Before the fact.
To WFDS Post 2051.
In today's Toronto Sun:
'T' in CRTC now stands for taxes: Phil Lind
By Phil Lind
Toronto Sun
Last Updated: April 5, 2010 3:16pm
Established over 40 years ago to regulate broadcasting in Canada, the CRTC has gradually reinvented itself to become this country's most regressive taxing agency.
On March 22nd, it released a decision which, if cleared by the courts, will introduce one more TV tax, one more cash grab from defenceless consumers.
Prompted by what has become a familiar and disturbing preoccupation with wealth redistribution, the Commission has once more ordered cable and satellite companies to collect money from their subscribers and deliver it to large commercial broadcasters.
How much? That depends on how greedy the broadcasters get.
Essentially, the sky is the limit.
What the CRTC has done is force cable and satellite companies to negotiate how much consumers will pay to receive signals that, until now, have always been available at no charge.
The idea, according to the Commission, is these companies will bargain hard to keep their customers' monthly bill increases as low as possible. The problem is the decision requiring these negotiations gives all the bargaining power to the broadcasters.
If television broadcasters can't convince cable and satellite companies to reach deeply enough into their customers' pockets, they have been empowered to pull their signals from cable and satellite schedules anywhere or everywhere in Canada.
So, for example, if CTV and Global demand a dollar per month from every cable and satellite customer in the country - that, by the way, amounts to over $250 million per year - and the distributors say "No," Canadians will lose access to Global and CTV.
"Who cares?" the average viewer may say. "We can live without CTV and Global, and, anyway, all our favourite shows are available on U.S. services like CBS, NBC and Fox."
Think again. The CRTC has also empowered broadcasters to order your cable and/or satellite distributor to black out all shows on U.S. channels to which Canadian broadcasters like CTV and Global own the rights in this country.
Either consumers dig deep and pay this new TV tax, or they'll be seeing a lot of nothing but black when they go channel surfing in the future - no Super Bowl, no Olympics, none of the sitcoms or dramas you love - nothing!
This is not the first time the CRTC has approved this sort of back-door taxing scheme. Past decisions have forced consumers to pay a 5% monthly premium that goes to subsidize Canadian programming and a 1.5% premium to subsidize local television stations.
But this is the first time the Commission has approved an open-ended taxing scheme.
Broadcasters are free to demand as much as they want and they are empowered to enforce those demands. Expect the size of your monthly cable and satellite bills to go through the roof.
When the CRTC was created in 1968, the "T" stood for television, as in Canadian Radio and Television Commission.
Some years later, the government expanded the Commission's mandate to include telephone regulation and the "T" took on a second meaning, telecommunications.
With this latest TV Tax decision, it's pretty obvious the "T" now stands for a third very disturbing area of jurisdiction, one which, in a democracy, usually falls within the exclusive purview of elected governments.
- Lind is vice-chairman of Rogers Communications Inc.
What Mr. Lind fails to realize is that with Justin.tv, Surf the Channel and, I forgot about this, black market satellite dishes, we don't need Rogers for either cable or the over the air channels they offer.
Sorry, dude.
WFDS
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