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Broadcasting - Staff Letter addressed to the Distribution List

Gatineau, 24 April 2026

Reference(s): 2026-0066-8

BY EMAIL

Distribution List

Subject: Addition of documents to the record of Application by Local Independent Television Stations Group (LITS) to commence collective bargaining with Meta relating to the Online News Act (Application 2026-0066-8)

The purpose of this letter is to deal with three procedural matters relating to LITS’s application.

  1. On 9 April 2026, an intervener in the application, the National Campus and Community Radio Association (NCRA), submitted a reply to interventions and indicated that it served this reply on all parties. Commission staff is not aware of any further response from parties in respect of NCRA’s reply. However, under the CRTC Rules of Procedure, only the applicant has the right to reply to interveners in an application.
  2. Commission staff is in receipt of a letter from Meta, dated 16 April 2026, as well as a letter from LITS, dated 20 April 2026, both of which were filed after the close of the record. In the first letter, Meta submitted that LITS had no standing to bring the application and indicated that Meta does not intend to take any further steps in relation to the application. In the second letter, LITS considered that Meta’s letter was out of process but indicated that it would have no objection to that letter being placed on the record.
  3. Between 4 October 2024 and 3 December 2025, Commission staff issued several letters and requests for information (RFIs) to Meta, to which Meta provided responses. Abridged versions of Meta’s responses have been publicly available on the Commission website from the time of their filing.

Commission staff has placed all of these materials on the public record of LITS’ application.

In order to ensure that the Commission has an appropriately robust record upon which to base its consideration of this application, parties to the proceeding will have the opportunity to comment on this additional information, as follows.

  1. Parties may comment on whether the Commission should take NCRA’s reply into account in its deliberations, despite the Rules not providing for such replies. NCRA may respond.
  2. Parties may comment on whether the Commission should take the letter received on 16 April 2026 from Meta, as well as the letter from LITS dated 20 April 2026, into account in its deliberations despite their having been filed after the record closed. Meta and LITS may respond.
  3. Meta may supplement its responses to the RFIs, in light of the current proceeding. Other parties may respond.

In all three matters, comments must be filed within 15 days and responses within 10 days of the due date for comments. All documents must be received, and not merely sent, by these dates.

Your response or other documents must be submitted electronically by using the secured service “My CRTC Account” (Partner Log In or GCKey) and filling the “Broadcasting and Online News Act Cover Page”. Instructions on submitting documents using My CRTC Account are also available on the Forms and My CRTC Account webpage.

A copy of this letter and all related correspondence will be added to the public record of the application.

Confidential Information

As set out in subsection 55(1) of the Online News Act and at paragraphs 4 – 9 of Online News Information Bulletin CRTC 2024-115, parties may designate certain information as confidential at the time it is filed. Designating information as confidential requires a detailed explanation as to why that information falls into a category set out in subsection 55(1) of the Act and why its disclosure would not be in the public interest. This explanation must include the specific direct harm that would likely result from disclosure and why that outweighs the public interest in access to the information.

Furthermore, should a party designate information as confidential, it must either file an abridged version of the document omitting only the information designated as confidential or provide reasons why an abridged version cannot be filed.

The abridged version of a document must omit only that information which is designated confidential. Information that is not itself inherently sensitive should not be omitted from the document and the document should not be edited in a manner that makes it difficult to determine where or to what extent information has been omitted. Where abridged information has been omitted, the space occupied by the omitted material should be left blank and the symbol “#” should be inserted to alert the reader to the omission of abridged information.

If you have any questions regarding the contents of this letter, please contact me any time.

Sincerely,

Original signed by

Scott Shortliffe
Vice President, Broadcasting
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission
scott.shortliffe@crtc.gc.ca

c.c.

Daniel Pye, A/Director General, CRTC, dan.pye@crtc.ca.ca
Salahuddin Rafiquddin, Legal Counsel, CRTC, salahuddin.rafiquddin@crtc.gc.ca
Melissa Larose, Manager, CRTC, melissa.larose@crtc.gc.ca

Distribution list:

All parties to the proceeding

Date modified: