By David Farrell
CRTC kills Leclerc Communications’ Quebec City ambitions
The CRTC has said no to Leclerc Communication’s request to own three French-language FM radio stations in Quebec City, but approved the $19-million deal for it to acquire CHOI-FM (Radio X) in the provincial capital as well as CKLX-FM (91,9 Sports) in Montreal, for which it also acquired a licence amendment to convert from a sports format into a music one based off its WKND brand.
Though the overall deal has been approved, under the CRTC’s conditions, Leclerc would need to sell one of its other stations — WKND 91,9 or Blvd 102,1 — in order to buy CHOI and still comply with the ownership rules in Quebec City. The ownership rules limit an owner to two stations in one market in one language on one band.
And Leclerc has said it won’t sell its stations. So its own media are reporting that the entire deal is off, and its owner confirmed to La Presse that it won’t proceed with the transaction.
Quick Facts
Leclerc Communication currently owns two French-language commercial FM radio stations in the Quebec City market: CJEC-FM (WKND 91.9) and CFEL-FM (BLVD 102.1).
The Common Ownership Policy for Radio states that, in markets with eight commercial stations or more operating in a particular language, a person may be permitted to own or control as many as two AM and two FM stations in that language.
The Policy aims to ensure that Canadians have access to a variety of editorial voices within the radio component of the broadcasting system and that a balance of competition between radio broadcasters in any particular market is maintained.
The failure to protect Canadian culture in the digital age
Canada is losing millions of dollars and thousands of jobs to Silicon Valley while perversely forcing regulated and taxed Canadian cultural industries to compete with the FAANGs – Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google – who aren’t covered by Canadian-content regulations and, for the most part, pay no corporate taxes here. Meanwhile, their digital products often escape the HST because Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and now Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have misleadingly labelled a reasonable taxation update a “Netflix tax.”
How did Canadian governments get this dumb? – Kate Taylor reviews The Tangled Garden: A Canadian Cultural Manifesto for the Digital Age by Richard Stursberg with Stephen Armstrong, Globe and Mail
Did SNC-Lavalin officials attempt to illegally influence Canadian elections?
A confidential document sent to the Liberal Party of Canada in 2016, and obtained by CBC/Radio-Canada, reveals how top officials at the embattled engineering firm SNC-Lavalin were named in a scheme to illegally influence Canadian elections.
The investigation reveals that over a period of more than five years between 2004 and 2009, 18 former SNC-Lavalin employees, directors and some spouses contributed nearly $110,000 to the federal Liberals, including to four party leadership campaigns and four riding associations in Quebec.
According to the letter, the investigation found that SNC-Lavalin reimbursed all of those individual donations — a practice forbidden under the Canada Elections Act. – Harvey Cashore & Frédéric Zalac, CBC News
Facebook and tyranny
Tim Wu's important book The Curse of Bigness is a cautionary tale about how ugly things can get when government turns from a countervailing force to private power and becomes a co-conspirator (hint: it involves concentration of power, massive income inequality, demonizing minorities, refusing to condemn domestic violence, the fomenting of bigotry, and trains to death camps). Except for the last part, I'm referring to present-day America.
This week, Facebook hired Jennifer Newstead, a talented lawyer who was the intellectual tonic to wash down the Patriot Act and other legislation that in large part was later deemed unconstitutional — after we tortured people and lost our moral standing in the world. Yay, she now works for Facebook… – Scott Galloway, No Mercy/No Malice
Is the art of media buying dead?
It’s true that traditional media buying was built on relationships and an understanding of any given location’s local ad landscape. Some would say that this is something that cannot be taught; it must be learned. Others would call that an art.
No matter how you look at it, building and maintaining rapport with industry contacts took time. Fully immersing oneself in a crowded media landscape took finesse. And despite our best intentions, we made mistakes from time to time.
Thanks to the rise of all things digital, things have changed. – Ben Zimmerman, Forbes
The billion-dollar mystery man and the wildest party Vegas ever saw
Armed with more liquid cash than possibly any individual in history, Mr. Low infiltrated the very heart of U.S. power. He was enabled by his obscure origins and the fact that people had only a vague notion of Malaysia. If he claimed to be a Malaysian prince, then it was true. The heir to a billion-dollar fortune? Sure, it might be right, but nobody seemed to care. Not Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese, who were promised tens of millions of dollars to make films. Not Paris Hilton, Jamie Foxx and other stars who were paid handsomely to appear at events. Not Jason Strauss and Noah Tepperberg, whose nightclub empire was thriving. Not the supermodels on whom Mr. Low lavished multimillion-dollar jewelry. Not the Wall Street bankers who made tens of millions of dollars in bonuses. And certainly not Mr. Low’s protector, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak.
Mr. Low’s purported scheme involved the purchase of storied companies, friendships with the world’s most celebrated people, trysts with extraordinarily beautiful women, and even a visit to the White House—most of all, it involved an extraordinary and complex manipulation of global finance. The FBI is still attempting to unravel exactly what occurred. Billions of dollars in Malaysian government money, raised with the help of Goldman Sachs, is believed to have disappeared into a Byzantine labyrinth of bank accounts, offshore companies, and other complex financial structures. – Tom Wright and Bradley Hope, The Wall Street Journal
