00:00:00.000How will Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's online censorship bills affect outlets like True North?
00:00:04.900We'll speak to one of Canada's largest YouTube creators to discuss how this bill will affect online creators.
00:00:10.600I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:24.520Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning in.
00:00:26.300So we are paying a lot of attention here at True North and at The Candice Malcolm Show to the new and improved, or new and worsely improved, online censorship bills being proposed by the Trudeau government.
00:00:36.960And I'm very pleased today to be joined by JJ McCullough.
00:00:40.280JJ is a Canadian commentator on YouTube.
00:00:42.600He hosts one of the largest channels, political Canadian channels, on the platform.
00:00:46.840JJ is also an opinion columnist over at The Washington Post, and he's been a guest several times here on The Candice Malcolm Show and on True North.
00:10:22.180I mean, I can look at your backdrop and see, you know, you have all kinds of Canadiana stuff.
00:10:27.780I think that's a little half Canadian, half American flag, which I know some viewers will hate to see that and others will agree and cheer.
00:10:35.020But, you know, you put out Canadian content.
00:10:37.420We here at True North are exclusively Canadian news channel.
00:10:40.300I sometimes laugh because, again, just to pick on the CBC a little bit, you know, there's there this government funded media behemoth designed.
00:10:47.560And, of course, the purpose of it is to tell Canadian stories, protect our culture, as you mentioned.
00:10:52.800And sometimes you turn on CTV and like the top five stories will all be foreign news.
00:10:57.280Even, you know, even this morning, it's like, you know, the budget just came out in Canada and they're still telling us about, you know,
00:11:03.940the top top five stories are all to do with Ukraine and Russia during the Trump era.
00:11:08.040This was a phenomenon where it didn't matter what kind of scandal Trudeau was up to.
00:11:11.800They would always focus on the Trump scandals on CBC.
00:11:14.540So they don't even really prioritize Canadian content, even though that's, you know, presumably what they're there for.
00:11:21.260So so so in theory, couldn't channels like yours channel like ours here at True North benefit from this kind of legislation?
00:11:28.880And even with the benefit, why is it that that people like us still criticize this kind of bill?
00:11:35.360Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, it's a it's a plausible argument.
00:11:38.900I mean, I was making it somewhat tongue in cheek.
00:11:40.440But, you know, the if you read the government's own rhetoric, they're trying to sort of buy off people like us by saying like, oh, you're going to do you're going to do great.
00:11:48.460Like, don't don't sort of bite the hand that feeds you.
00:11:50.740You know, I mean, to me, that's a kind of sort of somewhat ideologically compromised cynical argument.
00:11:56.280But I mean, the bigger problem, though, is that we don't really know what the government's criteria of Canadian will be.
00:12:03.480And what makes your content Canadian enough to be boosted by a sort of rigged algorithm?
00:12:09.640Right. And I know that this is sort of something that the YouTube people themselves are sort of concerned about.
00:12:13.800Right. Because when you when I go to submit a video on YouTube right now, I have to check all of these boxes that say, you know, it's not full of nudity or violence or hate speech or whatever.
00:12:23.560And that's sort of how YouTube determines whether or not my content is is family friendly for their purposes.
00:12:29.640And I think what's obviously going to happen is that at some point, YouTube, in order to sort of be compliant with this law and not face the millions and millions of dollars of fines that the legislation threatens, noncompliant streaming outlets,
00:12:42.460is that they're probably going to have to sort of subject the content to some sort of test as well.
00:12:46.640Whether or not that's a sort of self self-administered test like the current one is or if there's some sort of bureaucrat behind the scenes that YouTube is going to have to employ to sort of like look through a checklist that the CRTC has given them and go through the list.
00:13:00.740You know, we know that the legislation or the government has stated a lot of like quite ideological objectives justifying the legislation in terms of a desire to emphasize the prominence of marginalized communities,
00:13:13.540you know, communities of color, the bilingual realities of Canada, you know, you can sort of traditional, I think, identity politics sort of type of hangups that the Trudeau government is sort of known for.
