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Navigating the country’s telecommunications landscape a tricky task: Peter Menzies

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1 year ago

6 minute read

From the MacDonald Laurier Institute

By Peter Menzies

On the telecom side of things, the CRTC’s long-standing focus on the fundamental issues of access and affordability is far more tangible than the ethereal cultural ambitions that have swamped the broadcasting boat

Canada’s communications policy playing field is more uncertain today than it has been in decades.

The cause is primarily the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11), which attempts to “modernize” the Broadcasting Act by defining all internet-based audio and visual content as “broadcasting.” Promoted by a series of heritage ministers as a simple matter of ensuring that streaming companies support Canadian content, the act has alarmed a thriving community of unregulated online creators while causing targeted offshore operators to question how they can continue operating in Canada.

Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) chair Vicky Eatrides, appointed last January, is clearly feeling pressure to implement Bill C-11 as quickly as possible. Following a series of rushed preliminary processes that made it challenging for many companies in the regulatory “rookie” category to participate, the CRTC’s first public hearing is scheduled for Nov. 20.

It involves 127 intervenors, is scheduled to last three weeks, and Eatrides hopes to have initial decisions made by the end of 2024.

With all her staff’s hands to the pumps on that file, Eatrides has shut down dealing with new licensing matters in the traditional broadcasting fields of television and radio for at least two years. All TV licences up for renewal this year were administratively renewed until 2025 (Bell has filed a court appeal). All of those expiring next year were renewed as is until 2026, and the radio industry was informed the CRTC won’t accept applications in that genre for at least two years, putting it in a regulatory cryo-chamber.

Meanwhile, active broadcasting files have been triaged to the extent that they are backed up, in some cases for years, leaving those involved without the decisions they need. The renewal of the CBC’s licence, for instance, remains incomplete 33 months after the CRTC’s public hearing into the matter.

On the telecommunications side, life is much more steady as she goes. Early in July, the CRTC laid out what it described as a more streamlined and flexible manner for determining wholesale access rates with the goal of fostering competition. But these matters are rarely dealt with swiftly, and incumbent companies affected by this new—and, to many, refreshing—approach have a long track record of being able to drag things out.

Competitor access rates is a matter that has preoccupied the CRTC for a decade; the rates have wavered back and forth since at least 2016, and the lack of regulatory certainty has had a debilitating impact on smaller service providers. The largest of those—TekSavvy—threw in the towel early this summer and put itself up for sale.

The management of so-called mobile virtual network operator rates, particularly relevant in the shadow of Quebecor’s purchase of Freedom Mobile, has moved along efficiently. This is another positive sign involving an area in which the CRTC is attempting to foster competition with increased regulatory certainty. When it comes to the telecom side of things, the regulator’s long-standing focus on the fundamental issues of access and affordability is, while complicated in terms of implementation, far more tangible than the ethereal cultural ambitions that have swamped the broadcasting boat.

Two other matters are worth watching.

The first—the CRTC’s role in overseeing negotiations as foreseen in the Online News Act—may evaporate. Meta has moved out of the business of carrying news in Canada, with disastrous consequences for those in the business of creating it. News Media Canada, the industry’s lobbying arm, is now asking the government to bow to Google’s demands before it does the same.

That could mean significant legislative amendments which could eliminate the CRTC’s role entirely. Seeing as the commission has already delayed decisions on which news organizations would qualify until late 2024, this would be a welcome relief.

The second will be whether the CRTC, when dealing with the likes of Disney and Netflix next month, realizes what’s at stake. The United States-based companies aren’t interested in contributing solely through official funds while all the commission appears to want to talk about is how much they should pay and to which funds.

Neither has threatened, as Meta and Google did with Bill C-18, to disconnect Canada if they don’t get the outcomes they need.

Not yet, anyway.

Peter Menzies is a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a former newspaper executive, and past vice-chair of the CRTC.

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Published on March 31, 2025

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President Donald Trump says the slate of tariffs he plans to announce Wednesday will be “nicer,” “kinder” and “more generous” than other countries have treated the U.S.

Trump plans to unveil reciprocal tariffs on all nations that put duties on U.S. imports Wednesday, which the president has been calling “Liberation Day” for American trade.

Trump’s latest comments on tariffs come as he aims to reshape the global economy to reduce U.S. trade deficits and generate billions in federal revenue through higher taxes on imported products.

Trump’s trade policies have upended U.S. and global markets, but the president has yet to get into specifics ahead of Wednesday’s planned announcement.

At the start of March, Trump told a joint session of Congress that he planned to put reciprocal tariffs in place starting April 2.

“Whatever they tariff us, we tariff them. Whatever they tax us, we tax them,” Trump said. “If they do non-monetary tariffs to keep us out of their market, then we do non-monetary barriers to keep them out of our market. We will take in trillions of dollars and create jobs like we have never seen before.”

On Sunday night, Trump said on Air Force One that U.S. tariffs would be “nicer,” “kinder” and “more generous” than how other countries have treated the U.S.

Last week, Trump announced a 25% tariff on imported automobiles, duties that he said would be “permanent.” The White House said it expects the auto tariffs on cars and light-duty trucks will generate up to $100 billion in federal revenue. Trump said eventually he hopes to bring in $600 billion to $1 trillion in tariff revenue in the next year or two. Trump also said the tariffs would lead to a manufacturing boom in the U.S., with auto companies building new plants, expanding existing plants and adding jobs.

