Missed Opportunities: The Story of Canada's Broadcasting Policy

Dean Tudor is a professor of Journalism at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute.

Raboy, who teaches at the Université Laval, is the author of materials
dealing with radical and public broadcasting in Quebec, and that is the
perspective in this volume. His topics seem to be a catalogue of faux
pas, but of course hindsight is better than 20/20 vision. He has divided
a 60-year period (1928–1988) into seven distinct phases, emphasizing
policy, capital, and state power. He contends that the evolution of
Canadian broadcasting is unique, being dependent upon geography,
communication to the masses, and public policy debates. He says “the
Canadian broadcasting system is the result of the interaction of popular
social pressure for public service broadcasting, pressure from financial
interests to keep broadcasting in the commercial sector and provide
favourable conditions in which to do broadcasting business, and the
political project of maintaining ‘Canada’ as an entity distinct from
the United States of America and united against the periodic threat of
disintegration posed by Quebec.” Raboy argues that national policy
needs to be kept separated from public policy. This approach frees him
to use as a dominant subtheme the role of Quebec in broadcasting policy.
He suggests that there are four major issues to resolve in the context
of social activism: the question of jurisdiction (federal versus
provincial); the need for cultural sovereignty over American imports;
the loose cannons of commercial capital forces in the marketplace; and
the carefully delineated distinctions among policy-making, regulation,
programming, and consumer access. This book grew out of Raboy’s 1986
Ph.D. dissertation at McGill; readers will note that he has been
consistent here with his previous writings.