00:13:25.460So it with those sort of concerns being the case and the sort of the ongoing ambiguity of like exactly how good patriotic Canadian content is going to be defined,
00:13:35.400it can't necessarily be taken for granted that people like you or me will necessarily benefit from it.
00:13:40.320You know, it's depending on how ideological and how narrow and how specific the goal is, you know, there could be a lot of people that are creating Canadian content, but the content is not Canadian enough, right?
00:13:52.240This is what I think is quite pernicious as well is that I said, for example, I have 700,000 subscribers on my YouTube channel.
00:13:59.120There are over 400 YouTubers who are from Canada who are more successful than me.
00:14:03.080So we're talking about a very large community, but, you know, a lot of the people that are successful don't have channels that are as ostentatiously Canadian as mine, perhaps, you know, they might be cooking channels, they might be, you know, video game streamers, you know, they might be handymen or people offering, you know, tips on how to clean your apartment or care for your dog or do any of these kinds of things.
00:14:23.680Or, yeah, science experiments. There's so much on YouTube. It's like you could find something for anyone.
00:14:28.860And it's all relevant to Canadian lives, right? Like, I mean, Canadians need to, you know, learn how to cook and walk their dogs and they like hearing movie reviews and tech reviews and all sorts of stuff like that.
00:14:41.260So the problem, though, is that those people, you know, could be harmed by this, you know, like maybe somebody like me who's so ostentatiously Canadian will benefit, but there's a lot of Canadian creators who are being successful as Canadian creators.
00:14:54.220They're creating content that is relevant and interesting to Canadians, but perhaps because it's not like ideologically Canadian enough, it's not political enough, it's not kind of like overtly nationalistic enough, then maybe they're going to be harmed by it.
00:15:07.720So it's just, you know, I really would like to see the press kind of emphasize this a little bit more and like ask the minister and ask the government, like, what is Canadian enough?
00:15:16.080Like, who gets to decide that? And who is going to be coming up with the definitions?
00:15:20.500Because I think when we've seen, and, you know, people have had a lot of fun with this, talking about, like, say, movies and TV shows in the past that might seem Canadian or might seem very un-Canadian, and yet they pass the CRTC's kind of bureaucratic rules just because these rules are so, you know, convoluted and esoteric.
00:15:36.900Well, and it's so interesting because when you look, when you take a step back and look at, like, all of culture, all of Canadian, all of the Canadians who are successful in the cultural realm, a lot of them started out being successful in the Canadian cultural realm.
00:15:49.880Like, someone like, you know, Justin Bieber or Ryan Reynolds or someone who was, like, you know, early in their career, they were based in Canada, and then once they become popular, Celine Dion, you know, any Canadian person that's really famous, it's because they're famous in the U.S., right?
00:16:05.780So they kind of start out in Canada, and you could argue, like, if you were trying to steel man the CRTC, you could say, like, you know, the CRTC creates an environment where Canadians get the opportunity to, like, test out their product in the Canadian market,
00:16:18.940or they get to build up an audience here before, like, going for a broader audience abroad, you know, the purpose of all this, all this legislation is to protect a Canadian identity from, like, a larger cultural influence to the South.
00:16:32.600And, you know, you could have a reasonable argument about whether or not that is necessary, whether that's something that's desirable, but it doesn't seem like we've had that conversation at any point in my lifetime anyway.
00:16:43.920These rules have just sort of always been there, and now the Trudeau government is kind of, like, doubling down on that again to try to get the next, you know, the next domain that they don't have regulated under their thumb, which is the Internet.
00:16:57.480How would we go about having a broader conversation, national conversation, if you will, about whether or not it's the government's role to be trying to regulate culture, trying to protect culture, trying to foster culture?
