The Super Bowl sim-sub struggle between Bell Media president Kevin Crull and CRTC chair Jean-Pierre Blais showed up again on Friday at Prime Time in Ottawa.

While their impasse over the recent CRTC ruling that seeks to ban sim-sub during the Super Bowl now includes a federal court appeal, Crull used his keynote address to take aim at the decision and discuss what he sees as the threat to the CTV, and the broadcast industry as a whole, as the CRTC gets set to release more Let’s Talk TV decisions on March 12.

“The acquisition of exclusive [Super Bowl] rights for Canada is now meaningless. This has introduced unprecedented uncertainty and chaos into the market,” Crull said, arguing that interfering with Bell Media’s TV deal with the NFL could chill programming investment.

The Bell Media topper also said the CTV’s threatened loss of Super Bowl sim-sub in 2017 could result in less production coin and promotion down the road for homegrown TV shows.

“This decision is unreasonable and makes an unsustainable business model even worse,” Crull added, after pointing to the spectre of U.S. channels, such as AMC, CNN and A&E, beaming their signals into Canada with no compulsion to help fund Canadian content programming.

He professed to be “absolutely stunned” that Canadians were using IP address masking to view the U.S.-based Netflix service, and that distributors were raising border antennas to capture U.S. broadcast OTA signals to sell them to Canadians, with no regard for copyright holders.

Again, he maintained that it put Canada’s independent TV rights market in peril.

“It’s the unrestricted flood of American networks, not sim-sub, that makes it harder for Canadian programming to succeed,” Crull said. “After destroying the domestic rights market with U.S. signal rebroadcast, you cannot call the partial solution of sim-sub ‘protection.'”

His solution, also floated last week at the Banff Industry Connect conference in Toronto, was to “either fund the public broadcaster two to three times greater than today – that’s another billion [dollars] or two of taxpayer funding – or we can support a sustainable business model for private investment in media and broadcasting.”

Crull said a Canadian broadcasting industry that attracted private investment needed “a supportive regulatory and public policy framework – enabling rather than undermining content creators.”

“Unfortunately I don’t believe we have that right now,” he added.