OTTAWA – While some witnesses emphasized the importance of passing Bill C-11 for Canadian broadcasters, others raised concerns about the role it sets out for the CRTC and the potential for user-generated content (UGC) to be regulated during the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage’s first five-hour meeting on the bill today.
Over the course of the meeting, multiple witnesses told the committee the CRTC does not have the expertise the bill requires of it.
“The number of decisions that are left for it to make in Bill C-11 – deciding what companies this applies to and that sort of stuff is going to cause them to have to hire a lot of people and build a new… area of expertise because it’s not broadcasting,” said Peter Menzies, former CRTC vice-chair of telecommunications.
Menzies further told the committee that, while the CRTC has many talented people he does not believe it has the structure right now to be able to regulate platforms, arguing it would need to learn about issues such as user-generated content.
The issue of regulating user-generated content unsurprisingly came up, with Matthew Hatfield, campaigns director at OpenMedia pointing out CRTC chair Ian Scott previously told the committee the bill does give the Commission power to regulate user-generated content (a power Scott says the Commission has already under the current act).
Hatfield argued the CRTC cannot be trusted to make decisions about regulating content online in the public interest.
“You need to fix this. We understand that the CRTC believes it has always had the power to regulate our user audio and visual content online… concretely you are now considering a bill in which the CRTC will explicitly take up and use very broad regulatory powers it has never exercised before over the Internet,” said Hatfield.
“The minimum safeguard you must adopt would be ensuring user-generated content is fully, plainly and definitively excluded from CRTC regulation,” he said. “All we’re really getting from the government right now is a flimsy promise that the CRTC won’t misuse this astonishing extended power and a policy direction they won’t even let Canadians see yet. That’s not good enough.”
Morghan Fortier, CEO of Skyship Entertainment Company, which is the creator of popular Canadian YouTube channel Super Simple Songs, told the committee there is a difference between platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Facebook and broadcasters the bill itself does not get.
“It doesn’t understand how the platforms operate and it ignores the fundamental importance of global discoverability and worst of all, section 4.2 hands sweeping power to the CRTC to regulate the internet use of everyday Canadians and small business like mine who are not even associated with broadcasters,” she said.
“I absolutely appreciate the necessity of updating the Broadcast Act to include the new band of broadcasters. These are companies that take pitches, greenlight shows and movies and pay for productions, but regulating UGC content on platforms like Facebook, TikTok and YouTube is far too overreaching.”
Jérôme Payette, executive director of the Professional Music Publishers’ Association disagreed.
“The text of C-11 relating to social media broadcasting activities should not be changed further,” he said, according to an English translation of his remarks, which he gave in French. “If we change the text again in article 4, we risk creating a loophole for the benefit of social media that will be felt by all broadcasting companies. TikTok competes with YouTube, which competes with Spotify, which competes with radio stations.”
“We hear a lot about the potential negative impacts of the bill, and the possible twisted interpretation that the CRTC could make of it, but it currently has more power than Bill C-11 plans to give it, and the work it has accomplished over the past 50 years has caused no concern for citizens. For the Francophone music sector, CRTC regulation is crucial,” Payette said.
Brad Danks, CEO of OUTtv also emphasized the importance of CRTC regulation in the online space.
He told the committee the CRTC needs to have the ability to tell a platform to make a service available because the challenge OUTtv and other services will face going forward is assuring they can get on platforms such as Amazon, Apple TV+ and Roku that are controlled by foreign entities.
“We have been denied access on certain platforms in the U.S. and certain platforms in Asia simply due to being LGBTQ content,” he said. “Those same platforms will be coming to Canada at some point… so there’s a huge concern for Canadian broadcasters… that they might either be faced with competition from a foreign service or that the foreign service just said sorry, but we’re fully loaded, we have enough American services we don’t need Canadian services. These are very real concerns.”
Danks further told the committee without regulating online services properly and giving the CRTC the ability to tell platforms to make important Canadian services available he is worried there will be a real problem continuing their services in Canada.
“Experience has taught us that distribution platforms, and this includes our own large Canadian distribution platforms, cannot be counted on to deliver and support a wide range of Canadian-owned services and diverse programming without effective regulatory oversight and rules,” he said.
“Over the past decade we’ve learned the hard way in Canadian broadcasting about the difficulties and inequities that can happen when distributors show preference to their own content on their platforms. The CRTC is aware and well equipped to regulate these platforms but only if it has the tools and the power it needs.”
