By Christopher Guly
OTTAWA – The new year brings many challenges for Steven Guilbeault less than two months after he was sworn in as minister of Canadian Heritage, which was just a month following his debut as a federal politician, bringing the Liberals a win in Laurier-Sainte-Marie when he was elected MP for the downtown Montreal riding previously held by the NDP and the Bloc Québécois.
Co-founder of Quebec’s largest environmental organization, Équiterre, and a former campaign manager for Greenpeace, Guilbeault is tasked with managing a new ecosystem that calls on him to create new regulations for both social media platforms to ban such illegal content as hate speech and for large digital companies to protect personal data.
He and Innovation, Science and Industry Minister Navdeep Bains are also to introduce legislation by year’s end that will ensure all content providers, including internet giants, “offer meaningful levels of Canadians content,” as well as modernize the Broadcasting Act and the Telecommunications Act, which Guilbeault views as reforming the CRTC, as he outlined to Cartt.ca in an interview Tuesday.
Christopher Guly: Are we going to see a digital tax in this year’s federal budget?
Steven Guilbeault: It depends on what you mean by digital tax. As you saw in our platform and in my mandate letter, there are a number of things that we’ve said that we would do. The prime minister was quoted in a Radio-Canada interview saying that a GST on web giants could be in the budget.
Now I wouldn’t call that a digital tax because it’s the GST that everybody’s paying.
(In an email to Cartt.ca, Camille Gagné-Raynauld, a former public and media relations manager at Équiterre and currently Guilbeault’s press secretary, referred to Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s mandate letter that requires him to “ensure that multinational tech giants pay appropriate corporate tax on the revenue that they generate within Canada.” She said that “on the GST, we will also work to achieve the standard set by the OECD to ensure that international digital corporations whose products are consumed in Canada collect and remit the same level of sales taxation as Canadian digital corporations. There was an OECD report last June on the sales tax”)
If you’re referring to the other two taxes we announced in the platform on the sale of data for publicity purposes and the sale of publicity itself, this you won’t see in the budget. There’s more that we need to do to be in a position to move ahead with this.
(However as Cartt.ca reported during the federal election campaign, the Liberals said they planned to introduce a 3% tax on revenue generated through the sale of online advertising and user data by digital companies with global revenues of at least $1 billion a year, and Canadian revenues of at least $40 million a year, starting in April 2020.)
CG: So, if we’re not talking about a digital tax, how do you want Netflix, Amazon, Disney+ and other digital giants contribute to Cancon?
SG: This will be part of the CRTC reform and perhaps other measures. As you know in a parliamentary system like ours, changing something as complex as the CRTC is not something that can be done overnight. It will take time – some time, but not too much time. We said we would table a bill within the first year of our mandate and it’s clearly my intention to do so.
Once the bill is tabled, the CRTC may do some consultations, there will be a parliamentary process. So one piece of this puzzle is CRTC reform.
Are there other things we can do in parallel to reforming the CRTC that would help us make the system a bit more equitable? I think there needs to be. If you’re participating in the Canadian system and benefiting from it, then you should be contributing to it.
Some argued that we wanted to somehow disadvantage large companies. That’s not the case. We want the system to be equitable. Do I know exactly how this will look? I don’t.
Like many people, I am very eager to see the Yale report. We will take some time to digest it. It doesn’t mean we haven’t started thinking about different things.
(The final report of the Broadcast and Telecom Legislative Review panel, chaired by former Canadian Cable Television Association president and CEO Janet Yale, which has been reviewing the Broadcasting Act, the Telecommunications Act and the Radiocommunication Act, will be released this month.)
CG: What would you like to see happen?
SG: As you know as a minister I don’t have personal views on these files. And if I do, I really keep them to myself.
Again, we don’t have something specific to table or to propose right now. We’re very conscious that we’re a minority government. We probably have months to reform the CRTC [in a process] that would normally [take] years. So our hope is to table a bill in the coming months based on the Yale report.
We are looking closely at what different countries are doing and how they are tackling this issue. I’m not saying that we think we could just copy and import what other countries are doing. But we are doing a pretty exhaustive analysis of what’s being done to try and see if X country is doing that, could that work in a Canadian context.
CG: Doug Murphy, the CEO of Corus, and others have called for less of a regulatory burden on how Canadian broadcasters spend their programming dollars and who they spend it with. Will that align with whatever the government proposes in terms of a contribution from the digital giants?
SG: The system served Canadians and Canadian cultural content for decades well, but clearly it doesn’t anymore. If something isn’t done, then we are seeing some pretty serious cracks in the system which could become very wide gaps – and we don’t want that to happen for a whole number of different reasons.
“People understand there’s a fairly broad agreement about what some of the problems are.” – Minister Steven Guilbeault
But, the ability of continuing to produce and promote Canadian cultural content is very important to our government. You saw in the investment in the arts and culture sector we did in our first mandate that it’s something very dear to our hearts.
So I’m not in a position to tell you whether this aligns with [Murphy’s] comments. We’re looking at a whole range of different things and you will get to see in the future what they will look like. People understand there’s a fairly broad agreement about what some of the problems are.
CG: In terms of Canadian content, some say there’s never been more TV production happening in Canada, but most of it is not Canadian content. So how important is the distinction for you between content made in Canada versus Canadian content?
SG: I sat down a few weeks ago with union representatives from workers in the sector and they told me that in Toronto they’ve never had as many people working in that sector, so it is an important distinction. Clearly there’s a value to the Canadian economy and the Canadian workforce on having production in Canada.
It’s not the same as the production of Canadian cultural content, which is very important to us, but it’s not say that productions happening in Canada don’t have a value. Clearly they do, and we’re not oblivious to that.
CG: Many Christmas movies are being shot in Ottawa and in nearby Almonte, and many of these productions are for the Hallmark channel in the U.S. – and it’s generating a lot of revenue for the economy.
SG: If we’re talking about revenue, the question for us is could it be better? Obviously we don’t get any intellectual property from these productions. Clearly, they have value; they employ people; they contribute to the Canadian economy. This is great. But is there a way it could be even greater for Canadian artists, certainly, and for the Canadian economy? This is something we will be looking at.
CG: The government created a [$600-million] fund to support newspapers. Is there any thought to also assist broadcast journalism?
SG: Clearly, the traditional journalism model is changing, and we fundamentally believe in the importance of journalism for a healthy democracy. So, we are trying to make sure that we’re helping the ecosystem, but I’m not sure if we’ll have time to include some of these elements in the budget.
Photo by Alexandre Tétrault
