The CRTC said it would leave podcasts alone. Turns out that was a myth

From the MacDonald-Laurier Institute

This article originally appeared in the Hub.

By Peter Menzies, October 4, 2023

It’s clear the regulator is about to draw podcasts into its warm embrace.

The CRTC has backtracked on its promise to leave podcasts alone.

On May 12, the federal regulator stated in its “Myths and Facts” release that concerns it would regulate content such as podcasts were a “myth” and the “fact” of the matter was that “a person who creates audio or video content or creates a podcast, is not a broadcaster under” the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11).

That “fact” didn’t live long. It expired September 29 when, in its first decisions since being granted authority over the internet, the CRTC changed lanes.

While it was careful to state that podcasters themselves don’t have to register with the Commission, the web-based platforms that make podcasts available must do so. Indeed, podcasters may not be broadcasters, but very much as predicted by the legislation’s critics, the CRTC has found ways to bring them into scope anyway.

It decided that podcasts constitute “programs under the Broadcasting Act, given that they are comprised of sounds intended to inform, enlighten or entertain.”

The regulator’s decision further explains that while podcasters may not be broadcasters, the transmission of podcasts over the internet most definitely “constitutes broadcasting” which makes those entities that platform podcasts into cable companies.

So while the CRTC concedes that while “the Broadcasting Act does not give the Commission a mandate to regulate creators of programs” it nevertheless makes clear that its powers do cover “those services that are involved in the broadcasting of programs, which are referred to as broadcasting undertakings.”

Is your head spinning yet?

The legal contortions continue throughout the decision, but the clear takeaway, the bottom line, is that, while it keeps insisting it doesn’t intend to regulate the content of podcasts, it is very concerned about the content of podcasts and if it can’t legally regulate them, it’ll make sure someone else does it for them.

Paragraph 223 of its decision makes it clear the CRTC is about to draw podcasts into its warm embrace.

Without information about online undertakings that transmit or retransmit podcasts, it would be more difficult for the Commission to ensure the achievement of the objectives of … the Broadcasting Act, which relate to, among other things, providing a reasonable opportunity for the public to be exposed to the expression of differing views on matters of public concern, and (that) the programming provided by the Canadian broadcasting system should be varied and comprehensive, providing a balance of information, enlightenment and entertainment for people of all ages, interests and tastes.

In other words, what the CRTC denounced as “myth” in the spring has become a “fact” in the fall. It has kicked open the door to the regulation of online content, if not directly then by proxy through the platforms that deliver the work of podcasters to their audiences.

It is a bureaucratic master stroke.

Here’s what will follow.

The list of intervenors presenting at the CRTC’s public hearing coming up in late November indicates the panel of commissioners will hear from a number of groups that will explain the extent to which they are under-represented and funded. So, a possible outcome of this will be that services that carry podcasts will have to fund podcasters who, on their own, haven’t been able to find an audience.

Just as likely is that platforms will be regulated to ensure podcasts designated by the CRTC are given priority visibility/discoverability online over undesignated podcasts through the manipulation of algorithms. These are likely to be podcasts by Indigenous, BIPOC and LGBTQ2S creators.

As erstwhile CRTC Chair Ian Scott told the Senate committee studying Bill C-11 in 2022:

Instead of saying, and the Act precludes this, we will make changes to your algorithms as many European countries are contemplating doing, instead, we will say this is the outcome we want. We want Canadians to find Canadian music. How best to do it? How will you do it? I don’t want to manipulate your algorithm. I want you to manipulate it to produce a particular outcome. And then we will have hearings to decide what are the best ways and explore it.

This was reinforced in an exchange Scott had with Senator Pamela Wallin, who suggested proponents of the bill were parsing their words and that:

You won’t manipulate the algorithms; you will make the platforms do it. That is regulation by another name. You’re regulating either directly and explicitly or indirectly, but you are regulating content.

To which Mr. Scott replied: “you’re right.”

The CRTC has now confirmed what it denied mere months ago when it was parroting then-Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez’s talking points.

It will make sure podcasts and any other internet content it can capture is regulated.

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

Related Topics:#CRTCCanadianPodcasts #MacdonaldLaurierInstitute #PeterMenzies

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Javier Milei in Argentina, Musk and Ramaswamy in the US.. What does DOGE in Canada look like?