Trump predicts his protectionist trade policies will create jobs, make the nation rich and help reduce both trade deficits and the federal government’s persistent deficits.

The “Liberation Day” tariffs come after months of talk since Trump took office in January. On the campaign trail, Trump frequently called “tariff” the most beautiful word in the English language.

James Dorn, senior fellow emeritus at the Cato Institute, said Trump’s rhetoric on tariffs doesn’t match the economic reality of Americans.

“Tariffs expand the scope of government, politicize economic life, increase uncertainty, and reduce individual freedom,” he wrote. “Government officials gain arbitrary power while market participants face fewer opportunities for mutually beneficial exchanges and greater uncertainty as the rules of the game change.”

Dorn said consumers would pay the price.

“Tariffs are levied on U.S. importers as goods – both final and intermediate –subject to the tariff enter the country,” he wrote. “Importers and consumers typically end up paying the tariffs, as they cut into profit margins and drive consumer prices up.”

Business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Farm Bureau Federation, have urged Trump to back off tariff threats.

Trump has promised that his tariffs would shift the tax burden away from Americans and onto foreign countries, but tariffs are generally paid by the people who import the foreign products. Those importers then have a choice: absorb the loss or pass it on to consumers through higher prices. The president also promised tariffs would make America “rich as hell.”

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Biden’s Greenhouse Gas ‘Greendoggle’ Slush Fund Is Unraveling

Published on March 31, 2025

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Michael Chamberlain

We warned you: this gas didn’t smell right from the beginning.

The Greendoggle has made the big time! Not every shady government giveaway to special interests gets its own Wall Street Journal editorial.

But how often does the new EPA administrator announce that his staff has discovered that $20 billion that had been appropriated for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF or “Greendoggle”) had been “parked” in a bank by the Biden EPA until it could be ladled out as grants to climate industry cronies? That’s what Administrator Lee Zeldin announced back in February, referencing a Biden appointee who was infamously caught on tape explaining that the agency was “throwing gold bars off the Titanic” – trying to get the unspent money out of the reach of the Trump administration. Zeldin’s “clawing back” that money, and the lawsuit by “public-private investment fund” Climate United to get the $7 billion it was awarded, has got the media paying attention. Finally.

Administrator Zeldin’s announcement that EPA is taking back the $2 billion awarded to an organization tied to prominent political figures marks another auspicious turn in the GGRF saga, which Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) has followed and warned about since the beginning. Passed as part of the Inflation Reduction Act (Mr. Orwell, please call your office …), the GGRF was a massive spending program that would provide funds to environmentalist groups to finance green technology projects. The sheer amount of money Congress shoveled at the EPA was unprecedented. Unfortunately, it didn’t come with commensurate oversight resources – Mr. Zeldin says this was by design. The result was the Greendoggle, an environmentalist slush fund administered by insiders for insiders.

According to emails PPT obtained via FOIA request, the EPA invited a group of green activist organizations and thinktanks to a highly irregular November 2022 meeting to “provide early feedback on the RFI and ask clarifying questions.” And, as PPT foresaw, several groups with ties to EPA officials are on the invitation list. EPA’s “revolving door” with radical environmental groups spun fast in the Biden years.

PPT dug in and researched the green banks, finding multiple insider connections to the Biden administration. “With $27 billion dollars sloshing around, the American public should be on high alert for waste, fraud and abuse,” we warned in October 2023.

The next month, when the “short list” of coalitions vying to become GGRF distributors was announced, the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Nick Pope, whose reporting on the GGRF since early on has been essential in exposing the Greendoggle, revealed it featured “several organizations with considerable connections to the Biden administration, as well as the Democratic Party and its allies.” To put it mildly.

As the Greendoggle came together, the legacy media remained incurious, but for anyone paying attention, it smelled bad. There seemed to be no accountability, and given the Biden EPA’s ethical track record, that was concerning, to say the least.

One of the eight entities eventually chosen was the Coalition for Green Capital (CGC), a green bank whose mission is to “accelerate the deployment of clean energy technology throughout the US while maintaining a targeted focus on underserved markets.” CGC board member David Hayes left the organization for nearly two years to join the Biden White House Climate Policy Office as a special assistant to the president. He then went back to the CGC board. As PPT put it in a complaint it filed in June 2024 with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and the EPA’s inspector general (and which the Zeldin EPA cited in its legal defense of the clawback), while at the White House Hayes “presumably worked at the highest level on the very GGRF program from which CGC sought funding upon his return. This timing is suspect considering CGC itself publicly announced his return to its board as part of its effort to obtain GGRF funding.” Not very subtle, but it worked. CGC got a $5 billion windfall out of the Greendoggle.

It just so happened that, while Mr. Hayes was in the administration, so was another CGC veteran, Jahi Wise. Like Hayes, Wise was a special climate assistant to the president, until he joined the EPA in December 2022 as … founding director of GGRF. Subtlety doesn’t seem to be among the skill sets CGC looks for in its people. Wise at least didn’t return to CGC after that. He joined a George Soros foundation.

The GGRF should become a metaphor for congressional shortsightedness, bureaucratic arrogance and the venality of special interests at the government trough. The “green” industry is an industry like any other, green special interests are special interests and the color of a taxpayer dollar doesn’t change because it’s being wasted in a nominally noble cause.

The Greendoggle stank, gas and all.

Michael Chamberlain is Director of Protect the Public’s Trust.

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