The chair of the Canadian Television Fund says he’s ‘perplexed and surprised’ that cable giant Jim Shaw is reigniting his battle with the beleaguered fund’s board just over a week before its annual general meeting at the Banff World Television Festival.

On Friday, the head of Alberta-based Shaw Communications sent an aggressive letter to CTF chair Douglas Barrett accusing the board of trying to tighten its control over the fund by rewriting a series of bylaws in time for its upcoming AGM on June 12.

‘What you are doing with the AGM demonstrates that the CTF does not consider itself accountable to the outside world,’ reads the letter, which was copied to Bev Oda, the heritage minister, Konrad von Finckenstein, the chair of the CRTC, and Ian Brodie, the chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Specifically, Shaw says the CTF board is seeking to consolidate power and shut out cable and satellite carriers by ‘filling vacancies within its ranks’ and introducing a new rule that all ‘major decisions’ be approved by a double majority of its board.

‘The letter is a major surprise,’ Barrett tells Playback Daily. ‘We are doing our best to operate on a status quo basis, pending the results of the CRTC review. Those bylaw amendments are all housekeeping. Nothing substantial is changing. Our procedures and practices are the same now as in previous years.’

Barrett says the ‘double majority’ vote to which Shaw objects to has been part of CTF procedures since 2005. ‘We’ve been using it for two and half years, and someone suggested it was time to put it in the bylaws, so we are.’

In the double-majority format, anyone on the CTF board who is in a conflict of interest — in other words, who stands to benefit from the vote — withdraws from the vote. Then, there is a second round, in which those members of the board who are not representatives of the broadcasting, cable, or production sectors will vote on the same issue a second time.

Shaw also blasted the board for not properly notifying his company of the AGM, which has taken place at the Banff festival every summer since the CTF’s inception in 1994, according to Barrett. Shaw likely didn’t receive notice about the annual meeting because the cable company withdrew its representative on the CTF board when it temporarily stopped making payments to the fund last December, says Barrett.

‘They chose not to have anyone on the board. If he had wanted to put his member back after he started making payments, we would have been open to that, but he didn’t.’ Barrett says he plans to write a response to Shaw in the coming days.

Jim Shaw was not available for comment at press time.

Barrett says no substantive changes will be made to how the fund operates until the CRTC releases its report in August.

The CRTC began a review of the fund after Shaw temporarily stopped making its $6-million monthly payments last December. Videotron followed suit in January. Cable and satellite carriers are required to pay $145 million, or 55%, of the fund’s budget, through money collected from consumers. The government adds the rest – about $120 million. The cable providers want more input into how their money is spent, including more seats on the fund’s board.