Under their new(ish) president Javier Milei, Argentina cut deeply and painfully into their program spending to address a catastrophic economic crisis. And they seem to have enjoyed some early success. With Elon Musk now primed to play a similar role in the coming Trump administration in the U.S., the obvious question is: how might such an approach play out in Canada?

Sure. We’re not suffering from headaches on anything like the scale of Argentina’s – the debt we’ve run up so far isn’t in the same league as the long-term spending going on in South America. But ignoring the problems we do face can’t be an option. Given that the annual interest payments on our existing national debt are $11.7 billion (which equals seven percent of total expenditures), simply balancing the budget won’t be enough.

The underlying assumption powering the question is that we live in a world of constraints. There just isn’t enough money to buy everything we might want, so we need to both prioritize and become more efficient. It’s about figuring out what can no longer be justified – even if it does provide some value – and what’s just plain wasteful.

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Some of this may seem obvious. After all, when there are First Nations reserves without clean water and millions of Canadians without access to primary care physicians, how can we justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars funding arts projects that virtually no one will ever discover, much less consume?

Apparently not everyone sees things that way. Large governments operate by reacting to political, social, and chaos-driven incentives. Sometimes those incentives lead to rational choices, and sometimes not. But mega-sized organizations tend to lack the self-awareness and capacity to easily change direction.

And some basic problems have no obvious solutions. As I’ve written, there’s a real possibility that all the money in the world won’t buy the doctors, nurses, and integrated systems we need. And “all the money in the world” is obviously not on the table. So the well-meaning bureaucrat might conclude that if you’re not going to completely solve the big problems, you might as well try to manage them while investing in other areas, too.

Still, I think it’s worth imagining how things might look if we could launch a comprehensive whole-of-government program review.

How Emergency Cuts Might Play Out

Imagine the federal government defaulted on its debt servicing payments and lost access to capital markets. That’s not such an unlikely scenario. There would suddenly be a lot less money available to spend, and some programs would have to be shut down. Protecting emergency and core services would require making fast – and smart – decisions.

We would need to take a long, hard look at this important enumeration of government expenditures. There probably wouldn’t be enough time to bridge the gap by looking for dozens of less-critical million-dollar programs. We would need to find some big-ticket items fast.

Our first step might be to pause or restructure larger ongoing payments, like projects funded through the Canada Infrastructure Bank (total annual budget: $3.45 billion). Private investors might pick up some of the slack, or some projects could simply go into hibernation. “Other interest costs” (total annual budget: $4.6 billion) could also be restructured.

Reducing equalization payments (total annual budget: $25.2 billion) and territorial financing (total budget: $5.2 billion) might also be necessary. This would, of course, spark parallel crises at lower levels of government. Similarly, grants to settle First Nations claims (total budget: $6 billion) managed by Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada would also be at least temporarily cut.

All that would be deeply painful and trigger long-term negative consequences.

But there’s a far better approach that could be just as effective and a whole lot less painful:

What an All-of-Government Review Might Discover

Planning ahead would allow you the luxury of targeting spending that – in some cases at least – wouldn’t even be missed. Think about programs that were announced five, ten, even thirty years ago, perhaps to satisfy some passing fad or political need. They might even have made sense decades ago when they were created…but that was decades ago when they were created.

Here’s how that’ll work. When you read through the program and transfer spending items on that government expenditures page (and there are around 1,200 of those items), the descriptions all point to goals that seem reasonable enough. But there are some important questions that should be asked about each of them:

When did these programs begin?
What specific activities do they involve?
What have they accomplished over the past 12 months?
Is their effectiveness trending up or down?
Are they employing efficiency best-practices used in the private sector?
Who’s tasked with monitoring changes?
Where are their reports published?

