Another hat tip to conservativegal this morning for her pointer to this feature article in the National Post about Jim Shaw, who runs Shaw Cable. FYI for those of us in the east, Shaw Cable is “the Rogers Cable of the west”. “The west” is part of Canada, although it’s quite different.
It should be noted that Shaw Cable also owns Star-Choice Satellite service. Both offer Fox News Channel to Canadians, as does Rogers. I’m just throwing that in there gratuitously because I like to promote Fox News Channel, as it is my favorite TV station, and I wish I could get it without also having to get the state-run CBC Newsworld which I have to get by law, and so on.
Jim Shaw strikes me as the kind of guy Canada needs right now to lead Canada’s long citizen war against their own state and the state’s liberal-left bureaucratic elites and know-it-alls who run the state-run censor, the CRTC. The state-censor went to war against citizen Canadians’ freedom of choice and culture with its liberal-induced, antiquated, and freedom-negating rules and regulations back in the Liberal 1970s. That was when Liberal Pierre Trudeau was in power. Fidel Castro was one of the folks who carried Trudeau’s casket when he died. They were chums. I’m just saying.
I’m not sure Jim Shaw sees things in quite the same way as I, but I just wanted to set the stage to advance my bias in favor of freedom and free enterprise and culture brought to you by you, rather than by liberal-left appointed bureaucratic self-anointed elite know-it-all apparatchiks [my word-of-the-day] often as exemplified by this logo: 
This information comes to us from the National Post as I said, but you have to be a subscriber to read it. Here’s some salient points starting with a paragraph near the end:
Since the 1970s, the federal agency
[that’s the CRTC]
has tightly controlled every signal that flows through Canadian airwaves. Today, complex categories of programming and rules compel cable and satellite providers to carry and effectively subsidize dozens of channels, regardless of how many people watch them. But new technologies are outstripping Ottawa’s ability to stop Canadians from watching whatever they want. And Shaw’s hoping that fact, coupled with a new government in Ottawa, means the time is ripe for significant deregulation. It’s what customers want, he says, and it’s what they’re willing to pay for. Last year, to demonstrate his point, Shaw told his people to put a link on his company’s website that said “If you want to subscribe to HBO, click here.”
[See related Blog entry here]
Every time someone clicked the link, a letter was automatically sent to the CRTC asking for access to the popular U.S. channel. After receiving 100,000 such letters, Shaw says the agency asked him to take down the link.
Duly set up, here’s some other snippets from the article:
It quickly becomes clear, what you get from Jim Shaw is Jim Shaw—rough around the edges, yet brutally honest and full of opinion. “The odd time we have to pull the shoe out of our mouth,” admits Shaw. “But we lead with our chin.”
His blunt style has gotten him in trouble a few times. In 2001 he refused to carry a free preview of a new gay-themed digital channel because some subscribers didn’t want it piped into their living rooms.
[…] He’s guided by a singular mantra: When you plop down in front of the boob tube and flick on the remote, you should be free to watch whatever you damn well please.
We’ve heard this before. For years Shaw and others critics of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s policies have argued for more lax controls. But now the company is taking action. In December, Shaw pulled out of the Canadian Cable Telecommunications Association (CCTA), the cable industry’s lobby group, which Shaw describes as a “consensus group.” While Shaw feels the time is right to agitate for the dismantling of regulations, he said others disagreed. With Shaw and at least one other member gone, the CCTA folded in February.
[…] Shaw likes to talk about giving customers exactly what they want. He tells the following story to illustrate. Last year he met with Chuck Doman, chairman of New York-based Cablevision, over breakfast. Doman said that he’d called Shaw’s customer help line to see what the service was like. “I was a bit concerned, but he said [the service reps] were good,” Shaw says. “Maybe he was shining me on. I don’t know. But it was a good idea.” So Shaw did some mystery-caller research of his own. Using the address of his hotel doorman, he called up customer service at Time Warner, who told Shaw he could have his cable installed that day or the next. “As soon as I came back to Calgary I said to the boys, ‘We’ve got to do the same thing. Same day or next service at the latest.’”
This same commitment to customer choice is where his personal mission to tear down the rules governing Canadian broadcasting comes from. “In the world today, you can choose anything you want: the shirts you buy, your pants, your cereal, the coffee you drink, the colour you paint your walls. Everything, except what you watch on TV. It’s bullshit.” In his view, few rules should govern whether a channel succeeds. As long as it offers 20% Canadian content, the only factor that should determine its survival is if customers order it. It’s pure Darwin.
[…] Cable king Jim Shaw has long railed against the restrictions imposed on broadcasters by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). But now it looks like he’s fixing for a showdown.
[…] “Central Canada controlling everything is not right,” says Shaw. “You could even see by the [federal election] vote that it’s decentralized already. Now it’s time to make the next move.” What exactly that will mean for Shaw, he isn’t saying. But when the attack comes, we’ll know it.
James F. Dinning and the Rt. Hon. Donald F. Mazankowski, P.C., O.C., LL.D. are members of Shaw’s Board of Directors.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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