Conservatives oppose C-10; watchdog Friends says criticism of exemption removal ‘overblown’

The Conservatives “continue to oppose” Bill C-10, the revision of the Broadcasting Act, saying in a Monday statement that “Liberals are targeting ordinary Canadians,” while one industry stakeholder says those criticisms have been “overblown." Alain Rayes, the Conservative Shadow Minister for Canadian Heritage, issued a press release on Monday stating that his party would continue to vote against the bill’s main clauses in committee as well as the bill as a whole. During last Friday’s clause-by-clause reading of the bill in the Heritage committee, MPs voted on a government amendment to remove section 4.1 of the bill, which exempted “programs that are uploaded to an online undertaking that provides a social media service by a user of the service — who is not the provider of the service or the provider’s affiliate, or the agent or mandatary of either of them — for transmission over the Internet and reception by other users of the service,” from the regulations of the act. The removal of the exemption clears the way for social media companies like Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Youtube under the remit of the CRTC Rayes called the move “another unacceptable attempt to target the freedoms of individual internet users” in the release, noting that committee member voted down his “compromised amendment” to exempt streaming services and social media users with less than $50 million per year in Canadian advertising or subscription revenue, and a following of less than 250,000, from CRTC regulation. Executive director of Friends of Canadian Broadcasting Daniel Bernard called the criticism “completely overblown,” noting that the act simply brings in businesses whose content is user-generated under the act, but that there are no regulations yet in place -- which would left up up to the CRTC. He said the removal of section 4.1 from the bill makes sense because it brings in the largest broadcasters and media companies, rather than “completely excluded” them from any regulation right off the bat. “This is the future of the media industry, and if Canada wants to have a cultural policy, it's going to have to apply to these major companies,” he said. Camille Gagné-Raynauld, press secretary for the ministry, wrote in an email to the Wire Report that the bill “explicitly exempts all users of social media to be considered broadcasters” under section 2.1, and pointed out that a user who is not the provider of the service or the provider’s affiliate does not fall subject to the act. Where "content uploaded by individual users is curated by a platform, and is deemed of significant impact, that platform, not the users, could be subject to the Broadcasting act,” she wrote. Bernard added that critics of the bill are “hyperventilating about some future hypothetical police state that might one day come and overstep its bounds” and should instead focus on the current problems, such as the spread of anti-vaccine propaganda or porn sites uploading nonconsensual videos, “that are happening today for which trillion-dollar American companies are largely responsible.” “Companies are making these types of decisions every day, all the time," Bernhard said. "There's no accountability for them, no laws governing those practices, no real recourse for appeal -- and still we find that huge numbers of revenge porn videos for example get through and survivors tell us if they can't get taken down. I think this ‘free internet versus cultural policy’ dichotomy is just false.” In the Monday press release Rayes said that the Conservatives “support creating a level playing field between large foreign streaming services and Canadian broadcasters,” but that Bill C-10 “is a bad piece of legislation giving too much power to the CRTC to regulate the Internet and provides no clear guidelines for how that power will be used.” Dwayne Winseck, director of the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project, said he agreed with criticism that too much regulatory power was going into the CRTC’s “inner sanctum,” noting that there are no set financial or catalogue contribution rules laid out in the act for broadcasting linear services and video on demand (VOD) services. Winseck said in Europe and in Canada, VOD services have always been treated to lighter regulatory obligations with respect to the financial and catalogue quotas (around 5 per cent contributions in the two jurisdictions) and that it was “very smart” of the European Union to keep the distinction between linear broadcasting and VOD in its Audiovisual Media Services Directive. “Not legally, but rhetorically, those who are pushing for the revision of the Broadcasting Act are trying to bootstrap everything to the broadcasting standard of regulation, which is onerous, in terms of the amount of the catalogue that has to be dedicated to Canadian content and the contributions -- basically 30 per cent,” he said. He added that the bill doesn’t “swallow that rhetorical” but instead “pundts” the obligation to the CRTC to determine on an individual or case by case basis each service’s obligation rather than have a harmonized set of rules for each category, like the E.U. “We have several problems. One is we don't know the general rule here. It leaves way too much discretion up to the CRTC -- and I think that the CRTC has proven itself to be ill suited to these kinds of things,” he said. “It’s also a closed negotiation environment between large foreign video services and the CRTC, out of the public view.” -- Reporting by Jenna Cocullo at jcocullo@thewirereport.ca, editing by Michael Lee-Murphy at mleemurphy@thewirereport.ca

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