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A Political Football Game
The Super Bowl (Version LI) is happening just four days from now. Canadians watch in big numbers: the audience for last year’s event was estimated at over nine million, with over 20 million of us tuning in at some point. And this year we are going to watch it for a special reason. We are finally going to be able to see the same high quality, ‘$5-million-buys-you-30-seconds’ commercials as Americans get to see.
The overriding of American commercials and their replacement with commercials for Canadian audiences—even while watching an American channel—has been a coffeeshop sticking point with Canadians for years. Americans are proud of their big budget commercials, which ensure that non football fans are entertained and football fans are not totally disappointed if the game is lousy. It’s a positive feedback loop: safe in the knowledge that the audience will be big in any event, advertisers keep making expensive commercials. But Canadians feel like they’re second class because they have to settle for ads clearing out the last of the 2016 models or touting a back rubbing machine, of which we can get two if we phone within the next hour.
So the CRTC thought it was scoring a victory for Canadian consumers last summer when it changed its policy of “Simultaneous Substitution” only for the Super Bowl. This policy gives the Canadian broadcast rights holder (in this case, CTV) the power to substitute its own commercials over those of American broadcasters beaming the same program into Canada. But for this year’s Super Bowl, if you really want to watch the Canadian commercials, you can stay tuned to CTV (or TSN: both are owned by Bell Canada); and if you want to see the American commercials, just switch over to Fox. No more second class Canada!
Except that it’s all a little more complicated than that. CTV pays the NFL a lot of money for the exclusive right to broadcast football in Canada, and recoups it by selling time to advertisers, who pay according to audience size. If the advertisers can’t be sure that their commercials will reach their intended markets in predicted numbers, they won’t pay. CTV stands to lose a lot of money, as does the NFL. The NFL also argues that its intellectual property rights—enshrined in the NAFTA agreement, ironically—are being violated by the CRTC decision, which shows Canada to be an unreliable place in which to invest.
The NFL has made overt political entreaties to Justin Trudeau’s government, which has not interceded and invited the NFL to deal with the CRTC. CTV has asked the courts to review the CRTC decison, but the hearing won’t take place until a few days after the Super Bowl. So what happens next?
This is where the plot really starts to thicken. According to the National Post, the NFL’s senior vice president of government affairs has stated “the president [of the United States] is aware. This is on his radar. We are hopeful this will be resolved prior to the Super Bowl.”
So with four days to go until the Super Bowl, we are left with the distinct prospect of a presidential intervention. I’d wager the farm that Mr. Trump will come down on the side of the NFL rather than the CRTC, and time it for maximum shock value. He showed us last week that he isn’t afraid to use the (aptly named) “bully pulpit” to assert his influence through executive orders—and that he is prepared to do so on a weekend. And if it can be said that Canada is in breach of its NAFTA obligations to respect intellectual property rights, how could he not pass up the opportunity to give Canada a trade spanking?
What form will Trump’s retaliation take? Will he ban Canadians from playing on American NHL teams? Will he forbid Americans from going to Canada to play in the CFL? Will he make all Canadians obtain visas in order to travel through the States? Or will he just go straight for the jugular and adopt a ‘made in the U.S.’ policy for, well, absolutely everything?
Maybe that coffeeshop grousing that led to the CRTC decision didn’t take all the implications into account. Maybe I can constrain the urge to watch the latest American commercials and order two of those backrub machines within the next hour from a CTV advertiser. It gives me a shot at some of the $300,000 in prizes that CTV has reserved for its loyal viewers. I can still watch the halftime show featuring Lady Gaga and, oh yes, the football game too. It’s a small price to pay to avoid a presidential intervention.
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