They must be having a good giggle at Bell these days. The Big Thinkers there have considered the CRTC’s order to make a “skinny” package of TV channels available for $25, and they’ve decided to respond with what might be called in polite company, a giant “Screw you.”

Bell’s so-called Starter package is just $21.95 a month. (That doesn’t include a receiver you need, and taxes, but let’s move along.) And it’s for starters all right. That is, it’s all right for someone who just started watching television yesterday and can’t get over the fact that there’s picture and sound coming out of a box in their living room.

I’m a bit surprised no one at Bell thought of a way to separate the pictures from the sound and charge extra for one or the other.

There are 26 channels on offer from Bell in its Starter package. The big Canadian networks are there of course. CBC, CTV, Global. Also CITY, CHCH, and OMNI. You get the Ontario public channels, TVO and TFO. You can see federal politicians in action on CPAC. And you don’t have to look outside to find out if it’s snowing; you can watch the Weather Network.

Then it gets strange. Of the 26 channels, 10 are French. I’m all for bilingualism, but a package of channels truly serving southern Ontario would not make one-third of its channels French. In the entire province fewer than 5 per cent of Ontarians speak French at home.

Bell is willing to give us RDI, the CBC’s French-language news network, but not its English-language news network.

When I was a boy, cable television existed for one reason. It allowed you to watch the big American networks. There were just three back then — ABC, NBC, and CBS. I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that a lot of people in Canada still want to watch them. You can’t do that with Bell’s Starter package. Trying to add them to the package will more than double your cost.

Rogers, Shaw and Cogeco aren’t exactly brimming with goodies in their “skinny” deals. But they didn’t have the chutzpah to eliminate the major U.S. networks.

It’s been a year since the CRTC unveiled its bold new world of forcing television providers to let Canadians pay only for the channels they wanted to watch.

So Bell has had a long time to think about its strategy.

Bell and the CRTC are not the best of friends. Bell is particularly unhappy with a CRTC decision that forces Bell’s CTV network to stop replacing American commercials with Canadian ones in the Super Bowl beginning next year.

That decision, the only case where a Canadian network is not allowed to replace commercials on a program it is broadcasting at the same time as an American network, was not the CRTC’s finest hour.

A 30-second commercial on CTV during the Super Bowl apparently costs about $200,000. It’s hard to see why CTV (and Bell) shouldn’t be able to reap that reward since it pays for the Canadian rights to broadcast the game.

Perhaps Bell is poking its finger in the CRTC’s eye with its Starter package, payback for what it sees as the Super Bowl heist.

The CRTC’s chairman, Jean-Pierre Blais, says the objective of “skinny” cable packages is to make sure “viewers are in control.”

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Not yet we’re not. So far, we’re caught in the middle.

Mark Bulgutch is the former Senior Executive Producer of CBC News. He teaches journalism at Ryerson University. His book is That’s Why I’m a Journalist.

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