DEAR FUTURE GREAT-GRANDCHILD,

I will likely never meet you. I will never know the mid-21st-century world in which you will live. I hope you will be blessed with the opportunities and joys that I have experienced: the magic of visiting a pristine lake, the friendliness and generosity of neighbours, an array of vocational opportunities, and hope for the future. But I fear you won’t be.

As I write this letter, our world is increasingly subjected to human-induced and climate-related fires, floods, droughts, diseases, extinctions, and conflicts. I fear that the planet you will inhabit in 30 or 40 years will be a stark and brutal place, where the wealthy and powerful use violence and mass weaponry to protect themselves and their resources from the many more poor and desperate people.

And so, although I will never meet you, I want to apologize to you. My generation was warned for decades that we must fundamentally change our ways—and drastically reduce our reliance on fossil fuels—in order to allow future generations to share in the bounty of the earth. But we have dithered and debated and delayed—and failed to act with urgency. I hope this will change. But I fear it will not.

Many can be blamed: fossil fuel companies that obstructed change, advertisers who made millions peddling unsustainable consumption, and government leaders who have failed to stand up for the public good and the future.

But, in the end, those like me who live comfortably in wealthy countries really only have ourselves to blame. People have come together to end slavery, to defeat fascism, to stem the nuclear arms race, and to fight for the rights of those who are unjustly persecuted. Today, we are failing to tackle the biggest challenge of all: a global climate crisis arising from the very lifestyle of freedom and abundance that we have fought to defend.

It seems we just aren’t willing to give up the excitement of long-distance travel, the convenience of driving our cars, the comfort of large homes, the tastes and traditions of an animal-based diet, and most of all, the idea that we can consume our way to joy and fulfillment. I know I have often I been unable to resist the relentless advertising telling me that my happiness and self-worth depend on achieving more, having more, and doing more. But another part of me knows that buying and consuming does not deliver the meaning and sustained joy that I, and others, assume it will.

Indeed, even as we have pillaged and polluted our planet, our competitive consumerism has undermined our physical health and mental well-being, as well as the human spirit of caring and solidarity that might save us. We have become more and more immersed in social media and online entertainment, and rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness—particular among our youth—have soared.

We may still come together one day soon to forge a more modest, more equitable, and more fulfilling way of life based on learning, community, compassion, on the joys of creating rather than consuming, on sharing rather than accumulating, and on finding beauty and peace close to home. I fear we lack the courage and imagination to do so. I wish, today, I could offer you, dear future child, some words of hope and wisdom. But all I can say is this: Forgive me, and forgive us, for we have forsaken you.

Illustration by Valerie Thai

Now that my son is seven, our weekend mornings have gelled into a proper routine. He wakes up at some ungodly hour—earlier, by the way, than he gets up on weekdays—and plays for a while in his room. When he’s tired of that, he’ll grab a couple of granola bars from the kitchen and then find the family iPad. By the time I’m (finally) awake, he can usually be found sitting on his bedroom floor, his face creased into a frown of concentration as he swipes his way through whatever Netflix Kids is currently offering. His current favourites include a cartoon called Masha’s Spooky Stories and Teen Titans Go!, the latter of which made him think it was the height of hilarity to exclaim, “Look at those juicy thighs!” every time I wore shorts this summer.

I can remember the weekend mornings of my own childhood in the 1990s very clearly: the hush of our suburban neighbourhood, the ugly grey carpet scrunched beneath my bare feet and matched the colour of the pre-dawn sky, the impenetrable barrier of my parents’ bedroom door, which I was not allowed to breach until they were up for the day. Like my son, I would help myself to whatever food was available— usually Alpha-Bits, the plain kind, although I coveted the ones that had marshmallows. Then I would head down to our barely finished basement, where I would spend the next few hours watching cartoons. On the surface, this doesn’t seem so different from my son’s routine. But when I try to explain the details of it to him—the boxy old television, the five flickering channels we had to pick between, the fact that I had to wait a whole week between watching one episode of the Ninja Turtles and the next—I feel like I’m describing something so foreign that it’s hard to figure out the words to properly convey what it was like.

Where do I even start when some baseline words hold such different meanings today than they did three decades ago? When I’m telling a story about my child-self making a phone call, I picture myself talking on the big white rotary dial telephone that we had until I was 12; my son, by contrast, imagines me pressing the little green icon on an iPhone. For me, making calls is the raison d’être for the telephone; for my son, calling people is just one app among many. I blew his mind a few years ago when I told him that when I was a kid, phones didn’t have cameras. “But how did you take pictures back then?” he asked. And then: “What about walls? Did you have those? Were they even invented yet?” I can see his point: if this one thing that he considers to be a dependable and fixed part of the universe has not always been that way, then how can he know what to trust? The idea of a universe where phones can only do one thing—and not a very interesting thing, at that—both astonishes and disturbs him.

There is a part near the end of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 1932 novel Little House in the Big Woods where she describes lying in bed in her family’s log cabin and listening to her father play “Auld Lang Syne” on the fiddle. When he finishes, she asks him what the days of auld lang syne are, and he replies that they are the days of long ago. As she considers this, she tells herself that the “now” she lives in will always be now; it could never be a long time ago. I remember reading this passage as a kid and trying to figure out the paradox it offered. The time that Laura lived in, with its calico print dresses and wood stoves and lack of indoor plumbing, had inarguably happened a long time before I was born. But even though it was obvious to me that Laura’s present had eventually become the past, I was just as certain that the clothing, culture, and technology of the ’90s would never feel old. Even when I became a parent, by which point the decade of my childhood felt like the ancient past, I didn’t consider the cultural gap that would exist between my son and me.

It’s hardest for me to understand how the way we view information has changed. I don’t mean the ways in which we consume it and relay it, although those things are obviously different now than when I was younger; I mean the qualities we attach to it. By the time I was a tween, every bit of media felt so precious. If I wanted to watch an X-Files episode more than once, I had to make sure to record it on my VCR (and then make sure that no one else in my family taped over it). I kept a shoebox full of interviews with Tori Amos, each of which I had painstakingly cut out of newspapers and magazines. If I wanted to read up on the Black Death (I was a weirdly morbid kid), I had to go to the library, find the right keyword in their computer system, and then sift through the chapters of various books until I found what I was looking for. I would often photocopy things or write down quotes that seemed especially important; I remember feeling this urgent need to hold onto everything, because nothing seemed permanent. Once an article or a book or an episode of a favourite show was lost, there was a good chance that I would never find it again.

It’s not like that for my son, though. If he wants to know more about outer space, everything he needs is at his fingertips—YouTube videos, podcasts, articles written by actual NASA astrophysicists. And none of it is in danger of disappearing; after all, once something goes on the internet, it’s usually there forever in some capacity.

This might sound like some kind of value judgment about kids these days, but I promise that it’s not. Greater access to information is never a bad thing. Consider this: my great grandmother grew up in a house with two books (one of which was the Bible) and she probably treated them with a devotion that I wouldn’t be able to muster for any individual volume in my library. Books were, for her, a nearly irreplaceable treasure, whereas if I lose one of mine, I can usually find another copy quickly and cheaply. Would anyone argue that owning literally hundreds of times the number of books that my great grandmother did somehow means that I am somehow living a less wholesome or engaged life?

