CRTC chairman Charles Dalfen will not seek a second term at the helm of Canada’s telecom and broadcast regulator, after more than four years marked largely by the hefty challenge of trying to maintain national borders in the Internet era.
Mr. Dalfen said yesterday for the first time that he will complete his five-year term at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission at the end of the year and call it quits. Speaking to reporters after appearing before the House of Commons heritage committee, he wouldn’t comment on the reasons for his decision.
Mr. Dalfen said he hasn’t yet had much time to reflect on his period at the CRTC, but acknowledged that it was a difficult era in which to lead the federal regulator. He also said he wasn’t particularly surprised by too much of what he encountered.
“You’re facing technological changes of a dramatic kind all the time, so any surprises are dwarfed by those kinds of changes.”
Although Mr. Dalfen wasn’t expected to make any public comments about his future for at least another month or two, many industry and government officials predicted that he would step down at the end of the year. CRTC staff had in recent days already been tentatively planning a going-away event.
A top communications lawyer before he was heavily recruited by the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien, he has had a difficult relationship with the Conservative government in recent months. In particular, the CRTC boss has been in a standoff with Industry Minister Maxime Bernier, who has directed the commission to reconsider its important ruling on Internet-based telephony and allow market forces to play a bigger role.
Mr. Dalfen wouldn’t comment yesterday on Mr. Bernier’s directive.
His decision to leave will bring a behind-the-scenes race to be the next chairman out into the open. Lawyer Hank Intven, former CBC president and cabinet minister Perrin Beatty, CRTC vice-chairman Richard French, and consultants Fernand Belisle and Alain Gourd are among those who have been mentioned as possible replacements.
The new chairman, however, will face many of the same challenges. Contemporary technologies — including satellite radio, pirated TV, on-line telephony — make the industry much more difficult to regulate, while there have also been accusations that the CRTC moves too slowly for today’s business world.
The various planks of the telecommunications sector have increasingly converged in recent years. Cable, wireless, and wireline telephone firms now use different technology to offer similar services, which also makes them more difficult to regulate under today’s rules.
To make matters even more difficult, the CRTC has been pummelled by controversies over such things as Quebec City radio station CHOI-FM, Italian TV network Rai International and Arabic-language TV news network Al Jazeera.
Source- http://www.theglobeandmail.com
