
“All the most talented people I know have left. Some of them are still inside, but most of them are about to leave,” says Robert, although he's optimistic about the future of the independent producer as more people leave television in favour of creating online content. “I think all the best stuff you used to see on those channels, you're seeing on places like VICE now.” Even before this deal was approved, Canada already had the most concentrated media ownership in the G8, with over 86% of Canadian cable and satellite distribution controlled by just four large conglomerates—Bell, Shaw, Rogers, and Quebecor. The more concentrated a media market is, the more power owners have to bump up prices. I spoke with David Christopher of Open Media, a non-for-profit organization that advocates for open communication systems in Canada. “Costs of TV are likely to go up, and in order to make that affordable, people are increasingly being shuffled towards bundled packages, so they're forced to get their TV, their internet, their phone access from one conglomerate, which is certainly a bad thing because the cost goes up, and there is less choice in the marketplace.” “It's certainly very disappointing – when the news first broke that it had been approved, we started hearing from Canadians across the country who'd been hoping the CRTC would take the opposite perspective,” he says.
In general, David explains, the situation is worrying because control on so many different levels means, for example, that Bell can exempt its own content from download limits, stifling their competition. “These companies are acting as a dead weight on the economy.” The guidelines by which the CRTC determined this acquisition wouldn't destroy Canadian media—the Diversity of Voices decision of 2008—are outdated and no longer make any sense. According to these guidelines, a company shouldn't have any more than 35% TV market (a number set by the Competition Bureau in 2003 for the banking industry), which is ridiculously high if we're trying to make sure the media is diverse. The 2008 decision also didn't anticipate just how vertically integrated these telecom companies would become, and five years later, the landscape has changed completely. While it would have been great if the CRTC could have revisited their own standards that are supposedly in place protecting the diversity of voices in Canadian media, they didn’t. The centralization of power in this landscape has become even more swollen. But the problem extends beyond Bell and Astral: when there are only a handful of people controlling content, the media can no longer be seen as a democratic tool. That said, as YouTube and online video in general becomes more integrated into our lives—and people start watching online content in their living rooms—monopolistic deals like Bell’s will matter less and less. In the meantime, as Canadians are faced with below average Canadian content producers owned by increasingly few conglomerates with no real motivation to improve upon itself, we can't help but wonder how long viewers will keep tuning in. More Canadian problems:Canadians Should Be Concerned About the NSA and PRISMI Woke Up and Calgary Was FloodedPhony Abortion Clinics in Canada Are Scaring Women with Lies