We fought for a long time over Bill C-11 on online streaming and its first version, C-10, which died on the order paper. Hundreds of briefs have been reviewed, more than 300 witnesses have been heard, hours and hours of discussions and debates have added up around this law which aims to make the Netflix, YouTube and others of this world contribute to the Canadian cultural ecosystem.
And to achieve what? A meticulous examination, not to say meticulous, of the Senate which multiplies these days the waxing.
Its second reading was completed on October 25. Bill C-11 is back in committee. Polarizing, it has as many supporters eager to see it pass as detractors wishing to derail it. Both clans are especially noisy. They are also very organized and have mastered the sense of formula and the art of making themselves heard. However, all this noise is harming the quality of discussions in the Senate about this bill, which aims to force digital platforms to pay their fair share, just like Canadian companies, and to bring in — finally! — Canadian culture in the digital age.
It’s been almost six months since C-11 landed in the Senate. The senators have already spent more than 40 hours unfolding it article after article. The frictions, tough, concentrate on a handle. On Tuesday, the sponsor of the bill, the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Pablo Rodriguez, devoted a large part of his speaking time to painfully unraveling certain fears and half-truths. These are boosted and amplified by influencers and think tanks that have managed to make their way into the hushed Upper House of Parliament.
It is sometimes said that pedagogy is also the art of repetition, but it cannot be said that Minister Rodriguez has succeeded in scoring many points with this method, of which he masters the basics, but less the subtleties. He repeated in vain that this is not a frontal attack on the creators of content on social media, that he had amended his bill accordingly, that the exception for commercial content does not concern them, that t is not a question of manipulating the algorithms of the big platforms, even less of censoring the Web… several senators — mainly conservatives, but not only — have tirelessly returned to the charge.
A similar dialogue of the deaf emerged from the last passage of Ian Scott, President and CEO of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), who will be responsible for defining the regulatory framework for its application. Both Rodriguez and Scott would benefit from strengthening their arguments. Their inability to defend their point other than by ready-made formulas, even sometimes hollow, has nourished one of the worst faults of senators: their slowness.
The Senate can do useful work by quibbling, but only if it does so for the purpose of correcting a bill. We feel less this desire here than the more frontal one to obstruct. The urgency invoked by many players, creators as experts and politicians, is however real. Canadian cultural sovereignty cannot face this century with its hands tied by a policy dating back to 1991. Each passing moment takes us further away from the teeming and changing world that digital platforms are drawing without us, if not against us.
Bill C-11 can be improved, of course, but its foundations are solid. Above all, it has what it takes to help fight against the erasure of our culture and to protect our francophone realities and those of minority communities. Its refining can very well be done in the next step, which will mark the opening of an even more ambitious project in order to put in place the mechanisms of protection and visibility that our creators are calling for.
It’s time for action. Let everyone do their part, it is about our cultural sovereignty, which depends on our digital sovereignty.