Ottawa’s controversial streaming bill becomes law despite protests from digital giants

OTTAWA A federal bill seen as both a lifeline and a death sentence for Canadian content in a digital world officially became law on Thursday, after passing the Senate following one of the longest studies in the history of the upper house.

The Online Broadcasting Act, or Bill C-11, passed the Senate and received royal assent Thursday night, ending more than a year of intense political debate between the Liberal government and critics of the legislation.

“Today we defend our stories, our artists, our producers and our creators. We stand up so that Canadians have even more opportunities to see themselves in what they see and hear,” Heritage Minister Pablo Rodríguez said in a statement.

“With this legislation, we are ensuring that Canada’s incredible talent has a bigger and brighter stage online.”

The Liberals introduced the bill early last year in an attempt to subject streaming giants like Netflix, Disney Plus and Spotify to the same regulations that already apply to traditional TV and radio broadcasters in Canada.

In filing C-11, Rodriguez sought to update Canada’s outdated Broadcasting Act, which was crafted long before Canadians heavily relied on the internet for access to TV shows, movies and music. To do that, the bill creates a new class of transmission called “online engagements,” which share content on the Internet, including, in some cases, social media platforms.

The bill also calls for streaming services to contribute to the “creation, production and presentation” of Canadian content on their platforms. It would give the Canadian Radio, Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) broad enforcement powers, including the ability to penalize platforms that violate it. Precisely what those powers will be, and how the newly passed legislation will affect Canadians’ experiences with consuming content online, remains to be determined.

Over the course of the lengthy C-11 debate, the bill gained support in Canada’s production and entertainment sector as a way to stimulate investment in local programming and productions. Liberals argue that the bill would help give a larger platform to programming produced by indigenous, racialized and French-speaking creators.

He was also endorsed by the NDP and the Bloc Québécois. That left only Conservatives to campaign against the bill, which Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre frequently referred to as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “censorship bill.”

The Official Opposition argued that C-11 exceeded what it captured under the proposed regime, gave too much control to the CRTC, and improperly interfered with the type of content Canadians could find online.

The final days of the bill’s passage in the Senate were marked by procedural tactics by conservative senators to delay a final vote, prompting Sen. Marc Gold, the upper house representative of the liberals, to file a motion of time allocation to reign in the long debate.

The legislation has sparked a wave of criticism from platforms like YouTube and TikTok, which accuse online creators and everyday users of video-sharing apps of falling victim to changes governing how their content is produced and discovered. .

Those platforms recruited high-profile content creators to declare their opposition to the bill, fearing they would be treated unfairly by the regulations. One of the main concerns is that the so-called “discovery” requirements in the bill could force Canadians to find Canadian content when they scroll through those platforms, whether they want to watch it or not. Those provisions have raised alarm that people who are not interested in viewing Canadian content would tell the website’s algorithms that such content is undesirable, leading to its removal on a local and global scale.

Reacting on Thursday, a YouTube spokesperson said the platform was “disappointed that the concerns of thousands of Canadian digital creators and Canadian users were finally ignored.” Meanwhile, TikTok accused the bill of lacking “legislative clarity” and said creators “now just wait for the government to make good on its promise not to regulate” their content.

The question of whether user-generated content falls within the limits of C-11 has dogged the bill since the days of its predecessor C-10, which was introduced in 2020.

At issue was a section of the bill that critics say gives the CRTC the ability to regulate user content, despite government assurances that such videos would be excluded.

Last year, Senators Paula Simons and Julie Miville-Dechêne, both from the Independent Senators Group, drafted an amendment to make it more clear that user-generated content would be exempt from the bill’s provisions. But while the government accepted most of the Senate’s changes to C-11, it rejected the Simons-Miville-Dechêne proposal.

Senators finally voted Thursday to accept the House of Commons ruling on the bill, but in doing so they sent a message to Ottawa: that the government would keep its word and make sure the CRTC did not focus on user content.

In an interview with the Star, Simons said the bill was “imperfect” and that he “couldn’t vote for it.”

“Fundamentally, at a deep level, I think the whole idea of ​​the bill is wrong because I don’t think you can regulate the Internet in the same way that you regulate conventional broadcasting,” he said.

But the Alberta senator said the upper house nonetheless did its job by thoroughly shredding the legislation.

“I had real concerns about this bill, but I want to reiterate that this is not a censorship bill,” he said.

Media advocacy group FRIENDS (formerly known as Friends of Canadian Broadcasting) praised the House of Commons and Senate for passing the bill, acknowledging that “there is still work to be done before the credits roll.”

In fact, much of the true scope of the legislation has yet to be defined in the form of policy direction, which the government must now provide to the CRTC. That process will clarify what powers the regulator will have and what regulations will be formally put in place, likely setting the stage for future fireworks.

Raisa Patel is an Ottawa-based reporter covering federal politics for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @R_SPatel

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