The law of Canadian Communicationism: from each according to their licence, to each according to their feeds.

At this moment there is a cold war being waged over the cool medium. As a consumer your input to this conflict will be pretty well limited to deciding after the fact whether it is worth paying any attention to the winners.

The battle lines are drawn where they've always been drawn: the starving artists led by their gold-bedecked bishops carrying the cross of cultural purity face off against the massed media machines heading the hordes of the happily hypnotized.

In many ways the conflict is so embarrassingly Canadian: a passionate scrap over a couple channels in a 500-channel universe, and yet the battle may be a telling one for the future of media in general.

Then again, maybe not.

It's like this:

The CRTC decided it should licence some specialty channels.

The CRTC: Canadians Rarely Take Chances. You gotta feel sorry for these guys, deeply mired in bureaucratic tarpits, only stone-age tools of change at their disposal, with a mandate to be on top of a technology that is changing so rapidly even its creators are only guessing. We shouldn't criticize them for just playing catch-up, we should respect them for being able to keep a straight face.

The purported plan was to bolster the Canadian presence in this mythical future multiverse by whatever degree the market would allow. By the deadline forty-eight proposals had made their way in, including a hockey channel, an all-women's-issues channel, a llama channel (well, okay, not the last one)... Some seemed obvious, like channels devoted to animation, comedy, science fiction.... Others less so, like "You: Your Channel"! (What? My channel? Everybody gets a channel? Hunh?).

After it was over eight had survived the process (none of those obvious ones), including a couple more pay movie services (East and West), some abstract concept channels (Discovery, Lifestyle, and oh yes, You made it! Your channel! What have you got planned?), and one devoted to replaying all those Canadian-made dramas you weren't that thrilled to see the first time they were on for free.

Relevant to the present discussion are the so-called "Arts"channels proposed, the one that made the cut, and the fallout from that decision.

The question of Canadian Art and its presence in the Canadian Home is one that has received a lot of attention ever since the technology existed to put it there -- albeit mostly from those with a vested interest in Canadian Art. Between the unwashed masses and the spiritually pure art world lies a dense zone of cultural arbiters, government agencies, self-appointed apostles and self-important critics. Each of these groups or individuals has a particular take on the "needs" of the situation -- either the needs of those hapless uninformed plebeians who want only for the proper cultural education to become happy enlightened consumers of Canadian art, or the needs of those brave unsung artists who selflessly struggle on against insurmountable odds to bring the gift of their visions to a world that remains cruelly indifferent.

Of course this process is far from unique to Canada. Even that cultural giant to our South whose ubiquitous exports have been the primary cause of indigenous identity fear around the world for the better part of a century has an elaborate subsidization system in place to make sure that at least some Art survives the destructive currents of the capitalist tsunami in whose grip it reels.

Previous attempts to create a Canadian performing arts channel have met with varying degrees of failure. There was TeleCanada in 1982, and a proposed CBC2 modelled after the moderately succesful BBC4 in England, neither of which got past the proposal stage. Then there was the embarassment over C Channel, the performing arts purveyor that got the licence in '82, and promptly went bankrupt. Upon its demise the only approximately arts-oriented specialty service on the dial was the American Arts & Entertainment, which as it turned out represented the somewhat revisionist notion that old war documentaries are art and/or entertaining.

Everyone concerned in this latest round of applications has a slightly different take on why C Channel went down, but pretty well everyone agrees that the business plan was unrealistic; it was a discretionary channel with a fairly high subscriber fee and no ad revenues. To survive it would have had to have been a broad-based success story, instead of an elitist novelty with little hope of competing against an array of exciting new channels that included sports, music, and two movie services. The criticism the CRTC received for this particular licencing decision undoubtedly played a part in their latest actions.

Of the 48 contenders lined up last year for the opportunity to take their chances in the cable crapshoot, only a handful presented themselves as fulfilling the grand needs of Art on the tube. On the English-language side two were strongly aligned with entrenched federally subsidized arts entities, and one came from the private sector with a vengeance.

