On public trusts

Brian Topp notes that Kory Teneycke's attempt to use his political connections to force all Canadians to fund his Prison Rape TV sets a strong example of what we shouldn't want out of cable operators. But that leads to the question of what direction we should be pursuing instead:

Canada's regulated cable monopolies are doing Prime Minister Stephen Harper's political work, building television and print empires that share the Prime Minister's political DNA. It illustrates another familiar pattern – how insiders and "public rentiers" work together and serve each other.

It's a familiar story, similar to the abuses associated with privately-owned power companies – almost all of whom were replaced by publicly owned utilities in Canada over the course of the last century for identical reasons.

So what is to be done?

Denying Sun TV a licence would only be a good start.

What is required is a period of energetic trust-busting.

The cable monopolies need to be pruned back to their core mandates. Cable and Internet rates clearly can be cut – to a level sufficient to finance the operation and growth of the cable network, not empire-building.

Perhaps the mandate to provide cable service in specific territories should be put up to regular public tender, complete with a form of term limit.

The reward for consumers will be much cheaper cable and Internet service, at a time when access to that network has become an economic fundamental.

Now, I'm not sure that Topp's suggestions fit together all that neatly: in particular, a single-private-provider model for cable service only seems likely to boost exactly the trusts that Topp quite rightly wants to see busted. Indeed, I have to wonder whether the answer may instead be found in facilitating the entry of more cable providers so as to encourage the type of a-la-carte channel selection that the current system is set up to prevent.

Either way, though, it seems safe to say that we should be looking to alternatives to a system where insiders can expect to be able to use their government access to dictate the public funding of a partisan network. And if the result is a genuinely more open market for television channels along the lines of what Teneycke is pretending to want, then he wouldn't seem to have much reason to complain.