National Post (National Edition)
As Canadians die, Liberals worry about TV The many variants of anti-Semitism
There are a host of things our federal government could have done over the past year that would have allowed us to live much freer lives, and prevented many unnecessary deaths. Instead, the Liberals have been fixated on more trivial pursuits, like the current hearings in Ottawa over whether to force streaming video services to abide by Canadian content regulations.
This is certainly not a new idea. In 2014, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) held a series of hearings, during which it discussed a number of ideas that are still being bandied about in Ottawa, including mandating that streaming services devote a certain percentage of their revenue to Cancon and establishing a socalled Netflix tax.
Facing a public backlash and no clear legal jurisdiction over new media companies, the CRTC eventually backed down. “But if history has taught us anything,” I warned at the time, “it's that Canadian broadcasting regulators always try to expand their mandate.”
And indeed, last November — when the government should have been devoting every resource it had to creating a mass-vaccination strategy, making deals with pharmaceutical companies, beefing up this country's test-and-trace systems and finding ways to keep the newly discovered U.K. variant out of Canada — the Liberals instead introduced Bill C-10, which provides the legal framework for the CRTC to start regulating services like Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+ and Prime Video, including forcing them to purchase more Cancon and feature domestic shows more prominently.
Back in 2014, the regulator's attempt to expand its control over the internet could at least be explained as an overzealous government agency's attempt to fix a problem that didn't exist so bureaucrats could justify their own paycheques. Now, it just looks like the government is trying to go after one of the few things that have kept many Canadians sane since the start of the pandemic. (If you can't lock it down, regulate it!)
It just goes to show that it's really hard to kill a bad idea. But there is a good reason why the tech companies keep getting targeted by regulators: traditional broadcasters are irked that they are mandated to devote 30 per cent of their revenue to Cancon, while new media companies only have to pay for content that people actually want to watch. And the situation has only gotten worse for them, as more and more Canadians have eschewed cable networks, in favour of online services.
“It is critical that Canadian domestic broadcasting companies do not have more onerous obligations than U.S.-based big tech giants,” Susan Wheeler, the vice-president of regulatory media at Rogers Communications, told the standing committee on Canadian heritage on Friday.
She has a point. But the solution is not to force American tech companies to abide by the same antiquated regulations as traditional Canadian broadcasters and cable providers. Instead, the government should level the playing field by giving all companies the freedom to make editorial decisions that are in the best interests of their shareholders and customers, rather than in the service of a protectionist impulse to feature more Canadiana, regardless of its quality.
We already know what we get when the government mandates that too much of a good must be produced domestically. The East Germans got the Trabant, which is generally considered to be one of the worst cars ever built, but was incredibly popular, because it was the only one available. And in Canada, we've got the CBC, a network that costs taxpayers $1.2 billion a year, which it spends on shows that no one wants to watch.
That's around $34 a year for each and every one of us. And Mothercorp would like us to pay nearly double that — around $60 per year — for “premium” access to its streaming service, CBC Gem. The Crown corporation won't release data showing how many Canadians are gullible enough to actually send the state broadcaster more of their hard-earned money, but I can't imagine it's that many, given that the CBC's ratings have been falling for years.
A look at Numeris' list of the top English-language broadcasts each week over the first half of 2020 reveals that none of them aired on CBC. Of the top 30 programs for the week of Feb. 8-14, 2021 (the latest for which ratings are available), the public broadcaster had only one. It was number 29.
To be fair, the CBC does have a few gems. Shows like Kim's Convenience and Schitt's Creek immediately come to mind. They also happen to be shows that have been picked up by Netflix. In fact, the streaming giant has produced or licensed numerous Canadian shows and movies over the years, not because it was compelled to do so, but because it believed people would watch them.
At least private broadcasters are able to count their sports and news programming against their Cancon quota. But companies like Disney and Apple are not in those businesses, which is why, having resigned itself to the inevitability of being subjected to the regulator's boot, Netflix's director of public policy used his time at last week's heritage committee meeting to argue that regulations applied to streaming services should not be as onerous as those imposed upon traditional broadcasters.
