Western Standard - June 21, 2022


EXCLUSIVE： CTF Ontario director Jay Goldberg on Bill C-11.

Topics
Bill C963 regulation of user-generated content
Mentioned
Michael Geist Bill C-63 Trudeau Margaret Atwood Donald Trump Mendicino Corey Geis
EXCLUSIVE： UCP leadership candidate Rebecca Schulz EXCLUSIVE： Free parking for municipal employees & survivors of socialism

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

193.73

Word count

1,851

Sentence count

122

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Bill C-11 is a bill that would give the Canadian government more power over what you can see, hear, and share online. What does this mean for Canadian content? And what does it mean for the future of streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other major players in the entertainment industry?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 We've talked about C-11 before, but still not everybody's necessarily familiar with it.
00:00:03.520 What is C-11 and what's it all about here?
00:00:06.300 So Bill C-11, in reality, it's all about government power.
00:00:10.460 It's about the Trudeau government wanting more power for themselves and for bureaucrats.
00:00:15.080 So according to the government, they're trying to pass Bill C-11 to make sure that people see more Canadian content
00:00:22.300 and make sure that Canadian content providers succeed in the world.
00:00:25.840 What our report shows is that Canadian content is thriving like never before.
00:00:31.360 We had $6 billion of foreign investment in Canadian film and television in 2020, and that's during the pandemic.
00:00:39.580 So number one, when they're saying that we need this bill to try to get Canadian content to do better,
00:00:45.920 well, it's doing really, really well.
00:00:48.060 And then what's the other side of the coin?
00:00:50.280 And the other side of the coin is that the government will be controlling through the CRTC,
00:00:55.520 the Canadian Radio Television Communications, the government will be controlling what you can say, see, and share online.
00:01:03.360 That's the basic conclusion of the report.
00:01:06.460 And the reason for that is that the government's trying to create this new structure run by the CRTC
00:01:11.940 where they could prioritize what you do or don't see in your media feeds, in your social media feeds, in your streaming feeds.
00:01:19.780 They say what they're going to do is promote Canadian content and therefore demote non-Canadian content,
00:01:27.320 but they're the ones who are going to decide what counts as Canadian content.
00:01:30.980 And we also have no guarantee that once you create this mechanism now for prioritizing some content over other for CanCon,
00:01:38.900 that you're not going to use it for some other purpose later, like whether or not you support the Trudeau government.
00:01:45.140 Well, yeah, it gives a whole lot of arbitrary power to some regulatory bodies on what's appropriate and what's not.
00:01:50.720 And this is a government that just seems fixated on controlling information, though.
00:01:55.000 I mean, it does seem like CanCon is more a premise.
00:01:57.420 It's just a matter of wanting to get in and use that as an excuse to control.
00:02:02.460 The CanCon thing is a complete excuse.
00:02:04.940 We show in the report that Canadian content is doing better than ever before.
00:02:08.700 Netflix has invested hundreds of millions of dollars.
00:02:11.780 It's very easy to find Canadian content online.
00:02:14.580 And as I said, we had a record $6 billion of foreign investment.
00:02:18.320 So I think that needs to be taken off the table.
00:02:20.640 The government's rationale for doing this is completely flawed.
00:02:23.420 And then once you figure that out, then you have to dig into, well, what's actually in the bill and what are they really trying to do?
00:02:29.060 Yeah, and you did that, as you said, with input from Michael Geist.
00:02:34.340 I had him on the show before, and he talked about, you know, some of the things.
00:02:37.860 Well, what is CanCon and what isn't?
00:02:39.340 I mean, is it CanCon if it was produced, you know, here in the country and shot here, but it's actually, you know, the set is an American one.
00:02:47.420 So it doesn't look Canadian, or does it have to have Canadian elements in it, or does it have to employ a certain degree of Canadian people?
00:02:54.180 Like, it's a very nebulous world when you start talking about what may or may not qualify as CanCon.
00:02:59.620 Well, that's exactly right.
00:03:01.020 And one thing that I mentioned in the report, for example, is that there is a biopic on Donald Trump called Gotta Love Trump.
00:03:08.760 According to the CRTC, that counts as Canadian content because of some of the people who worked on that film.
00:03:14.720 Whereas The Handmaid's Tale, which is based on Margaret Atwood's famous book, you know, a very famous Canadian author,
00:03:21.920 it's not considered Canadian content because it was, it doesn't have producers that are from Canada, they're from elsewhere.
00:03:27.320 So it shows you already that the CRTC is very bad at trying to figure out what Canadian content is and what it isn't.
00:03:34.360 And if they're already bad at this now, why are we going to give them 10 times the amount of power to be bad at this at a much bigger scale?
00:03:41.960 So that's a huge concern.
00:03:44.040 Well, and I imagine that the CRTC, the people who are going to be managing that, running that, I mean, they're people who are appointed by the federal government.
00:03:50.520 So the ability for those people to be politicized can be high.
00:03:54.280 It's not to say they necessarily are right now, but you never know.
00:03:58.600 Absolutely.
00:03:59.240 So you are giving these bureaucrats at the CRTC, literally, the power to decide what we see in our news feeds and in our streaming feeds online.
00:04:08.380 They say it's just going to be for Canadian content.
00:04:11.440 And, you know, for example, say we're going to take them at their word.
00:04:14.100 That's what they're planning to do right now.
00:04:15.740 Well, a year or two from now, they might decide, you know, we've heard Minister Mendicino, who's been under fire for various reasons.
00:04:23.800 He's suggested, for example, that in the future, the government might have to look into how to promote social cohesion, is his words.
