by Richard Skelly » Sun Jan 28, 2018 7:51 pm
For some reason, we mere citizens must elevate the Supreme Court Of Canada to an exulted status. Yet, compared to the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS), our Justices are a lazy lot. They hear fewer cases and take immeasurably longer to issue rulings than SCOTUS. Time and again, those rulings are then so vague (hello native rights) that issues remain festering and often spark new cases that meander up to the Canadian Supremes years later.
Re: Super Bowl ads...I’m no lawyer. But one solution might see the Supremes rule that market forces apply. But with the proviso that the Canadian rights holder cannot charge US Super Bowl advertisers proportionately more than the American network pays. If NBC this year charges Pepsi $5 million for a 30-second spot, then the soda maker would pay no more than, say, $500K to run it in Canada. These ad contracts are probably signed well in advance. If a US advertiser refused to pay for Canadian broadcast then our rights holder could substitute for that 30 seconds.
But what if all US advertisers colluded against playing that game? Well the Canadian rights holder would have a much more compelling argument to sway public opinion: The Yanks are too damn cheap to pay the justifiable rates for reaching Canuck eyeballs. Perhaps Toronto media bigwigs should have used this argument all along. Surely, nothing has prevented American brands—over the years—from paying to air those special ads up here. Maybe they tried, but wouldn’t accept gouging over and above my guesstimated 10 percent rule-of-thumb ratio. To me, that’s a key untold tale of this endless saga.