Like any parent, I have some anxieties about what changing technologies will mean for my kid, but most of them centre around how he will use them to interact with his peers. Will I know what to do if he’s being bullied on social media? What limits will be fair to set on devices that he uses for learning, entertainment and socializing? How can I know if I’m making the right choices, not just making it up as I go along?

Sometimes it can feel like these are questions unique to the past decade or two, but I suspect that every generation of parents has wrestled with them in some way or another. It’s tempting to try to find someone or something to blame for the ways in which the world is changing—over-indulged kids, lazy parents, the technology itself—but to look for a scapegoat is a way of refusing to deal with a fundamental truth about life, namely that change is not good or bad, it just is.

I feel the same way about social media and smartphones and streaming services; they’re a part of our world now, whether we like it or not. There’s no going back to how things were before. Our only choice is to learn to adapt as best we can and accept that the day will come sooner rather than later when our kids’ understanding of how to navigate technology and media outstrips our own.

It’s tempting to dread what you don’t know, and I certainly don’t know what the world will be like when my kid is a teenager or a young adult. But instead of giving into that fear, I’m trying to be excited about the brave new world he’s growing up in. My parents must have faced similar challenges, and someday my son will live through his own season of realizing that the phones, tablets, and computers he grew up with are clunky and obsolete. By then, maybe our respective childhood weekend mornings won’t feel so different from each other; just two more links in the chain of ever-advancing cartoon consuming technology. Until that day, I reserve the right to feel like an old crank every time he asks me to explain the exotic functions of the VCR.

When Canadian singer Grimes appeared on a segment of Tout le monde en parle in 2015, she was the only guest on the Franco-Canadian talk show answering questions in English. When co-host Dany Turcotte discovered she had lived in Montreal for six years, he asked if she had learned any French. “No,” she replied smirking, “…actually my last name is Boucher, so my grandparents are super-pissed at me still.”

If this exchange sounded a little tense, then know that Turcotte and host Guy A. Lepage like to push their guests’ buttons, but just a little. The atmosphere of the panel show strikes a perfect balance between amity and friction. It’s how Lepage and Turcotte steer their most candid interviews.

On average, 1.3 million people tune into Tout le monde en parle every Sunday night, on ICI Radio-Canada, for that two-hour entre-nous experience. The show’s format was adapted from the original French version, which aired on France 2 from 1998 to 2006. It replaced Du fer dans le épinards, another panel show where host Christophe Dechavanne and guests debated both serious and light-hearted topics. In its first season, the original French Tout le monde en parle harkened back to its predecessor by leading panel discussions and political debates. By the second season, though, producers reformatted the show to include interviews with guests from different cultural milieus. The show quickly gained notoriety for probing its interviewees with very personal and often inappropriate questions. One of its better-known incidents was in 2002, when host Thierry Ardisson brought up Milla Jovovich’s estranged father, who was in prison for eight years. The actress sat uncomfortably before abruptly ending the interview by slamming a glass off the table and storming off the stage.

Quebec’s version of Tout le monde en parle is very different. In 2004, Radio-Canada’s adaptation debuted with a slightly different setup and dynamic, with Lepage as host and Turcotte as the court jester/co-host. The guest list, for the most part, is comprised of Quebecers and international guests, and includes a mix of both famous and lesser-known figures in politics, sports, academia, journalism, film, television, and music. Unlike his French counterpart, Lepage’s aim is to make guests comfortable enough that they can express themselves freely—sometimes to their own disadvantage. Still, he asks tough questions, and Turcotte relieves the tension with quips and jokes. It’s important to note that Turcotte and Lepage have backgrounds in comedy, so they know how to read the room. As Lepage pointed out in a 2014 Globe and Mail article: “My show is very Quebecois, in the sense that we can have disagreements and still talk about them. Quebecers,” he expounded, “don’t like chicanes, but they want to understand.”

In order to strike that balance—to get people to open up and listen to each other—Lepage can’t dominate the interview. The more he talks during an episode, the less he’s happy with the end result, he told La Presse. The goal is to get the guests asking each other questions. “As an interviewer, if I antagonize a guest, I won’t get anything out of them,” he said. “It would make for a great smoke show, but nothing would come of it.” In the episode with Grimes, another guest, TV host Maripier Morin, would asked follow-up questions in English right after Turcotte called her out for not speaking French. If and when things do get tense, other guests will often chime in to keep the conversation going.

But the success of the show hinges on how Lepage and Turcotte moderate these different personalities, situations—and each other. To date, no one has stormed off their stage, but the show has been known to make or break a career two. Just ask any politician who has turned down a guest appearance on the show, or former Parti Québécois leader Pierre Karl Péladeau, who stepped down after his ex-wife, Julie Snyder, opened up about their relationship and divorce on the show. (Neither one of them had openly discussed the divorce before. Snyder’s candour was later described as “à coeur ouvert,” open-hearted.) The tougher lesson to learn as a guest is that your words are completely open to interpretation. Péladeau stepped down the next day.

***

As much as the talk show covers the news, it has, over time, become the news. The show is unlike any other in that it has a well-defined audience, and that audience, in turn, wields its own power at the water cooler or on social media the next day. Everyone in Quebec is talking about Tout le monde en parle, and the show’s audience is now the most coveted among politicians, journalists, up-and-coming artists, and anyone else with a platform.

Not only is there no English talk show equivalent in Canada, but English-speaking guests are now being booked for the show and trying to speak as much French as they can throughout their interviews. This comes at a pivotal time when Netflix is desperately trying to corner the Francophone market in Quebec only to be met with resistance. This was made especially clear in an episode that aired in 2017 featuring then-minister of Canadian heritage Mélanie Joly, who signed a deal with Netflix. Joly was scrutinized for the deal; while Netflix would invest in Canadian content, it was under no obligation to develop Francophone programming. There were also talks that Netflix would be exempt from a federal tax. (Starting January 2019, Quebec will be imposing a provincial sales tax on Netflix.) Franco-Quebec audiences are loath to adopt streaming services like Netflix because they want something made by them and for them. A 2016 study by eMarketer, a market research company that provides consumer insights on digital media, even showed that French-speaking Canadians spent more than double their time watching TV (32.8 hours per week) than logging time online (16.1 hours per week). Despite airing shows like Série Noire, Vertige, and 21 Thunder, Netflix only started reaching out to Quebec production teams in April. It is still unclear whether it will fund any original programming.

In 2011, La Presse television critic Hugo Dumas sparked a debate on Twitter asking if an English-Canadian version of Tout le monde en parle could ever work. Focusing heavily on the celebrity guest list, the debate never really unpacked what makes Tout le monde en parle work in the first place—what made it so much more different than even its French predecessor. What has contributed to its success is its hosts, its blueprint, and the intimacy it creates between its guests.

Currently, the CBC has something somewhat close: The Debaters, a show where two comedians dispute a range of light-hearted “comedic topics,” such as Scientology or showers versus baths. The format is nowhere near as intimate as Tout le monde en parle: Host Steve Patterson is more of a referee compared to Lepage and Turcotte. He isn’t directing a conversation or mediating guests. And those guests aren’t debating hot topics.