First in line was the imaginatively-titled Arts Network, a project originating from the National Arts Centre. If you wonder how the NAC could hope to operate a national television service when it can hardly keep its own lights plugged in then you share the concerns of the commission. When certain aspects of their business plan were questioned before the hearings they quickly offered to restructure the whole thing, no problem, wait here we'll be right back... and were summarily booted out the door.

Festival, a performing arts service with CBC and Bell Canada as its legs, was the darling of the arts community, practiced the three P's of Perfect Political Posturing, promised lots of money to arts people and lots of arts people deciding who should get it. It was considered a shoe-in, despite its relatively high per-subscriber fee. One of the commission's problems with it may have been the fact that though they claimed to be an arm's-length independent entity the staff would have been under a CBC payroll, and if they got into financial trouble the CBC would have had to bail them out.

Bravo! was the private sector volley, just one of ten specialty channels proposed by CHUM/City TV, the same people that brought you the only real success story in Canadian specialty programming - MuchMusic. They didn't promise MuchMoney to anybody but themselves (isn't that always the way with those nasty commercial broadcasters!), but the subscribers wouldn't be paying much either, and at least part of their mandate would be providing a venue for whatever Canadian arts programming that clever Canadian artists could make available to them, in a way not presently offered by the CBC (our great national network which doesn't seem to be supplying any unique services and is both paid for by Canadians and runs ads -- who's bright idea was this?).

And, as if the commission voted solely on the basis of the applicant's name, the kudos went to Bravo!

And all hell broke loose, a bit.

At first there appeared to be a unified front in the AGWIT (Arts Groups With Impressive Titles) in denouncing the licencing decisions of this summer, then it appeared that all were not in complete agreement with how to proceed. A lot of press releases went down a lot of fax lines (remember Bell Canada's involvement?). In the end the biggest move was made by the Director's Guild of Canada, which filed a petition on behalf of itself and 14 other groups - regional arts councils, writer's and actor's guilds and unions, production groups, a UBC film studies group (!). - in which it recommended not only that the commission review its decisions, but that the Cabinet exercise its right under the Broadcast Act of 1991 to direct the commission to act to fulfill the promise of that legislation. From an earlier position that demanded the revocation of the contentious licences (they also are protesting the granting of Arts et Divertissement for the French language market, which is essentially the same documentary service as its English namesake , over more arts-friendly applicants), they moved to propose that the commission should simply recognize that the licencees do not supply the necessary service and that another round of applications should be immediately ordered or other more drastic measures taken to ensure that the perfect channel come into being forthwith. Significantly, they failed to endorse Festival as that channel, since not all the signatories agreed that for all its pedigree it would be any damn good.

Unfortunately, out of fear that the existance of the licenced channels might jeopardize the creation of alternative proposals, they also included a clause that recommends that the startup of these new services be delayed until everybody's had time to think about it more.

This last suggestion is unlikely to be taken, and its only real impact will be against the very community the petitioners purport to represent. Bravo! agreements with prospective producers must now include a related clause promising payment only if they go to air, which is a shaky contract to take to the bank. In the next six months there may be significantly less Canadian television arts production than there might have been solely as a result of this one codicil.

The jury is still out, at least until September 4, when a decision has been promised. This appeal to the cabinet is an unprecedented move and no one really knows yet what might come of it. What if they decide that the War Measures Act is in order, seize the holdings of Telefilm and the NFB, and set up EATEN, the Emergency Arts Transmission Extended Network, blacking out all other channels and blanketing the country in a last ditch effort to save Canada from becoming the cultural backwater that is its apparent destiny? On the other hand, what if they say "sorry, but just cause we got this Broadcast Act doesn't mean we have to do all the work. Why don't you guys come up with a proposal that functions? At least this Bravo! thing will probably still be on the air this time next year, and somebody will have gotten some work out of it!"?