To show you what I mean, here are some specific transfer or program line items and their descriptions:

Department of Employment and Social Development

Workforce Development Agreements ($722 million)
Indigenous Early Learning and Child Care Transformation Initiative ($374 million)
Payments to provinces, territories, municipalities, other public bodies, organizations, groups, communities, employers and individuals for the provision of training and/or work experience, the mobilization of community resources, and human resource planning and adjustment measures necessary for the efficient functioning of the Canadian labour market ($856 million)

Department of Industry

Contributions under the Strategic Innovation Fund ($2.4 billion)

Department of Citizenship and Immigration

Settlement Program ($1.13 billion)

Department of Indigenous Services

Contributions to provide income support to on-reserve residents and Status Indians in the Yukon Territory ($1.05 billion). Note that, as of the 2021 Census, there were 9,150 individuals with North American Indigenous origins in Yukon. Assuming the line item is accurately described, that means the income support came to $114,987/person (not per household; per person).

Each one of those (and many, many others like them) could be case studies in operational efficiency and effectiveness. Or not. But there’s no way we could know that without serious research.

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DOGE seeks ‘super high-IQ’ people willing to work 80 hours a week for free

Published on November 17, 2024

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By Brett Rowland

President-elect Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency is seeking “super high-IQ” people to work more than 80 hours a week for free.

DOGE co-leader Elon Musk, who is the CEO of Tesla and is one of the richest people in the world, is working with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to find top talent to cut wasteful spending, overburdensome regulations and re-structure federal agencies. Neither Musk or Ramaswamy will be paid for their work.

“We are very grateful to the thousands of Americans who have expressed interest in helping us at DOGE,” the new advisery group said in a social media post. “We don’t need more part-time idea generators. We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.”

Candidates can send their resumes to the DOGE account on X.

“Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants,” according to the post.

In a separate post, Musk said the work will be challenging and won’t be paid.

“Indeed, this will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero,” Musk wrote.

The department’s acronym, DOGE, is a nod to Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency, dogecoin. Trump said the new group will pave the way for his administration to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulation, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies.”

Trump laid out lofty goals for DOGE in his announcement this week.

“It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhatten Project,’ of our time,” Trump’s announcement said. “Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of ‘DOGE’ for a very long time.”

Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said the group welcomes DOGE to the challenge.

“Given our cumbersome bureaucracy and large fiscal imbalances, the effort is long overdue,” she said. “Regardless of political views, we should all want the federal government to spend scarce dollars wisely.”

MacGuineas said the outside group’s work could help restore trust in the government.

“An aggressive effort to reduce waste, fraud, abuse, and inefficiencies could save billions or even trillions of dollars over a decade and could help improve the public’s faith in government,” she said.

MacGuineas urged DOGE to look at the full budget.

“Such an effort should look at all parts of the budget, especially in the areas of health care, national defense, and spending through the tax code, and it should look beyond just cutting fraud and reducing bureaucracy to also identify places where the taxpayer is not getting the best value for their dollar,” she said. “Federal health care spending, in particular, is rife with overpayments and inefficiencies that offer the opportunity to substantially lower costs without meaningfully reducing quality or access to care.”

Social Security and federal health care programs, specifically Medicare, deserve special attention, MacGuineas said.

Since fiscal year 2003, improper payment estimates by executive branch agencies have totaled about $2.7 trillion, including $236 billion for fiscal year 2023. Improper payments have declined in recent years, but remain a stubborn challenge for many federal agencies. Improper payments are payments that shouldn’t have been made or were made in the wrong amount.

Most of the improper payments come from five federal programs: Medicare, comprising three programs ($51 billion); Medicaid ($50 billion); the Department of Labor’s Unemployment Insurance – Federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance ($44 billion); the Department of the Treasury’s Earned Income Tax Credit ($22 billion); the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Paycheck Protection Program Loan Forgiveness ($19 billion).

MacGuineas said DOGE should take a bipartisan outlook.

“Importantly, the process will need to be as bipartisan as possible in order to help with the deliverability and implementation of ideas,” she said. “The recommendations will need Congressional buy-in, further emphasizing the need for this to be an effort reaching across the aisle and leaving all options on the table to address our fiscal imbalances.”

Congress has run a deficit every year since 2001. In the past 50 years, the federal government has ended with a fiscal year-end budget surplus four times, most recently in 2001.

DOGE also plans to go after fraud at the federal level. The Government Accountability Office, which serves as the research arm of Congress, estimated fraud losses cost taxpayers between $233 billion and $521 billion annually, in a report in April. The fraud estimate’s range represents 3% to 7% of average federal obligations.