As Kate Taylor pointed out in her piece for the Globe and Mail, “Talk TV: Why English Canada can’t get it right,” English-speaking Canadians are “notorious talk-show agnostics,” and the challenge for a Toronto talk show compared to, say, a Quebec or Los Angeles one is that it has a “great deal of difficulty gathering an audience around a single cultural hearth.” English Canada is constantly pulled by the appeal of U.S. late-night talk shows (after Canadian newscasts)—The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Late Late Show with James Corden, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon—and British panel shows like 8 Out of 10 Cats, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, The Big Fat Quiz of the Year, Have I Got News For You. Tout le monde en parle has a clearly defined audience, and the show speaks to it every week. The magic is in the connections it creates between the hosts, their guests, and that audience.

When asked about Quebec’s future in 1972, Marshall McLuhan said that its “secession ha[d] already occurred” psychically. And while it’s felt like Canada and Quebec have been constantly compromising with each other, Quebec has still carved out its own culture and take on the public debate. It may not be bloodsport debate à la William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal, but it’s created a public venue for unpacking issues and disagreeing.

Tout le monde en parle is not in any way perfect, but it’s managed to cultivate an atmosphere where celebrity and politesse are disarmed so that people can, simple as it is, talk to each other

In the five years that I’ve lived in Toronto, many of my phone conversations have started the same way: “Are you calling me from Saskatchewan?” the person on the other end will ask after seeing my caller ID.

No, I tell them, I kept my Saskatchewan number because I can’t get a phone plan anywhere near as cheap in Ontario. It’s also my way of staying out of the clutches of the Canadian wireless oligopoly.

That Canadians are getting hosed on their phone plans isn’t news. Canada has some of the highest wireless prices in the developed world. The Big Three national telecoms—Bell, Rogers, and Telus—claim this comes down to the size of the country, its spread-out population, and how much they’ve invested in building advanced wireless infrastructure.

But Saskatchewan is about as large and sparsely populated as it gets, and somehow the province’s government-run telecom, SaskTel, offers cheaper plans with the same high speeds and fewer data caps than what’s available in other parts of Canada. This has also forced other telecoms in the province, like Rogers and Telus, to compete on price; according to a 2017 government-commissioned wireless study conducted by consulting firm Nordicity, phone plans offered by the national carriers in Regina are on average $30 to $40 cheaper than those offered in Halifax, Toronto, and Vancouver. And across Canada, prices tend to be lower where there is a regional competitor.

There is no reason the Saskatchewan model can’t be applied on a national scale: a crown corporation that provides fast, affordable wireless services. It’s an idea that crops up from time to time—as in 2013 when the Stephen Harper government was trying to entice U.S. telecom giant Verizon to enter the Canadian market. The Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (since merged with the Canadian Auto Workers union to form Unifor) suggested the federal government instead establish “Canada Wireless” to provide the competition it was looking to import.

Such an idea seems like a no-brainer. Internet access and mobile technology are an essential part of modern life, and the current system places undue financial burden on people who require those services while funnelling the profits to a select few private companies.

But Canada’s oligopoly problem extends beyond the telecom sector.

Who can forget the cozy price-fixing scheme Loblaws and its major competitors had going for 14 years, before a pang of conscience brought about an admission from the grocery chain that they had systematically overcharged all of us for bread? According to analysis by Maclean’s, a typical one-loaf-a-week household may have spent nearly $400 more on groceries as a result of this industry-wide collusion. (It’s okay, Loblaws offered people $25 gift cards as penance.)

The banks, too, have been ripping us off. In addition to ever-increasing fees we pay for the use of our own money, a series of CBC investigations in 2017 found frontline employees were under constant pressure to upsell and even trick customers into new products and services, all to meet crushing sales goals. Is it any wonder then that the Big Five banks—RBC, TD, Scotiabank, BMO, and CIBC—consistently report record profits?

The problem might be worst in Canadian media. An industry already struggling with the loss of traditional advertising revenue has been further diminished through the greed and mismanagement of the few companies that have a death-grip on print, radio, and television markets. The result is a steady drumbeat of layoffs, mergers, closures, and the decimation of vital information sources. The free press is supposed to be the lifeblood of democracy, but those who run it are happy to act as vampires, extracting as much value as they can for as long as possible. Perhaps the most brazen example of this behaviour came when Postmedia and TorStar, the two largest Canadian newspaper chains, swapped ownership of 41 newspapers only to shut half of them down, limiting what little competition existed in some areas.

There are signs the tide is turning. In the United States, the dominance of a handful of technology companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon has started to ring alarm bells, and there is a growing chorus of people calling for the tech giants to be broken up. That same conversation is badly needed in Canada, where oligopolies are arguably even more powerful.

Luckily, there’s no shortage of ideas to right the scales. In some cases, the answer might be a public option, like a Canada Wireless to compete against the telecoms, or introducing postal banking to offer a means of accessing financial services without being forced to use big banks or even less scrupulous payday loan operations. Or where public alternatives exist, like the CBC, it requires us to fight efforts to kill it and sell off the pieces (as conservatives have demanded for decades) and insist on greater investment in public and alternative media to counterbalance the imploding media giants. We can also make it easier for workers to unionize or form co-operatives, thereby reintroducing a measure of democracy into economic decision-making. Where necessary, the government should break up monopolies, or at least regulate them much more stringently.

Above all, what is really needed is for people to make the case—to properly diagnose the problem of corporate dominance and propose bold alternatives to the status quo. Even so-called progressive politicians have largely stopped talking about how unchecked corporate power undermines the public good, leaning instead on the wishy-washy language of consumer protection. But this is more important than a customer service complaint—it’s about what it means to have true democratic control over our lives.

Illustrations by Miko Maciaszek

Je m’appelle Reynaud. My mother named me. She was French. Other than her, I have never met anyone else who was French. No one else in this city is French. I don’t recall ever meeting my father. I am alone in a dead city. There are no more people here. People do not live in dead cities. But I’m still here. And I’m still alive. It’s like living inside of someone else’s dream. Someone who took too much valium dans la nuit. There are apartment buildings and hydro lines and legion halls and trees and a ferris wheel. But there are no cars. There is no noise. There are no children or hot dogs.

After the evacuation 10 years ago the only ones who live here now are the boars and the wolves. And a pack of dogs who haunt the tallest building. Last weekend Ryuskla had a litter of 10 but six were born already dead, one was born with no hind legs, one was born with no face, one was born already almost full grown and he immediately ate two of the dead puppies. There’s a rumour that one was born completely healthy and playful. The only word I have to describe my life skirting around the dogs is hate. I hate the dogs. And I have reason to believe the feeling is mutual. My fear is that the overgrown puppy may try to eat me while I sleep. Living in a dead city it is the same as being buried alive. At sea. You have the lungs but not the air. We have the stores but no commerce. There is the forest but that forest is poison. I have always loved the Italian Renaissance, but have no one to share it with. The one thing I do love about dead city is that the night is blind dark. It is a night saturated with its own darkness. And when it is that dark the silence finally makes sense. The silence and the night, when taken together, are the only things that can be considered familiar about this place anymore, the one thing that is comparable before the evacuation as now. Dead quiet in the dead of night. Dead. I am dead. Zut. The only thing for me to do now is run.

