[BRIEF NOTE] On the CRTC, Cancon porn, and cultural identity in Canada

[rfmcdonald]

The CRTC, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, has appeared on A Bit More Detail a few times before, in 2009 regarding Al-Jazeera and last year in relation to the demand of little-watched Sun TV for promotion on cable packages (1, 2). The news--as noted at Global News--that the CRTC is looking into channels which don't show enough porn from Canada

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) claims the company behind AOV Adult Movie Channel, XXX Action Clips Channel and Maleflixxx isn’t broadcasting enough homegrown pornography.

Toronto-based Channel Zero, which owns the speciality channels, is required by its license to air at least 35 per cent Canadian programming “over the broadcast year and during the evening broadcast period.”

The CRTC is holding a hearing on April 28 to review the license renewal application for the channels.

The regulator is also concerned the broadcaster failed to provide the minimum 90 per cent closed captioning for English-language programming.

The CRTC could choose not to renew Channel Zero’s license, to renew it for a shorter period, or suspend it with an order to comply with the license conditions.

Channel Zero is not commenting on the CRTC’s concerns but has previously described the lack of Canadian programming as an error.

Canada is a major player in the production of porn, with thriving companies based in Toronto and Montreal.

I'm inclined to wonder if this might not be a bad way of getting more high-profile Canadian porn produced. Cancon seems to have helped produce stronger music and other cultural industries, after all. I'm also inclined to consider seriously the argument of The Globe and Mail's Kate Taylor that this raises issues of the relevance of Canadian content regulation to some media.

[I]n a land awash in American programming, Canadian content regulations have a larger purpose, to reserve some portion of cultural space for domestic product so that Canadians occasionally see Canada and Canadians on TV. Adult movies may be culture in the broadest definition of the term, but they don’t have much redeeming social value. Unlike sitcoms or dramas, which are potentially filled with meaning that contributes to a social conversation, porn is a generic product whose national origins are as unimportant as those of a light bulb or a vibrator.

Beyond that, however, lies a nastier question about all Canadian broadcasting: How effectively can you ever compel commercial interests to advance public policy objectives? Lots of anodyne specialty channels featuring comedy, cooking and cartoons as well as the main commercial networks themselves have to meet more onerous programming requirements than the AOV trio and it is often not in their best business interests to do so. Depending on their niche, they can usually buy American content more cheaply than they can produce Canadian, and they rarely show much enthusiasm for their obligations, squirming around the regulations in one inventive way or another. Commercial Canadian broadcaster is something of an oxymoron; one of the reasons Canada needs a powerful public broadcaster is so that at least one institution can operate free of that contradiction and dedicate itself to Canadian programming.

Thoughts?