Talking with Tom Kent (Part 1)

Thirty years ago, Tom Kent chaired the last Royal Commission on the state of news ownership in Canada. Today, Mr. Kent is a retired Queen’s University professor and political pundit. He answered a few questions via e-mail about his time as Commission chair, and his thoughts three decades after his landmark report that has all but faded from memory. Here is part one of Kent’s answers.

The Commission arose following a high-profile merger and the deaths of two newspapers. What would have to happen today for the country to revisit the issue of media ownership and content quality?

It’s hard to imagine. In the absence of a remarkable shift in political attitudes, there would have to be an even more striking event than the 1980 Ottawa/Winnipeg deal.

How did you get involved in the Commission? What, if any, working hypotheses did you have going in?

The day after that deal, [Jim] Coutts (the PM’s principal assistant) phoned me to say that the government was keen to move quickly against increasing media concentration. It was drafting an order-in-council appointing me [to] a one-man Royal Commission charged to publish its recommendations within six months. I was the obvious appointee because I had both edited a major newspaper and had proven experience in drafting major legislation. Also, I had recently retired from public service to become Dean of Administrative Studies at Dalhousie.

However, I said no. A one-person commission with a very tight deadline would be dismissed as a pretense. If the primary consideration was quick action, while indignation in Ottawa and Winnipeg remained strong, the government should promptly decide what to do by normal internal process. If it preferred backing by the more judicial process of a Royal Commission that must have several members and due time to undertake research as well as hold public hearings.

We came to a compromise. I agreed to chair a three-person commission with nine months to do its work.

In agreeing, my “working hypotheses”, as you put it, were (a) find ways to induce improved news and editorial comment, (b) eliminate print/tv overlap, (c) substantially reduce (I saw no way of eliminating) chain ownership.

• What expectations did you have of the government once the Commission filed its report? (i.e. did you expect all the recommendations to be implemented?)

I would not have undertaken the assignment if I had not believed that the government would be disposed to implement the commission’s recommendations. In direct conversation with the Prime Minister, I emphasized that effective measures would inevitably provoke fervent hostility from the press. (I had been through the fight over the Pearson government’s provision that advertising in a publication not Canadian-owned would be disallowed as an expense for tax purposes.) Trudeau responded that the government wanted to take effective action and was quite prepared to face the hostility.

I was sure he meant it – at the time.

• In your opinion, what caused the Commission’s recommendation’s to be largely ignored?

In 1980, Trudeau had staged a remarkable return to power after the brief Clark government. The Liberals had won a good majority and were highly confident. But in 1981 they began to run into trouble. Even so, when we reported in the summer, they at first gave serious consideration to the recommendations.

Change came with the budget in the fall. It proposed major tax reforms. They were bitterly opposed by affected interests, and therewith by most of the media. The government was ill-prepared for the uproar and was forced to a humiliating withdrawal.

With their previous self-confidence deeply shaken, cabinet ministers immediately became much less disposed to face media criticism. In particular, they quaked at any thought of again proposing tax changes. In other words, the budget retreat immediately put the most important of our recommendations out of consideration.

Its objective was (as stated above) “to induce improved news and editorial content.” The inducement that would work with newspaper proprietors had to be financial. There was no justification, however, for subsidizing what was then a very profitable industry. The inducement had to be a balanced mix of carrot and stick, of less or more taxation.

Specifically, the commission proposed the calculation each year (from certified accounts) of the average, for all daily newspapers, of their expenditures on news and editorial content, as a proportion of their total revenues. A paper whose ratio of content expenditure to revenue was below the industry average would become liable for a 25% surtax on the amount of the shortfall. On the other hand, content expenditures above the average, in proportion to revenue, would create an entitlement to a tax reduction of 25% of the surplus.

So producing a paper on the cheap would reduce the company’s after-tax profit. Content expenditure above average would result in reduced taxation and thereby increase the means, and create some pressure, to put further money into future reporting, etc. Consequently, while it would be overly optimistic to expect dramatic improvement, the average expenditure on content would at least edge upward year by year, producing some steady improvement in media quality. Complicated as the proposal seemed, it was the practicable way in which government could have induced that result without imposing in any way on press freedom.

The need for quality improvement was forcefully demonstrated by the response to the commission’s recommendations. Amid all the invective, there was virtually no reporting  of the tax proposal. Criticism of it would have been readily seen as self-centered defence of newspapers’ profit-making. So they just kept quiet about it. The suppression was so severe that it seems necessary to describe the proposal even to people closely interested in the media issue.