I don’t know how long I’ve been out here. I’ve been running for weeks. That mole was the first thing I’ve eaten in three days. I can’t believe I didn’t see those owls lurking behind the garbage bin. Four of them. I came across that food first. Honestly, I don’t really remember—maybe I did steal it from them. That still doesn’t give them the right to be on me like this—stalking me through all these alleyways. Mon dieu, I can barely remember a time before the owls. I want to stop running more than anything I can ever remember wanting; carcass aside. I want to stop but I can’t. I can hear them coming; I can’t see them anymore, but I can still hear their owl hoots; their frenzy. I want to stop running but I won’t. This is not how I want to die. I’m not going to die over one dead, radioactive mole. Maybe I can hide somewhere. Maybe there is somewhere warm where they won’t think to find me. Maybe I can outrun them after all. I want to be alone and safe. Where can I go? Where can I go? Where is safe? There is nowhere left to go. Where will I go?

Reynaud was running and while he ran he was crying because he was so very tired and he just wanted to feel good again. He felt good when he lived with his family. Natasha was 10 and she loved Reynaud with the enormity of a 10-year-old heart, which is vast the same way the sea is complete and vast. And Reynaud loved Natasha that much too with his whole dog heart. Reynaud remembers how Natasha cried, her face pressed against the back window of the Peugeot as her father tried to wend his way out of their neighbourhood. Natasha cried and cried calling Reynaud’s name over and over until she was howling like a wolf. Reynaud ran after them, as fast, if not faster, than he was running now. He wasn’t crying then but he was crying now. That day he just felt confused, and slightly embarrassed for M. et Mme. Zygmunt, whom he felt certain were sure that he was in the backseat with Natasha, instead of gulping down exhaust fumes until he could no longer keep up. Reynaud was alone. Reynaud got left behind in a town everyone was leaving.

Reynaud’s body was lean and taut—a runner’s body. But he was tres, tres, tres fatigue. And then in a flash he remembered the old kindergarten across from the park. He knew the owls were smart, but they weren’t that smart; they would not expect him to double back. That he would run toward them. He banked right and dashed out of the alley, across the barren roadway and back behind the soap factory, running alongside the tracks. It was eerie being hunted in a deserted maze without the obstacle course of traffic and people and noise it seemed futile and doomed; desperately quiet except for Reynaud’s own panting. He knew there wasn’t much time, the vista was so flat, so charged with open space, they’d spot him soon. And the only recourse he had was to keep running. He just had to make it through those bright blue doors. The beating, beating, beating of wings carried on the wind bearing down on him, echoing all through the dead city.

I just need some water. I’d kill for un peau de l’eau.

Reynaud dragged himself from one classroom to the next, not even sure anymore what he was scanning the rooms for, confused as to what he should stay alert to, and why he even bothered coming here. There was no water here. His eyes were burning, his throat was on fire, his muscles were livid. Every room an endless repetition: piles upon piles of plaster; piles of tiny shoes; piles of dolls missing eyes, appendages, clothing; dusty piles of sepia photographs of children performing morning callisthenics; all the furniture overturned and upended. Merde. Familiar with images of tsunamis and civil wars, Reynaud saw the similar ways any disaster could leave the skeleton of a city exposed and weatherstripped. No matter the nature of the particular disaster— pestilence, flash flood, genocide, zombie attack, radioactive fallout—they all stole their visual cues and style from the tornado’s aftermath. Reynaud was irked by the predictability of this kindergarten disaster, by the pointlessness of his escape. Rather than feeling safe in hiding, Reynaud felt trapped. Reynaud was caught in a trap that he had set. C’est incroyable! The owls were, in fact, wiser than he had given them credit for.

He found a child’s desk upright, lay under it and closed his eyes. He lay like this for 20 minutes, forcing himself not to think any thoughts. He turned his attention inside his body. He checked in with each limb, trying to appease them all: right hind leg, left hind leg, just breathe, just breathe. Right fore leg, left fore leg, just lay still and breathe. Relax back, relax throat. Breathe in a little. Breathe one more time a bit bigger. Lungs you’ve done this before. Lungs just let in a little bit more air, just to the bottom, just fill my body. Like a balloon. A balloon that gravity cannot grasp. A balloon that just floats up and up and up. My body weightless. Just one more deep breath and my body will be weightless. Now.

His ears perked dead alert: he could hear someone else in the room breathing too. And before he could shift his weight around, he felt again how heavy and stony and rigid his muscles and tendons and bones actually were. And the complete understanding of that heaviness is what did Reynaud in. The instant reckoning that his body would never float away from this place hit him like a ton of bricks. Reynaud now knew exactly where those clichés came from and how their practicality and cynicism could keep a man jailed. Je renounce la chasse. Vous avez gagné. He could feel someone’s breath on his back, and then a hand on his neck. He was immobilized from where he was positioned under the desk, his only defence now was to whip his head around in an attempt to look his attacker in the eye, and growl as menacingly as he could muster and snap his jaws to crush what appendages might be in his way.

The hand that quickly pulled back from Reynaud’s neck was a tiny, light hand. A light, tiny hand with seven separate and distinct fingers. From what he could tell, the hand led up the fragile arm of a tiny girl. Reynaud was in complete amazement and stopped gnashing at the space between them.

“Don’t bite me. You’re a bad, bad dog. I’m six and I’m called Lhaali. Nooooo! No, no, don’t move. Just let me lie down on you. I don’t want to be cold anymore.”

And Reynaud didn’t move because he didn’t want to be cold anymore either.

He didn’t know how Lhaali had contorted herself under the desk around him, but she managed to find the exact right spot along his back that needed to be covered and warmed up. Lhaali had her arm across Reynaud’s neck, the metal leg of the desk behind her head, her legs sticking out straight behind her from under the desk. Had American comic books ever been of interest to Reynaud, it would have occurred to him that he was wearing Lhaali like a cape; as though he were in flight, flying away from this place. And though she couldn’t have been that much warmer, she fell into a sound sleep. She slept like someone who had been awake for three days. Lhaali was eaten alive by her sleep and Reynaud knew he may never sleep again; he could never let his guard down. Ever. He knew that if there was one little girl here, that meant that somewhere there were other humans, probably those who were angrier, hungrier, more frightened, more violent than this one. He knew he had to leave this place as soon as possible. He imagined those four ugly owls lurking vengefully in all corners of the room. In the dark of the kindergarten he lay panting as heavily, and feeling as spent, as if he were still out in the streets running for his life. What was he thinking? He was, in fact, still running for his life.

Reynaud didn’t mean to fall asleep. After nine hours of wakefulness, listening only to Lhaali’s breath, his eyes couldn’t help but soften. For the first time in the ten years since the evacuation Reynaud had a dream: a lighthouse sending its beacon out over a night sea. He could hear, but not see, the waves killing themselves against the cliff. One. Then another. Then another. In his dream he hated these waves for being so much like lemmings. Reynaud would have preferred never to dream again than to be forced to dream this dream even once, because he knew it to be an omen and not a dream, at all.

Days and nights are passing, though I would be at a loss as to distinguish that passage, if asked one day. I try to avoid sleep, I try not to move around too much, I have only Lhaali to keep me company. But I am completely bewildered by this little girl: I catch myself trusting her, wanting to protect her, laughing along at her jokes, but what if I can’t trust her? What if she was sent to kill me? What if I should really be protecting myself against her? What if the jokes are really at my expense? But I miss her when she leaves me, and I am relieved when she comes back to this room, to me.

