Talk is cheap, Bell

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This article was published 17/02/2024 (623 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Hello, Bell? Yes, you — the Canadian telecommunications giant whose holdings include TV and radio stations, broadcast and specialty-cable networks, conventional and cellular telephone utilities, internet service provision and a major stake in some of the most profitable franchises in professional sports.

We need to talk. Let’s talk, Bell.

When news broke last week that you were cutting your workforce by nine per cent — some 4,800 employees in all — while selling off 45 of your 103 regional radio stations and eliminating numerous TV newscasts, your chief executive officer, Mirko Bibic, blamed the federal government and the federal broadcast regulator for the financial hardship he says made the massive cuts necessary.

He said both have failed to adequately respond to the fiscal adversity Bell Media and other communications companies are facing in the current media environment, in which traditional advertising revenue has been devastated by the incursions of global technology companies that have removed untold billions from the Canadian economy.

“We continue to face a difficult economy and government and regulatory decisions that undermine investment in our networks, fail to support our media business in a time of crisis and fail to level the playing field with global tech giants,” he said.

At the centre of the issue are two pieces of legislation — Bill C-18, the hotly debated Online News Act, intended to force those global tech giants to compensate Canadian news providers for online use of their content, and Bill C-11, a long-overdue update of the Broadcasting Act that would force digital platforms to contribute to the creation and promotion of Canadian content.

Bell’s executives contend these changes don’t do enough, soon enough, to ease the financial stress Bell is enduring. And so, for the second time in less than a year, Bell has imposed sweeping cuts that have left thousands without jobs and many more without sources of news and information on which they have long depended.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called them a “garbage decision,” an example of how corporate entities “have abdicated their responsibilities toward the communities that they have always made very good profits off of.”

Bell argues that this is a business decision, plain and simple. But that ignores the reality that control of the airwaves (and the various platforms into which they have mutated) is a public trust; the fact they are not as boundlessly profitable as they once were does not remove the responsibility the company bears to the communities in which it does business.

It is not insignificant that the $40 million in annual operating losses cited as the rationale for these cuts is equalled by the $40 million in regulatory-requirement relief Bell sought — and was granted — or that its parent company, BCE Inc., reported operating revenue of $6.7 billion last year, an increase of $260 million over the previous year.

“They are not going bankrupt. They’re still making billions of dollars,” is how federal Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge responded. “And they still have the capacity and the means to hold their end of the bargain.”

The fact these cuts and layoffs come hard on the heels of Bell Let’s Talk Day, an annual campaign in support of mental-health initiatives that also serves as a massive branding exercise for the company, only serves to underscore the corporate cynicism at play here.

And now Mr. Bibic and other executives have been summoned to testify at a House of Commons committee regarding the cuts and their impact on news operations and communities across the country.

One can’t help thinking what they’ll offer will be little more than that which Bell so proudly stakes its public image: talk.