00:17:12.420Well, just to go back to the point I was making about the people like Justin Bieber or Ryan Reynolds or whoever's latest big Canadian star, once you hit a certain point of success in Canada, it seems inevitable that any field, whether it's sports, music, entertainment, they go to the bigger market where they finish out their career,
00:17:31.120which is why a lot of the content that starts out being Canadian content is no longer Canadian after a certain point, because it gets, you know, even something like my kids love Paw Patrol, the show, and I know it was Canadian to begin with.
00:17:42.580I don't really know if you could call it Canadian anymore, because I think it was bought out by Nickelodeon and it's produced in a Hollywood studio now.
00:17:49.400But anyway, how do we get this conversation going about whether this is actually something that Canadians want or need?
00:17:55.400Yeah, I mean, it's a very good question. And I think on some respects, it's an interesting sort of blind spot on both the left and the right in this country.
00:18:03.440You know, I think that the left, for its part, doesn't, you know, the left is in, I think, a little bit of cognitive dissonance, right?
00:18:15.260In the sort of sense that, like, they are in the left wing in this country is very sort of like nationalistic in many ways, right?
00:18:21.520Like that they push this kind of like heavy handed idea that government should control the culture, that government should control the cultural sovereignty of the nation,
00:18:29.480that there's sort of like a cultural purity that government has a right to kind of enforce and sort of carry through in a way that like would seem really,
00:18:38.000I think, abhorrent or distasteful if, say, like Viktor Orban's government in Hungary was making those same sorts of arguments.
00:18:44.720So like the left in this country, I think, are quite hypocritical, like they don't quite understand to what degree that they are on the side of making like quite paternalistic,
00:18:54.100quite nationalistic, quite sort of regressive, authoritarian, chauvinistic arguments, which I don't think like, like they basically inherited rather uncritically.
00:19:03.840And even now, like when you sort of ask a kind of like mainstream center left person about this, they're just kind of like, oh, yeah, well, I guess it's good for government to sort of control our sovereignty.
00:19:12.520And, you know, you can always our cultural sovereignty and you can always sort of like make appeals to kind of like anti-Americanism, which will get sort of people's blood boiling.
00:19:19.480But then the other problem, too, is that on the right, I think that there is such a strong narrative that like the Trudeau government, you know, is unpatriotic and hates this country.
00:19:30.260And, you know, says things like, you know, what we're like the first post national nation and has no core identity and that kind of stuff, you know, which they do say rhetorically.
00:19:39.780But on the other hand, they're also pushing this very heavy handed cultural nationalistic kind of agenda, which I think is a bit of cognitive dissonance for the right as well.
00:19:48.960Like it's kind of hard and it is hard to square those two things.
00:19:52.080And it is just complete hypocrisy on the part of the Trudeau government that it can say, on the one hand, Canada has no core identity.
00:19:58.740But on the other hand, we need something like the CRTC to maintain our cultural integrity in the face of, you know, evil foreign corruption and so on and so forth.
00:20:06.320So I kind of do think that like both sides just kind of need to open their eyes a little bit and kind of have a clear eyed understanding of what the status quo is and why that status quo purports to exist.
00:20:17.680And whether or not any of us really sort of buy those arguments anymore, because I think it's true.
00:20:22.500Like, I think that, you know, Canada is a big, diverse country.
00:20:26.400And I think Canadians have are elaborate and diverse people.
00:20:30.640And we've got a lot of distinct interests.
00:20:32.600And we also have a very individualistic culture.
00:20:34.420And I think that's the thing that's really important to emphasize is that we're all our own tastemakers.
00:20:39.800We all have our own preferences in terms of what kind of culture we want to consume, what we are interested in,
00:20:46.480whether that's cooking videos, pet videos, gaming videos, whatever.
00:20:51.640We all have a right to our own tastes.
00:20:53.520And we live in a remarkable time in which it's never been easier to curate an online entertainment cultural experience on your own terms.