Either way Reynaud was captive.

“I don’t think this is a good idea, Lhaali.”

“Why not Reynaud, it’s not like you have anything better to do.”

“While you may have a point there, mon dieu, how are you and I going to catch a wild boar? Here in the school?”

Lhaali laughed as though this were the funniest thing she’d heard in ages, “Not here inside. Out there,” and she thrust her arm almost accusingly at the blown-out window, her open palm presenting it with all seven, reaching fingers. “Outside, Reynaud, outside!”

“We have no guns! We have no ammunition! I didn’t see any wild boars when I came here.”

“That’s because they hide in the forest behind the school. And they have gigantic heads and tiny feet because of the radiation. Or sometimes they have two heads and one body. And there’s one, I think, that grew wings.”

“Wings, Lhaali?”

“Yes, Reynaud, wings. Is that really so hard for you to believe?”

“Lhaali, with no guns, they’ll eat us both.”

“It would have been better if you were a bigger dog, because then I could ride on your back like you were a pony or a unicorn, and that way we could run faster than the boars, and surprise them.”

“I don’t think this is a good idea, Lhaali.”

“Reynaud, if you say that one more time I’m going to go by myself. You say that about every single idea I have.”

“That’s because you always want to do things that are basically deadly.”

“Nuh-unh.”

“Wanting to jump from the roof of the school into a pile of leaves and garbage that you piled up on the asphalt?”

“Reynaud, you just wait here, I’m going to get water from the drinking fountain. We’ll lure them with a bit of water.”

As soon as he heard the word ‘water’ Reynaud had a flash of déjà vu that tightened his belly. He suddenly felt unsettled. Un peau de l’eau. Un peau de l’eau. He looked around the room and saw that he was alone, he listened for Lhaali’s footsteps, or whispering, or singing, and he heard nothing. He listened harder and the silence answered him back more aggressively. Un peau de l’eau. He remembered that day he came here, so thirsty, he had searched the whole building but hadn’t been able to find any water. How long ago that was—three days? Six days? Nine days? Ten days?

How is little Lhaali surviving and playing and scheming if we have no water? She probably has a secret cache of supplies somewhere that she hid from me. Was that why she told me to stay put?

She is taking so long to come back. That’s it, I’m going to look for her. Maybe she went downstairs into the gymnasium. Maybe she tried the fountain on the third floor. Maybe there’s a pipe somewhere on the grounds outside. It’s funny how big this kindergarten feels although everything is miniature for the children. Hundreds of children. How many children could have possibly lived in a city to warrant a school with all of these never-ending corridors? Maybe she’s already back in the classroom. It’s dark. We should not go into the forest at night. If we get attacked by any of those winged boars I’ll never be able to protect her by myself. If she really wants to do this we will have to wait until dawn. It was still light out when she left for water. How many hours ago was that? It may have been close to twilight, though, and here the night drops so quickly. But my legs are so tired, as though I’ve been circling these halls for hours. How have Lhaali and I managed to outrun those owls? Why did I even come here? Why was I running so fast? Why would I run so fast when I had no water?

Reynaud began to call out Lhaali’s name over and over, howling through the deserted hallways. Finally, he decided to go back to the classroom that he and Lhaali liked to stay in. It was the one that seemed to let in the most light during the day, and had the most toys left behind. As he approached the room he picked up a strange scent in the air and knew that someone, or something—and probably more than one—was waiting for him inside. He paused at the doorframe, where the door had long been missing from its hinges, and made himself very, very still.

They’ve probably already seen me, and are hoping that I don’t know they’re in here. Hoping that I’m delusional and that my guard is low, so when I set foot in this darkened room they’ll surprise me. They will probably come at me from all sides. They will probably be merciless. They are probably hungry. Well, I’m certainly not going to fall into their trap. I must commend their patience, though, c’est bon. I’ve been waiting here, before this betraying doorway for a long while now. And they—all of them—have managed to stay exactly as still as I have. I’m not going to give them the satisfaction of killing me here in this decrepit, radioactive building. They’ll have to get me out in the open if they want me.

Reynaud broke through his watchful inertia almost explosively, desperately, vengefully, and made a break for the exit at the end of the hall. He called on everything that he was made of and sprinted out of the kindergarten and across the field and onto the road, yet again. Encore. Plus encore. He tried to tear down the road, but in truth he was barely lifting each paw off the ground. He commanded his legs to go, go, go. He was almost clear of the shadow cast by the tallest apartment building, crossing the tracks, and soon to round the bend leading to what used to be the Lhaali & Co. Soap factory. For the first time that he could recall, the air was filled with the sounds of all of the animals that occupied this dead city: howling, barking, hooting, chirping, crying, laughing, snorting, wailing. His smile widened the moment he decided to follow this road no matter where it led. He would run and run. He began to laugh his dog laugh because he noticed that at the point where the road fell off the edge of the horizon the dawn was approaching, its sky soft and shimmering right there so far off at the knife’s point of the road. And although it was so far off, it was unmistakable that the tiny pinprick of sky there was winking and smiling along with Reynaud. And that is how he knew that if he kept running he would crash straight into the sea.

Illustration by Valerie Thai

In the 1980s, Dan Hubbard and Richard Catinus were two brainy young guys trying to sell Apple computers when I was working in a government office that used IBMs. While outlining the advantages of using a Mac for my work, Dan mentioned in passing that, after reading Jerry Mander’s book, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, he and his wife had decided to raise their children without a TV.

They wanted to give their kids a more enriched life, he told me, one that wasn’t influenced by a diet of bland television programming. About 15 years later, I heard that a young girl with the same last name won a prestigious science award and wondered if the parent’s no-TV decision was a factor in their daughter’s early success.

Dan was a smart fellow so I paid attention to his book recommendation. I headed to the library and borrowed what would prove to be a life-changing read. Mander argues brilliantly that TV is dangerous to viewers, the environment, and—the factor that worried me most—our democracy. He proposes that the medium discourages vigorous thinking and discussion, instead confining human understanding to a rigid channel. After the compelling read, I tossed my little Hitachi, smack in the heyday of M*A*S*H, Three’s Company, and Happy Days. I was in my early 20s, living on my own, and had been spending most evenings sitting on the couch watching sitcoms for three or four hours after working all day. It wasn’t a very different routine from the one I’d had growing up. The novelty of an alternative lifestyle seemed like a perfect challenge, and I went at it with the usual righteous determination of someone that age. I didn’t want a co-dependent relationship with a television.

So, I spent most of the next three and a half decades without one.

***

I grew up as one of six kids in a small flat in Montreal and had never been a huge reader or had much quiet time. Now, I figured, was my chance to change that. A typical weeknight in those years without TV consisted of wolfing down a large bowl of Kraft dinner with a glass of red and retiring to a dilapidated chaise lounger to spend an evening reading. Every so often I’d lean back, look out the window, and ponder an especially enjoyable chapter.

The tranquility of evening reading in my very own rented bachelor suite on Vancouver Island was thrilling. After a few satisfying book hours, I’d listen to some Spirit of the West or Madonna or Fleetwood Mac, maybe write a letter to family or friends back east, and putter around, getting ready for work the next day. I really came to know myself in those years.

