The Minister of Canadian Heritage, Pascale St-Onge, sent on Tuesday the final decree of instructions of the Online streaming law to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), which will have to establish a regulatory framework for its implementation.
The new law, which received royal assent last April, aims to promote Canadian stories and music.
The aim is to support the creative industries, which employ around 250,000 people in the country; to give greater space to indigenous stories; and increase the representation of marginalized groups. Regulations must be “fair, just and flexible”. Podcasts are excluded from the regulations.
“We faced a lot of obstruction between the time we tabled the first bill in the House in 2020 and its adoption last April,” indicated Minister Pascale St-Onge as she left a meeting with around ten cultural organizations and unions. The minister took the opportunity to recall her Ministry’s priority of “protecting our cultural sovereignty”.
PHOTO SEAN KILPATRICK, CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVES
The Minister of Canadian Heritage, Pascale St-Onge
By adopting this law, we wanted to ensure that the content produced by us, for us and at home is easily accessible online so that all Quebecers and Canadians can discover it and relate to it.
Pascale St-Onge, Minister of Canadian Heritage
The ball is now in the court of the CRTC, which will have to find a regulatory framework for the implementation of the law. The federal agency’s consultations will begin on November 20.
“The objective is for the regulatory framework to be sufficiently flexible, but at the same time we want to ensure that Canadian content, French-speaking and Indigenous, is viable, therefore that it receives adequate support, for example by imposing obligations expenses for the various platforms so that they produce Canadian content on Canadian soil; but also to ensure that this content is easily discoverable. »
The Union of Quebec Artists (UDA) welcomed Minister St-Onge’s announcement. “The current business model of the online distribution giants is threatening for local cultures and for our artists,” wrote its president Tania Kontoyanni in a press release published Tuesday.
Do discussions with online platforms, whether we’re talking about Netflix, Disney or Amazon Prime, look difficult?
“We had several discussions with representatives of the different platforms and we took their points of view into account in our directives,” replied Pascale St-Onge, “but it is certain that there are economic interests which are not easily reconcilable, that is why we are asking the CRTC for a certain flexibility. Most platforms understand the need to regulate, although there are others, like YouTube, for whom it is more foreign to deal with regulation. »
The Conservative Party, the only party in the House of Commons that opposes this law, has already indicated that it would repeal the law if it were brought to power in 2025. To ensure that it is applied, the minister St-Onge hopes that the CRTC will have time to define a “more modern” regulatory framework by then.
“We know what conservatives think about the cultural sector and the media,” responded Pascale St-Onge, “that the government should not support the creative industries or the media, that they should be subject to the laws of the market. We do not agree with this view, and we hope that by 2025 we will have a new regulatory framework. »
There Online streaming law and the Online News Act – which will come into force on December 19 and which is notably contested by Meta and Google – are the two legislative texts aimed at modernizing the Broadcasting Actthe last reform of which dates from 1991, before the existence of the Internet.