00:04:30.960 If the government's going to try to go after social cohesion a couple of years from now, well, is that going to be another reason or rationale to instruct the CRTC to filter what we see because of that?
00:04:41.880 So that's the big concern is down the road.
00:04:45.140 This could be used for literally any purpose the government wants.
00:04:48.640 These bureaucrats are appointed directly by the government and the government gives them instructions about what to do.
00:04:54.860 And the final thing that I'll add is that the minister actually hasn't even told us what the instructions are that he's going to give to the CRTC.
00:05:02.640 He says he wants Parliament to pass the bill.
00:05:05.720 The governor general decided into law and then he's going to figure out exactly what he wants them to do.
00:05:11.060 You know, that's like signing on to buy a used car before he even did the test drive.
00:05:16.020 So he wants to give them all of the powers, but he won't tell us exactly what the mandate and what those powers will entail.
00:05:22.220 That's exactly right.
00:05:23.420 There is no articulation of the mandate.
00:05:25.560 And Dr. Geis has pointed this out as well.
00:05:27.380 It's a very slippery slope when you give bureaucrats all of this power and literally don't even outline what you want to have done with all these powers.
00:05:37.040 And, yeah, these things have a chilling effect.
00:05:41.520 I mean, again, it's hard on independent media, things like that.
00:05:44.780 Our organization, we know we're opinionated and loud most.
00:05:49.080 We're not going to back off on the government, but we could pay a terrible price.
00:05:51.700 And suddenly they could find an excuse.
00:05:52.980 Oh, you guys have infringed on this or that.
00:05:55.500 And we're going to pressure providers to de-platform you because you didn't fall within the CRTC regulations.
00:06:03.120 It's a dangerous area to go.
00:06:05.160 And a lot of independent outlets might think, you know what, we're just going to not shake the tree too much so we can avoid that happening.
00:06:10.080 That's exactly right.
00:06:12.420 And the problem is that you have right now the government and the CRTC able to define what they believe Canadian content is.
00:06:20.600 And as we said before, their definition of what's Canadian content is very flawed.
00:06:25.160 But one of the questions that will come up, of course, is what counts as un-Canadian content?
00:06:30.020 If you are advocating for Western separatism or Quebec separatism, does that count as Canadian content?
00:06:37.540 If it's somehow un-Canadian to suggest that, you know, you don't want to see the country stay together, is that going to fall under content that we shouldn't be promoting?
00:06:46.240 So it's a very slippery slope between Canadian content for the sake of what's actually in it and Canadian content for the sake of what government bureaucrats think should count as Canadian content.
00:06:58.600 That's the huge concern.
00:07:00.020 Yeah, and they use buzzwords that get disturbing or loaded words like social cohesion.
00:07:04.440 I mean, there's a lot of things you could say too.
00:07:06.620 Well, you know, Corey rants too much at the start of his show and he angers people and he's shot at Quebec a couple of times.
00:07:11.920 That's interfering with Canada's social cohesion.
00:07:14.860 Thus, his show should have the plug pulled.
00:07:18.220 Yeah, I mean, social cohesion is like a very broad and dangerous word, a couple words.
00:07:23.500 That's something you expect to hear in communist China. 0.79
00:07:26.160 I mean, that's not something you expect to hear in Canada, a minister saying we might have to figure out some government regulations to promote social cohesion.
00:07:34.340 That's literally what they're saying in countries like China and North Korea.
00:07:37.740 And I should add that Twitter, when they were consulted on some of the government's planned bills, when they testified, they suggested that some of the government's plans are akin to what they're doing in China and North Korea.
00:07:50.280 And to regulate user-generated content, which they're proposing to do and we can talk about, through broadcast regulations, they've said, Dr. Geist says it's unprecedented.
00:08:02.520 It's not done in any other democratic country.
00:08:05.780 And also, this is something that is done in non-democratic countries like China and North Korea.
00:08:11.000 Well, that's some scary stuff.
00:08:14.320 Hopefully, I don't know, we can keep shining a light on it.
00:08:16.400 I mean, the minister is pretty embattled right now.
00:08:19.300 The government might want to kind of move him along and back off on some things anyways.
00:08:22.980 We'll see.
00:08:23.600 But this hasn't been a government terribly inclined to give ground when they dig their heels in either.
00:08:28.040 So all we can do is shine a light on it and discuss it and hope that we can pressure them enough to move along.
00:08:33.240 You guys are doing a good job at that.
00:08:34.580 Before I let you go, where can people find more information about what you guys are doing and stuff on these subjects?
00:08:41.000 They can go to taxpayer.com.
00:08:43.120 You can see our new report that's out on Bill C-11, which we did in concert with, consultating with Dr. Geist.
00:08:50.760 There's petitions there.
00:08:52.060 There's all kind of news information there.
00:08:53.920 But I should also add that people should be very concerned about the regulation of user-generated content.
00:08:59.920 User-generated content is captured by this bill.
00:09:03.120 The CRTC says so.
00:09:05.040 And that means that your posts on YouTube or TikTok, they could be regulated by the government.
00:09:10.260 So we're not just talking about Netflix.
00:09:12.020 We're not just talking about big companies.
00:09:14.000 The government's going to come after you for your content.
00:09:16.700 That's the danger.
00:09:18.800 Yeah, and that is a big danger we've always got to be on.
00:09:22.060 I mean, again, this government's appetite for control has really been distressing.
00:09:26.080 Well, thanks for coming on and your report on that and, you know, expanding on it for us today.
00:09:30.260 Jay, I hope we can talk again sometime soon.
00:09:32.020 Thank you.
00:09:33.220 Thank you.