By Jeremy Nuttall

When the subject of Chinese state media and the CRTC came up at the Hogue Commission last month, we finally got a glimpse of what was going on behind the scenes at the regulator when it came to China’s state broadcaster CGTN broadcasting its content into Canada.

And what we learned should concern everyone.

When I was a reporter at the Toronto Star, which I left in late 2023, I had written a number of stories on the CRTC and China’s state broadcaster, mostly stemming from a complaint filed by Safeguard Defenders’ co-founder Peter Dahlin.

Dahlin was a human rights worker in China until he was taken away by police and held for three weeks. During that time, authorities forced him to confess to fabricated allegations of espionage. It was recorded and broadcast in parts on Chinese state media, including CGTN and CCTV-4.

Dahlin’s complaint to the CRTC listed 30 incidents of forced confessions broadcast into Canada involving about 60 people.

Yes, that’s the same CGTN you could easily get in your home via a cable package if you wanted to flip back and forth between creepy propaganda and Hockey Night in Canada.

The thing is, while watching grown men beat the crap out of each other in pursuit of a black hunk of rubber may be perfectly legal, showing torture and forced confessions to fabricated political crimes on prime-time television is not.

The CRTC knows this, and its job is to enforce the regulations. In fact, the agency even warned Chinese broadcasters against airing such “abusive” content when they were first given permission to be carried in Canada in 2006.

But the most nausea-inducing part of these recent revelations at the Hogue Inquiry isn’t that the CRTC appeared too incompetent to enforce its own rules—it’s that they knew the rules were being broken and didn’t care. Worse yet, they seem to have deliberately obfuscated and were dishonest about it.

Yes, I really mean that. I know I and a lot of other reporters are tired of being polite about this nonsense.

Why? Going back through my stories, almost every time I had asked the CRTC for comment on Dahlin’s case, I received a milquetoast “the complaint is open” response. This went on for four years. The CRTC even tried telling Dahlin it isn’t responsible for regulating foreign broadcasters.

Now, five years later, here is the response from the CRTC’s representative Scott Shortliffe as reported by The Bureau when questioned about Dahlin’s complaint at the Hogue Commission.

“When asked specifically about the Safeguard Defenders complaint, which alleges that Chinese broadcasters aired forced confessions, Shortliffe said that the hearing process is still open.”

Much of the rest of the testimony shows the CRTC never even attempted to do anything about CGTN and CCTV-4. Every time they answered me, they knew what they were doing would help CGTN, not the Canadian public—particularly not Chinese-Canadians whose communities are being harmed by this CCP propaganda, and certainly not the people being abused.

Again, from The Bureau’s report on it from a few weeks ago:

“In another significant admission, the CRTC highlighted a stark contrast with regulatory actions taken by the UK. While UK regulators deplatformed a PRC-owned broadcaster following a complaint from the NGO Safeguard Defenders that the Chinese TV station had aired confessions elicited through torture, the Canadian regulator has not taken similar action after receiving the same complaint.”

It goes on to quote Shortliffe repeatedly pressing the “we didn’t know this was a problem” button over and over on the subject of national security concerns and CCP media.

It’s stunning that a government body in charge of overseeing the country’s communications infrastructure is apparently never actually monitoring the news or wondering if questions from reporters might be worth investigating further.

By contrast, it took the CRTC mere weeks to pull Russia Today off the air for its hateful propaganda targeting Ukrainians—yes, I covered that story too—and it was a fast decision.

The only conclusion I can come to is that, once again, the Canadian government leads the world in feckless bureaucracies uninterested in doing their jobs or defending the core values of the public that employs them.

They are required to take an oath of office that is short, sweet, and pretty clear.

“I will faithfully and honestly fulfill the duties that devolve on me by reason of my employment in the Public Service of Canada…” part of it reads.

Someone at the CRTC, for some reason, decided that this oath, their job, and the suffering of people humiliated by CGTN didn’t matter. But why?