Juno News - What Trudeau's censorship legislation means for Canadian content creators

00:00:00.000 Let's talk about the new bills. There's two of them that have been proposed so far. Bill C-11,

00:00:05.100 which deals with algorithms and how private tech companies provide content to users, how

00:00:12.040 searchable things are on platforms like YouTube and Facebook. And then the second one has more

00:00:18.020 to do with the compensation. So tech companies paying journalism outlets for their content. I

00:00:26.740 know you have had lots and lots of opinions on these, and both of these bills will impact the

00:00:31.680 work that you do directly. So in a nutshell, what is your position on these bills?

00:00:37.500 Well, I mean, I'm against both of them. I mean, I think that this is a classic sort of case of

00:00:42.500 government sort of extending its grip into places where it just doesn't belong. I think, frankly,

00:00:47.720 a lot of it is also just a kind of solution in search of a problem. To talk about Bill C-11,

00:00:53.760 which is the bill that would regulate YouTube. I mean, I think what makes this sort of particularly

00:00:58.980 pernicious is just that there's really no evidence that YouTube as a platform, that YouTube creators,

00:01:05.780 that Canadian YouTube creators like myself, or like, you know, the over 400 YouTubers from Canada

00:01:11.200 who are more successful than I am. I think there's really no evidence to suggest that these people

00:01:15.400 need a helping hand. I mean, we've all been quite successful just in an unregulated YouTube. And I think

00:01:21.420 that a lot of both creators and consumers of Canadian YouTube have enjoyed, frankly, that for

00:01:26.840 the 16 years that it's existed, it has been a kind of unregulated place, it hasn't been subjected to

00:01:32.360 the kind of heavy handed CRTC content quotas, and, you know, government putting its finger on the scale

00:01:39.600 in terms of determining, you know, what kind of Canadian content you should be watching and sort of

00:01:45.180 promoting certain kinds of Canadian content over others for largely sort of political ideological

00:01:50.360 reasons. Because that's basically what the bill aims to do what Bill C-11 aims to do is it aims to

00:01:56.400 basically bring the regulatory regime that I think a lot of Canadians have grown pretty irritated with

00:02:01.260 as it regulates TV and radio, and sort of imposing that into a previously unregulated realm, which is

00:02:07.380 things like YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and, you know, Netflix and Disney Plus, and who knows how many

00:02:13.540 other sort of areas of online life.

Juno News - April 20, 2022