OTTAWA – In a series of meetings yesterday that lasted past midnight and can only be described as chaotic, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage made it through clause-by-clause review of Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act, and committee chair Hedy Fry reported the bill back to the House of Commons today with amendments.
Due to a motion passed in the House (which former Green Party leader and current MP Elizabeth May expressed disapproval of several times during the meetings), the committee had a limited amount of time in which to debate amendments. Two of three meetings ended up being extended by half an hour, which somewhat compensated for the time wasted while the chair, who was still participating virtually, was unintentionally on mute.
The main event – the part of clause-by-clause review many of those watching the proceedings were likely waiting for – came at the tail end of the allotted time for debate on amendments.
The main event, of course, was debate on the bill’s contentious section 4.2, which provides exceptions to 4.1(1), which itself states the act does not apply to programs uploaded by users on social media sites.
“This is it,” Conservative MP John Nater said of an amendment that proposed to get rid of the clause altogether. “This is in my view one of the most important aspects of this bill.”
“I want to be very clear – if there’s one aspect of this bill that I’ve received the most correspondence on it has been on this aspect, on 4.2,” Nater said.
“When it comes to this aspect, if the minister can be taken at his word… removing 4.2, removing this aspect of the piece of legislation will very clearly… show to Canadians that users are out, that user-generated content will not be captured by this bill.”
Liberal MP Chris Bittle, however, disagreed that simply removing the clause was the right move, explaining the amendment would end up excluding social media sites like YouTube from the bill’s scope, despite YouTube being used by many Canadians to stream music.
“It would perpetuate an unfair playing field, and ultimately that’s what this bill is about. It’s about making these platforms pay,” Bittle said.
Earlier in the day another amendment was debated that would have seen a monetary threshold implemented as a way of ensuring the act only captures the major players. Neither this amendment nor the one seeking to get rid of section 4.2. passed.
The latter of the two was the last amendment any member was able to have a say on as debate on it ran into the hard stop of 9 p.m., at which point the motion passed in the House dictated the committee would have to vote on the amendments without debate. (In practice, this meant without the amendments being read out loud either so those watching and trying to follow the meeting on ParlVu had no idea what the members were voting on as the amendments are not made public in written form either.)
Nater attempted to persuade the chair that the motion adopted in the House did not specify whether debate was to stop at 9 p.m. ET or PT, and so given the chair was in Vancouver, the committee could continue to debate amendments for another three hours, until it was 9 p.m. where the chair was located – but the chair was unconvinced.
Members of the committee did indicate there were other amendments proposed regarding user-generated content, however, because of the hard stop on debate, it is unclear whether any passed or if 4.2 remains as it originally appeared in the bill.
It is worth noting that section 4.2 of C-11 is the government’s response to criticisms of Bill C-10. When he announced the new bill back in February, Heritage minister Pablo Rodriguez said: “It’s true, we did try to get a similar bill passed last year, so what’s new? We took stock from the work done by the last department, we listened especially to the concerns around social media, and we fixed it.”
Whether the government actually “fixed it” with section 4.2 has been contested and debated at length during Heritage Committee meetings, at conferences, and in the media, including here in the (web)pages of Cartt.ca (examples can be found here, here, here, here, and here.)
In other words, this component of the bill is both new (it was not previously discussed when C-10 was being studied) and contentious. Despite this, debate on proposed amendments to section 4.2 was cut short, and the public did not get to hear or see any but one of the proposed amendments.
And now the bill is moving along onto third reading.
Over in the Senate, the Senate Committee on Transport and Communications is meeting tonight at 6:30 p.m. ET to consider a draft agenda for its own study of C-11.