I read a library tome, an introduction to 500 great books, and jotted down the titles that looked interesting to me. I gave the list to my sister in case anyone in our large family was ever looking for a useful gift idea for me. My siblings surprised me that year and delivered 30 wrapped books for my 30th birthday. That thoughtful present set me up to a habit of reading 30 or 40 books a year for most of my adult life.

Not having a TV habit enabled me to use my leisure time to pursue different interests. In 1986, I took a leave of absence from my government job and went to Tokyo for a year to learn about Japanese culture and work for a local advertising firm. In 1990, I won a competition for an international Rotary scholarship to the Philippines. I took night classes at the University of Victoria over a 20-year period and managed to earn a bachelor’s degree and a humanities diploma (I was probably the slowest person ever to earn a degree, but I had fun learning). One summer, I took a peace research course in Norway, and for several years I mentored a boy with dyslexia. I seriously doubt I would have pursued these adventures if my life had centred on keeping up with my favourite TV programs. My time was unmediated by a screen.

There were, of course, downsides of not owning a television in the pre-internet age. Visiting nieces and nephews were horrified at the prospect of spending a cartoon-free weekend at Aunty Thelma’s. I was frequently the odd one out at the water cooler, as colleagues and friends discussed the latest episode of their favourite show. I remember two friends talking about some person named Roseanne and thought: “This woman sounds like a jerk, I hope I am never introduced to her.”

TV then had strange effects on society. I had read about people in some countries using the show Friends as a teaching aid to learn English. After seeing an episode at my sister’s place, I thought the idea was strange. The lines delivered by the actors sounded like clever and witty phrases concocted by writers. No one I knew talked like that in everyday conversations; if they did, I would have thought they were a bit off. The sitcom-language-study model is fine for learning new words as long as you realize no one actually speaks that way.

I also avoided amassing a surplus memory full of unerasable real and staged violent scenes. Once while visiting a friend, I saw the television news of two girls hanging from a mango tree in India. The young women were strung up after being raped. I wept at the sight and still ache from that painful scene. Another time, I walked into my brother’s house as a scene from CSI was on the prominent living room screen. A group of young women were celebrating as they partied in a limo when one of them stuck her head out of the sunroof waving a glass of champagne—just as the car veered under a low-hanging sign. The memory of the five-second horrific glimpse still sends shivers down my spine. I have not been desensitized to violent images and have no impervious armour.

It is hard to believe that 100 years ago there was no such thing as television. And now, after millions of years of human evolution, few people on the planet exist without daily exposure to a steady stream of perpetually shocking images, as well as constant sales pitches from our televisions and screens.

***

After 15 years without a television, I married a man who had a big-screen TV. Television was a disappointment. I was traumatized to find the newscasters’ nostrils were bigger than my head, or so it seemed. The images looked kitschy and over-the-top. Sitting by the radio and listening to CBC News had been much more interesting than watching an announcer sit behind a desk reading a teleprompter. It felt hollow and lonely to be sitting in a room with another human being when we were both silently staring at a TV in the corner. The marriage was short-lived, and the big boring box exited with the man who loved watching it.

I spent another 10 years enjoying life without a TV until 2011, when I fell in love with a man who had three TVs. (Men with TVs are everywhere.) This time I was more careful. I laid bare my disclosure: I wasn’t interested in television, particularly violent content, but I did enjoy thoughtful movies. He played his cards well. Every weekend we spent together he would borrow a movie from the library. He consulted lists of the “most inspiring movies”—Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Dead Poets Society, and Groundhog Day—and we saw them all over the course of a couple of years. He also saved carefully considered programs and weaned me back to the worldwide tube. Usually anything with David Suzuki, 60 Minutes, or political humour worked for me.

After seven years of blissful weekends, we decided to live together. The expectant question on my mind was: How will I cope with television in my midst?

At first, the most shocking thing on TV was the wavy red, blue, and green, ribbon-like digital graphics on CTV’s station identification. The novel optical illusion of the compelling artwork was mesmerizing. I couldn’t get over the richness of the colours and the sharpness of the images. I felt like a child observing something fantastically new. TV in the early ’80s didn’t look like this. In those re-entry months, I found many programs and ads to be hysterical. I would actually slap the arm of the couch and nearly roll over laughing. The Olympic Rona ads were goofy comical—I got a kick out of the circle of about a dozen needle-nose pliers opening and closing to mimic synchronized swimmers, and the relay race with a Rona employee running across the country to deliver a single tool to a worker on the job. There was one shoe store ad where a woman was in her closet trying on half a dozen pairs of new shoes while dancing around as if in a state of delirium. Her husband kept calling her for dinner. He should have called a psychiatrist. The whole thing was too silly.

I only watched one episode of a reality TV show and it was absurd. Ozzy Osbourne was dumping a huge bag of large chocolate bars into a drawer in a cavernous kitchen, while nearby little dogs pooped on the floor. I pitied the poor souls who had to live in such a desolate environment. That was the end of reality TV for me. I agree with film director Spike Lee as he commented in a 2016 CBC interview with Peter Mansbridge: “I think one of the worst things that has ever happened to America, or the world, is reality TV…. [Reality TV] put the worst elements of us human beings on television, and made it entertainment.”

In 35 years, the evening entertainment medium has gone from Happy Days to an insulting assortment of so-called reality shows and a frightening abundance of crime dramas. We have gone from Perry Mason to Judge Judy; from “betcha can’t eat just one” or “reach out and touch someone”—cute ad jingles— to a barrage of stress-inducing, digitally constructed morphing monster graphics with laser beams shooting out of their everywhere as they inexplicably chase the latest version of the new car being advertised. I don’t get it.

And then I saw the sensational Wild Canada, a four-part documentary series on CBC’s The Nature of Things, narrated by David Suzuki. We have watched it several times and each time it makes me feel grateful to be alive and living in a country that is still full to the brim with magnificent natural beauty and thriving wildlife compared to many other places on the planet. I imagined what television could be if all the content were all as thoughtfully produced. I was reminded: It is not the TV itself, but the content we select.

***

After six months or so, I came to the new habit of watching an hour or two of television every day with my partner. My favourite daily program is CHEK TV, a local five o’clock community news show produced by a station that has been successfully employee-owned for nine years. They do a good job of covering events on Vancouver Island and they talk like sane, everyday people you might chat with at the grocery store.

If I had to pick a single weekly television show to watch, Real Time with Bill Maher would be the one. The program is well-named; the content feels real. I could actually imagine having a decent conversation with the guests; they aren’t there just to flog their books or their movies. We never miss it and are disappointed when Maher takes a holiday. What more could you want from a TV show when you sit down to relax after dinner, holding hands with your lover on a Friday night?

I enjoy some of the broad range of TV fare, but with the focus on President Donald Trump this past year in both news and entertainment, I am becoming bored. If I flip through the channels it usually feels like a waste of time. Violence, conflict, and anger are predominant themes. I don’t laugh at the TV as much as I did at first. The shine is off. Some days it is beginning to feel as if watching television takes me away from myself and makes me feel less alive.

When I am home alone, I never turn on the television. Frankly, I don’t even know how to. But I’m okay with that.

