Jon Liedtke opines on Ottawa’s sudden reversal on the CRTC’s 15% tax on US streaming services like Netflix. Framed as a consumer win, Liedtke calls it political panic ahead of USMCA trade talks, criticizing bureaucratic overreach, legacy media special interests, and weak negotiating posture with Washington, & he draws parallels to 1970s CRTC rules that damaged Canadian radio.
Transcript (Grok Generated):
[Gene Valaitis] Brilliant or crazy, you decide. Gene Valaitis on 610 CKTV, Niagara’s News and Talk.
It is Friday, and if you’re in tonight, you might be watching Netflix or Disney or Paramount or any of those really cool US video streaming services. We’re gonna talk about what’s going on with these. John Litke is joining me. He always has a take on everything. Good morning, John. Happy Donut Day, Happy Beach Day.
[Jon Liedtke] Thank you, Gene, and to you and Alex.
[Gene Valaitis] Okay, so back on May 21st, the CRTC announced that it was going to start charging US streamers like Netflix, Disney, the ones I mentioned, fifteen percent of their yearly Canadian revenues to give to Canadian content.
People freaked out because in the end, we know who was gonna be paying for this. It’s you and me at home watching Netflix. We’re heading into the Kuzma review starting on July 1st, and the Americans just— Absolutely, I hate this.
Now, interestingly enough, there was an opposition day earlier this week in the House of Commons, and the Tories wanted to freeze this mandatory charge. And of course, because the Liberals are in charge, they voted against it, so it was going to go ahead.
But then all of a sudden on Wednesday, the government said it’s going to talk to the CRTC and advise it not to implement this charge from five percent to fifteen percent. So, Liedtke, that’s where we stand this morning.
Now, let’s start with where you’re sitting this morning. You’re tracking this modern digital cloud crisis from the mindset of an old-school 1970s radio station manager. God bless you. So connect the dots. What does a ‘70s radio desk have to do with the feds basically folding to Silicon Valley?
[Jon Liedtke] Well, Gene, thanks for bringing me on. I’m actually sitting at a custom-built 1972 executive station manager’s desk from the old Big Eight studios on Ouellette Avenue, CKLW. Love Big Eight.
This thing is solid wood, eight hundred leather lined, gold leaf rimmed. It’s a literal monument to the golden age of Canadian broadcast relevancy. We’re talking about an era where a fifty thousand watt Clear Channel tower launched global giants like Gordon Lightfoot, The Guess Who, Motown, Alice Cooper, Bob Seger, Aerosmith. I mean, Rosalie Trombley, the music director, she did magic there.
I secured this desk a decade ago. It was going away for free into the garbage. I got it for a single case of beer traded to two friends with a work truck.
But here’s the cautionary tale, Gene. This desk is aftermath infrastructure. It was commissioned to be built after the CRTC dropped its heavy-handed thirty percent CANCON regulations in nineteen seventy-one, and then choked out the station’s future by refusing to let them migrate to FM stereo from AM.
The ivory tower regulators in Ottawa couldn’t see past their own clipboards. Their institutional blindness killed CKLW’s ability to compete with Detroit stations playing just one mile across the river. Listenership cratered, advertisers fled, and the desk was built to manage the slow decline from the new studios.
But fast forward fifty-five years, and Ottawa’s doing the exact same thing. Well, at least they’ve done a U-turn. They thought they could throw a rigid geographic fence around a borderless digital cloud network under the Online Streaming Act, but the only difference here is the Feds hit that panic button and reversed course before the wreckage was absolute.
But it’s the same bureaucratic arrogance, it’s the same cultural elites, but it’s just a different century.
[Gene Valaitis] Yeah. Well, you know, I remember working at a radio station and the CRTC said that one Bryan Adams song wasn’t Canadian content. I mean, the CRTC gets a lot of things really, really wrong.
Now listen, so Carney and the culture minister, Mark Miller, are spinning this sudden reversal as a big win for the consumers of Canada. Now, do you buy it’s really about your monthly Netflix billers? This some sort of political smokescreen?
[Jon Liedtke] This is an absolute joke for Carney and Miller to coat this retreat in the language of affordability for households. Don’t buy it for a single second, Gene. This had nothing to do with looking out for our wallets. It had only to do with desperate political self-preservation.
The cabinet realized far too late that they had built a regulatory Frankenstein. They handed the CRTC a loaded gun with the Online Streaming Act, and then they act shocked when the regulator actually pulled the trigger and implemented the crushing top-line tax.
The Liberals, though, they’re still haunted by the ghost of Chrystia Freeland’s infamous Disney Plus incident, and so they’re operating in a fragile government, of course, that’s been patched together through floor crossings. And they knew that letting an out-of-touch tribunal inflate household entertainment bills right before going into trade talks that are gonna be hammering us every day with this conversation—they didn’t want those angry phone calls. They couldn’t afford that backlash.
So the affordability is just a convenient marketing PR spin for a panicked cabinet retreat.
[Gene Valaitis] Well, you know, interestingly enough, look, the members of the CRTC aren’t elected, they’re appointed, they’re federal bureaucrats. They come up with a lot of make-work projects, and in fact, the government, the duly elected government, doesn’t really have the legal direct power to say, “You can’t do this,” so they had to play a bit of a shell game, didn’t they?
