices over time (in production, distribution and funding), whether commercial, artistic or for the public good. Indeed, that is the sense in which the anecdotes at the top of the paper were offered. My own artistic training and background in media production and non-profit management led to the role as founder and producer of CBC ArtSpots (1997-2008). But it was also because Adrienne Clarkson and Laurie Brown (among many outstanding producers, hosts and researchers who were also women) had successfully navigated the public broadcasting system for decades before me, demonstrating that cultural programming could be nationally pluralistic, idiosyncratically innovative in expression, and equitably creative. Perhaps Canada becomes increasingly democratic as we move more deeply into a digital society that enables pliable communication production and distribution as well as cultural convergence, resulting in co-creative strategies and the realization of hopes for a diffused distribution system. Like many others, I have served in leadership positions on advisory boards to Ministers, on governing boards for companies, universities and arts councils alike, and consulted and made culture with dozens of individual artists and organizations across the country, in the spirit of building bridges, sharing knowledge and facilitating transitions. By training in many fields, working as artists and with several non-profit organizations, and persistently making video art, contemporary music, public broadcasting programming, and commercial media, among other contributions, Tagaq, Bowles, Cobb, Donovan and I (and thousands of others) exhibit a personalized, highly networked version of the vision, missions and mandates of the leading culture and communications infrastructures and systems I analyse above.

To conclude my review of policy documents, I consider the most recent of them all: the November 2015 Mandate Letter to the Minister of Canadian Heritage. Albeit with a distinctive tone emphasizing economic needs (a flashpoint during the Federal election), the Canadian Heritage letter states:

Canadians expect us…to reflect the values we all embrace: inclusion, honesty, hard work, fiscal prudence and generosity of spirit…; [the] overarching goal will be to… strengthen our cultural and creative industries…; protect our important national institutions, safeguard our official languages, promote the industries that reflect our unique identity as Canadians, and provide jobs and economic opportunities in our cultural and creative sectors (Prime Minister 2015).

The letter did not just share the political and governance goals of the sitting government with external as well as internal (departmental) audiences. The publication of all the mandate letters indicates a return to a demonstrably public use of vision and values as guiding principles for decision-making, productivity measures and creativity.

There is an undeniable confluence of phrasing and mandates arising from many of the policy documents compared above. They include commitments to pluralism, collaboration, innovation/creativity and knowledge-sharing. All four elements are necessary for full creative citizenship engagement by those responsible for activating legislation and strategic plans. As suggested earlier, all four elements were present at CBC ArtSpots and elsewhere through the first decade of the 2000s, though on a more modest scale than the national broadcasting and telecommunications infrastructure requires. The legislation and strategic plans reviewed in this paper suggest the importance and viability of knowledge-sharing practices, triangulating identity, self-representation, storytelling, collaboration and pluralism as core commitments within Canadian culture and broadcasting. They also assert security concerns, a particularly 21st century addition. By looking closely at mission, vision and mandate statements, contemporary expressions of economically-inflected values are likewise seen to be embedded in the documents, including the drive towards generating innovative and creative jobs. Together, these articulate a broad vision of culture and communication with a clear focus on creative workers. By bringing increasingly convergent technologies into dialogues with the stories of real people producing media programming and art, the personal nature of innovation and collaboration in Canada becomes evident. It also sets the scene for ongoing pluralistic, sometimes protectionist, and nationalistic commitments by Canadian citizen-audiences from more recent initiatives such as the LTTV consultation. During that consultation, the CRTC’s emphasis on access and affordability generated responses from Canadians that explicitly linked the production of Canadian content to cultural identity and to the need for equitable local and national distribution systems, rather than articulating significant concerns with affordability (Luka & Middleton, in review).

As digital television, social media and telecommunications consumption continue to evolve in Canada, the express desire to maintain a vision for Canadian culture and programming in those domains relies on healthy infrastructures for the arts and the creative economy as well as the individuals working within those environments. A desire for participatory co-distribution, then, includes a modern-day understanding of what the asynchronous public ownership, management of public airwaves, and other sovereignty-related requirements found in the legislation could really mean.

The emphasis on narratives of economic innovation that co-exist with identity, security and pluralistic values in the legislation and strategic plans sometimes sidestep how and why knowledge is shared among narrowcast audiences and creative workers, as well as throughout related industries, including during current CRTC hearings and arts council strategic plan consultations. They mask how growing numbers of multi-modal distribution opportunities build on decades of policy mission and vision work to suggest new ways forward in telecommunications and media production. As the LTTV consultations demonstrate, uneven access to already-existing networked forms of creativity and distribution make civic engagement crucial in the activation of Canadian culture and media. The participation of more than 10,000 individuals and the majority of the industry’s crucial stakeholder groups during the LTTV consultation (including 110 presentations at the traditional hearings) point towards the potential for the CRTC to activate creative citizenship in a co-distribution environment. The more recent #Talk Broadband consultation will further test this possibility^{Footnote 3}.

What is at stake, then, and what becomes possible, is not just the considerable interest in relevant Canadian content that can be made available across multiple platforms, as Canadians freely articulate during consultative CRTC or culture/communication processes generally. It is a vision of Canada itself.

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Appendix 1

Date modified:

2021-12-08