Juno News - Bill C-11 is closer to becoming law

00:00:00.000 Bill C-11, which has been dubbed Justin Trudeau's online censorship bill, has received a lot of

00:00:05.880 pushback. And when a piece of legislation gets this much pushback, it can often be scrapped.

00:00:11.980 But not now, not this time. Justin Trudeau and the liberals, defiant, digging in their heels,

00:00:17.360 determined to ram this through. So the legislation, it's now been passed through the Senate.

00:00:22.900 Amendments have been proposed by senators, but Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez says,

00:00:27.120 well, I don't know if we're going to accept these amendments. We'll see what happens. And the bill

00:00:31.280 could be made law very soon. Now, there are a lot of people who are concerned about this bill.

00:00:36.940 Opposition politicians, sure. But people from different walks of life as well. You've got a

00:00:41.780 lot of academics who are experts in this field who say they have problems with the legislation.

00:00:46.700 Now, what Bill C-11 ostensibly is, is to modernize the Broadcasting Act. Because since the last time

00:00:52.640 they dealt with these bills and the Broadcasting Act, the landscape was very different in terms of

00:00:57.200 online streaming and different things that are happening in the realm that the CRTC governs.

00:01:02.360 But the critics say the devil is in the details. And while there may need to be some modernizing

00:01:06.840 going on, there's also stuff here that amounts to censorship in terms of the promotion of Canadian

00:01:11.940 content, determining what is and what isn't Canadian content, and how algorithms can basically be

00:01:18.460 prodded about by the government, by the CRTC, to determine what content is pushed forward and

00:01:24.220 advocated and encouraged to be viewed, and what is downplayed, what is shadow banned. Basically giving

00:01:29.680 the government potentially the power to determine what content you can and can't watch online. A lot

00:01:35.940 of people concerned about just how far these details could potentially go. Now, you've also got

00:01:41.780 YouTube content creators who've stepped forward appearing at House of Commons committees to sound the

00:01:46.300 alarm about it. YouTube itself, the corporation, they've had a big ad campaign. They bought ads

00:01:51.520 all around Toronto's Union Station, a really large place to say, watch out. This is a big problem. Keep

00:01:57.020 your hands off of YouTube. And you've had novelists getting in on the conversation. David Adams Richards is

00:02:03.040 one of Canada's most respected novelists, and he's won all of the top awards. He was also appointed to the

00:02:08.520 Senate in 2017, and he gave a big speech in the Senate where he was really criticizing this bill.

00:02:14.020 Margaret Atwood, she tweets this speech and says this needs a lesson, encouraging everyone

00:02:19.240 to check out that very speech. So you've got a whole lot of people, not just opposition politicians,

00:02:24.100 who say, we have a problem with this bill, shorthand known as Justin Trudeau's internet censorship bill.

00:02:30.340 Why the need to ram this through? What is going on? Why the obstinacy? Clearly, a lot of people are just

00:02:36.640 not okay with this, and they need to do more to signal to Canadians that, look, we are not going to move

00:02:42.900 forward on all of these controversial aspects. They really need to shelve the whole thing and

00:02:46.920 maybe just pick out the one or two things that are nothing to do with the algorithm, and maybe you do

00:02:51.540 need to modernize the broadcasting act. Fine, give it a totally different name. Just start from step one.

00:02:56.420 But no, they are insistent on saying it's our way or the highway. A lot of people concerned. Watch out,

00:03:02.480 folks. It's almost the last moments here where people can voice their opposition and concerns about

00:03:07.720 Bill C-11.

Juno News - February 06, 2023