00:21:01.120And I think that the government really has to, you know, should face a much higher standard in justifying why that is bad.
00:21:09.820You know, I would like to ask, like, you know, ask the Minister of Heritage, why is it bad that when I log on to YouTube, I get to see videos that I want to watch?
00:21:18.380Why is my freedom of choice to consume the kind of online content that I want to watch?
00:21:25.780And I think that, you know, can you answer that question without sounding like Viktor Orban?
00:21:30.880Can you answer that question without sounding like a terribly sort of regressive authoritarian sort of type of leader who thinks that, you know,
00:21:37.100the cultural integrity of the country is sort of like under threat and needs to be sort of cured by a sort of wise, all-knowing paternalistic political class?
00:21:45.680Like, is that really what the Trudeau government wants to go down in history as being?
00:21:49.640Right. And I mean, I think I would hope not.
00:21:53.260And I hope that that this is as a result, that this is perhaps an issue where the Trudeau government could be shamed a little bit more than it is.
00:22:00.820Although it is difficult because I do think that, again, like a lot of conservatives don't really want to admit that this government is in many ways as nationalistic as it is,
00:22:09.100because they're very invested in a sort of counter narrative that this government actually, you know, has no respect for the culture of the country at all.
00:22:16.260Well, it's definitely hypocrisy on the end of liberal government, but certainly to your point,
00:22:22.300if it was a conservative government that was proposing all these sort of nationalistic barriers and promoting certain pro-Canada,
00:22:32.280pro-patriotic, pro-nationalistic measures, I'm sure the tone in the media and the critics would be calling it right wing and far right and all that kind of stuff.
00:22:41.880So it's super, it's super interesting on that point. I want to ask a question about the sort of the power of these big tech companies,
00:22:48.860because it's kind of interesting where, you know, you have this algorithm that nobody knows, right?
00:22:53.460It's secret. We don't know what it is that when I go onto YouTube, a JJ McCullough video is the first thing to pop up.
00:22:59.140You know, why is that? What is it about YouTube's studying of my habits of video watching that it knows that I want to watch the latest JJ video?
00:23:06.620So you could say, is that power in the hands of tech companies who are secretive, who have their own political agendas, who are, you know, not Canadian at all?
00:23:16.420None of the profits that come from the YouTube ads that I watched before watching your video go to anything.
00:23:23.620I mean, I'm sure you get paid for your channel, but the major profits go to Google, which is based in San Francisco.
00:23:29.840So you have these really powerful tech companies, and you don't necessarily know what's driving them, what's motivating them,
00:23:37.400why some political discussion is suppressed and others is promoted.
00:23:41.720We know that they meddle in the political process.
00:23:44.120We know that, for instance, during the 2020 U.S. election, the Hunter Biden story was buried.
00:23:52.140You weren't allowed to share or discuss it throughout COVID.
00:23:54.900We've seen a lot of issues with YouTube censoring and demonetizing and sort of disappearing channels that take critical positions when it comes to, you know, the efficacy of the vaccines and stuff like that.
00:24:08.540So it's not like these tech companies are benevolent.
00:24:12.300And you hear increasing calls in the U.S. for more government intervention, more, you know, making sure that free speech is protected.
00:24:19.680So we're kind of having the opposite conversation that our American friends are having, that, you know, in the U.S., a lot of conservatives want YouTube and want Facebook and Twitter to be regulated to promote free speech.
00:24:31.400Whereas in Canada, we have the prime minister's office threatening to take over the algorithms and conservatives are like screaming like, no, no, no, that's a terrible idea.
00:24:38.380So I'm just wondering, how do you balance the power of these huge tech companies with the need to sort of protect everybody's basic rights to free speech and free information?
00:24:49.680Yeah, I mean, it's I guess I sort of have a kind of somewhat old fashioned, stereotypically conservative view about this and which is just that these are private companies and private companies have a right to basically do what they want.
