Watching Pierre Karl Péladeau over the past year, one could easily get the impression that he wants to rule the world, or at the very least, the entire Canadian media industry.

Péladeau is the savvy and driven president and CEO of the ever-expanding Quebecor media empire.

He is also one of two men who helped spur an industry crisis last January when he defiantly – albeit temporarily – stopped paying into the CTF (Quebecor contributes $14.3 million annually), calling it a poorly managed ‘subsidy machine’ out of step with the digital age. He was effectively joining forces with Alberta-based Shaw Communications CEO Jim Shaw, who had withdrawn his contributions the month before.

The two giants seized the full attention of the Department of Canadian Heritage, which passed the buck to the CRTC for a full review of CTF policies and spending procedures that is still underway.

Péladeau sent further shockwaves through the industry when he proposed scrapping the CTF altogether and replacing it with a financing model of his own design – the Quebecor Fund – which would pledge $109 million in its first three years.

‘We want to manage our own fund,’ Péladeau tells Playback on the phone from a lakeside vacation in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. ‘We are a Canadian company and we already spend more on Canadian content than is required. We want to put more money into the system and have it managed in some way by the CRTC.’

It’s little wonder the feds listen when Péladeau speaks. Quebecor’s print, phone, Internet and television properties essentially dominate the Quebec media market, and the company is still growing both inside the province and in the rest of the country.

Quebecor tripled its profit in the second fiscal quarter, reported Aug. 9, largely due to the strong performance of Videotron – the cable, Internet and phone operations giant that it acquired in 2000. Videotron falls under the profitable Quebecor Media subsidiary, which owns the company’s television, newspaper and entertainment operations. Its performance offset the struggling print subsidiary Quebecor World.

Quebecor Media’s most recent acquisition was inked Aug. 3, adding Osprey Media (and another 33 community newspapers and 20 dailies in English Canada) to that fiefdom, which swallowed the Sun Media chain in 1998, bringing it the Sun newspapers. It also owns the highest circulation French-language paper in the country, Le Journal de Montréal, and a host of other French-language publications.

Still, it’s the Videotron numbers that fuelled Quebecor Media to a profit of $88.7 million (up nearly 50% from the previous year). Its cable telephone subscriber base grew by 55,000 new subscribers in its second quarter, pushing the total beyond 500,000 Videotron customers. The company’s cellular phone business also reported a jump of 10,400 clients.

Quebecor Media also owns the province’s largest private TV network, TVA, which is arguably Canada’s top broadcaster of Canadian content – at least content that people watch. All of the top 30 shows in la belle province are homegrown, and 24 of those are broadcast on TVA, which has the highest audience share with 27% (Radio-Canada has 14%).

TVA’s mega-hits include last season’s Le Banquier (Quebec’s take on Deal or No Deal), which attracted two million viewers per episode, as well as American Idol’s Quebec cousin, Star Académie (2003-2005), which drew three million viewers at its peak. In a province of approximately six million francophone Quebeckers, that means that half the population was watching one television show. Mind-boggling market penetration makes TVA one of the most envied networks in the world.

Péladeau, however, is a wizard of understatement. ‘We certainly haven’t invented anything new – we do what the Americans are champions at doing. We try to appeal to the most people as possible.’ Yet he is keenly aware that TVA’s audience power gives him remarkable political clout in Ottawa.

The disciplined CEO uses his status in the nation’s capital to influence how CTF money might be better spent in the future. For instance, the Quebecor Fund proposal had a hitch – Quebecor would maintain copyright of the produced shows.

Péladeau claims the only way to compete in the multi-channel universe is to distribute and promote content over many platforms. Viewers are turning to specialty channels and the Internet for entertainment, and advertisers are following, says Péladeau, but the government funding system has fallen behind.

‘If we are not able to have proper regulation, the entire industry will suffer,’ he warns.

The Quebecor Fund proposal would cover the TVA Group of television channels and illico Digital TV, its blossoming VOD branch.

TVA Group reports earnings separately from Quebecor, and its second quarter results saw net profits of $16.6 million (up from $13.4 million the year before). However, the CEO maintains that homegrown TV, particularly big-budget dramas, is getting too expensive to produce.

‘At TVA we are now in a position where we can’t afford to finance drama,’ Péladeau says.

Despite the fact the CTF provided seed money for 89 dramas in its fiscal 2006/07 year, including 32 in French and 57 in English, he is unconvinced of its effectiveness.

‘These rules that provide exclusive funding for independent producers don’t create Canadian content,’ he says. ‘They don’t create anything except a situation where there are less dramas available for Canadian viewers.’

Quebec’s independent producers association, the APFTQ, maintains that the Quebecor Fund proposal is self-serving.

‘[It] serves the interests of Quebecor and not the industry,’ says APFTQ president Claire Samson.

Nonetheless, the feds are listening, and the CRTC appears to be buckling under pressure from Péladeau and Shaw. In June, the CRTC released a report saying that the mandate of the CTF needs to be reviewed for a ‘more commercial’ approach to financing Canadian content. The regulatory task force also recommended that the CTF allocate a portion of its funds to the development of productions for new media platforms (which includes VOD).

The CRTC is currently weighing industry response and a final report is due Sept. 15.