Juno News - December 27, 2019Trudeau wants to mandate Canadian content on Netflix
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Summary
The federal government is coming for your Netflix catalog. In Justin Trudeau's mandate letter to the new Minister of Canadian Heritage Stephen Gilbo, there is a section that will impact the catalogs potentially of streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and even the new Disney service.
Transcript
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the federal government is coming for your Netflix catalog one of the details buried
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in Justin Trudeau's mandate letter to the new Minister of Canadian Heritage Stephen
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Gilbo is a section that will impact the catalogs potentially of streaming services like Netflix
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Amazon Prime and even the new Disney service this is what Justin Trudeau said to the minister work
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with the Minister of innovation science and industry to introduce legislation by the end
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of 2020 that will take appropriate measures to ensure that all content providers including
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internet giants offer meaningful levels of Canadian content in their catalogs contribute
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to the creation of Canadian content in both official languages promote this content and
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make it easily accessible on their platforms the legislation should also consider additional
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cultural and linguistic communities so what the government is saying here is that within the
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next year there must be legislation that forces Netflix not only to produce and showcase Canadian
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content but to do it in a way that makes it very prominent so when you log in and it gives you that
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list at the top of recommended movies well as one friend of mine pointed out it might not be that far
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off that there has to be a bar pretty high up that says Canadian movies or Canadian TV shows now Canadian
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content laws are already rampant in the television and traditional broadcast radio sectors the reason
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those Canadian content laws exist is because there was a time when these companies found it more cost
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effective just to buy American shows than to produce Canadian programs now despite the fact that there is
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still a lot of great American programming there's also good Canadian programming now this idea that you need to
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force companies to showcase it is not really all that appropriate in 2019 or 2020 but the problem that
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we have here is that Canadians also can access better programming if they don't want whatever a service is
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offering them the second you say that something has to be a Canadian show you're putting another priority
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above quality why couldn't it just be a good show that happens to be Canadian for example through Netflix I've managed to find my
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way into watching Spanish shows German shows other things that I may prefer to whatever else is on that
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the Canadian government wants me to see the reason that streaming services exist and have become so
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popular is because people are wanting to circumvent the traditional stranglehold that broadcast
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regulators and broadcasters have had on what you can view streaming services let you choose what you want to watch so for the
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government to throttle that in some way is just plain wrong now some of you may be thinking well
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hang on the government saying you have to do more Canadian content there's nothing about taking away
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other content well not so fast University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist who specializes in
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internet law said that Netflix or other similar companies may be forced with a couple of options depending
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on what percentage of overall content the Canadian government designates must be Canadian he said
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that if the requirement is that shows have to have three percent Canadian content then it doesn't really
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matter the Giants will be able to do it but if the number is 30 companies will be forced to either
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shrink their catalogs or boost the Canadian content by making a lot of bad television and this is a very
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significant challenge right now because these Giants exist because they give people choice government is
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now trying to manipulate that which defeats the purpose of why they're so successful for True North I'm