There has been much said and written about the federal government’s latest bit of outrageous stupidity, Bill C-10, which seeks to treat all digital streaming services available to Canadians as broadcasters and regulate them like radio or TV stations.
Plenty of partisan commentators have . . .
worked themselves into a lather over this issue, either declaring it a big to do about nothing as Kate Taylor did in the Globe and Mail, or an Orwellian scheme to have Justin Trudeau censor your tweets, as the more conspiratorially-minded would have you believe.
It’s not exactly either, but it’s a jumbled, incoherent mess cooked up at the behest of Canada’s legacy media hogs and should be scrapped.
This has been in the works for quite some time, with a report from the Broadcast and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel released in early 2020 declaring that Canada should implement all kinds of kooky regulations, from mandating internet giants to promote CanCon to licensing news organizations.
What this latest debacle boils down to is the removal of a specific clause (section 4.1) in the bill that exempted individual users from regulation by the CRTC. While the bill wouldn’t directly subject individual users to regulation and CanCon requirements from the CRTC, they aim to treat social media companies, with their vast amounts of user-generated content in the same way as the tightly regulated TV and radio stations, which would have an enormous and terrible impact.
If Taylor, the Globe’s “cultural columnist and visual arts critic” is to be believed (she shouldn’t be), the Liberals merely placed that exemption in the bill “inadvertently” and removed it when they realized the error of their ways. Who among us hasn’t made a little whoopsie while crafting federal legislation to regulate the internet? She also claims that the only people opposing this dog’s breakfast of a bill are the scheming conservatives and “technological fundamentalists”, a hilarious designation that she’s made up to encompass people who disagree with her. You can’t fault a columnist for having an active imagination but lo and behold, she even cites the “election interference” bogeyman as a reason for treating social media companies as broadcasters, even though a government appointed watchdog couldn’t find evidence of any such malfeasance in our last federal election in 2019.
The government’s point man on this issue, Steven Guilbeault has appeared like an incompetant stooge during this whole process. In two separate interviews over the past few days, one with CBC and the other with CTV, he fell apart trying to explain the legislation he was in charge of shepherding. Nobody can seriously watch both those train wrecks and come away confident or even knowledgeable about this government’s plans. Guilbeault had to offer a follow up explainer after the disaster of his latter appearance, where he suggested that only those with large followings on social media would be regulated.
This isn’t the first time he’s has had to plant his foot directly into his own pie-hole. What seems like an eternity ago, back in early 2020, he shrugged his shoulders and opined in an interview on CTV’s Question Period that he didn’t see what the big deal was when he suggested that all media organizations, even those outside of Canada, be licensed by the government.
In a little under two years as a cabinet minister, he’s racked up some of the most cringe-worthy and confusing TV interviews of any elected official, having to come back and “clarify” his contradictory statements on several occasions. If he’s unable to clearly lay out his government’s plans on this file, he should be replaced with someone who can.
Our laws in this area could definitely use an update, but certainly not this one. It’s a silly attempt to port over regulations from a bygone era to the vastness of the internet, at the behest of lobbyists from Canada’s telecom and legacy media industries.
Take this one back to the drawing board folks, it needs some work.
Caleb Nickerson
