MONTREAL — It’s time for Josée Verner to wake up and force the CRTC to protect Canadian content. That’s the message 18 of Canada’s largest cultural unions and associations, most of which hail from Quebec, sent the new minister of Canadian Heritage at a press conference this week in Montreal.

The group — which includes film, TV and music lobby groups such as the Union des artistes, the AQTIS, the APFTQ and ACTRA — says cultural stakeholders in Quebec are worried about the apparent deregulation agenda of the CRTC and its head Konrad von Finckenstein. It is calling on Verner, who took over for Bev Oda in August, to put pressure on the CRTC to enforce its cultural and social regulations — and those of the Broadcasting Act — more rigorously. It also wants the feds to be more involved in the Internet.

ACTRA president Richard Hardacre joined the chorus with a public plea to Verner at Sunday’s televised Quebec music industry awards show, the ADISQ gala. His message to Verner, who was in the audience, was delivered in French to resounding applause. Over 1.7 million Quebecers tuned in.

‘It was a cry from the heart,’ Hardacre tells Playback Daily. ‘We want the minister to pay attention. There is a change happening at the CRTC, it’s been happening for a while. It’s driven by commercial interests. It has nothing to do with the Broadcasting Act’s objectives.’

He says the CRTC has been on the deregulation road since it decided in 1999 not to monitor the Internet. ‘The CRTC has basically decided not to regulate something that represents the biggest innovation in terms of content delivery in recent years,’ says the ACTRA president. ‘It’s instead putting all its energy into facilitating media convergence. It should be creating regulations to protect culture within this new context.’

Vincent Leduc, president of the Quebec producers’ association, the APFTQ, is also concerned about the direction the CRTC is taking. ‘It’s mainly independent producers who produce Canadian content. It’s not that we want to be mired with unnecessary regulation. But we need to protect culture,’ he says.

The coalition also fears that the CRTC is going to blend its telecommunications and broadcasting regulations and, in the process, eliminate the Broadcasting Act’s social and cultural objectives, according to Anne-Marie Des Roches, spokeswoman for Quebec’s largest actors’ union, the UDA.

‘Von Finckenstein’s discourse is very ambiguous. It’s not clear. We hear him talk about the need to protect culture. But when he talks about telecommunications it’s all about deregulation and free market. Culture cannot be regulated by market forces,’ she says.

Von Finckenstein has said publicly that federal legislators should look at merging laws regulating the broadcasting and telecommunications sectors, given that technology is rapidly bringing the two together.

‘If the laws for the two sectors are merged, broadcasting will lose,’ says Des Roches.

The federal regulator held a public hearing Tuesday in B.C. on a number of broadcasting applications, and next month will begin hearings into the purchase of Alliance Atlantis by CanWest Global and its U.S. partner Goldman Sachs, a move that, if approved, could rewrite the rules of foreign ownership in Canada. It is also due to issue a decision on the future of the Canadian Television Fund in December.

The CRTC had no comment on this story. Calls to the minister’s office were not returned.