Despite the flurry of outrage and opposition surrounding the legislation, the Liberal government’s Bill C-10 was passed in the House of Commons last week.
The Globe & Mail’s Andrew Coyne and Youtube’s head of Canada government affairs Jeanette Patell join host Michael Hainsworth on the C.D. Howe Institute podcast to discuss the implications.
The premise of the legislation rests on outdated thinking, says Coyne.
“All the things that made the case for regulation and subsidy in the past have basically vanished. So if you were saying OK, we have a disjoint between the really heavy regulation we have for traditional broadcast TV and radio (all of which is migrating online), and we have no regulation at all in the internet world, maybe the way we level that playing field is to get rid of the CRTC, get rid of regulation altogether because the rationale for it has disappeared. Instead what the government and the CRTC have latched onto is no, we need to regulate the entire internet the way we used to regulate 1950s television. And they have the gall to call this modernization.”
Patell agrees. Canadians already punch above their weight, and regulation does more harm than good, she warns.
“Canadian creators do really well when they are provided an open playing field and an open platform…In 2020, the Youtube ecosystem contributed over $920 million to the Canadian economy, supporting 34,000 jobs. We saw these creators’ channels growing at an enormous pace. Thirty percent year-over-year growth in the channels that are making over six figures. That’s a really compelling number for Canadian artists.
“What I want people to understand is that there are real risks and repercussions that are not being adequately considered when we think about taking a system that was developed for the 1960s broadcast era and copying and pasting it into the 2021 internet,” she said.