[Jon Liedtke] Yeah, this is why I’m a cynical person, Gene. Legally, the cabinet doesn’t have any statutory ability to call them up and say, “Hey, do this.” The system is designed that way to give politicians plausible deniability, of course.
But they didn’t want that, so what did they do? They loaded the deck and they forced a shuffle. They issued a convoluted broad policy direction to order the CRTC to immediately launch a public review of the levy that was implemented by the law that was just passed that allowed it to do it.
I mean, this is a rigged process, but it’s been framed around consumer feedback. They know that automatically guaranteeing the outcome wasn’t going to be the only way to get towards what they wanted, which is lower rates. They did this to desperately clear the deck before this high-stakes USMCA trade review that we just talked about.
But do they honestly think Washington doesn’t understand what this game is? They’re not stupid. They see the loaded dice, they see the forced shuffle, and it makes our government look so weak on this world stage.
[Gene Valaitis] Yeah. Now, organizations like ACTRA, they’re pretty upset the streamers got off the hook. Do they have a right to be angry, or is there something else going on here?
[Jon Liedtke] Oh, I mean, sure, they have a right to be angry, but we can strip away all the high-minded rhetoric that they have, and we can call these groups exactly what they are. They’re not cultural defenders. These are institutional special interest groups, corporate syndicates and labor orgs that are looking out strictly for their members.
Look, you know, I know what actual structural community support looks like. I serve on multiple boards, I’ve served on many boards before that. These legacy groups don’t care about you or me or the average Canadian storyteller. They care about securing their slice of a regulatory tax pipeline that they saw coming.
They expected a permanent guaranteed corporate payday extracted directly from foreign tech revenues. Now that that’s been taken away, they’re throwing a massive public temper tantrum like they’re a toddler. They’re whining to the media to trick gullible people into believing they’re fighting for Canadian identity when in reality, we all know what it is. They’re just furious that the corporate gravy train hit a dead end or decided not to stop at their station.
[Gene Valaitis] Well, you know, a massive chunk of that six hundred million bucks, about two hundred and twenty million to be exact would be going straight to media services like CPAC, which is, which I watch sometime in the afternoon just to do homework for the show, but that’s the government channel, and I mean, it’s more boring than watching a piece of white bread. Now, you’re— That’s the parliamentary channel. So you’re calling this a con job?
[Jon Liedtke] Yeah, I mean, this is a scam, Gene. It is a total con job. I mean, I suppose we could call it ConPar instead for Parliament. We could call it ConPar, could star Nicolas Cage and Mark Carney. But look, at the end of the day, the government is standing at a podium bragging about deploying six hundred million dollars and then taking two hundred and twenty for themselves essentially for a vanity project.
This is being used to finance a centralized top-down vanity machine that provides essentially makeup and touch-up service for parliamentarians to broadcast their own spin. We won’t go calling it propaganda, but if you’re smart enough to know how to use it for your own purposes, that’s exactly what it is.
If this administration actually cared about civic transparency, that money would be on the ground in regions like Niagara or Windsor right now. It’d be funding independent grassroots local journalism like you guys, the boots on the ground reporting that actually holds municipal leaders and regional MPs accountable, challenging why you guys just lost your chair in that situation.
But instead, local news is being starved to death while tech execs in Silicon Valley are sitting on their mega yachts pouring expensive champagne and laughing at all of us who are picking up their tabs.
[Gene Valaitis] You know, whenever there’s a dumb decision, I always wonder in my mind, I always say, like, wasn’t there somebody in the room who thought this through and could have jumped up and said, “Guys, this is a really dumb decision.” I mean, we’re heading into the Kuzma review. I mean, what a crazy thing to do just weeks before.
[Jon Liedtke] We just— Canada collectively just took a machete, chopped off our arm, and is letting the blood pool in the water, sitting in the middle of the Pacific without a life preserver. The single most short-sighted move cabinet could have done heading into these talks.
Trump operates on one psychological framework: leverage or dominance in deals, if you will. When he and the ambassador see this reversal? They’re not gonna see a sophisticated, pragmatic concession. They’re gonna see a weak trading partner stinking of absolute desperation.
We have signaled to Washington our domestic policies are paper tigers. We have demonstrated that all they need to do to force our capitulation is to rattle their sabers. And by bleeding out on the streaming tax before we even sit down at the table, we gave Trump all the cards. He’s gonna use this blueprint to try to make us fold on supply management, on dairy, on auto. And because we decided to show our weakness before we even walked into the room, we don’t even have the leverage to walk away.
[Gene Valaitis] Yeah. So what’s the bottom line for listeners who are gonna be checking out Netflix and Disney tonight?
[Jon Liedtke] You know, I guess the problem is that we can’t allow Canada to continue to exist as three telco giants and a handful of legacy organizations stuffed into a trench coat, all looking out for each other’s mutual survival.
We can have it better, Gene. We can choose to have an adept, functional government that divides public resources equitably instead of funding centralized pork barrel projects and buying off special interests or regionalized interests.
But that shift will only happen if we refuse to let them buy peace with our own money. We have to stop accepting the loaded dice. We need to demand absolute, uncompromised, unvarnished accountability. We can have it. We just have to demand it.
[Gene Valaitis] Another great take this morning. Enjoy Paramount Plus tonight.
This aired on 610 CKTB
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