This would, in effect, be settling for second-worst. Forcing new media companies to pay for content that wouldn't otherwise make sense from a financial perspective will cause them to hike their prices or forgo purchasing more popular international content. It will also create a barrier to entry for new firms that may want to compete with them in the future.
After a year of resigning ourselves to the inevitability of substandard outcomes in dealing with the pandemic, is it not time that Canadians stood up and demanded better from their government? If the Liberals are going to waste time determining what's on TV, the least they can do is try to improve the situation by doing away with regulations drafted in a bygone era in which our juvenile country was preoccupied with the “threat” of American cultural imperialism, rather than making everyone worse off.
The coronavirus is the most horrific human catastrophe in modern times. Millions have already died, and millions more have experienced pain and suffering. Yet the threat comes not just from the virus itself. Over the past year, we have also seen it have a devastating impact on communities and families, on the prevalence of mental illness and on the incidences of anti-Semitism.
Nearly 10 months ago, in these pages, I predicted that what we were starting to see was a new variant of anti-Semitism, which I dubbed “coronasemitism.” At the time, we were witnessing an uptick in anti-Semitism on social media, with Jewish people being accused of carrying and spreading the disease.
It was not dissimilar to historic conspiracy theories. In feudal times, Jewish people were often accused of spreading the plague, lice and other ailments, as a way to marginalize, oppress and defame them.
In describing the evolution of the coronavirus, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) explains that, “Viruses constantly change through mutation, and new variants of a virus are expected to occur over time.” This is how anti-Semitism has evolved over time, as well.
Centuries ago, it was fundamentally based on religious beliefs. Jews were persecuted over the belief that they betrayed Jesus and were complicit in his murder. The Catholic Church has since stepped back from this ludicrous accusation, recognizing its own complicity in fomenting anti-Semitism.
The Nazis later introduced an additional variant of anti-Semitism that was based on race. To dehumanize and murder the Jews, they falsified science in an attempt to prove that the Jewish people were an inferior race and therefore deserving of death.
Then, in the last two decades, another variant of anti-Semitism was born out of the radical left, which sought the destruction not only of the Jewish people, but of the Jewish state in its entirety. In the early 2000s and for the next 20 years, anti-Semitism mutated into boycott campaigns against Israel, along with false and defamatory accusations claiming that Jews had somehow transformed into Nazis, colonialists, apartheidists and murderers.
The CDC says that, “Sometimes new variants emerge and disappear. Other times, new variants emerge and persist.” In the case of anti-Semitism, variants are long-lasting and seem to stay and reinforce previous strains of the virus.
Many people still hold onto ancient religious beliefs that malign Judaism as a religion. And while the Nazis are gone, their ideology not only remains, but is growing along with neo-Nazi groups in Europe and the United States. And even those who claim that racism is beneath them have managed to direct their hatred toward the State of Israel, creating another new form of anti-Semitism.
COVID-19 and anti-Semitism were further conflated recently, when a Vancouver woman ignited a firestorm by designing a T-shirt with the words “COVID CAUST” printed on a yellow star. While she claims it is a statement about masks and vaccines, the imagery and language was hurtful to the Jewish community.
Like the coronavirus, anti-Semitism is a social illness. It has caused the deaths of
WE NEED NEW AND INNOVATIVE
GLOBAL APPROACHES.
more than six million Jewish children, women and men during the Holocaust and countless more over the last 2,000 years.
Over the centuries, Jewish leaders have tried in vain to inoculate their neighbours against the myriad of variants of this hatred. It did not matter, however, if they were communists or capitalists, if they were assimilated or stayed apart in their shtetls (towns), or if they had their own country — they were persecuted either way.
To end this pandemic, we have placed our hope in vaccines. In our fight against new variants of anti-Semitism, we need new and innovative global approaches to inoculate the world. The same old just doesn't work anymore. We must redouble our efforts, and mobilize international partners, to forge relationships among people of different faiths and educate the world in the hopes that one day, we may all realize that we all face the same fears, hopes and dreams, and that all of humanity must band together against our common enemies, such as COVID-19.