Yesterday was Canada Day and I completely forgot to post something about it. To make it up today my whole blog post or the majority of it will deal with homegrown stories. Yea!
Last week I was reading Maclean’s and it’s cover story caught my eye. It was about how Obama was ‘bad’ for Canada. Reading the article, it pinpointed his stance on trade and environmental standards as being major obstacles for the country. Maclean’s accused Obama of establishing protectionist policies to help keep business inside the United States and away from Canada. When reading this I couldn’t quite help saying, ‘I knew it.’ I’m not an Obama hater not by a long shot but when I heard him on the campaign trail say things like ‘Fair Trade not Free Trade’ and wanting to rework NAFTA, it immediately sounded an alarm. This is a double edged sword not only does it damage relations between the two countries, but if Canada goes ahead with limiting imports from the US, it would be bad for citizens from both countries as prices are likely to go up and people will not be able to afford things at home. Yes, perhaps more jobs will stay at home but that’s just in the short term, down the road the problems would be massive. Then again, I was thinking shouldn’t Obama have already seen this and know the massive implications protectionism would have on the economy. Perhaps he knew the damages this would cost but knew this was a popular idea among the working class Americans and went with it anyway or I could be overreacting again.
The A & E! stations in Canada (not the unrelated US cable network A&E) are in a lot of trouble due to the economy. A owned by CTV globemedia and E! owned by Canwest Global are secondary channels to CTV and Global respectively and have been losing money for what seems to be ages.
Both have undergone numerous makeovers in the past few years A at the start of this decade was known as The New [insert last two letters of the local station's call sign here] and later A-Channel, E! was known as each individual stations call sign such as CHCH, CHCH also took on the branding ONTV and CH but no matter what CTV globemedia and Canwest Global did in the past few years gussying up their networks with new names and logos no one bothered to tune in, mostly because the programming sucked. (The Best Years or Comedy Inc. anyone?)
So in the past few months CTV has been trying to unload its A stations which will either shut down or be sold and Canwest has been trying to do the same for E!. Both companies agreed that the Canadian television industry has changed and they no longer need a secondary system of channels to complement their bigger CTV and Global stations.
The two have also been arguing that cable companies should pay them for local stations (CTV the more vocal one) and that local television was in crisis. The local CTV and Global stations in my area I believe only provide local news programming everything else is either imported stuff from the States or low budget Canadian made national programming.
The worst part about this is that if no buyers come about for A and E! the local areas served by these channels will be without a local newscast and these workers will be out of a job. The good part is that we wont have to deal with A and E! hijacking American programming and shoving down crappy original programming down our throats.
Regardless its a dark time for Canadian broadcasting but it is deserved they’ve managed to keep out HBO and MTV out of Canada for years only to let them in, in a way by making watered down Canadian versions of their channels in the form of HBO Canada and MTV Canada and before that The Movie Network/ Movie Central and Muchmusic.
However, its the jobs that are important, and without A & E! many of their workers (including journalist) will be out of a job and areas that rely on these stations for news will now be uninformed.
Important to note that some A stations were nearly sold to Corus (The guys that run YTV, W, CMT etc.) but later backed out. The E! affiliates in Montreal and Hamilton are to be sold, with the station in Montreal increasing it’s focus on multicultural programming and the station in Hamilton turning into a predominantly news channel. This still has to be approved by the CRTC.