***

I never set out to be a freak, but reading the Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television in my early 20s led me down a different boulevard. TV-free living offered a rich set of decades for me—but I doubt I will venture back there. Recently I have been thoroughly enjoying the brilliant documentary filmwork of Ken Burns, especially his series on the Roosevelts. (Eleanor Roosevelt is my new hero.) Mind you, I do find myself winnowing my way into my partner’s heart with my audiobook-listening habits. At the moment we are getting refreshed by reading Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now and we just finished swooning over Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us. Reading together is even more pleasant than watching a little TV together. I’m torn.

But I am grateful to that Apple salesperson for the excellent book recommendation.

Mr. Mander had some compelling arguments.

Photo courtesy of HighBarFirstNations.com

Along the Fraser River in the B.C. Interior is the High Bar First Nation reserve, a vast, rocky piece of land 120 kilometres northwest of Kamloops, population one. The sole resident, an elderly woman, doesn’t live there year-round. “She’s too old to go down there and live permanently,” says Angie Kane, High Bar general manager. “Her daughter takes her down and they’ll stay for a weekend.”

The federal government allocated the land to the High Bar nation in 1881, but in the 1920s, Canada deemed the land unlivable due to its lack of water access. It has remained empty and unserviced by the government ever since, forcing High Bar’s 164 members to disperse elsewhere, from Washington to Kamloops, Kelowna, and Vancouver.

With almost every member of the community living off of their reserve land, it occupies a grey area in the Trans Mountain Pipeline project consultation process with First Nations whose land or territories will be directly impacted by the project, or lie within 50 kilometres of its path.

While the boundaries of the High Bar reserve technically lie outside of the 50-kilometre radius, Kane argues that the project infringes on many areas where High Bar members are living, specifically Kamloops, where the pipeline will pass directly through. Some nations in the Kamloops area, such as the Whispering Pines First Nation and Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓pemc have signed an agreement of some kind, which might include an amount of money that would help the community in the case of a spill.

In 2016, in the midst of the project’s consultation process, High Bar hired a lawyer and forced then-owners Kinder Morgan (the federal government has since purchased the project) to consult with them. According to Kane, her community spent nearly $20,000 in legal fees—most of which was eventually reimbursed—only, Kane says, to be brushed off.

“They just sat across the table and said, ‘Well, you’re not within our 50-kilometre radius, we really don’t need to talk to you, but we’re here because we’re supposed to be,’” Kane recalls. According to documents, High Bar’s concerns extended from access to hunting grounds and medicinal plants, to environmental impacts from spills or leaks. After two meetings, the Crown found the impacts of the project on High Bar to be “negligible.”

“They should have had more talks with us, but they cut us off,” says Larry Fletcher, High Bar’s Chief. “We have band members that will be affected [by the pipeline] because they never got us a piece of land that is suitable for housing.”

There might be new possibility for members of the nation who feel they have so far slipped through the cracks. On August 30, the Federal Court of Appeal rejected the Liberals’ planned expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline, citing a failure to engage in meaningful dialogue with B.C.’s Indigenous communities; they were ordered to conduct a second round of consultations.

Still, Kane isn’t hopeful. “It’s been so many years of not being recognized,” she says. “Until we actually have somebody sitting in front of us having a discussion, we don’t hold our hope out for it.”

“Do Canadians really use the word ‘eh?'”

“Yes, they do.”

Welcome to one of OMNI television network’s flagship shows, Your New Life in Canada. Produced in English, Punjabi, Cantonese, and other languages, it offers a taste of Canadian lifestyle, culture, and language to newcomers to Canada and covers everything from how food differs in Canada to what work environments are like in the country. Keep watching the Rogers Media network, and you’ll see anchors talking current affairs and local news in Mandarin, Vietnamese, or Tagalog, or even a broadcast of Hockey Night in Canada in Punjabi. The glitz and the glamour of Canada’s linguistic diversity: that’s OMNI’s shtick.

Canada’s multicultural media isn’t a topic that appears much in mainstream news. But in November, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) will gather a large group of media broadcasters in Ottawa to decide the future of multi-ethnic and multilingual media in Canada. The topic in question: which media network will be granted a special broadcasting licence, regarding section 9(1)(h) of the Broadcasting Act, worth millions of dollars. (For the sake of clarity, we’ll refer to it as the 9(1)(h) licence.)

The tussle for winning this speciality licence for ethnic media has been simmering since the CRTC took strict action against Rogers Media this year. In 2017, the CRTC awarded the 9(1)(h) licence to Rogers Media for OMNI. This licence makes possible the broadcast of certain diverse channels—including the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), CBC News Network, CPAC, and Accessible Media Inc. (AMI) TV— to millions of Canadians as a mandatory service, in an effort to improve access to media programming in languages other than English and French. A majority of 9(1)(h) licence holders are non-profit organizations that seek to serve the regional and national audience through a publicly funded television network. But the Quebecor group and Rogers Media are two for-profit corporations that have been awarded 9(1)(h) licences to air as a broadcasting distribution undertaking (BDU)—meaning Canadians pay a certain fee for TV or digital media services for a certain number of TV channels. As a result, these channels are considered taxpayer-funded.

Now, the CRTC is changing its tune over the Rogers deal, restricting its licence after 2020. The commission is asking the rest of Canada’s television producers to bid to replace Rogers— but the company is pledging not to go down without a fight. In the end, it has spoiled a process intended to diversify content across the country. Ethnic media has become a game of money and power—and it has largely gone unnoticed in mainstream Canadian media.

***

The 9(1)(h) Act came about in 1991 to promote multilingual media for the multi-ethnic Canadian population. According to the section on BDU, the criteria for assessing the value of a certain service include whether the programming safeguards, enriches, and strengthens “the cultural, political, social and economic fabric of Canada; is drawn from local, regional, national and international sources; [and] includes educational and community programs.” There is another criterion, one that’s key to this article: that the programming “reflects and contributes to Canada’s linguistic duality and ethno-cultural diversity, including the special place of Aboriginal peoples in Canadian society.” (Twenty percent of Canadians use a language other than English and French at home, according to Statistics Canada.)

In 2017, Rogers received its licence from the CRTC for its OMNI Regional channels. The mandatory carry of OMNI as a digital basic service awarded to Rogers Media—one that is publicly funded—saved the network. Two years prior, Rogers Media shuttered multiple stations across Canada, citing unprofitability. The new 9(1)(h) licence was supposed to ensure a steady stream of revenue for OMNI’s newly rebranded regional feeds in B.C., Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec, covering all regions of Canada. OMNI Regional broadcasts news and current affairs stories about local communities across Canada, programming considered critical to many communities. These regional broadcasts also carry multilingual and multi-ethnic programming of national interest.

But based on the criteria laid out by the CRTC, issues around Rogers’ use of the licence arose. In 2017, Unifor, the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic, and the Urban Alliance on Race Relations filed a complaint against Rogers Media for using Mandarin and Cantonese newscasts produced by Fairchild TV, an outside contractor. Under OMNI’s licensing agreement for basic distribution, Rogers Media is supposed to produce and broadcast original content for the local communities where it operates. OMNI’s BDU application was approved for developing a regional feed model—with four regional feeds broadcasting from the west to east coasts.