00:25:02.580I mean, I agree that it is it can be very frustrating and, you know, there's no one that complains about these sorts of things more than YouTubers themselves, the unpredictability of the algorithm and, you know, frustrations, particularly like with smaller channels as well, like the difficulty in getting the video to be, you know, to be widely seen or to be monetized.
00:25:22.080And sometimes, you know, videos get demonetized and it seems very opaque, the reasoning for why it is and people sort of go nuts about this.
00:25:28.520And, you know, I think I can relate to those those those sorts of frustrations.
00:25:32.040But at the same time, like I am pretty I am pretty, I suppose, rigid in my defense of private industry to have a right to sort of practice, you know, what they want to do on their own terms.
00:25:44.860And if they if they if the consumer base gets irritated enough and if the creator base gets irritated enough, in theory, we could move on to some other platform.
00:25:52.720And there are there are always sort of efforts in the background sort of percolating, you know, attempts to sort of create rival platforms.
00:25:58.800But the reason why these rival platforms have not taken off is that because for all of the difficulties in dealing with YouTube, it is still the best user experience and the best creator experience out there.
00:26:07.660It's not to say it always will be. But, you know, for the time being, I think it legitimately can make that argument.
00:26:13.500But, you know, you do get at a good point, which is that at the very least, you know, in America, the argument is that, you know, that these platforms should be even freer, that they should err more on the side of of of kind of a user centric, creator centric sort of experience.
00:26:29.220Whereas in Canada, the understanding is that, like, you know, that these things should exist on the terms of the of the government for explicitly content driven agendas.
00:26:39.340Right. So the government of Canada feels it has a right to dictate the content more than like very specifically the type of content that they believe the viewers should be consuming.
00:26:49.140Whereas in the sort of the American discourse, it's like, you know, YouTube shouldn't have any regulation over content at all, you know, which in my my opinion, that's going a little bit far.
00:26:59.600But basically that we should just sort of like trust the audience to curate their own experience and, you know, just kind of like let the chips fall where they may there.
00:27:06.680I mean, it does it does get to another sort of effort is or another kind of reality in the difference between Canada and the U.S. as well, is that Canada really tries.
00:27:15.480I think the Canadian government really wants to sort of like co-opt large influential institutions and make them cooperate with the state as actively as possible.
00:27:25.540Right. So like you kind of have this kind of society where the line between government and private entity becomes blurred when that private entity becomes big enough.
00:27:35.520And I think that's already, you know, what you see with the mainstream press in this country, which is now so regulated and so subsidized that, you know, it can be a little bit difficult to tell where the CRTC ends and, you know, it begins.
00:27:48.420Right. And I think that that seems to be the goal of this regulatory bill over YouTube is to make YouTube into a partner, as they would call it, like a partner with the federal government that doesn't really make any substantial decisions without sort of consulting with their sort of masters in Ottawa and just having this very creating a new consensus.
00:28:07.260You know, we always talk about the Laurentian consensus. And I guess this is a sort of an effort to sort of bring, you know, the big tech companies into that consensus.
00:28:14.580And I think people are right to be worried about that.
00:28:17.340I get your point that they're private companies and they can run in any way they want, but it seems to me that YouTube, maybe to a lesser extent, although I know they still do de-platform people and channels disappear, comments disappear, even, you know, disabling the dislike sign so that the sort of democratic feedback is unavailable.
00:28:37.100But so many of these tech companies, JJ, they just take unbelievable steps in curbing free speech.
00:28:42.520And it's not uniform. It's not it's not based on clearly set rules.
00:28:47.080I hear a lot of people on the right say, you know, they kind of shrug and they say, oh, well, you know, the First Amendment in the United States is only applicable to governments.
00:28:54.700It's not applicable to tech companies. I've also had an interesting argument about the fact that people like like Twitter is a place where we have most of our political discourse.
