Conservatives attack bill to regulate online streaming

As the Liberal government's Online Streaming Act moves through the House of Commons, controversy over the legislation is emerging again, a year after the previous version of the bill died on the order paper.

The Conservatives attacked the bill in the House of Commons this week, accusing the Liberals of wanting to choose what Canadians watch online and allowing the CRTC to regulate “wide swaths” of social media. Bill C-11, like its predecessor C-10, sets up the CRTC to regulate streaming platforms.

After Bill C-11 was introduced in February, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez maintained that the government listened to concerns over regulating user-generated content that erupted over the previous version of the bill, and that it “fixed” them.

Rodriguez said at the time the bill is aimed at “big online streamers” only and that the CRTC will have a specific “sandbox” within which it can regulate them. He said C-11 is meant to capture music on platforms like YouTube and would be “mostly about the big labels” — not aimed at online creators, even successful ones who might earn a significant amount of money and have millions of followers.

“All we've been asking for is a bill that reflects what the minister is saying,” said Scott Benzie, executive director of advocacy group Digital First Canada. That “sandbox,” he said, is more of a “Sahara desert.”

The issue, according to critics, is that the language of the bill is much broader than the use cases Rodriguez describes, and could put a wide range of online content under the CRTC's authority.

The details of how the CRTC will use its new powers will be defined in a new policy direction the government will give the regulator. During question period Wednesday, Conservative Heritage critic John Nater asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau whether he would commit to releasing that document before the House votes on Bill C-11.

“The government is asking an entity that has neither the capacity nor the competence to regulate vast swaths of the internet, but the government will not disclose how it will instruct it to do so,” Nater said.

In his responses, Trudeau accused Conservatives of standing “against the arts community and creators.” He said the CRTC “has always ensured that we promote Canadian creators creating Canadian content” and that the bill is about continuing the same “in a digital world.”

The bill states any content that doesn't earn revenue is exempt, but leaves it to the CRTC to decide what types of content that do earn revenues will be regulated, using three criteria — the degree to which it's monetized, whether it's carried by an entity licensed by or registered with the CRTC and whether it has “unique identifier under an international standards system.”

Benzie said those categories are so broad — for instance, covering both direct and indirect revenue — they could capture practically “the entire internet.”

One way to fix the bill, he said, is to include “guardrails” and pare down the scope of the wording so that the language of the bill reflects the intent of the bill and what Rodriguez has said the bill aims to do.

The issue with relying on a policy direction for those specifics, Benzie said, is that it's not set in law the way legislation is, because a future government could issue another directive to the CRTC.

Benzie added his other concern around the bill is around the discoverability provisions, which would allow the CRTC to force online platforms to promote Canadian content. Benzie said such a move would hurt Canadian creators, due to the way many online platforms' algorithms work. If the content is shown to Canadians who aren't interested, those creators will end up penalized by the algorithm, he said.