Joe I-am-Canadian is soon to find that he’s become just another John Doe, no clear identity and no fixed address. At least, no fixed address that’s identifiably Canadian.

Why would that be?

Because the governing powers that seem to be and the corporate powers that really are, are so intent upon divvying up the television, cable, satellite and telecom real estate that they’ve forgotten to think about what’s going to happen to the tenants living on the land.

You remember the consumer? He who is long-suffering, who feels inchoate rage, who flails wildly, trying to figure out what his TV set can actually show him, how much it will cost, and how he can get it without waiting all day for the cable guy. Or the phone guy. Or the satellite guy.

The consumer is in a white noise fog of mixed messages coming from all directions. TV nets, cablers, satellite people and a bunch of confused mumblers who offer various combinations of all three – plus Internet access, personal digital hair dryers and Web-ready electric toothbrushes that will sear off your stained enamel if you’re brushing while a friend is trying to send you e-mail.

Meantime, our industry gets all woolly over who should be allowed to own what networks, which specialties (if any), which newspapers, which production companies, which distributors and which rights to sell what to which media.

These are important matters that need to be sorted out equitably in order to protect not only the industry players such as independent producers, non-commercial broadcasters, cable and satellite distributors and deep-pocketed conglomerates, but also the consumer.

But lately, a new force threatens to unbalance the business/consumer tug-of-war. The anti-regulatory crowd is whispering persistently that there should be a review of the CRTC and its mandate.

Before the government leaps into the breach, let’s review.

Certainly, the CRTC has raised questions about the nature and scope of its raison d’etre by a) declining to regulate the Net and b) saying yes to BCE’s takeover of CTV while denying cablers the right to own majority stakes in specialty channels. And some in the consumer press continue to argue that the free market should determine which specialties survive, and argue that imposed rules on channel packaging protect weak channels at the expense of popular ones.

But remember, when unregulated Canadian cultural industries are left, er, unregulated, they tend also to become – how to put this tactfully? – unnoticeable. Witness the feature film industry, whose product occupies a depressingly low percentage of Canadian screens, say 2% or 3%, depending on the day.

The CRTC is pretty much the only body which spends time saying the forgotten word ‘consumer’ right out loud. The CRTC certainly has its flaws and it may be at a crossroads within Canada’s media consolidation mania, but if we truly produce, buy, distribute and multi-platform for the consumer, we must recognize the value of the CRTC.