By Taimur Sikander Mirza
Former Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) chair and Canada’s first official languages commissioner, Keith Spicer, has died at 89.
Spicer served as the CRTC’s chair from 1989 to 1996, where he worked for the promotion of Canadian programming and artists, and spearheaded a push against violent children’s television.
In an interview with Media in Canada sister publication Playback in 1996, he said his “vision” for the CRTC was to be in service of the public, and not just the industry.
On the violence campaign, he had said: “Not everyone was wildly enthusiastic on the violence issue, but they all agreed that they would mandate me to do this and that I would keep them informed. There wasn’t a single dissenting voice and now they’re saying, ‘Hey, not bad. He wasn’t so crazy. We all look pretty good on this.'”
Spicer presided over the CRTC at a time when a raft of new specialty channels were licensed in Canada, with several still around today, including Discovery Canada, Space (now CTV Sci-Fi), and the Women’s Television Network (now W Network).
Tandy Yull, the Canadian Association of Broadcaster’s VP of policy and regulatory affairs, and former CRTC senior manager, said in a LinkedIn post: “He’d already left the CRTC when I joined, but his influence lived on through the Violence Code and VChip work I did in my early years at the Commission. My thoughts are with his family.”
Spicer, an Officer of the Order of Canada, was also a political science professor, a host and commentator at the CBC and Radio-Canada, a writer with The Globe and Mail, an author, and editor-in-chief at the Ottawa Citizen. He also chaired the Citizen’s Forum on Canada’s Future under then-prime minister Brian Mulroney.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau paid tribute to Spicer in a statement on Thursday that said Spicer’s “work over decades helped shape Canada’s linguistic landscape as we know it – a torch we continue to hold high as we work to achieve substantive equality of English and French in Canada.”
“Raised in a unilingual English Canadian family in Toronto, Ontario, Mr. Spicer dedicated his life to promoting bilingualism and advocating for French in Canadian institutions and media,” said Trudeau.
Photo courtesy Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages of Canada
A version of this story previously appeared on Playback.
