Archive for March 2010

Dissolve the CRTC

By admin on March 22, 2010
This entry is filed under Communications, Media and tagged , , , , , .View Comments

My friend @DuncanKinney reminded me that the fee-for-carriage decision (a.k.a. the end of the annoying “Save Local TV” vs. “Stop the TV Tax” campaigns) is coming out today. It reminded me of the most brutal dismantling of the Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) that I ever had the pleasure of reading.

Broadcast industry veteran Howard Bernstein brings out the hammer and the blowtorch in Liars Poker at the CRTC:

The CRTC has seldom, if ever, had close ties to the real world. The consumer is always at the bottom of the CRTC’s list of cares. The CRTC’s job, as they see it, is to protect Canadian TV. Not TV production as in new dramas and comedies, but TV distributors and stations. The reason: without a bunch of TV stations operating in Canada there is no need for the CRTC to oversee television. So they protect the millionaire owners. More important to the CRTC is cable. Every decision they make is to fortify cable. As long as most Canadians get their TV through cable the CRTC is powerful. You see, you cannot block over the air signals at the border, you cannot stop satellite feeds from entering Canadian air space, but you can control Canadian companies who distribute these signals over cable to millions of Canadian homes. Thus, over the years the CRTC has become the political arm of Rogers Cable. I have appeared before the CRTC five or six times and on each occasion at least half the commissioners were former Rogers employees. In many cases they went back to work at Rogers after their term was up at the CRTC. The connection is too obvious and has been going on for too long to call this a coincidence. CRTC decisions inevitably favour the cable companies first, the broadcasters second, the satellite companies third and I have to say it, the consumer never.

Some sensible people have created a Dissolve the CRTC slacktivist Facebook page. I do suggest that you join.

What is Reboot Alberta?

By admin on March 8, 2010
This entry is filed under Politics and tagged , , , .View Comments

There’s sure been a lot of talk about Reboot Alberta lately. But ever since the first meeting in Red Deer last November, much of Alberta’s political chattering class seems completely puzzled over just what Reboot Alberta actually is.

Is it a “standard unite the left” movement? Or maybe it’s a right wing plot?

Is it a bunch of out-of-touch “elitists” as Hugh MacDonald would have us believe? Or is it a nearly irrelevant “debate society” ?

Could it simply be a vehicle for a new political party? Or maybe it’s a support group for those fed up with partisan politics and yet somehow, simultaneously, group therapy for committed partisans?

Is it a group of people focused on democratic reforms that will re-engage Albertans in the political process, or just another division of Alberta’s rapidly shrinking pie of voters?

File:Blind monks examining an elephant.jpg

Alberta's pundits examining the Reboot Alberta elephant

There’s an ancient parable from India about seven blind monks touching different parts of an elephant and jumping to conclusions about what an elephant must be:

“Hey, the elephant is a pillar,” said the first man who touched his leg.

“Oh, no! it is like a rope,” said the second man who touched the tail.

“Oh, no! it is like a thick branch of a tree,” said the third man who touched the trunk of the elephant.

“It is like a big hand fan” said the fourth man who touched the ear of the elephant.

… and so on.

The moral of the story is that each monk was partly right, but none could describe the true essence of the elephant.

Reboot Alberta is our elephant.

It began as an experiment without predetermined outcomes or set expectations starting from this simple premise: put a bunch of politically engaged Albertans in the same room for a weekend and encourage thoughtful, respectful discussions about politics and Alberta’s future.

What emerged was a buzz of new ideas, new discussions and new relationships among the politically engaged.

In hindsight, the first Reboot conference was about creating a space for these important conversations to take place. The beauty of this idea was its simplicity. Tapping into a deep desire for renewed engagement, a decentralized community formed around Alberta’s political blogs and the #rebootab tag on twitter.

But who were these people? What bound them together?

Having actively engaged in this online community and participated in both conferences, here are the four things that I believe characterize the Reboot Alberta elephant, as refined by the discussion at my table on the bright Sunday morning of February 28th at Reboot 2.0.

Rebooters are already actively involved in their communities and share a desire to:

  1. create a better Alberta -  a place where we all can “live and flourish.”
  2. course correct with meaningful democratic reforms to address broken aspects of our system and encourage more Albertans to “dust off their citizenship.”
  3. connect with other people who want to foster democracy and establish a new vision for Alberta’s future.
  4. link together our existing organizations, communities and political vehicles to work towards these goals, both together and independently.

Some participants’ high expectations for the second conference were not met. And there are some genuine and very legitimate concerns about how to make these in-person meetings more accessible to those Albertans without a few hundred extra dollars to spend on a luxury hotel for a weekend. Yet I remain optimistic about these simple, action-oriented goals for Reboot Alberta.

So if you have something important to contribute to this ongoing discussion, I encourage you to take ten minutes and start a blog, sign up for twitter and start sharing your thoughts on how best to advance these goals.

I’ll be listening.