A pathetic war for public opinion is taking place between Canadian television networks and cable and satellite providers. At issue: whether the CRTC, the country’s broadcasting regulator, should allow broadcast networks to charge broadcasting distributors for the right to carry their signal, a service that was once offered free. The broadcasters say they need the revenue to protect local television. The cable and satellite providers say Canadians will simply pay more for the same service and claim consumers will now pay a “TV tax.” Each side launched lame public relations campaigns complete with commercials, Facebook pages, and faux viral videos all intended to encourage Canadians to express their support for one side or the other to the CRTC. The deadline for public comment will have passed by the time this piece is published. One hopes few heeded the call. By getting involved, Canadians will only share a sad legacy of helping make television worse than it already was.

The issue of “fee-for-carriage” (networks spin this as “negotiation for value”) represents an intra-industry matter. What we are seeing is the actions of two privileged children acting out for the parent’s attention. The parent is the CRTC, forced into the middle of the dispute through vigorous lobbying of the Conservatives by the networks. In fact the CRTC already rejected the broadcasters’ requests for fee-for-carriage a few times. That the broadcasters are back at the plate yet again is one thing – the fact that this effort has sparked tactics such as the closing of local television stations, ominous warnings on other stations about their impending demise, news stories about the importance of local television news, and editorials in local newspapers in support of one cause or the other has given this battle a decidedly slimy feel.

Let’s be clear here on what this about.

This is not about saving local television. Canada’s local television stations have served for the last two decades as affiliates of major broadcast networks and, by extension, as re-transmitters of programming aimed at a national audience. This is not a judgment of their performance (although many feel the broadcasters’ performance has been lacking, too), but rather a statement on the nature of network broadcasting. In the network-affiliate arrangement, there isn’t supposed to be lots of room for local content, except outside the times when the affiliates pick up the network feed. This is a little different in Canada, where the networks own a number of local stations, but the idea is the same. Community broadcasters provide this service to a degree. And, of course, Canadians are now blessed with an abundance of local news that comes from places outside of television, most notably on the internet. Further, there isn’t a shred of evidence that the fees generated from the fee-for-carriage regime will go directly into local television. The claim that this is about the preservation of local TV is sheer folly.

This is not about a television tax. The government is not collecting taxes from Canadians to support broadcasters. It has asked the CRTC to effectively force a settlement on the value of the carriage of conventional network television. Cable and satellite providers are not obliged to pass those costs to consumers, just as they weren’t the last time the CRTC put measures in place to support local programming about a year ago. By framing the matter as a “TV tax,” they have given themselves the room to do precisely that. If the public isn’t happy, they can blame the broadcasters or the CRTC itself, but certainly not themselves.

What this is really about is a profound lack of imagination by all involved. The networks are reeling from the emergence of new-media platforms, the decline of large audiences for content, and the subsequent decline in advertising revenues. However, rather than seeing this as an opportunity for innovation, the broadcasters have taken the most effective route to date, threatening the public to act on its behalf or else lose their television stations, and going to the CRTC to fix problems the industry created on its own.

Not a word about how Canada’s broadcasters run horrible websites, or how terrible they are at marketing Canadian programs. Just that local television is in trouble and that the people responsible for its failure should be given the grant to continue to make unsuccessful local television. Shouldn’t someone else be given a chance to succeed before we reward losers?

A move to a fee-for-carriage system marks the decline of the broadcast model of television and its replacement with a subscription model. In the old model, networks provided their services free in return for access to national audiences. The size of that audience appealed to local advertisers, who subsidized the costs by paying for airtime. In Canada, this model was given a distinctively nationalist taint: access to these programs meant that “Canadian stories” could be shared from coast to coast. A pay-television model works differently; revenues are generated in part from subscriber fees. This also happens to be the most profitable form of broadcasting for the companies that run the networks asking to be bailed out.

Now the cruel irony: If we move toward a subscription model, will Canadians be given the choice to opt out, or to build television packages that exclude networks they don’t wish to watch, such as Global, or TVA, or CBC? One would certainly hope so, but it is unlikely to occur. The lost revenues would undercut any benefits fee-for-carriage provides. Would we have to get these channels and networks – and be forced to pay for them – whether we want them or not? Now that would be a taxing situation.

What we need is not fee-for-carriage, but a modernized Broadcasting Act. The existing act has remained untouched since the mid-'90s, a time that not only pre-dates the age of YouTube or Facebook, it nearly pre-dates the age of the internet. Unless the act is revisited, very little will change to bring television in line with an environment characterized by media abundance, except to make it look exactly like it did before we were exposed to content more interesting or diverse than anything offered to us by our champions of local culture, Canada’s broadcasters, and cable and satellite providers.