00:29:03.640It's a place where most of the political conversation speech in both Canada and the U.S. happens.
00:29:09.880And so to remove somebody to say you only have access to this public square, you no longer have access to the conversation on politics in this country and YouTube as well.
00:29:19.280You know, losing your ability to have your free speech just because you don't agree with the latest consensus on vaccines or the latest consensus on whatever the popular issue of the day is leaving this power to companies to determine.
00:29:32.340And it's not only a freedom of speech issue. It's also freedom of association.
00:29:36.440You have the right to say what you want and to associate with whom you want.
00:29:41.000And the reaction to just be to displatform people and sort of institutionalize, cancel culture.
00:29:47.600I don't see this as a healthy environment for an underpinning of free speech and a healthy discourse in society.
00:29:56.600I know this is beyond the realm of just Bill C-11 and C-18 here.
00:30:03.320But do you think there is a role for government in ensuring free speech and freedom of association online?
00:30:10.460I mean, I don't know. It's just I've never I mean, like in theory, like you can say these sorts of things.
00:30:17.300And I like, you know, I'll sort of shrug and be like, yeah, that sounds good.
00:30:20.540Like, obviously, more freedom of speech is better than less freedom of speech.
00:30:23.960It's just I kind of wonder how that would manifest in practice as a matter of public policy.
00:30:29.840Right. And whether or not a government that kind of has that sort of power to determine what YouTube has to allow could then in turn abuse that power in basically similar ways to what the government of this country wants to do.
00:30:43.900Right. Sort of like once you sort of say on some level that, you know, that YouTube or whatever other platform has an obligation in practice to platform channel X, Y, Z or, you know, character X, Y or Z.
00:30:58.540You know, how else will those powers be used when there's a government in power that perhaps we're less inclined to support?
00:31:04.760I don't know. Like I'm I suppose it would really I feel like right now this matter exists mostly as a as a as a bit of conservative rhetoric.
00:31:18.100Right. Like right now, I feel like there's a kind of like obviously there's a sort of populist upswell against the power of the big tech companies.
00:31:24.880And I agree the power of the big tech companies can be can be frightening and does feel like quite unprecedented, like nothing else we've ever really experienced.
00:31:31.880And I think you're you're not wrong when you sort of say, like when people are silenced on Twitter or, you know, YouTube, it can be remarkable, like how quickly they just sort of like disappear as a person from the public consciousness and public imagination.
00:31:43.560But again, like I just don't really know what the legislative fix to that would look like and whether or not the cure would be, you know, better than the disease as opposed to being worse than it.
00:31:53.440And I, you know, because actually this is one of the things that is in Bill C-11, is that the government can obligate the YouTube or any other platform to carry a channel, regardless of if it violates YouTube's own internal policies.
00:32:08.040So, you know, for example, you know, RT was just recently banned.
00:32:12.800Right. Like in theory, the government of Canada could obligate YouTube that they couldn't do that, that they have to pass.
00:32:19.260They have to keep that channel in place, even if it violates YouTube's own internal guidelines, because they would sort of say that YouTube's YouTube's guidelines take a sort of second tier to government's priorities.
00:32:29.440Right. And so I don't know, like this to me, this kind of meddling in a private business's ability to make money on their own terms and to do what they view as being right for their consumer base.
00:32:40.800Maybe that that is not as persuasive an argument as it as it used to be in an era where we have much more sort of monopolistic power in the tech community.
00:32:49.000And that sort of monopolistic power is being used to regulate more of the realms of sort of public discourse that is essential in any democracy.
00:32:56.200But I just kind of feel like until I see a clear legislative agenda, as opposed to just rhetoric that I can judge, I'm inclined to sort of still side with the sovereignty of free enterprise.
00:33:08.880It was certainly and I don't think I would trust the true government to draft any kind of legislation that I would feel comfortable with, as is the case with these ones.