Some consumers aren’t happy about the programming either, claiming that dependence on outside sources has left them with stale content. One viewer from Surrey, B.C., whom we’ll call Harpreet, says OMNI’s recent programming has turned his family off of the network. “There are no shows that interest me,” he says, particularly of OMNI’s Punjabi programming. “Most of them have been taken from somewhere else—old shows from another network. Shows we have seen 10 years ago.” That sentiment is echoed online, where little is posted about programming aside from interviewees promoting their appearances on the channel. Of these posts, one outlier exists. It’s a tweet by a stand-up comedian from Toronto: “Fun fact: OMNI is a shitty TV channel in Canada,” it reads.

OMNI’s practices have even been questioned by its own media workers who have demanded a more stringent set of conditions regarding the licence. Jake Moore, president of the Unifor Local 79M, which represents OMNI journalists and media workers in Vancouver and Toronto, noted in a press release that the basic distribution licence should work toward delivering local news. Howard Law, Unifor’s media director, also pointed out that Rogers Media shouldn’t be handed a blank cheque if it doesn’t retain the licence.

Nigel Barriffe, president of the Urban Alliance on Race Relations and part of the coalition that has raised concerns about Rogers Media’s skewed practices, says the “CRTC had given the licence to Rogers without holding them accountable. It has everything to do with money… They aren’t struggling with funding. This isn’t about helping them survive. They bid enough to be able to do this. It is the right thing to do.”

Laith Marouf, policy consultant at the Community Media Advocacy Center (CMAC), claims Rogers also tried to back out of producing more original content in-house at OMNI Quebec—an issue at the heart of the concerns raised against the corporation. “After agreeing to air 14 hours per week of original content from Quebec as part of their licensing conditions to obtain the 9(1)(h) licence, OMNI applied to modify the condition to 14 hours per month, claiming they had made a clerical error during their licence renewal hearing,” he says. “The CRTC rejected their claims and request for condition modifications.” (Marouf is also a project consultant at Independent Community Television [ICTV], an applicant that is competing against Rogers Media for the 9(1)(h) licence. It also isn’t the first time ICTV has raised issues with CRTC licensing: the company filed a complaint in 2015 against Vidéotron’s community channel in Montreal due to noncompliance with regulatory requirements of the CRTC; the CRTC ruled in favour of ICTV’s complaint.)

“We initiated the request to amend the licence in an effort to clear up confusion around the condition of licence for the independent ethnic service ICI,” Colette Watson, senior vice president of television and broadcast operations at Rogers Media, told This in response to the allegations. “While 14 hours weekly is the commitment we made as part of OMNI Regional licence, the intent was not to create onerous licence requirements for this small broadcaster. OMNI Quebec has met its weekly commitment of 14 hours per week and that is what we continue to deliver.” Rogers points to collaborations with regional broadcasters, such as ICI Montreal and Fairchild TV, to produce the content, and will make original content a priority should the licence be renewed. Critics, however, say this is an unfair practice that violates the terms of the CRTC’s 9(1)(h) agreement.

The CRTC wasn’t completely convinced by Rogers’ arguments, instead initiating a call for new applications for the licence and restricting Rogers’ licence until 2020. A recent Globe and Mail report, featuring an extensive interview with Watson, failed to mention why the CRTC decided not to renew Rogers’ licence. Meanwhile, the corporation had grown its profits by more than one-third to $425 million as reported at the end of its first quarter in 2018.

When it comes to promoting inclusivity and diversity in programming—the chief concern for critics of the Rogers licence—some say there’s plenty of work to do internally to improve matters. According to one former OMNI employee, who has asked to remain anonymous to protect their identity, “no one from the ethnic community is part of the executive team at OMNI. They do have an advisory council that suggests ideas, but it doesn’t make any decisions.” Watson denies this. “The reality is quite the opposite and we’re extremely proud of the diversity we have on the OMNI team, both in front of and behind the camera,” she tells This, citing multiple employees; those mentioned in her response, however, are part of the editorial leadership team, and not from the executive board.

Rogers Media has since made some controversial decisions for OMNI, closing local stations in Vancouver and laying off a large number of journalists across the country. The CRTC took notice of these shutdowns, both by Rogers and other networks, and has enforced a policy requiring a 120-day notice before closing a TV station. Local community media is, after all, essential to the prosperity of millions of Canadians outside of urban areas—and such cost-cutting measures only hurt them.

***

The 9(1)(h) licence Rogers Media now holds will be up for grabs in 2020, and though OMNI is still in the running, there are seven other media networks—large and small—also vying for it. Bell Media, Ethnic Channels Group Limited, Telelatino Network Inc. and Asian Television Network International Limited, Amber Broadcasting Inc., Independent Community Television Montreal, Corriere Canadese, and Multicultural Described Video Guide—all major players in the third-language media industry—hope to get their hands on the licence.

Some applicants provide an option that’s similar to what already exists. Bell Media, a large corporation in direct competition with Rogers, has requested that they be allowed to contract productions of national interest to independent production companies rather than producing them in-house. But others show promise for change that would be welcome by unhappy viewers: According to the CRTC’s instructions the broadcasters are supposed to produce content in at least four languages—Italian, Punjabi, Mandarin, and Cantonese. ICTV’s TELE1 and TELE2 plan is the most ambitious, with 45 languages as part of its broadcast. ICTV is also the only applicant that has proposed content in Indigenous languages.

Meanwhile, Rogers Media has started a robust public relations campaign on Twitter with the hashtag #supportOMNITV and a website to gather support letters. The public support is critical for Rogers Media to save its licence at the hearing, slated for November 26. “We have mandatory carriage on the basic service of all television distributors, which has allowed us to provide programming to over 40 different ethnic groups in over 40 different languages, and to continue offering our third-language newscasts in Italian, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Punjabi,” the Support OMNI website reads. “Now, we are at risk of losing this mandatory distribution which will mean closure of the service.” The website does not state why CRTC is reconsidering OMNI’s licence or why it could lose it.

“We believe OMNI Regional is the clear choice for Canadians and we look forward to demonstrating that to all stakeholders in November at the public hearing,” Watson says of Rogers’ strategy moving forward. “We received close to 5,000 letters of support for the renewal of our service— far exceeding the support received for other applications.” This could not independently verify these claims.

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According to data from consumer marketing company Statista on BDU subscribers across Canada, the households receiving basic distribution through various services such as Dish or IPTV declined to 76.2 percent in 2016, down from 83 percent in 2009. Still, the reach is great, and allows diverse communities to consume programming that speaks to their realities.

In times when the local and community news media industry is facing extreme challenges, this CRTC licence could strengthen civil society institutions in Canada. As Harpreet notes, from a viewer’s perspective, multicultural media in this country “should [uphold] Canadian cultural values. The network should be sensitive about translating and transmitting the cultural and social issues of the ethnic community into broader Canadian society.”

When mainstream English- and French-Canadian media are facing its biggest challenge in decades, OMNI’s case highlights a different story: a certain brand of multicultural media is thriving in Canada thanks to taxpayers’ money. But what does creating silos of media representation do to media produced in languages other than English or French? The mundane affair of a broadcasting licence might appear to be prosaic, but perhaps one overused quote by a famous Canadian might help us understand the gravity of the situation: “The medium is the message.”

Check back for updates on the story after the CRTC decision this November.