Media ownership in Canada, 30 years after the Kent Commission
In 2006, the Canadian Senate released a report on the state of Canada’s news media. The lengthy report was rosy and gloomy at the same time. While the Senate committee was content with overall state of the Canadian media and its service to the country and democracy, these optimistic viewpoints were tempered by concerns regarding the concentration of ownership that was high in Canada relative to other Western nations. As well, unlike other Western countries, Canada had no legal framework to ensure diversity of news ownership.
In Canada, print media ownership falls under the auspices of the Competition Act and the Income Tax Act (Blidook, 2002). Broadcasting ownership rules and cross-ownership of a broadcasting and print outlet is the purview of the CRTC. Outside of that, there are no explicit laws that oversee print media ownership. There is no law preventing one company from cornering the print media market in Canada.
This is where the Senate committee, much like those that came before it, suddenly became concerned. If the number of owners diminished and newspapers became beholden to corporate masters or to shareholders only interested in profit, what incentive was there for them to invest in the news? A healthy democracy requires a plurality of owners, the committee argued, and that was the opposite case in Canada. However, the findings were not unique. In fact, one could argue that the findings only supported the old axiom that if we don’t learn from history, we are doomed to repeat its mistakes.
It is impossible to have democracy without citizens and impossible to exercise meaningful citizenship without access to news, information, analysis and opinion. The core of this report addresses crucial factors related to the exercise of citizenship. The public interest in healthy and vibrant news media is as important as the public interest in the rights and freedoms of individual citizens. It is time to recognize this interest and develop, in Canada, mechanisms similar to those in other developed democracies. (2006 Senate report, p. 65)
In 1981, the federal government struck a Royal Commission on the state of Canadian newspapers. The government asked the commission to review the media ownership landscape at the time and determine options to ensure diversity of ownership and, by extension, viewpoints in the media. The man tapped to head the commission was Tom Kent, a former editor with the Winnipeg Free Press and political adviser to the Pearson government. Thirty years ago this summer, the Kent Commission, as it came to be known, delivered its final report that urged the federal government to enact legislation to increase the number of print media owners. The Senate committee in 2006 made the same recommendations, yet both reports have been ignored or forgotten in the years since they came to light.
In light of the anniversary, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the Kent Commission’s report and speak with its chairman, Tom Kent. I have divided up this retrospective into five parts, beginning with this post of a brief overview and look forward. Other posts will include a “Press Notes” version of the report’s findings and recommendations and an interview with Tom Kent. Part history lesson and part advocacy, I hope these posts will reignite a debate in this country about the state of the news media that is simmering and only needs to be stoked.
If indeed the content of mass media impact opinions and assessments of issues, and these opinions and assessments may in turn affect other components of political behaviour, such as the public salience of certain policy topics, or the choice to vote for a certain party, then content matters.
– Kelly Blidook, 2009
Thirty years ago, Canadians were seemingly uninterested in addressing the issue of media ownership, wrote Tim Creery, head of research for the commission, in a 1984 article for the Ryerson Review of Journalism. Today, there seems to be some interest in the future of the media. There has been some public concern about the launch of a new, right-wing news channel from Sun Media and a more recent, vocal outcry over a now-dead proposal to amend the broadcasting act. Canadians seem interested in their media and the quality of news they consume. But will that momentum continue and force the federal government to review media ownership for the same of Canadian democracy? I’m doubtful, but I’ll give the last word to Creery on this matter:
But there are those who still believe, of course, with the Kent Commission, that ” freedom of the press is not a property right of owners. It is a right of the people. It is part of their right to free expression, inseparable from their right to inform themselves.” They believe with the Commission that “the key problem. …is the limitation of those rights by undue concentration of ownership and control of the Canadian daily newspaper industry.” They believe that such undue concentration mocks the guarantee of freedom of expression, and freedom of the press and other media of communication, now entrenched in the Canadian Constitution. And if they are right in those beliefs, then some day they will prevail; for there must be some constitutional remedy for a constitutional wrong.
Here’s hoping that someday is today.
